The dirty secret here is that neither party really respects private property or individual freedom. Both seem to make exceptions that suit their own embittered radicals that drive the whole show.
If there is any hope for this country, it is going to be that the middle is going to have to reassert itself, and start brokering compromises that restores freedom to both sides. Let's have conservatives come around and support gay marriage, if liberals can come around and support the 2nd amendment. Let's have both sides resist eminent domain. Let's trade a slightly higher tax rate for a real cap on entitlements. Let's compromise on calling off the DEA on the average joe and at the same time call off the IRS on the same.
The illusion that this country is under, is that, compromise makes you weak, but bashing your way through a majority makes you strong, and I think the opposite is true. It is easier to give into the radicals that support you, when you are in office. It is easier to avoid compromise and deadlock the government until the balance of power is on your side. It is easier to ignore the other side.
We conservatives were wrong to do what we did in 2000-2004, just as liberals are wrong to do what they are doing now. All this shit does is piss people off on both sides of the aisle, and sooner or later, this constant escalation and going for the jugular will lead to civil war.
This whole conversation isn't practical anyway. The only way we can even practically travel around even our own solar system is with nuclear power and too many people are trapped in 50's monster movie world to let that happen any time soon.
Why is PHP so huge? Because large chunks of those developers were VB developers
Not VB, but classic ASP developers. I would give you that. classic ASP had problems but it was pretty simple to program for. ASP.NET is better but it is more complicated.
I think there's nothing wrong with running yum or apt. That part of the end, of installing and searching for applications to install, is better.
My issue is more that uninstallng from yum or apt seems to not work. Installing from APT or YUM is absolutely great, but the other way, not so. To me a real installer is database based, transacted, and snapshot preserving. You install a product and if you uninstall it, the system is the way it was. apt isn't there yet. I tried to uninstall yet another ubuntu download that bricked my x, and, when the dust settled, half the stuff was still there, and my desktop was still bricked. Not saying this can't happen in Windows, but, it happens a lot less often than it used to. Finally, as a developer, I would like to be able to -write- an installer with some confidence that it will actually work on most Linux distributions. I don't know that now. If I build an installer in Windows, I know that it will at least deploy ok to Windows XP and Vista. I have to test it, for sure, but testing it at least gives me a better warm and fuzzy.
I think, and I could be wrong, that problem with installing or doing any sort of programmatic systems management in Linux is because everything is in text files, and I think it would make a lot more sense if all the configuration information were loaded into a relational store. It doesn't have to be transacted, I think, as much as it has to have known transaction complete snapshots periodically, so that you can confidently roll back to a date, or better still, an event. That level of technology would crush Windows and I think all the pieces are in place for that to happen. Obviously a lot of people would prefer MySQL to back it but PostGres is out there and free.
I agree that the way the registry is implemented is utterly terrible. But the idea of having a database central to the system where all the system settings that could be altered by an installation, from startup scripts to drivers to x desktop settings, would be utterly kick ass. To me, the registry was like, here's a step towards making a central system database, but instead of really pushing forward with it, and making it into a genuine database built in with the system, Microsoft just kept it at its crippled hierarchical self, probably so that people would still have to buy SQL Server.
Registry has everything to do with installation. The whole point of the registry was to provide a consistent and programmatic place to describe all the system settings. Now, I won't argue that the Registry is a terrible database, but it is a database.
Sure, in Linux, I can put a copy of a program into my ~/username folder and rock on. But, what if that program is going to alter characteristics of my shell or my desktop? Or, more naggingly, what if I want to add a driver to my system? There's a bunch of startup scripts that need to be altered and those are not so easily tangled with programmatically.
SciAm sensationalized it yesterday to focus on just one thing, because SciAm has sadly succumbed to the economic fact that the masses will not pay for news unless it's incredible (in all senses of the word)
See, I think that this misplaced belief in the stupidity of the masses is the single largest reason why the media is sinking like the rock that it deserves to. People know when they are being coddled or patronized. You might think you win a few more popularity points with them in the short term but in doing so what you actually lose is their respect.
The one thing is too, is that, while reducing emissions by nuclear power replacement is nice, we are ultimately going to need to have the means of scrubbing the CO2 out of the atmosphere and manage that mix on an ongoing basis. Ultimately, whether or not the CO2 is there is our fault or mother natures doesn't even really matter. It's that its there and we need to manage the level.
