hey already have a test chip that they used to power a ~90W Xeon E7330 for four hours while it ran Linpack. (Or a virus -- it says Linpack in the summary page.)
Respectable viruses take issue with your comment that Linpack is anything like them. Viruses do useful work.
Actually you can. It's called a switching power supply.
In other news, a Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Anonymous Coward of Slashdot today, after discovering that the laws of physics do not apply to switching power supplies... His next research proposal is on solving the energy crisis by designing keyboards to detect when someone is angry and then increasing the key resistance by piezoelectric effect to generate energy. While it would generate only marginal amounts of power when used by 99.975% of the population, it was recently discovered that the remainder are actually Linux and Apple fanboys who, if fed a regular diet of dismissives via their computer screen, will so furiously hit the keyboards that power for entire cities is easily achievable.
come guys, comment, so I know how excited I should be
Sorry, we were just reading about how the IT crowd will have one final episode, and really rather didn't care about Intel changing something about their product that likely nobody would have ever noticed if some marketdroid hadn't palmed the new Dice overlords a few scheckles to get it on the slashdot front page. So, umm, if you want to know how excited you should be, well... You know how happy a three year old is when they go pee-pee in the grownup toilet all on their own? Imagine you're mom, and the kid is thirty-five, retarded, and you take care of him.
My suspicion(if only for die-space reasons, it isn't purely cosmetic that contemporary VRMs occupy a substantial amount of board space) is that is this a 'marketecture' summary of Intel moving some additional voltage adjustment and power gating functions on die, to support dynamic adjustment of power to the greater number of components(multiple CPU cores, possibly independently clocked, GPU, RAM controller, PCIe root, etc.); but we'll still see a bunch of chunky power silicon under serious heatsinks clustered around the CPU socket.
That's the only plausible thing I could come up with as well. The control logic could go into the CPU, but I don't see how pulling 12V down to fractions of a volt is going to happen on the die itself without it burning a hole through the board; heatsink or not, you can't escape Ohm's Law.
Intel refers to this as a FIVR (Fully Integrated Voltage Regulator), and it apparently eliminates voltage ripple and is significantly more efficient than your traditional motherboard VRM. Added bonus? It's 1/50th the size."
I have yet to come across a voltage regulator that doesn't run hot. Typically, it's one of the hottest components in an electrical circuit. And we're integrated this into a slab of silicon already well-known for getting so hot it can catch fire?
Can someone please tell me why this is a good idea, because all of my experience in electrical engineering says that when things heat up, they become more unstable and prone to failure, and the one thing you do not want going critical is your voltage regulator. If that goes, the whole computer catches fire.
As a doctor I am allowed to do many things that you are not allowed to do. Does that make me into another "class" of citizen? A journalist who studied journalism should certainly have both the rights AND responsibilities that go with his earned degree.
Perhaps, but a doctor's slip of the hand can kill. A journalist's slip of the tongue will only irritate. As well, one can argue about the appropriateness of demanding to see your papers before being afforded protection for public speech in a self-described democracy...
Amazon also isn't talking about how they plan to use the electrowetting screen tech, but many are assuming that a Color Kindle is in the works."
Something I learned many, many years ago watching Apple's amazing marketing division at work. Leak. Leak early, leak often. Spread rumors. But deny everything. This accomplishes two things: First, it gives you very accurate marketing data on what your customers are expecting and want. Second, it creates an atmosphere of expectation and excitement. By carefully modulating these things, you can multiply the amount of advertising for your product many, many times over what conventional marketing can do.
Amazon is just taking a page from Apple's playbook.
someone leaked classified info to the press which is a crime DoJ is investigating what's the problem?
Maybe we should also be asking what compelled the director of one of the most powerful intelligence organizations in the country to feel he had to tell his fellow citizens something that was so important, he was willing to risk his career and his freedom to do.
And if we judge his actions to be on the side of justice, fairness, and the principles of democracy which we say are the foundation of our laws... then perhaps we should examine more closely how a man who did right by his people is being declared a criminal by his government.
Having said that, I think this is more about mental break-though; self-awareness, teleological mechanisms.
