If a new cult formed in the United States that stated mankind was created by magic, and demanded that their particular belief be included in science textbooks, that would absolutely be newsworthy. My question is, what is the functional difference between the cult's irrational beliefs and those found in the Bible?
Once separated from the institution of Christianity, the notion of having such idiotic ideas in a science textbook being taught to children falls flat on it's face. This is proof to me that the idea continues to be influential not on it's own merits, but because of the institutional weight it carries.
This is the same reason, as Hitchens has stated, that you will move away from and not closer to a man on the subway who claims to be the son of god. When trying to place this idea in our current reality, it's too ridiculous to support, even for a believer. What nun would take him to the church and see if the priest could ascertain if he was indeed the resurrected Jesus? What pious evangelical would take this man into their home and then go to church and proclaim they had found the messiah?
Stories can exists by themselves in a state of suspended belief. As soon as you try to bring these ideas to the current day, they serve no use at all, besides relating moralities that have been told much more effectively by much better story tellers.
You're trying to make the case that evolution and biblical literalism are not diametrically opposed.
Perhaps you can explain to me how creating a person out of dust with magic (as far as humans are concerned) doesn't cause issue with the theory that we evolved from lower life forms.
The Intelligent Design crowd does not advocate for the Native American belief that it's turtles all the way down. Stop pretending that these two ideas - Christianity and Intelligent Design - are not the same political force. It's childish.
The poll shows that almost half of the U.S. population believes that human beings did not evolve, but instead were created by God -- as stated in the Bible -- essentially in their current form about 10,000 years ago...
A segmentation of Americans based on their responses to the questions about creationism and biblical literacy finds that a quarter of Americans can be considered to be true literalists -- believing not only in the literal interpretation of the Bible, but also in the creationist view of the origin of humans.
Of course you don't believe there are many creationists out there, because you're not a creationist. I have trouble imagining how many people accept this ridiculous idea myself. But there the numbers are.
For hobbies, there are tons of programs. For professional users, there are zero.
For instance, you could create a demo record in Linux. However, there's no way in hell you could master and release a studio quality album.
You could create a nice home video with cinelerra. I can almost guarantee no studio quality movie has ever been released using only linux for post processing.
You could make a nice flyer for your lost dog with OOo or GIMP. You could not produce an image for any major magazine without using a real suite for color correction.
And as far as desktop accounting goes, there are 0 options available that provide anything close to the functionality of quickbooks. That's why Intuit, despite their idiotic business practices and piss poor program quality, is still making billions.
The first problem with American culture is simple credulity. There are accepted dogmas that are not meaningfully challenged in the mainstream. There are inroads being made, but there are two entities fully tied to the status quo, which are christianity and business.
For the most part, Christianity demands reason being left at the door. If you've seen the way young kids are indoctrinated, especially in evangelical circles, you immediately understand why skepticism has been eliminated from American vocabularies. There are some things you just don't question. Period. The bible is true - period. The world is 6000 years old - period. Anything outside of this one book is considered false until proven true, and only if it is congruent with a particular interpretation of the bible.
Business has similar dogmas that have now been accepted without skeptical analysis. The market always works. Unions are always corrupt and run by the mafia. Government is always bad, unless you're talking about nuclear weapons or invading other countries, in which case government is always good. (It amazes me some people can have a total meltdown over imaginary government death panels, and in the next breath praise former CIA torture policies.)
In a skeptical environment, these dogmas do not hold up to scrutiny. Therefore, a skeptical environment can only be allowed when it makes more money. Shell does not look for oil based on a Young Earth model, because that wouldn't yield oil. The Christian community will misuse scientific theory to strawman evolution, but would never apply any scientific principles to their own faith. Pharmaceuticals will claim that they have to gouge American consumers for their medications to afford the science, and hope you will ignore the fact that they spend more money on marketing than research. Every day drips with irony after irony.
There are elementary philosophical discussions that simply don't exist in American thought. Is it ethical to make money without working? Is it ethical to invade another country who has not attempted to invade you? Is it ethical to have private entities profit from going to war? Is it ethical to treat Christian churches as tax exempt entities when they are clearly creating wealth that is not going to charities?
All of this has a root in the idea that money is the only way to value anything. Once this becomes your basis for reasoning, you immediately eliminate all possibilities that don't involve profit. And unfortunately, many valuable things lay in areas which may never be profitable for the existing business infrastructure. How can new ideas flourish in such an environment? How can new technology replace old technology? How can we progress?
The answer is that we have lost our position as the meritocracy of ideas. Great minds from muslim states don't even bother applying for student visas. Exxon owns patents expressly so they won't be used. Businesses bully the rest of society with well funded teams of lawyers to keep markets uncompetitive.
We haven't woken up to these facts, because in true dogmatic fashion, we aren't allowed to consider the possibility.
Slashdot is subject to it's own internal liberal and conservative swings. Right now it's unpopular to point out that Windows 7 is a superior operating system. In a few weeks it will be the reverse.
I can be in X and web surfing via Firefox in less than two minutes
Surfing the internet is not working for most people. It's a way to get information, but in order to get paid they have to create a document, or a dataset, or a physical product.
Incidentally, I get the same boot time in XP, 7, and Leopard. Perhaps not on lower end hardware.