The thing is, there's no way cap and trade of CO2 is actually going to work in the USA. We're about to blow hundreds of billions of dollars to accomplish absolutely nothing. There's actually a coal mine fire in China that produces more greenhouse gases than all of our cars combined... the present congress's environmental plans are simply retarded.
hot of developers spilling out of the Microsoft dam and into the PHP, Perl, Python, Java and Ruby streams
I'd say you have a ways to go before you get any Windows developer to give up on Visual Studio + SQL Server stack + Windows Server stack.
You could get some to switch out SQL Server for Oracle or MySQL. Some bolder developers could see switching out IIS for Apache.... But, you are going to have to do an awful lot to get developers to give up Visual Studio for some other environment.
Unless your IDE is -better- than Visual Studio, nobody is going to switch. And the funny thing is, I think Visual Studio is a beatable target.
PS. Linux needs a real installer / uninstaller for applications too, and that really means you need to suck it up and implement some sort of a registry for all of your settings. Woops, did I say that?
How good is it at divvying up memory among threads? Like, if I have a big old rectangular chunk of RAM, can I slice it in some way so that all 64 CPUs aren't stepping on each other trying to get at the memory? For that matter, is the RAM fast enough to feed all these CPUs?
Here I was ready to make some crack about how global warming is causing jupiter's red spot to shrink and this shows that the sun is having some other effect, and there it is in the tags:
"globalwarming manbearpig globalshrinking...."
totally burst my bubble, stole my thunder... I might actually have to do some work.
Like, right now, I have to ask myself, what exactly does a SPARC or even POWER do that an AMD64 cannot? I just don't know now, and the differences used to be much more clear cut.
IT used to be floating point and registers that set the workstation cpu apart and both of those advantages are gone. Both AMD and Intel have made a lot of strides in floating point and then AMD64 added a lot of registers.
x86 assembly went from torture to kinda fun. I don't lust after a POWER chip the way I used to want Alpha or SPARC.... with my dual Opteron I'm well, fairly satisfied.
Let's normalize the DOE numbers - 1,145.6 x 10^6 = 1.1456 x 10^9, which is, like I said, about a billion tons per year, or roughly 200 great pyramids.
The total mass of earth's atmosphere, as you said, is 1.135 x 10^16 tons. The present carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere is 582 parts per million, so roughly, the mass with which we are concerned is only about 6.6057x10^12 tons. If we calculate a little more, we can readily see that each year of burning, given a world wide manmade CO2 production is about 1 part in 825. It's not really a lot, but it does pile up. There is no discovered mechanism by which our CO2 production is magically removed from the air and indeed, direct measurements show that CO2 is rising at about a few ppm per year in way that is consistent with the amount of CO2 man produces.
I agree with you about AGW and I certainly distrust the motives of those who promote carbon taxes and massive energy changes. I do not believe in environmentalism as a proxy for socialism. But I do know that at our present rate of burning, we know that 20% of all humans will start to feel the actual health effects of CO2 in the atmosphere at 1000ppm, and that, at, the prehistoric levels of 3000ppm which are arguably more "normal", most humans actually will be continually sick. We really do not want to keep jacking up the CO2 into the air.
I look at it this way - would you swim in a pool that someone else pissed in? By volume, a little bit of pee is not very much compared to the overall mass of the pool, so why not hop in? We manage our water, we manage our soil, and I think we need to manage the air as well. That's all I'm saying.
I certainly do NOT think that we put ourselves into the stone ages. I think instead that we should be building nuclear power plants like no tomorrow. I would have much preferred Obama to take that 800b in stimulus money and begin construction on the hundreds of nuclear power plants, retire coal and natural gas plants, and move on. Enviros will bitch about the waste. Reprocess what you can and put the rest in the ground. The earth ways a lot more than the atmosphere and so the ground is the safest place to put things. When nuclear power runs out, then, we should hopefully be onto fusion.
All the windmills and energy cuts are ridiculous, I agree, but we do need to be building nuclear power plants and NOW.
Workstations died because all the PC hardware and software got better, and by leaps and bounds.