I won't disagree with you. But I take umbrage with anyone who says that attitude is all you need. No, it's a starting point. Nobody's going to tell the 400 pound asthmatic who dreams of winning a marathon to just show up at the starting line and if he wants it bad enough, he'll get it. And yet, this arrogant line of thinking is found in every aspect of our "individualist" culture. It's a poison when it's overindulged in.
Attitude is important insofar as keeping your ego intact. It's important in a crisis, when you're being ripped to shreds by a cold an uncaring universe. It's important when you're at the top of your game, and every obstacle is falling to the left, right, and center too. I will not say attitude is unimportant, but it is only the start of a journey. It's like hope: It makes a great breakfast, but a terrible dinner. Attitude is about an orientation, a direction, a focus... but attitude alone will not move you an inch, nor change your circumstances one iota.
To succeed also requires positioning yourself so that you're likely to be at that wonderful point of convergence where time and place meet to create opportunity. Not everyone can get there; It's not assured. Someone has to win the lottery; But the odds of you winning it are vanishingly small. And this is the part where american culture fails -- its siren song tells us anyone can win the lottery.
There are people who have a good attitude, work hard, and will never get their reward in this life. Until recently, America didn't have very many of them, because we had a lot of opportunities -- a lot of chances to win the lottery of success. But today, we have a lot of those people. Wealth has become super-concentrated in the hands of a very small number of people, and the lottery pot grows smaller at the same time. There's fewer jobs, fewer opportunities for career advancement, fewer options for affordable education... all the things we used to have to invest in ourselves and which had a good chance of returning that investment, are gone.
I'm not saying move away because I hate my country. I love it. But I'm not deluded to the point of thinking I can fix all these problems. I will take my american culture elsewhere, and wait out the storm. I shouldn't have to suffer because an entire generation fucked up what the previous ten spent building. Nobody should. We've won every war we've fought in, and America has a lot of things to be proud of... but guys, we lost this fight. The economic fight. And nobody with a sense of practicality is going to suggest you fight on the side that's guaranteed to lose.
I look at my country now like a drowning man. You can swim out to him and try to help him, but all he'll do is grab onto you and you'll both drown. You cannot save him, he can only save himself. What you CAN do -- is throw him a floater and wait until he's latched on, then pull him to safety. But he has to participate in saving himself.
This is how I feel about the Boomers. We can't keep throwing money at the problem... or hard work, or anything else we have. We need to stop swimming out to them and letting them drag us down with them. So I say leave. Walk away. And wait.
Eventually, they're going to decide they don't want to drown, or they'll drown. Either way, they'll have made a choice, and then, and only then, can we as the younger generation, move in to pick up the pieces. But for now... get the hell out of here, kids. Go anywhere but here. Get as far away as you can... and then wait for the sign.
A sure sign that your life will never improve is spending all your time saying "the system is rigged! the man is keeping me down! it's not my fault I'm not successful! I can't do anything!". If you want to make your life better, that's on you: it won't be handed to you. You can make your life better, but only if you're willing to change. You have to change you, not the world. Moving to where the jobs are in your field is often a great start - and for most fields, America has such places.
So I see you've read the book The Secret, wherein it says that all you need to be successful is a positive attitude to the point of self-delusion on a scale that doctors usually order medication for. Sir, let me clue you in on reality -- thousands of newspaper articles, research papers, and bits on the evening news have pointed out that our generation will be the first generation of Americans ever to have less than our parents. This is established economic fact. The economy isn't expected to recover to its pre-2003 levels until sometime after 2021, making this the longest depression this country has ever seen. And make no mistake, it's a depression. Ask anyone under the age of 25 how their job hunt is going. You don't need to ask them whether they have a job, because odds are better than not, they don't. Ask them about their piles of student loan debt.
I've dealt with your kind before, the kind who likes to blame the victim, who likes to yell "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" as if that absolves them of any responsibility to help others, who thinks that if they've managed to get a smidgeon better quality of life it's because of their own hard work and couldn't possibly be because they won a statistical lottery. But when you dig into it, success isn't about attitude; it's also about being in the right place, at the right time. And there's only so many of those chances, in the same way there's only so many good hands being held at the cosmic poker table. And sometimes, you get dealt a shitty hand. Doesn't matter how good you are at poker, or your attitude, the cards... are the cards.