My definition of user-friendliness, aside from being a system which doesn't cause me a lot of time, is a system which works continually because of its' level of reliability.
You're missing the entire point. Booting into an environment without error is nice, but it's just the beginning. Then you have to provide tools for your users to complete a task. This may be a moot point with HTML 5 and virtualization, but the amount of products you could not produce with any *nix native application is truly large.
Hi. I work with small businesses. I'm here to explain to you why Windows 7 will dominate this market for the foreseeable future, and why Linux will not. It is my hope that you will get some inspiration to create products that I can sell to customers besides file and web servers.
1. Windows 7 does not force a user to edit any configuration files for any normal desktop user. I cannot stress how important this is for most small business owners. This is not the 1980s. No one has any interest in programming or fiddling with tens of arcane text files to get work done. They just want to turn on their computer, use it to process data, and then go home. If you claim that this is not the case, you're just ignoring reality.
2. Windows can run on most hardware. It can run most applications. This means it's cheaper to deploy than Apple solutions, and you can actually do something once the OS is installed.
3. After years and years, there is still no multi-user, end-to-end solution for creating quotes, orders, and invoices, that integrates with an accounting solution to keep track of payables and then print checks to pay them. You are being beaten by a company, ironically called Intuit, that just switched from a flat file system in 2006.
I realize a lot of this has to do with driver support. I realize most of you don't care if your software is popular or not. I realize that you will reply with some alpha and beta stage software which you think can do the job, but won't.
However, bashing Windows is a complete waste of time. I'm not saying I can do better, but I am saying that you need to stop pretending that you are doing any better. The future is not going to be using a computer like a computer. The future is turning a computer into an appliance that Just Works Every Time.
Don't get me wrong - newer distros are amazing. Synaptic is like a revelation of the way things should be done. OOo is so close it's almost unbearable. I'm learning Python on the Linux side because it's easier than trying to configure windows for the same task. But you've got to start expecting more out of yourselves than of your end users.
So let me be your James Carville for a moment. My big banner says:
1. Users are not programmers 2. It's the applications, stupid! 3. Don't forget about accounting software 4. Laptops are people too
I have an immense amount of respect for the people who work on these projects, because you all know a hell of a lot more about computers and computer science than I probably ever will. However, I am pleading with you to abstract your knowledge so that everyday people can use it. Otherwise, it's not going to do the world much good.
So your argument is we need to artificially raise the cost of energy. That sounds like an economic winner.
That's not artificial. There is a real cost that SOMEONE will have to pay eventually. These are called externalities. You cannot allow an industry to externalize the expense associated with their product to the point where there's no competition.
>What does "hegemony" in the Middle East have to do with the price of a gallon of gas? The bulk of our imported oil comes from friendly Western hemisphere sources. Europe and China are much more reliant on Middle Eastern oil than we are -- perhaps we should let them try their hand at stabilizing the region?
Well, there are several political realities here. First is that we are in the middle east precisely to have veto power over other nations. It's a political power play that's been going on since the British navy switched from steam to diesel.
However, if you cut out the availability of Middle East Oil, you would see prices as they were in the 70s. The simple fact that we are reliant on an external entity for our cheap transportation means it isn't cheap. It's just cheap right now.
All countries that don't have to pay the full cost of their own national defense, by virtue of being under the American umbrella. How much would England, Germany and France have spent on defense in the latter half of the 20th century if they had to build up the forces on their own to deter the Warsaw Pact?
They may have spent more. I doubt they would have refused to defend themselves. It's difficult to extract the guns and butter question from the Cold War, I can agree, but that ended 20 years ago. If the cold war was really the driving force behind our military expenditure, whey didn't it dramatically fall after the CCCP collapsed?
The market can value every one of those things just fine if people would stop interfering with it. The reason we have a piss poor last mile telecommunications infrastructure in this country is because of Government granted monopolies.
It's because corporations were handed the keys at all. If they have 95% coverage in an area, they do not give a shit about the last 5%. The only entity that would sanely care about 100% saturation would be a highly regulated non-profit or county level telco. If there were no regulation, the US would look just like Latin American countries where the rich suburbs are wired, sewered, watered, and the rest of the country is left to their own devices.
One of the reasons our health care system is in shambles is because a huge health care customer (Uncle Sam, via Medicare) pays below-market rates for services rendered, thus leading to the rest of us being charged more to make up the difference. I want to scream at the TV every single time somebody mentions Medicare as a model because it has "lower costs" -- it's easy to have "lower costs" when you don't even pay a break-even price to the provider of the services you receive.
America pays 16% of GDP for it's healthcare. The rest of Europe pays less than 10% of GDP, and they are just as healthy, and they all have coverage. You're going to have to overcome that fact before you have a persuasive argument.
Medicare is an interesting example. It works so well that when they allowed private corporations to compete, they couldn't. Private Medicare providers receive government subsidies just to stay in business. I don't see any reason to create a profit motive where the need for one doesn't exist.
Transportation would also work better if Government would stop picking winners and losers. Why don't trucks have to pay full price for the damage they do to the roadways? Perhaps if they did other methods of moving goods around (trains, waterways, etc) would be more competitive. Instead we effectively subsidize the trucking industry with our taxes that
Yeah, it's sort of counterintuitive. I usually distrust people when they say that word, so take this with a grain of salt.