I think it started with the discovery that people could buy server motherboards and put them into desktops. Workstations were always about multiple processors and big bandwidth, and you could get there with a PC by buying a server motherboard. AMD + Intel's Mhz war just rocketed x86 way past where the likes of MIPS and Alpha could go through sheer brute force.
Even in the late 1990s, I had a dual Pentium II that was pretty competitive with a Sun workstation and for a lot less money. Better graphics cards, integrated SCSI, and AGP were the body blow. I'd say SATA and PCI-Express have just doomed the whole genre of proprietary hardware computers.
Finally, on the o/s side, Windows 2000 came out and was a lot sexier than existing proprietary unixes and at the same time, a bit more functional than the still newish Linux. Proprietary unix vendors could laugh at DOS and Windows 3.1, disparage Windows 95, and criticize Windows NT, but every release from MS just closed the big criticisms - first real multithreading, process isolation, auditing, remote management, all those features gradually were attacked in successive Windows releases. I remember people doing X remotely and saying "hah, Windows can't to that", and today even Linux uses Windows remote desktop protocol RDP, even if only to run VNC over it.
Face with an ever increasing mountain of debt, the US Government today has asked Microsoft for a bailout. Under the terms of the bailout, Microsoft Windows licenses will be exchanged with holders of Treasury Bonds to help the USA reduce its debt.
The Chinese Government expressed great interest in the deal. "We were thinking about using Linux, but knowing that we now have the rights to sell 5 billion copies of Microsoft products allows us to settle the debt the Americans have with us, and helps us become a software super power." Under the terms of the new arrangement, every house in China will receive their choice of Visual Studio Team System, Windows Server, or a lot of games.
If climate change were all about a few extra breaths of CO2 and beer, we would hardly have a problem with CO2. It's difficult to really believe that man could actually have an impact on the planet. It is. The atmosphere is enormous, but then, so too are all the industries that provide us energy.
The United States mines and burns, each year, about the same mass of coal as roughly 200 Great Pyramids. That which took nearly the entire ancient Egyptian economy, with all of their wealth, decades to produce, the USA does 200 times over, every year, and then burns it. You could almost say that the USA burns a great pyramid sized mountain of coal just shy of every two days the year. Nearly all the weight of that goes straight up into the atmosphere in the form of CO2. The carbon from the coal combines with oxygen, and there you go, you got 200 great pyramids floating around.
If you doubt this, go take a drive to your local power plant. Chances are, its a coal fired unit. You should see rail lines coming to it, and, what looks like one or more big black hills sitting next to it. Those hills are piles of coal and they will be burnt in about 30 days. The trains that ship the coal are easily a mile long. Sure, you could drive past it in a minute, but take the time actually to imagine that the whole thing probably weighs about 3000 tons.
By mass, that's enough coal to double the atmospheric concentration of CO2 over a fairly significant. Do the math. Take 3000 tons of carbon, and knowing that earth's atmospheric pressure is 15psi, of which a 300ppm is carbon dioxide, and see just how many square inches that trainload of carbon touches. It's a big number, and thousands of these trains cross America every year, each carrying mile long trains of coal from places like Wyoming all across the country.
I did a back of the envelop calculation that shows that replacing all of this coal fired generation with windmills. If you use the windmills site being installed off of Delaware as a benchmark, you can calculate that it would take about 300,000 windmills to replace all of our coal.
It is for this reason that energy businesspeople scoff at the green lobby. For the most part, environmentalists really do not understand the scale of what they propose. America's energy industry is just physically enormous. Conversely, you can't seriously take an energy man's claim that fossil burning can't effect the planet. Unlike other industries, energy executives usually have degrees in engineering and they can do or should do the calculations needed to see that the scale of their activities is in fact planet altering.
Of course, I have not even touched on the natural gas and petroleum we consume. But, I can tell you this much. If you use 15 gallons of gas per week, you are putting about 300 pounds of carbon dioxide, straight into the air. How many square inches does it take to spread that out, just so that it doubles the amount of CO2 in the air?
I'm not a greenie by any stretch of the imagination, as I've written plenty about enviro's being commies out to crush the USA... but it is pretty indisputable that our activities are planet consuming and that, as goofy and perhaps as evil as enviro's are, they are right on one fundamental point. We do have to manage the atmosphere. We do have to manage our ecosystem. We do have to view the earth as a closed system and we do have to understand the effects of our actions upon its chemistry and consequently our environment. There are just too many people with too many powerful tools consuming too much energy to do otherwise.