And deluded people like you can't, or won't, recognize that because it's a blow to their ego. It has nothing to do with what is manifest reality. It has nothing to do with the facts. And I say your kind is deluded because how the hell else can you justify believing that hundreds of millions of americans are lazy over the idea that only a few thousand of them are greedy.
Ah yes, the good ol' US of A... showin' everyone how it's done with their abject lack of journalist shield laws. Well, it's not like anyone ever said freedom of the press was essential for democracy. *cough*
If you ask me, shield laws are kinda pointless. I mean, the EU, the UN, and many countries have made statements about how important they are, but they didn't have to worry about terrorists. We should trust that our government knows best here; I mean, if the Director of the CIA develops a conscience, it could compromise national security.
So you're expecting that someone is just going to hand you an opportunity?
I'm suggesting that if you're armed with a stick, going up against an aircraft carrier will probably end badly for you. Likewise, the difference in wealth between the rich 1% and the poor 99% in this country.
Doesn't that mean there's an opportunity to make college affordable?
Yeah, if you own the college. Perhaps less so if you're a poor student just starting out in life and have to pick out a college and discover... there aren't any in your price range.
You expect to elevate yourself with a 9 to 5 job? Isn't there an opportunity to find people jobs?
We work the longest work days and have the fewest vacation days of any industrialized country on the planet. I'm not saying working a 9 to 5 job is the fastest way, but if I'm going to work a 9 to 5 job... it'll be better rewarded anywhere I move to but here.
How does how much others make affect your success?
It's called the production possibilities curve. You probably learned about it in Macroeconomics, before they started catering to the very rich, but self-involved, slashdot pundit. It goes something like this: There's a finite amount of pie available. If others take more of the pie, that means there's less for you.
Bullshit.
So... a shallow response to every one of my other points, and then a handwave on this one. You couldn't find anything to support your position -- could you? Large tracts of New Orleans taken over by aggressive wildlife, all curiously located in the traditionally "poor" parts of the city. Detroit, rotting from the inside out to the point they're demolishing entire blocks at a time and have called in emergency managers to stabilize the city's finances amid a mass exodus of the populace. To all this, you reply "Bullshit"? You could have just said "You win," it would have been both correct, and more dignified.
You don't suppose there's someway to elevate yourself by finding a way to help people respond to natural disasters?
You were asleep in statistics class, weren't you? If there's a 99% probability of failure, and a 1% chance of success, you don't charge forward on the notion that there's "some way to elevate yourself". And besides, you're ignoring the point: Which is that it shouldn't be your job, as a private citizen, to do that. It's the government's job. That's how it is in the other industrialized countries that haven't had their government taken over by a rich, self-absorbed elite class. When bad shit happens, everybody pitches in a few sheckles and the bad shit goes away. That's how civilization does it... not this degenerate version of it where we throw people to the wolves while screaming "Elevate yourself, mother fucker!"
And will continue to read about that until someone comes up with a way to fix it.
(reads previous comment) Yeah. Though we're probably thinking about fixing it in different ways: You're thinking if we just throw enough poor people under the bus, it'll "elevate itself". I'm thinking, why not put everyone IN the bus and then figure out how to move it?
Yes, please do.
Maybe you haven't noticed... but the only people moving to this country are from the 3rd world. Nobody in the industrialized world wants to come here. That tells me we're worse than any of the industrialized countries everyone is fleeing to, but better than the third world these people are coming from.
So, rest assured... you'll still continue to have plenty of people to leech off of to continue your self-indulgent lifestyle. But America as we knew it is dead, plain and simple. And anyone who's still hoping for class mobility is going to start by mobilizing themselves away from exploitative assholes like you, that destroyed it.
"...in the effort to show the reader how they can elevate themselves from the stuff in life that glues them to the status quo."
I can do this in a lot fewer words than a book: If you live in the United States and aren't already rich -- Move. That's it. One word. Move.
Everyone will tell you success isn't a guarantee. But you can put yourself in a better position to take advantage of any opportunities that do come along -- thus improving your chances. Right now, there are no opportunities in our country. College is too expensive, the job market is shit, the wealth gap is growing by leaps and bounds, our government turns a blind eye to major cities getting eaten by mother nature -- Detroit, New Orleans... every year there's a major natural disaster. And every year we get to read about our total abject failure in dealing with it. Our bridges are structurally deficient, our health care is shit.