Let's say you have a community with 10,000 commuters. They all want to get roughly downtown at the same time. Would there be more profit involved in building an electric transit system that brought them close to their destination, or in selling every single one of them a car, gasoline to power it, and then charging them for the road construction and maintenance?
This is an oversimplification, but it's important to remember that the efficient solution will not be supported by the market every time, especially when it's a necessity. That's because there are two questions you can ask about necessities: how much will it cost to provide them, and how much are you willing to pay to receive them? Think about that. I pay maybe $20 a month to have running water in my little apartment. How much would I be willing to pay? Probably ten times as much. What would happen to the progress of a community with such a high infrastructure cost? It wouldn't go anywhere. It couldn't, because a corporation is sucking it's resources dry because no one is telling them not to.
So, once technology improves to the point where a luxury becomes a necessity, I think it should be socialized. Otherwise we will be stuck while corporations squeeze every last penny out of decades old technology, and societies more progressive than ours have moved on.
The actual unemployment rate for the US is nearly 17%. The 10% figure we are at now doesn't consider prisoners, those who are underemployed, and those who have given up on looking for work more than 6 months ago. France is around 10%, and as far as I can tell, they do include these numbers.
If you look more closely at the numbers, it gets even more interesting. Look at "working age" unemployment, between 22 and 55, and the numbers look even worse for America. That's because most people are allowed to have an education for free, so they don't work until they graduate. And once they have reached retirement age, Europeans actually retire. They haven't been bankrupted by an illness. They have kept their pensions, since they demand accountability from their corporations. And there's no data to suggest they weren't as productive as an American worker, even though they have three to five weeks of vacation every year. The desire of my fellow countrymen to continue working harder for less never ceases to amaze me.
As far as social medicine goes, it takes only a moment to realize that early treatment for everyone is far cheaper than emergency treatment for everyone. So, unless you can get hospitals to be more blunt about letting poor people die just outside their doors, and start denying accident victims with their guts hanging out entry into the ER, you aren't really solving the problem. You're just pretending.
Mass transit isn't profitable because it's efficient. Solar power isn't profitable because coal isn't properly taxed for the amount of damage it does to the ecosystem, or when a slurry wall fails and kills a few hundred people directly. Batteries are expensive because the cost of maintaining hegemony in the Middle East is hidden in our defense budget, and not tacked on to the price of a gallon of gas.
There are many things that the market is piss poor at valuing. There are many services better considered as infrastructure than as a luxury, like transportation, health care, electricity, and telecommunications. That's why when you look across the world, large state sectors dominate economically. They have spread out the cost and benefits of this infrastructure, and raised the standard of living for everyone. Weak states, where the market has no boundaries, perform very poorly in comparison. They are subject to more devastating economic cycles, corruption, monopoly practices, and so on.
There is no need to engage in philosophical debates. You can simply look at the economic history of the last thirty years, and compare America to Canada, England, France, and Germany. America now has the highest unemployment, worst income inequality, pays the most portion for basic services, transportation, health care, and education. Our savings have evaporated. The dollar only holds value as far as China is willing to lend us money. We have no way to create things that other people want to buy because we don't have a manufacturing sector. The leftover bits of prosperity from the postwar period will not last forever.
This is not progress. In fact, the cost of doing business has gone up so much that there is now "political support" - meaning, some corporate support - for health care reform after 30 years of majority support for a single payer system. A market, properly calibrated by regulation, can do amazing things when it increases competition. Remove the corrective effects of good governance, and it turns into a nightmare.
I wonder if that's because it's run by lawyers, bankers, and insurance companies?
On an even deeper philosophical level, when you are only encouraged to measure success by wealth, I don't think anyone should be surprised at the shortsighted nature of American innovation at the moment. Many hard problems are not profitable to solve, so all of our capital is flooding into financial services and marketing. I don't imagine we can make a space program out of that.
I read the article. It was an example of an extraordinary bit of medicine, which saved a young girls life.
You don't hear about a doctor saving someone with simpler treatment methods because it happens all of the time, every day. A hundred years ago this kind of survival rate of disease would be considered miraculous. Today it's commonplace because of medicine.
Sorry to say, average healthy adults have died from H1N1 - there are numerous examples throughout the US and in India and in Mexico. The survival rate compared to regular influenza is unclear. The point is that if a person feels very ill, they should go to a doctor. The doctor should decide the best course of action for a patient, not you. If home therapies worked, why would we be bothering with health care at all? People could just swing by your house and you could pretend you are telling them something valuable.
You're a fucking creep, do you know that? Move in with some Christian Scientists and die a slow painful death away from places where you can continue to give bad advice.
So, no listening to the FM radio when it's docked? That would be kind of a bummer. I'm sure they'll release iTenna for $39.95 to solve this "problem," which will last about a week before the connector separates from the wire jacket.
It's not a matter of some conspiracy. Fear sells. It's legal to "stretch the truth," or as I like to say, lie about things in order to get your numbers higher for the nightly news or the homepage impressions.
When you listen to what scientists are saying, it's the fact that it's a new strain that is the dangerous part. It's already shown resistance to typical treatment, so if it becomes particularly nasty through mutation this winter (exactly as the Spanish flu did, by the way) then it will be a problem.