Yeah, like naming our multi-billion dollar warships. Apparently most of them should be named after late 20th century Presidents instead of war heroes, famous battles, etc. *sigh*
Sadly, its primarily Aircraft Carriers that are aflicted with this cursed disease. If I ever come to power, the Navy will not get a dime until it renames the Reagan, Bush, Vinson, and Ford as Yorktown, Lexington, Saratoga and Hornet, the next one after that had better damned well be named Enterprise!
Protectionism is why the South is so far behind the rest of the states
To say the South is protectionist is completely backwards from history. The south is ALWAYS a free trading place, and the north is the one that is generally more protectionist. In fact, you are so wrong, it is almost fair to say that if the civil war was not about slavery, then it was most certainly about trade.
Protectionism is actually why the North went so far past the south. The south, and all rural areas of the USA, want the right to sell their produce to as many people as possible, and to also shop for the lowest bidder for a product. The north, on the other hand, except for the last 40 years or so, has typically erected barriers to imports so that its own manufactured goods could compete, guaranteeing jobs for its own people, and, above all, locking in the rural states as markets for their products.
This is true even to this day. Free trade is advocated by rural states and by the south. If the north could get away with it, it would shut down free trade in a heartbeat - Ohio, PA, Mass, New York, and now Michigan, they don't want foreign goods and never have.
Woodrow Wilson and his understudy FDR adopted free trade when the Democrats had the "solid south" - and they rationalized it to the northern liberal progressives on the grounds of breaking out of the trusts and corporations that dominated the day. Years later, Republicans picked up the free trade banner when the "solid south" switched from Democrats to Republicans.
Then why did Lincoln say "If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it [...]"? That makes it sounds like it was about a lot more than slavery. Otherwise there wouldn't have been a war
That's like Obama denying that he's a liberal. Lincoln -had- to say it because abolitionists in the USA were a vocal minority, but a minority none-the-less.
Even if you look at how people identified themselves abroad back then. Northerners usually referred to them selves as Americans or from the US.
Hmmm, no actually it was common up North to be affiliated with one's state. Remember that states were actually responsible for raising forces for the union army back then. So you would have the New York and the PA and Massachusetts units all joining.
Civil War was about States rights vs the rights of the Federal Government. Slavery just was the right that was most publicly in contention. In the North, it made an easy target; "See the evil slave holders!" I
You know, I used to think so too, but the smoking gun for slavery is the confederate constitution. When the USA rebelled against the King, they put into the constitution things a system of government to prevent such abuses. When the South rebelled, they KEPT the US Constitution, and only altered it so that they were allowed to keep slaves.
Protectionism didn't win the war for the North any more then free trade or workers rights made the South lose it. What wins wars historically is three things, beans, boots, and bullets. Or to put it more succinctly, resources. The South lost because it needed to import most of it finished goods. The North didn't.
Point is, those industries do not exist unless they were protected. If those industries do not exist, the North is in the same boat as the South. But the North pursued a policy of developing native industrialization through protectionism, got the industry, and won the war. Protectionism worked.
The point here is, that, you don't need to be in favor of slavery if you think the south should secede again, but there's no denying that the south originally seceded so that they could keep slaves.
As a step toward simplification, Mr. Obama during the campaign proposed relieving millions of workers of the burden of filing income-tax returns, an idea that seems likely to resurface....
That's change I can hope for. We shouldn't be doing their paperwork.
Ah, but the question is, exactly how is the IRS going to find out how much in taxes you owe? IT's actually kinda creepy, when you think about it.
Slashdot Mirror
The dirty secret here is that neither party really respects private property or individual freedom. Both seem to make exceptions that suit their own embittered radicals that drive the whole show.
If there is any hope for this country, it is going to be that the middle is going to have to reassert itself, and start brokering compromises that restores freedom to both sides. Let's have conservatives come around and support gay marriage, if liberals can come around and support the 2nd amendment. Let's have both sides resist eminent domain. Let's trade a slightly higher tax rate for a real cap on entitlements. Let's compromise on calling off the DEA on the average joe and at the same time call off the IRS on the same.