Guys; The writing is on the wall... run. Move. Leave. Don't keep inhaling self-help books that ration out hope. If you want to be successful in life... get out now. Because otherwise, your life is going to be thrown away supporting the previous generation's bad choices.
Actually, I was just snarking the headline... but you know, it makes everyone look so damn smart, emoting several paragraphs on a 1 line comment that didn't have anything to do with your rants
Lets just clear something up right now, gun bans have NEVER worked and will NEVER work because of one simple flaw in the logic. you see criminals? DON'T FOLLOW LAWS which is why they are called criminals, fucking duh!
I guess we'd better just give up on making laws in the first place because they don't work. Your logic is so failed it's not even funny. We have regulations covering toxic waste disposal, food processing -- most aspects of your daily life has some level of government regulation, and it's better because of it. Businesses don't routinely dump tons of toxic chemicals on your head, pour it into your drinking water... food isn't sold to you rotting and putrid... all of this is because of government regulation. Your car has airbags, seat belts, and other life-saving features because of regulation.
I keep hearing over and over again from gun advocates that "laws don't work". Well, let me give you an example of a gun regulation-- it's regarding silencers. You have to fill out a form in order to buy one. This regulation has been so "ineffective" that very few people own silencers. Regulating guns in Australia has resulted in them having no mass shootings. Anywhere in the country. For about three years running now.
This "but criminals don't follow laws" argument is stupid; There's millions of people in jail right now. They may not have followed the law, but the law followed them.
Now I personally think people should be allowed to own a gun if they want. But if I'm going to construct an argument to support that, it's not going to be a bunch of blithering nonsense about how we need them because otherwise only criminals will have them. Gimme a break. Japan has very few shootings due to their gun control laws. Many countries have successfully instituted gun regulation.
So "gun regulation doesn't work" is a painfully stupid thing to say. It does work. This isn't up for discussion. Now, if you want to talk about why not to regulate, okay then... but "it doesn't work" isn't on the menu. Sorry.
It is my understanding that Executive Orders have to do with the internal operations of the government, not as a mechanism of usurping congress when it comes to laws that have an effect on the American public.
People seem to forget Executive Order 9066, which led to the creation of internment camps for "Japanese-americans" (or as I call them, citizens) during WWII. There's a great many more examples of executive orders going far beyond "internal operations of the government." And yes, Obama, like every other president has penned some questionable executive orders.
Of course, even snarking the President on slashdot is a hanging offense, so god help me for suggesting this; But it's clear that every administration. Every. Administration. Has used executive orders to expand the power of the executive branch, or as you put it "usurping congress". Whether this is a problem or not depends largely on your personal political preferences and which party controls the white house at the moment... but historically, they have a long tradition of going far beyond "internal operations of the government"... at least as I suspect you're thinking of it.
In an overdue but welcome move, President Obama today issued an executive order mandating "open and machine-readable data" for government-published information.
Yes, and after so much money and effort spent creating the databases and websites, they'll contain no data because it was all marked classified for national security reasons./snark
Umm, its relatively common to cite cases from other districts, and not uncommon to cite cases from other countries, or at least the legal logic in there. Neither are binding, but judges do consider them.,/quote>
If the citation is about the logic of the argument, you're absolutely right. Some people say it better than you can, and courts recognize this. I agree completely. But you hit the nail on the head when you said it's not binding. What I was saying about form is if the brief that was submitted implied that case law from another circuit court had legal weight, the judge would be unamused in a "Picard facepalm" kind of way. It'd be the courtroom equivalent of calling tech support for a broken computer only to find it hadn't been plugged in. It's a stupid mistake, and will earn you some ribbing for it.
Sorry, the distinction I was making was a subtle one. Case law is, frankly, an archaic part of our judiciary that we have the British to thank for. Working with it is not unlike how I feel when I get a ticket for "network slowness" and when I arrive at the site I find they're using token-ring. It's like "FFFFFUUUUUuuuu..."
.. but it still establishes a persuasive precedent that other circuits are going to be reluctant to ignore.
That's now how the case law system works. While the judges from other circuit courts may research out a case in their own jurisdiction comparatively like this, they are neither expected nor required to -- and rarely do because of high workloads. It is the job of the prosecution and defense to cite specific applicable case law. Citing the case law from another district is worth the same as citing a court in another country, in a strictly legal sense, and may even earn them a chastizing by the judge for poor form in attempting it.