I know using "science" to head problems like this one off at the pass is a terribly unpopular idea in America, but one that I support anyway. It's better to be safe than sorry, as the saying goes. Wash your hands. Don't go to work if you're sick. And if you feel ill, go to the doctor. Good advice in general, but not only are you protecting yourself, but also reducing the chance that we turn this winter into a perfect storm for H1N1.
A black preacher with bad ideas is just as bad as a person who's murdered his own countrymen for decades. That's a fantastic set of moral values! Where'd you get them from, Oliver North?
Your ideal about investment is nice, but totally imaginary. Manufacturing jobs are moving overseas because the manufacturers require the exploited workforces provided by Malaysia, Vietnam, El Salvador, etc. They do not want to pay a day's wage for a day's work to an American, but they do want to sell their products in America. They only care about profit. If they have to destroy a community to get it, well, that's business.
Here's a choice quote (via the Wik) from the very far right British National Party about the NHS in general, that I'm sure you won't see on Fox News anytime soon:
socialized medicine is not just a hallmark of a decent society, but economically rational as well. If one leaves behind capitalist-romantic theories about private-sector efficiency and looks at real-world privatised medicine, which may be observed in America, it is an obvious disaster. It is vastly more expensive and delivers mediocre results outside of luxury care. Britain spends about 1/3 the money per person and we have public health statistics roughly equivalent to America. Except for the fact that the bottom 1/4 of our population is vastly healthier.
Suddenly I've realized though, that you are right. You are so right I'm just going to admit it right now, and come to Jesus and truth and the glory and the light of free enterprise, and admit fully and with my whole heart, the following statement:
You are an idiot. What's the point in bothering with you?
First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win. -Ghandi
We are at stage three. Assuming someone in the open source community wakes up and gives small businesses a real alternative to QuickBooks and creative media software.
Have you been to a best buy lately? I hate to generalize about their floor staff, but as Rowan Atkinson once said, "I wouldn't trust them to sit the right way on a toilet."
It's sort of like trying to convince a guy with an apple logo shaved into his ironic haircut that he paid too much for his Air. Best to just leave them be.
First, damage to property is not violence. The proper response is to seize the assets of anyone connected with the plot, and prosecute the case as a crime.
Second, no one should condone irrational behavior like this. But before you go after the environmentalists with guns, you should probably consider that in the grand scheme of things, the loss of AM towers are the tiniest problems facing the nation right now.
If you want to repeat history, by all means, crack down on the ELF and send them all to prison and beat up anyone in the group. Throw the PATRIOT act in their faces. Within no time at all you will have given their movement the publicity and recruiting tools to really cause problems. And erode public support as more and more people are locked up by guilt from association. Or you can arrest the criminals who participated in the act, force the dissolution of the rest of the group unless they officially renounce property damage as a method of protest, and actually take care of the problem.
Let me address the real issue here. Just because the US has poorly managed it's infrastructure does not mean the rest of the world has. Capitalist fanaticism is just as dumb as communist or anarchist fanaticism.
For instance, the whole of Europe is covered by subsidized rail. Europe uses less than 20% of the energy that we do for transportation. Who is more efficient? France has a nuclear powered high speed rail system that is ridiculously efficient, clean, and well used. Just because lobbyists are directing all our infrastructure to the dead idea of highways and urban sprawl doesn't mean that subsidized rail is a bad idea. It means that rail and sensible land use aren't receiving as much money as they should.
The best illustration of the failure of US governance can be seen quite plainly in healthcare. I don't care what anecdote you have. Statistically, the rest of the world pays at least 35% less than what we do for health care, they live just as long, and they are happier with their system than we are with ours. This is because they have grown up and realized that the market solution is not always the best.
Another example is telecommunications infrastructure. Across the whole of Europe, well regulated broadband has covered nearly every inch of the continent with low cost, high speed internet access. Even in countries with similar population densities, like Norway and Sweden and Finland. Sure, you can find complaints. Give them the choice of a government option or a closed option like Comcast or AT&T, and you'll quickly discover that people don't want to be locked into a vendor. It would be like Georgia Power (where I live) only allowing Georgia Power appliances to use electricity. The liberation of American network access, if it ever happens, will be with corporations fighting to the bitter end to keep their profit margins intact, built not on their own dime, but the infrastructure subsidized by you and me from programs throughout the 90s.
You've swallowed wholesale the lie that corporations are better than government for everything. Just take a look at the 1880s before public outcry ended child slavery, 70 hour workweeks, unsafe working conditions, and crippling manual labor. That's the reality of corporate governance. These deplorable conditions didn't disappear, they were just outsourced to countries where the leaders are willing to exploit their workforce for kickbacks.
You can advocate an intelligent position, where corporations are kept in check by a more powerful and localized government, and the local government is kept in check by a powerful participatory democracy. Or you can advocate for the madness of money being the only metric by which success can be measured. You could munch on a Baconator while the rest of the world continues to improve through science and collective innovation, and we become an echo chamber of reality shows and televangelists and Fox News anchors, trying to convince a nation literally dying from it's own selfishness and gluttony that they're still #1.
Slashdot Mirror
If a new cult formed in the United States that stated mankind was created by magic, and demanded that their particular belief be included in science textbooks, that would absolutely be newsworthy. My question is, what is the functional difference between the cult's irrational beliefs and those found in the Bible?