The illusion that this country is under, is that, compromise makes you weak, but bashing your way through a majority makes you strong, and I think the opposite is true. It is easier to give into the radicals that support you, when you are in office. It is easier to avoid compromise and deadlock the government until the balance of power is on your side. It is easier to ignore the other side.
We conservatives were wrong to do what we did in 2000-2004, just as liberals are wrong to do what they are doing now. All this shit does is piss people off on both sides of the aisle, and sooner or later, this constant escalation and going for the jugular will lead to civil war.
This whole conversation isn't practical anyway. The only way we can even practically travel around even our own solar system is with nuclear power and too many people are trapped in 50's monster movie world to let that happen any time soon.
The SCI-FI buff in me holds out hope that physics will uncover a trick to FTL, but...
It doesn't really matter if we cannot travel faster than the speed of light so long as we can live long enough to get there.
Who cares if it takes 50 years to fly to Alpha Centauri if we can engineer ourselves to live for a thousand!
Why is PHP so huge? Because large chunks of those developers were VB developers
Not VB, but classic ASP developers. I would give you that. classic ASP had problems but it was pretty simple to program for. ASP.NET is better but it is more complicated.
I think there's nothing wrong with running yum or apt. That part of the end, of installing and searching for applications to install, is better.
My issue is more that uninstallng from yum or apt seems to not work. Installing from APT or YUM is absolutely great, but the other way, not so. To me a real installer is database based, transacted, and snapshot preserving. You install a product and if you uninstall it, the system is the way it was. apt isn't there yet. I tried to uninstall yet another ubuntu download that bricked my x, and, when the dust settled, half the stuff was still there, and my desktop was still bricked. Not saying this can't happen in Windows, but, it happens a lot less often than it used to. Finally, as a developer, I would like to be able to -write- an installer with some confidence that it will actually work on most Linux distributions. I don't know that now. If I build an installer in Windows, I know that it will at least deploy ok to Windows XP and Vista. I have to test it, for sure, but testing it at least gives me a better warm and fuzzy.
I think, and I could be wrong, that problem with installing or doing any sort of programmatic systems management in Linux is because everything is in text files, and I think it would make a lot more sense if all the configuration information were loaded into a relational store. It doesn't have to be transacted, I think, as much as it has to have known transaction complete snapshots periodically, so that you can confidently roll back to a date, or better still, an event. That level of technology would crush Windows and I think all the pieces are in place for that to happen. Obviously a lot of people would prefer MySQL to back it but PostGres is out there and free.
I agree that the way the registry is implemented is utterly terrible. But the idea of having a database central to the system where all the system settings that could be altered by an installation, from startup scripts to drivers to x desktop settings, would be utterly kick ass. To me, the registry was like, here's a step towards making a central system database, but instead of really pushing forward with it, and making it into a genuine database built in with the system, Microsoft just kept it at its crippled hierarchical self, probably so that people would still have to buy SQL Server.
Registry has everything to do with installation. The whole point of the registry was to provide a consistent and programmatic place to describe all the system settings. Now, I won't argue that the Registry is a terrible database, but it is a database.
Sure, in Linux, I can put a copy of a program into my ~/username folder and rock on. But, what if that program is going to alter characteristics of my shell or my desktop? Or, more naggingly, what if I want to add a driver to my system? There's a bunch of startup scripts that need to be altered and those are not so easily tangled with programmatically.
SciAm sensationalized it yesterday to focus on just one thing, because SciAm has sadly succumbed to the economic fact that the masses will not pay for news unless it's incredible (in all senses of the word)
See, I think that this misplaced belief in the stupidity of the masses is the single largest reason why the media is sinking like the rock that it deserves to. People know when they are being coddled or patronized. You might think you win a few more popularity points with them in the short term but in doing so what you actually lose is their respect.
The one thing is too, is that, while reducing emissions by nuclear power replacement is nice, we are ultimately going to need to have the means of scrubbing the CO2 out of the atmosphere and manage that mix on an ongoing basis. Ultimately, whether or not the CO2 is there is our fault or mother natures doesn't even really matter. It's that its there and we need to manage the level.