If, on the other hand, they the other court sided with the 9th, the non-binding precedent would become almost impossible to override.
You apparently aren't aware of a major legal battle brewing in this country over gay marriage. If anything showcases our marble-cake judiciary, it would be this. California rules one way. Maryland rules another. They both appeal to the circuit courts. Three of those courts rule one way, two rule a different way, a few refuse to hear it, and others remand it back to lower courts after finding substantive problems with the original case. There is no "impossible to override"; Case law is hereditary. The highest court to rule on it takes precidence, but courts on an equal level can have conflicting and contradictory rulings and they each stand on their own within their jurisdiction if and until a higher court rules on it.
It can be said that over a long enough timeframe, these inconsistencies are settled and case law tends towards unity, but the caveat here is over a long enough timeframe. Justice is neither swift, nor efficient, in our judiciary system. And arguments can be made to keep it that way, but it is beyond the scope of this discussion to have.
So, no, they don't have eleven more chances, nor even 10. At best they have one remaining chance, and it's a very, very long shot: go to trial in a district court in a different circuit, win that, win the appeal and then win in DC. Given that AFAIK they haven't found a single judge who didn't slap them down, I think that's vanishingly unlikely.
I could provide a detailed exposition on how flawed the logic is here, but having already blown away your supports, there's no point. But if I haven't made it clear enough by now that you're mistaken, consider this: How long have these copyright cases been appearing on the pages of this website? Days? Weeks? Months? Years? Decades? History suggests that the problem will not simply dry up and shove off because a dozen judges in a single court has had enough.
Any defense lawyer can cite them in a new lawsuit and it will be thrown out on summary judgement
You're missing my point; Their business model doesn't require this court to approve, merely a court. And until the people behind it are hung out to dry, they can just keep reincorporating in other jurisdictions and continuing. They still have eleven more chances at the circuit court level, if you include the DC and federal circuit courts. Though it's unlikely this would be heard by the federal circuit court, it is on the same jurisdictional level, technically.
That's the thing about our judiciary branch: It has a nearly limitless appeals process. This represents a victory in one court for one approach to the problem. So long as they can eek out profit or retain funding... they can keep this up, effectively forever.
But ignoring that, you still have the corporate shield against personal liability to contend with. You have to put real people's asses on the line to stop this: Levying fines against corporations is pointless... you can just declare bankrupcy, and in the very next stroke, incorporate a new business with a fresh ledger and continue on your merry.
Reminds me of the Monty Python skit. But I digress. We might be able to stick a fork in this business and call it done, but they haven't targetted the individuals behind it; They can simply incorporate under a new name, in a new jurisdiction, and continue on their merry. And there's a lot of other ways to troll people with official-looking legal letters of demand that have proven successful as well, when you look at it from a profit perspective.
The courts will have to do a lot more than this to stop them: They need to make people personally liable, not just the company names they use as shields.
These files have been available for a day and have propagated to many other sites. So much for control.
Who said this was about control? This is about sending a message: The current administration lost its battle for gun control. Badly. So they used their newfound internet "kill switch" powers that were meant to protect us against terrorists to send a political message. A rather impotent one, if you ask me. Rather than going toe to toe with Goliath again, aka the NRA and the Republicans, they decided to put the smack down on an out of the way website without the financial means to fight back.
It's a dick move, nothing more. Just wait until they find out that the internet also has recipes for how to build high velocity explosives, primitive shaped charges, napalm, and drones. Oh wait...
Slashdot Mirror
hey already have a test chip that they used to power a ~90W Xeon E7330 for four hours while it ran Linpack. (Or a virus -- it says Linpack in the summary page.)
Respectable viruses take issue with your comment that Linpack is anything like them. Viruses do useful work.
you can't escape Ohm's Law.
Actually you can. It's called a switching power supply.