Once separated from the institution of Christianity, the notion of having such idiotic ideas in a science textbook being taught to children falls flat on it's face. This is proof to me that the idea continues to be influential not on it's own merits, but because of the institutional weight it carries.
This is the same reason, as Hitchens has stated, that you will move away from and not closer to a man on the subway who claims to be the son of god. When trying to place this idea in our current reality, it's too ridiculous to support, even for a believer. What nun would take him to the church and see if the priest could ascertain if he was indeed the resurrected Jesus? What pious evangelical would take this man into their home and then go to church and proclaim they had found the messiah?
Stories can exists by themselves in a state of suspended belief. As soon as you try to bring these ideas to the current day, they serve no use at all, besides relating moralities that have been told much more effectively by much better story tellers.
You're trying to make the case that evolution and biblical literalism are not diametrically opposed.
Perhaps you can explain to me how creating a person out of dust with magic (as far as humans are concerned) doesn't cause issue with the theory that we evolved from lower life forms.
The Intelligent Design crowd does not advocate for the Native American belief that it's turtles all the way down. Stop pretending that these two ideas - Christianity and Intelligent Design - are not the same political force. It's childish.
http://www.gallup.com/poll/14107/Third-Americans-Say-Evidence-Has-Supported-Darwins-Evolution-Theory.aspx
The poll shows that almost half of the U.S. population believes that human beings did not evolve, but instead were created by God -- as stated in the Bible -- essentially in their current form about 10,000 years ago...
A segmentation of Americans based on their responses to the questions about creationism and biblical literacy finds that a quarter of Americans can be considered to be true literalists -- believing not only in the literal interpretation of the Bible, but also in the creationist view of the origin of humans.
Of course you don't believe there are many creationists out there, because you're not a creationist. I have trouble imagining how many people accept this ridiculous idea myself. But there the numbers are.
For hobbies, there are tons of programs. For professional users, there are zero.
For instance, you could create a demo record in Linux. However, there's no way in hell you could master and release a studio quality album.
You could create a nice home video with cinelerra. I can almost guarantee no studio quality movie has ever been released using only linux for post processing.
You could make a nice flyer for your lost dog with OOo or GIMP. You could not produce an image for any major magazine without using a real suite for color correction.
And as far as desktop accounting goes, there are 0 options available that provide anything close to the functionality of quickbooks. That's why Intuit, despite their idiotic business practices and piss poor program quality, is still making billions.
The first problem with American culture is simple credulity. There are accepted dogmas that are not meaningfully challenged in the mainstream. There are inroads being made, but there are two entities fully tied to the status quo, which are christianity and business.
For the most part, Christianity demands reason being left at the door. If you've seen the way young kids are indoctrinated, especially in evangelical circles, you immediately understand why skepticism has been eliminated from American vocabularies. There are some things you just don't question. Period. The bible is true - period. The world is 6000 years old - period. Anything outside of this one book is considered false until proven true, and only if it is congruent with a particular interpretation of the bible.
Business has similar dogmas that have now been accepted without skeptical analysis. The market always works. Unions are always corrupt and run by the mafia. Government is always bad, unless you're talking about nuclear weapons or invading other countries, in which case government is always good. (It amazes me some people can have a total meltdown over imaginary government death panels, and in the next breath praise former CIA torture policies.)
In a skeptical environment, these dogmas do not hold up to scrutiny. Therefore, a skeptical environment can only be allowed when it makes more money. Shell does not look for oil based on a Young Earth model, because that wouldn't yield oil. The Christian community will misuse scientific theory to strawman evolution, but would never apply any scientific principles to their own faith. Pharmaceuticals will claim that they have to gouge American consumers for their medications to afford the science, and hope you will ignore the fact that they spend more money on marketing than research. Every day drips with irony after irony.
There are elementary philosophical discussions that simply don't exist in American thought. Is it ethical to make money without working? Is it ethical to invade another country who has not attempted to invade you? Is it ethical to have private entities profit from going to war? Is it ethical to treat Christian churches as tax exempt entities when they are clearly creating wealth that is not going to charities?
All of this has a root in the idea that money is the only way to value anything. Once this becomes your basis for reasoning, you immediately eliminate all possibilities that don't involve profit. And unfortunately, many valuable things lay in areas which may never be profitable for the existing business infrastructure. How can new ideas flourish in such an environment? How can new technology replace old technology? How can we progress?
The answer is that we have lost our position as the meritocracy of ideas. Great minds from muslim states don't even bother applying for student visas. Exxon owns patents expressly so they won't be used. Businesses bully the rest of society with well funded teams of lawyers to keep markets uncompetitive.
We haven't woken up to these facts, because in true dogmatic fashion, we aren't allowed to consider the possibility.
Slashdot is subject to it's own internal liberal and conservative swings. Right now it's unpopular to point out that Windows 7 is a superior operating system. In a few weeks it will be the reverse.
I can be in X and web surfing via Firefox in less than two minutes
Surfing the internet is not working for most people. It's a way to get information, but in order to get paid they have to create a document, or a dataset, or a physical product.
Incidentally, I get the same boot time in XP, 7, and Leopard. Perhaps not on lower end hardware.
My definition of user-friendliness, aside from being a system which doesn't cause me a lot of time, is a system which works continually because of its' level of reliability.