The thing is, there's no way cap and trade of CO2 is actually going to work in the USA. We're about to blow hundreds of billions of dollars to accomplish absolutely nothing. There's actually a coal mine fire in China that produces more greenhouse gases than all of our cars combined... the present congress's environmental plans are simply retarded.
hot of developers spilling out of the Microsoft dam and into the PHP, Perl, Python, Java and Ruby streams
I'd say you have a ways to go before you get any Windows developer to give up on Visual Studio + SQL Server stack + Windows Server stack.
You could get some to switch out SQL Server for Oracle or MySQL. Some bolder developers could see switching out IIS for Apache.... But, you are going to have to do an awful lot to get developers to give up Visual Studio for some other environment.
Unless your IDE is -better- than Visual Studio, nobody is going to switch. And the funny thing is, I think Visual Studio is a beatable target.
PS. Linux needs a real installer / uninstaller for applications too, and that really means you need to suck it up and implement some sort of a registry for all of your settings. Woops, did I say that?
For SPARC, awesome parallelism
Interesting.
How good is it at divvying up memory among threads? Like, if I have a big old rectangular chunk of RAM, can I slice it in some way so that all 64 CPUs aren't stepping on each other trying to get at the memory? For that matter, is the RAM fast enough to feed all these CPUs?
Here I was ready to make some crack about how global warming is causing jupiter's red spot to shrink and this shows that the sun is having some other effect, and there it is in the tags:
"globalwarming manbearpig globalshrinking...."
totally burst my bubble, stole my thunder... I might actually have to do some work.
You are so right.
Like, right now, I have to ask myself, what exactly does a SPARC or even POWER do that an AMD64 cannot? I just don't know now, and the differences used to be much more clear cut.
IT used to be floating point and registers that set the workstation cpu apart and both of those advantages are gone. Both AMD and Intel have made a lot of strides in floating point and then AMD64 added a lot of registers.
x86 assembly went from torture to kinda fun. I don't lust after a POWER chip the way I used to want Alpha or SPARC.... with my dual Opteron I'm well, fairly satisfied.
Let's normalize the DOE numbers - 1,145.6 x 10^6 = 1.1456 x 10^9, which is, like I said, about a billion tons per year, or roughly 200 great pyramids.
The total mass of earth's atmosphere, as you said, is 1.135 x 10^16 tons. The present carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere is 582 parts per million, so roughly, the mass with which we are concerned is only about 6.6057x10^12 tons. If we calculate a little more, we can readily see that each year of burning, given a world wide manmade CO2 production is about 1 part in 825. It's not really a lot, but it does pile up. There is no discovered mechanism by which our CO2 production is magically removed from the air and indeed, direct measurements show that CO2 is rising at about a few ppm per year in way that is consistent with the amount of CO2 man produces.
I agree with you about AGW and I certainly distrust the motives of those who promote carbon taxes and massive energy changes. I do not believe in environmentalism as a proxy for socialism. But I do know that at our present rate of burning, we know that 20% of all humans will start to feel the actual health effects of CO2 in the atmosphere at 1000ppm, and that, at, the prehistoric levels of 3000ppm which are arguably more "normal", most humans actually will be continually sick. We really do not want to keep jacking up the CO2 into the air.
I look at it this way - would you swim in a pool that someone else pissed in? By volume, a little bit of pee is not very much compared to the overall mass of the pool, so why not hop in? We manage our water, we manage our soil, and I think we need to manage the air as well. That's all I'm saying.
I certainly do NOT think that we put ourselves into the stone ages. I think instead that we should be building nuclear power plants like no tomorrow. I would have much preferred Obama to take that 800b in stimulus money and begin construction on the hundreds of nuclear power plants, retire coal and natural gas plants, and move on. Enviros will bitch about the waste. Reprocess what you can and put the rest in the ground. The earth ways a lot more than the atmosphere and so the ground is the safest place to put things. When nuclear power runs out, then, we should hopefully be onto fusion.
All the windmills and energy cuts are ridiculous, I agree, but we do need to be building nuclear power plants and NOW.
Workstations died because all the PC hardware and software got better, and by leaps and bounds.
I think it started with the discovery that people could buy server motherboards and put them into desktops. Workstations were always about multiple processors and big bandwidth, and you could get there with a PC by buying a server motherboard. AMD + Intel's Mhz war just rocketed x86 way past where the likes of MIPS and Alpha could go through sheer brute force.