In other news, a Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Anonymous Coward of Slashdot today, after discovering that the laws of physics do not apply to switching power supplies... His next research proposal is on solving the energy crisis by designing keyboards to detect when someone is angry and then increasing the key resistance by piezoelectric effect to generate energy. While it would generate only marginal amounts of power when used by 99.975% of the population, it was recently discovered that the remainder are actually Linux and Apple fanboys who, if fed a regular diet of dismissives via their computer screen, will so furiously hit the keyboards that power for entire cities is easily achievable.
come guys, comment, so I know how excited I should be
Sorry, we were just reading about how the IT crowd will have one final episode, and really rather didn't care about Intel changing something about their product that likely nobody would have ever noticed if some marketdroid hadn't palmed the new Dice overlords a few scheckles to get it on the slashdot front page. So, umm, if you want to know how excited you should be, well... You know how happy a three year old is when they go pee-pee in the grownup toilet all on their own? Imagine you're mom, and the kid is thirty-five, retarded, and you take care of him.
You should be as excited as mom is.
My suspicion(if only for die-space reasons, it isn't purely cosmetic that contemporary VRMs occupy a substantial amount of board space) is that is this a 'marketecture' summary of Intel moving some additional voltage adjustment and power gating functions on die, to support dynamic adjustment of power to the greater number of components(multiple CPU cores, possibly independently clocked, GPU, RAM controller, PCIe root, etc.); but we'll still see a bunch of chunky power silicon under serious heatsinks clustered around the CPU socket.
That's the only plausible thing I could come up with as well. The control logic could go into the CPU, but I don't see how pulling 12V down to fractions of a volt is going to happen on the die itself without it burning a hole through the board; heatsink or not, you can't escape Ohm's Law.
Intel refers to this as a FIVR (Fully Integrated Voltage Regulator), and it apparently eliminates voltage ripple and is significantly more efficient than your traditional motherboard VRM. Added bonus? It's 1/50th the size."
I have yet to come across a voltage regulator that doesn't run hot. Typically, it's one of the hottest components in an electrical circuit. And we're integrated this into a slab of silicon already well-known for getting so hot it can catch fire?
Can someone please tell me why this is a good idea, because all of my experience in electrical engineering says that when things heat up, they become more unstable and prone to failure, and the one thing you do not want going critical is your voltage regulator. If that goes, the whole computer catches fire.
As a doctor I am allowed to do many things that you are not allowed to do. Does that make me into another "class" of citizen? A journalist who studied journalism should certainly have both the rights AND responsibilities that go with his earned degree.
Perhaps, but a doctor's slip of the hand can kill. A journalist's slip of the tongue will only irritate. As well, one can argue about the appropriateness of demanding to see your papers before being afforded protection for public speech in a self-described democracy...
Amazon also isn't talking about how they plan to use the electrowetting screen tech, but many are assuming that a Color Kindle is in the works."
Something I learned many, many years ago watching Apple's amazing marketing division at work. Leak. Leak early, leak often. Spread rumors. But deny everything. This accomplishes two things: First, it gives you very accurate marketing data on what your customers are expecting and want. Second, it creates an atmosphere of expectation and excitement. By carefully modulating these things, you can multiply the amount of advertising for your product many, many times over what conventional marketing can do.
Amazon is just taking a page from Apple's playbook.
someone leaked classified info to the press which is a crime
DoJ is investigating
what's the problem?
Maybe we should also be asking what compelled the director of one of the most powerful intelligence organizations in the country to feel he had to tell his fellow citizens something that was so important, he was willing to risk his career and his freedom to do.
And if we judge his actions to be on the side of justice, fairness, and the principles of democracy which we say are the foundation of our laws... then perhaps we should examine more closely how a man who did right by his people is being declared a criminal by his government.
Having said that, I think this is more about mental break-though; self-awareness, teleological mechanisms.
I won't disagree with you. But I take umbrage with anyone who says that attitude is all you need. No, it's a starting point. Nobody's going to tell the 400 pound asthmatic who dreams of winning a marathon to just show up at the starting line and if he wants it bad enough, he'll get it. And yet, this arrogant line of thinking is found in every aspect of our "individualist" culture. It's a poison when it's overindulged in.
Attitude is important insofar as keeping your ego intact. It's important in a crisis, when you're being ripped to shreds by a cold an uncaring universe. It's important when you're at the top of your game, and every obstacle is falling to the left, right, and center too. I will not say attitude is unimportant, but it is only the start of a journey. It's like hope: It makes a great breakfast, but a terrible dinner. Attitude is about an orientation, a direction, a focus... but attitude alone will not move you an inch, nor change your circumstances one iota.