You're missing the entire point. Booting into an environment without error is nice, but it's just the beginning. Then you have to provide tools for your users to complete a task. This may be a moot point with HTML 5 and virtualization, but the amount of products you could not produce with any *nix native application is truly large.
Hi. I work with small businesses. I'm here to explain to you why Windows 7 will dominate this market for the foreseeable future, and why Linux will not. It is my hope that you will get some inspiration to create products that I can sell to customers besides file and web servers.
1. Windows 7 does not force a user to edit any configuration files for any normal desktop user. I cannot stress how important this is for most small business owners. This is not the 1980s. No one has any interest in programming or fiddling with tens of arcane text files to get work done. They just want to turn on their computer, use it to process data, and then go home. If you claim that this is not the case, you're just ignoring reality.
2. Windows can run on most hardware. It can run most applications. This means it's cheaper to deploy than Apple solutions, and you can actually do something once the OS is installed.
3. After years and years, there is still no multi-user, end-to-end solution for creating quotes, orders, and invoices, that integrates with an accounting solution to keep track of payables and then print checks to pay them. You are being beaten by a company, ironically called Intuit, that just switched from a flat file system in 2006.
I realize a lot of this has to do with driver support. I realize most of you don't care if your software is popular or not. I realize that you will reply with some alpha and beta stage software which you think can do the job, but won't.
However, bashing Windows is a complete waste of time. I'm not saying I can do better, but I am saying that you need to stop pretending that you are doing any better. The future is not going to be using a computer like a computer. The future is turning a computer into an appliance that Just Works Every Time.
Don't get me wrong - newer distros are amazing. Synaptic is like a revelation of the way things should be done. OOo is so close it's almost unbearable. I'm learning Python on the Linux side because it's easier than trying to configure windows for the same task. But you've got to start expecting more out of yourselves than of your end users.
So let me be your James Carville for a moment. My big banner says:
1. Users are not programmers
2. It's the applications, stupid!
3. Don't forget about accounting software
4. Laptops are people too
I have an immense amount of respect for the people who work on these projects, because you all know a hell of a lot more about computers and computer science than I probably ever will. However, I am pleading with you to abstract your knowledge so that everyday people can use it. Otherwise, it's not going to do the world much good.
So, a unix-like kernel with a pretty window manager is modern?
Damn. That's some strong kool-aid.
So your argument is we need to artificially raise the cost of energy. That sounds like an economic winner.
That's not artificial. There is a real cost that SOMEONE will have to pay eventually. These are called externalities. You cannot allow an industry to externalize the expense associated with their product to the point where there's no competition.
>What does "hegemony" in the Middle East have to do with the price of a gallon of gas? The bulk of our imported oil comes from friendly Western hemisphere sources. Europe and China are much more reliant on Middle Eastern oil than we are -- perhaps we should let them try their hand at stabilizing the region?
Well, there are several political realities here. First is that we are in the middle east precisely to have veto power over other nations. It's a political power play that's been going on since the British navy switched from steam to diesel.
However, if you cut out the availability of Middle East Oil, you would see prices as they were in the 70s. The simple fact that we are reliant on an external entity for our cheap transportation means it isn't cheap. It's just cheap right now.
All countries that don't have to pay the full cost of their own national defense, by virtue of being under the American umbrella. How much would England, Germany and France have spent on defense in the latter half of the 20th century if they had to build up the forces on their own to deter the Warsaw Pact?
They may have spent more. I doubt they would have refused to defend themselves. It's difficult to extract the guns and butter question from the Cold War, I can agree, but that ended 20 years ago. If the cold war was really the driving force behind our military expenditure, whey didn't it dramatically fall after the CCCP collapsed?
The market can value every one of those things just fine if people would stop interfering with it. The reason we have a piss poor last mile telecommunications infrastructure in this country is because of Government granted monopolies.
It's because corporations were handed the keys at all. If they have 95% coverage in an area, they do not give a shit about the last 5%. The only entity that would sanely care about 100% saturation would be a highly regulated non-profit or county level telco. If there were no regulation, the US would look just like Latin American countries where the rich suburbs are wired, sewered, watered, and the rest of the country is left to their own devices.
One of the reasons our health care system is in shambles is because a huge health care customer (Uncle Sam, via Medicare) pays below-market rates for services rendered, thus leading to the rest of us being charged more to make up the difference. I want to scream at the TV every single time somebody mentions Medicare as a model because it has "lower costs" -- it's easy to have "lower costs" when you don't even pay a break-even price to the provider of the services you receive.
America pays 16% of GDP for it's healthcare. The rest of Europe pays less than 10% of GDP, and they are just as healthy, and they all have coverage. You're going to have to overcome that fact before you have a persuasive argument.
Medicare is an interesting example. It works so well that when they allowed private corporations to compete, they couldn't. Private Medicare providers receive government subsidies just to stay in business. I don't see any reason to create a profit motive where the need for one doesn't exist.
Transportation would also work better if Government would stop picking winners and losers. Why don't trucks have to pay full price for the damage they do to the roadways? Perhaps if they did other methods of moving goods around (trains, waterways, etc) would be more competitive. Instead we effectively subsidize the trucking industry with our taxes that
Yeah, it's sort of counterintuitive. I usually distrust people when they say that word, so take this with a grain of salt.