Even in the late 1990s, I had a dual Pentium II that was pretty competitive with a Sun workstation and for a lot less money. Better graphics cards, integrated SCSI, and AGP were the body blow. I'd say SATA and PCI-Express have just doomed the whole genre of proprietary hardware computers.
Finally, on the o/s side, Windows 2000 came out and was a lot sexier than existing proprietary unixes and at the same time, a bit more functional than the still newish Linux. Proprietary unix vendors could laugh at DOS and Windows 3.1, disparage Windows 95, and criticize Windows NT, but every release from MS just closed the big criticisms - first real multithreading, process isolation, auditing, remote management, all those features gradually were attacked in successive Windows releases. I remember people doing X remotely and saying "hah, Windows can't to that", and today even Linux uses Windows remote desktop protocol RDP, even if only to run VNC over it.
Face with an ever increasing mountain of debt, the US Government today has asked Microsoft for a bailout. Under the terms of the bailout, Microsoft Windows licenses will be exchanged with holders of Treasury Bonds to help the USA reduce its debt.
The Chinese Government expressed great interest in the deal. "We were thinking about using Linux, but knowing that we now have the rights to sell 5 billion copies of Microsoft products allows us to settle the debt the Americans have with us, and helps us become a software super power." Under the terms of the new arrangement, every house in China will receive their choice of Visual Studio Team System, Windows Server, or a lot of games.
If climate change were all about a few extra breaths of CO2 and beer, we would hardly have a problem with CO2. It's difficult to really believe that man could actually have an impact on the planet. It is. The atmosphere is enormous, but then, so too are all the industries that provide us energy.
The United States mines and burns, each year, about the same mass of coal as roughly 200 Great Pyramids. That which took nearly the entire ancient Egyptian economy, with all of their wealth, decades to produce, the USA does 200 times over, every year, and then burns it. You could almost say that the USA burns a great pyramid sized mountain of coal just shy of every two days the year. Nearly all the weight of that goes straight up into the atmosphere in the form of CO2. The carbon from the coal combines with oxygen, and there you go, you got 200 great pyramids floating around.
If you doubt this, go take a drive to your local power plant. Chances are, its a coal fired unit. You should see rail lines coming to it, and, what looks like one or more big black hills sitting next to it. Those hills are piles of coal and they will be burnt in about 30 days. The trains that ship the coal are easily a mile long. Sure, you could drive past it in a minute, but take the time actually to imagine that the whole thing probably weighs about 3000 tons.
By mass, that's enough coal to double the atmospheric concentration of CO2 over a fairly significant. Do the math. Take 3000 tons of carbon, and knowing that earth's atmospheric pressure is 15psi, of which a 300ppm is carbon dioxide, and see just how many square inches that trainload of carbon touches. It's a big number, and thousands of these trains cross America every year, each carrying mile long trains of coal from places like Wyoming all across the country.
I did a back of the envelop calculation that shows that replacing all of this coal fired generation with windmills. If you use the windmills site being installed off of Delaware as a benchmark, you can calculate that it would take about 300,000 windmills to replace all of our coal.
It is for this reason that energy businesspeople scoff at the green lobby. For the most part, environmentalists really do not understand the scale of what they propose. America's energy industry is just physically enormous. Conversely, you can't seriously take an energy man's claim that fossil burning can't effect the planet. Unlike other industries, energy executives usually have degrees in engineering and they can do or should do the calculations needed to see that the scale of their activities is in fact planet altering.
Of course, I have not even touched on the natural gas and petroleum we consume. But, I can tell you this much. If you use 15 gallons of gas per week, you are putting about 300 pounds of carbon dioxide, straight into the air. How many square inches does it take to spread that out, just so that it doubles the amount of CO2 in the air?
I'm not a greenie by any stretch of the imagination, as I've written plenty about enviro's being commies out to crush the USA... but it is pretty indisputable that our activities are planet consuming and that, as goofy and perhaps as evil as enviro's are, they are right on one fundamental point. We do have to manage the atmosphere. We do have to manage our ecosystem. We do have to view the earth as a closed system and we do have to understand the effects of our actions upon its chemistry and consequently our environment. There are just too many people with too many powerful tools consuming too much energy to do otherwise.