Let's say you have a community with 10,000 commuters. They all want to get roughly downtown at the same time. Would there be more profit involved in building an electric transit system that brought them close to their destination, or in selling every single one of them a car, gasoline to power it, and then charging them for the road construction and maintenance?
This is an oversimplification, but it's important to remember that the efficient solution will not be supported by the market every time, especially when it's a necessity. That's because there are two questions you can ask about necessities: how much will it cost to provide them, and how much are you willing to pay to receive them? Think about that. I pay maybe $20 a month to have running water in my little apartment. How much would I be willing to pay? Probably ten times as much. What would happen to the progress of a community with such a high infrastructure cost? It wouldn't go anywhere. It couldn't, because a corporation is sucking it's resources dry because no one is telling them not to.
So, once technology improves to the point where a luxury becomes a necessity, I think it should be socialized. Otherwise we will be stuck while corporations squeeze every last penny out of decades old technology, and societies more progressive than ours have moved on.
The actual unemployment rate for the US is nearly 17%. The 10% figure we are at now doesn't consider prisoners, those who are underemployed, and those who have given up on looking for work more than 6 months ago. France is around 10%, and as far as I can tell, they do include these numbers.
If you look more closely at the numbers, it gets even more interesting. Look at "working age" unemployment, between 22 and 55, and the numbers look even worse for America. That's because most people are allowed to have an education for free, so they don't work until they graduate. And once they have reached retirement age, Europeans actually retire. They haven't been bankrupted by an illness. They have kept their pensions, since they demand accountability from their corporations. And there's no data to suggest they weren't as productive as an American worker, even though they have three to five weeks of vacation every year. The desire of my fellow countrymen to continue working harder for less never ceases to amaze me.
As far as social medicine goes, it takes only a moment to realize that early treatment for everyone is far cheaper than emergency treatment for everyone. So, unless you can get hospitals to be more blunt about letting poor people die just outside their doors, and start denying accident victims with their guts hanging out entry into the ER, you aren't really solving the problem. You're just pretending.
You've got it backwards.
Mass transit isn't profitable because it's efficient. Solar power isn't profitable because coal isn't properly taxed for the amount of damage it does to the ecosystem, or when a slurry wall fails and kills a few hundred people directly. Batteries are expensive because the cost of maintaining hegemony in the Middle East is hidden in our defense budget, and not tacked on to the price of a gallon of gas.
There are many things that the market is piss poor at valuing. There are many services better considered as infrastructure than as a luxury, like transportation, health care, electricity, and telecommunications. That's why when you look across the world, large state sectors dominate economically. They have spread out the cost and benefits of this infrastructure, and raised the standard of living for everyone. Weak states, where the market has no boundaries, perform very poorly in comparison. They are subject to more devastating economic cycles, corruption, monopoly practices, and so on.
There is no need to engage in philosophical debates. You can simply look at the economic history of the last thirty years, and compare America to Canada, England, France, and Germany. America now has the highest unemployment, worst income inequality, pays the most portion for basic services, transportation, health care, and education. Our savings have evaporated. The dollar only holds value as far as China is willing to lend us money. We have no way to create things that other people want to buy because we don't have a manufacturing sector. The leftover bits of prosperity from the postwar period will not last forever.
This is not progress. In fact, the cost of doing business has gone up so much that there is now "political support" - meaning, some corporate support - for health care reform after 30 years of majority support for a single payer system. A market, properly calibrated by regulation, can do amazing things when it increases competition. Remove the corrective effects of good governance, and it turns into a nightmare.
I wonder if that's because it's run by lawyers, bankers, and insurance companies?
On an even deeper philosophical level, when you are only encouraged to measure success by wealth, I don't think anyone should be surprised at the shortsighted nature of American innovation at the moment. Many hard problems are not profitable to solve, so all of our capital is flooding into financial services and marketing. I don't imagine we can make a space program out of that.
I read the article. It was an example of an extraordinary bit of medicine, which saved a young girls life.
You don't hear about a doctor saving someone with simpler treatment methods because it happens all of the time, every day. A hundred years ago this kind of survival rate of disease would be considered miraculous. Today it's commonplace because of medicine.
Sorry to say, average healthy adults have died from H1N1 - there are numerous examples throughout the US and in India and in Mexico. The survival rate compared to regular influenza is unclear. The point is that if a person feels very ill, they should go to a doctor. The doctor should decide the best course of action for a patient, not you. If home therapies worked, why would we be bothering with health care at all? People could just swing by your house and you could pretend you are telling them something valuable.
Antiviral drug saves UK swine flu victim
You're a fucking creep, do you know that? Move in with some Christian Scientists and die a slow painful death away from places where you can continue to give bad advice.
So, no listening to the FM radio when it's docked? That would be kind of a bummer. I'm sure they'll release iTenna for $39.95 to solve this "problem," which will last about a week before the connector separates from the wire jacket.
You are being controlled through fear.
It's not a matter of some conspiracy. Fear sells. It's legal to "stretch the truth," or as I like to say, lie about things in order to get your numbers higher for the nightly news or the homepage impressions.
When you listen to what scientists are saying, it's the fact that it's a new strain that is the dangerous part. It's already shown resistance to typical treatment, so if it becomes particularly nasty through mutation this winter (exactly as the Spanish flu did, by the way) then it will be a problem.
I know using "science" to head problems like this one off at the pass is a terribly unpopular idea in America, but one that I support anyway. It's better to be safe than sorry, as the saying goes. Wash your hands. Don't go to work if you're sick. And if you feel ill, go to the doctor. Good advice in general, but not only are you protecting yourself, but also reducing the chance that we turn this winter into a perfect storm for H1N1.
I don't really associate with newer UIDs. They haven't really figured out what sort of trolling they prefer, you know?
That was adorable. What's your number?
A black preacher with bad ideas is just as bad as a person who's murdered his own countrymen for decades. That's a fantastic set of moral values! Where'd you get them from, Oliver North?
Your ideal about investment is nice, but totally imaginary. Manufacturing jobs are moving overseas because the manufacturers require the exploited workforces provided by Malaysia, Vietnam, El Salvador, etc. They do not want to pay a day's wage for a day's work to an American, but they do want to sell their products in America. They only care about profit. If they have to destroy a community to get it, well, that's business.
Here's a choice quote (via the Wik) from the very far right British National Party about the NHS in general, that I'm sure you won't see on Fox News anytime soon:
socialized medicine is not just a hallmark of a decent society, but economically rational as well. If one leaves behind capitalist-romantic theories about private-sector efficiency and looks at real-world privatised medicine, which may be observed in America, it is an obvious disaster. It is vastly more expensive and delivers mediocre results outside of luxury care. Britain spends about 1/3 the money per person and we have public health statistics roughly equivalent to America. Except for the fact that the bottom 1/4 of our population is vastly healthier.
Suddenly I've realized though, that you are right. You are so right I'm just going to admit it right now, and come to Jesus and truth and the glory and the light of free enterprise, and admit fully and with my whole heart, the following statement:
You are an idiot. What's the point in bothering with you?
First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win. -Ghandi
We are at stage three. Assuming someone in the open source community wakes up and gives small businesses a real alternative to QuickBooks and creative media software.
Yeah.
Have you been to a best buy lately? I hate to generalize about their floor staff, but as Rowan Atkinson once said, "I wouldn't trust them to sit the right way on a toilet."
It's sort of like trying to convince a guy with an apple logo shaved into his ironic haircut that he paid too much for his Air. Best to just leave them be.
First, damage to property is not violence. The proper response is to seize the assets of anyone connected with the plot, and prosecute the case as a crime.
Second, no one should condone irrational behavior like this. But before you go after the environmentalists with guns, you should probably consider that in the grand scheme of things, the loss of AM towers are the tiniest problems facing the nation right now.
If you want to repeat history, by all means, crack down on the ELF and send them all to prison and beat up anyone in the group. Throw the PATRIOT act in their faces. Within no time at all you will have given their movement the publicity and recruiting tools to really cause problems. And erode public support as more and more people are locked up by guilt from association. Or you can arrest the criminals who participated in the act, force the dissolution of the rest of the group unless they officially renounce property damage as a method of protest, and actually take care of the problem.
Let me address the real issue here. Just because the US has poorly managed it's infrastructure does not mean the rest of the world has. Capitalist fanaticism is just as dumb as communist or anarchist fanaticism.
For instance, the whole of Europe is covered by subsidized rail. Europe uses less than 20% of the energy that we do for transportation. Who is more efficient? France has a nuclear powered high speed rail system that is ridiculously efficient, clean, and well used. Just because lobbyists are directing all our infrastructure to the dead idea of highways and urban sprawl doesn't mean that subsidized rail is a bad idea. It means that rail and sensible land use aren't receiving as much money as they should.
The best illustration of the failure of US governance can be seen quite plainly in healthcare. I don't care what anecdote you have. Statistically, the rest of the world pays at least 35% less than what we do for health care, they live just as long, and they are happier with their system than we are with ours. This is because they have grown up and realized that the market solution is not always the best.
Another example is telecommunications infrastructure. Across the whole of Europe, well regulated broadband has covered nearly every inch of the continent with low cost, high speed internet access. Even in countries with similar population densities, like Norway and Sweden and Finland. Sure, you can find complaints. Give them the choice of a government option or a closed option like Comcast or AT&T, and you'll quickly discover that people don't want to be locked into a vendor. It would be like Georgia Power (where I live) only allowing Georgia Power appliances to use electricity. The liberation of American network access, if it ever happens, will be with corporations fighting to the bitter end to keep their profit margins intact, built not on their own dime, but the infrastructure subsidized by you and me from programs throughout the 90s.
You've swallowed wholesale the lie that corporations are better than government for everything. Just take a look at the 1880s before public outcry ended child slavery, 70 hour workweeks, unsafe working conditions, and crippling manual labor. That's the reality of corporate governance. These deplorable conditions didn't disappear, they were just outsourced to countries where the leaders are willing to exploit their workforce for kickbacks.
You can advocate an intelligent position, where corporations are kept in check by a more powerful and localized government, and the local government is kept in check by a powerful participatory democracy. Or you can advocate for the madness of money being the only metric by which success can be measured. You could munch on a Baconator while the rest of the world continues to improve through science and collective innovation, and we become an echo chamber of reality shows and televangelists and Fox News anchors, trying to convince a nation literally dying from it's own selfishness and gluttony that they're still #1.