Was thinking
USS Gerald R Ford (CVN 78)
Yeah, like naming our multi-billion dollar warships. Apparently most of them should be named after late 20th century Presidents instead of war heroes, famous battles, etc. *sigh*
Sadly, its primarily Aircraft Carriers that are aflicted with this cursed disease. If I ever come to power, the Navy will not get a dime until it renames the Reagan, Bush, Vinson, and Ford as Yorktown, Lexington, Saratoga and Hornet, the next one after that had better damned well be named Enterprise!
This protocol has been so touted, so advocated and so under adopted, that it reminds of the days of OS/2 being the next big thing.
Protectionism is why the South is so far behind the rest of the states
To say the South is protectionist is completely backwards from history. The south is ALWAYS a free trading place, and the north is the one that is generally more protectionist. In fact, you are so wrong, it is almost fair to say that if the civil war was not about slavery, then it was most certainly about trade.
Protectionism is actually why the North went so far past the south. The south, and all rural areas of the USA, want the right to sell their produce to as many people as possible, and to also shop for the lowest bidder for a product. The north, on the other hand, except for the last 40 years or so, has typically erected barriers to imports so that its own manufactured goods could compete, guaranteeing jobs for its own people, and, above all, locking in the rural states as markets for their products.
This is true even to this day. Free trade is advocated by rural states and by the south. If the north could get away with it, it would shut down free trade in a heartbeat - Ohio, PA, Mass, New York, and now Michigan, they don't want foreign goods and never have.
Woodrow Wilson and his understudy FDR adopted free trade when the Democrats had the "solid south" - and they rationalized it to the northern liberal progressives on the grounds of breaking out of the trusts and corporations that dominated the day. Years later, Republicans picked up the free trade banner when the "solid south" switched from Democrats to Republicans.
Then why did Lincoln say "If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it [...]"? That makes it sounds like it was about a lot more than slavery. Otherwise there wouldn't have been a war
That's like Obama denying that he's a liberal. Lincoln -had- to say it because abolitionists in the USA were a vocal minority, but a minority none-the-less.
-can't-take-any-more-bad-april-fools-articles--
Even if you look at how people identified themselves abroad back then. Northerners usually referred to them selves as Americans or from the US.
Hmmm, no actually it was common up North to be affiliated with one's state. Remember that states were actually responsible for raising forces for the union army back then. So you would have the New York and the PA and Massachusetts units all joining.
Civil War was about States rights vs the rights of the Federal Government. Slavery just was the right that was most publicly in contention. In the North, it made an easy target; "See the evil slave holders!" I
You know, I used to think so too, but the smoking gun for slavery is the confederate constitution. When the USA rebelled against the King, they put into the constitution things a system of government to prevent such abuses. When the South rebelled, they KEPT the US Constitution, and only altered it so that they were allowed to keep slaves.
Protectionism didn't win the war for the North any more then free trade or workers rights made the South lose it. What wins wars historically is three things, beans, boots, and bullets. Or to put it more succinctly, resources. The South lost because it needed to import most of it finished goods. The North didn't.
Point is, those industries do not exist unless they were protected. If those industries do not exist, the North is in the same boat as the South. But the North pursued a policy of developing native industrialization through protectionism, got the industry, and won the war. Protectionism worked.
nstead of taking a history 101 course, try reading original source material from the day. You will find a radically different view from your own
Sorry dog, you are just completely wrong.
http://www.civilwarhome.com/csconstitution.htm
here's an editorial on the possibility of southern secession in the NY Times from before the war: at issue: slavery
http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?_r=1&res=9B02E5DD1E31E134BC4151DFB667838B679FDE
From 1853,
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9E00E5D7133AE334BC4D51DFB2668388649FDE
It really goes on and on.
The point here is, that, you don't need to be in favor of slavery if you think the south should secede again, but there's no denying that the south originally seceded so that they could keep slaves.
As a step toward simplification, Mr. Obama during the campaign proposed relieving millions of workers of the burden of filing income-tax returns, an idea that seems likely to resurface....
That's change I can hope for. We shouldn't be doing their paperwork.
Ah, but the question is, exactly how is the IRS going to find out how much in taxes you owe? IT's actually kinda creepy, when you think about it.