To succeed also requires positioning yourself so that you're likely to be at that wonderful point of convergence where time and place meet to create opportunity. Not everyone can get there; It's not assured. Someone has to win the lottery; But the odds of you winning it are vanishingly small. And this is the part where american culture fails -- its siren song tells us anyone can win the lottery.
There are people who have a good attitude, work hard, and will never get their reward in this life. Until recently, America didn't have very many of them, because we had a lot of opportunities -- a lot of chances to win the lottery of success. But today, we have a lot of those people. Wealth has become super-concentrated in the hands of a very small number of people, and the lottery pot grows smaller at the same time. There's fewer jobs, fewer opportunities for career advancement, fewer options for affordable education... all the things we used to have to invest in ourselves and which had a good chance of returning that investment, are gone.
I'm not saying move away because I hate my country. I love it. But I'm not deluded to the point of thinking I can fix all these problems. I will take my american culture elsewhere, and wait out the storm. I shouldn't have to suffer because an entire generation fucked up what the previous ten spent building. Nobody should. We've won every war we've fought in, and America has a lot of things to be proud of... but guys, we lost this fight. The economic fight. And nobody with a sense of practicality is going to suggest you fight on the side that's guaranteed to lose.
I look at my country now like a drowning man. You can swim out to him and try to help him, but all he'll do is grab onto you and you'll both drown. You cannot save him, he can only save himself. What you CAN do -- is throw him a floater and wait until he's latched on, then pull him to safety. But he has to participate in saving himself.
This is how I feel about the Boomers. We can't keep throwing money at the problem... or hard work, or anything else we have. We need to stop swimming out to them and letting them drag us down with them. So I say leave. Walk away. And wait.
Eventually, they're going to decide they don't want to drown, or they'll drown. Either way, they'll have made a choice, and then, and only then, can we as the younger generation, move in to pick up the pieces. But for now... get the hell out of here, kids. Go anywhere but here. Get as far away as you can... and then wait for the sign.
A sure sign that your life will never improve is spending all your time saying "the system is rigged! the man is keeping me down! it's not my fault I'm not successful! I can't do anything!". If you want to make your life better, that's on you: it won't be handed to you. You can make your life better, but only if you're willing to change. You have to change you, not the world. Moving to where the jobs are in your field is often a great start - and for most fields, America has such places.
So I see you've read the book The Secret, wherein it says that all you need to be successful is a positive attitude to the point of self-delusion on a scale that doctors usually order medication for. Sir, let me clue you in on reality -- thousands of newspaper articles, research papers, and bits on the evening news have pointed out that our generation will be the first generation of Americans ever to have less than our parents. This is established economic fact. The economy isn't expected to recover to its pre-2003 levels until sometime after 2021, making this the longest depression this country has ever seen. And make no mistake, it's a depression. Ask anyone under the age of 25 how their job hunt is going. You don't need to ask them whether they have a job, because odds are better than not, they don't. Ask them about their piles of student loan debt.
I've dealt with your kind before, the kind who likes to blame the victim, who likes to yell "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" as if that absolves them of any responsibility to help others, who thinks that if they've managed to get a smidgeon better quality of life it's because of their own hard work and couldn't possibly be because they won a statistical lottery. But when you dig into it, success isn't about attitude; it's also about being in the right place, at the right time. And there's only so many of those chances, in the same way there's only so many good hands being held at the cosmic poker table. And sometimes, you get dealt a shitty hand. Doesn't matter how good you are at poker, or your attitude, the cards... are the cards.
And deluded people like you can't, or won't, recognize that because it's a blow to their ego. It has nothing to do with what is manifest reality. It has nothing to do with the facts. And I say your kind is deluded because how the hell else can you justify believing that hundreds of millions of americans are lazy over the idea that only a few thousand of them are greedy.
Ah yes, the good ol' US of A... showin' everyone how it's done with their abject lack of journalist shield laws. Well, it's not like anyone ever said freedom of the press was essential for democracy. *cough*
If you ask me, shield laws are kinda pointless. I mean, the EU, the UN, and many countries have made statements about how important they are, but they didn't have to worry about terrorists. We should trust that our government knows best here; I mean, if the Director of the CIA develops a conscience, it could compromise national security.
So you're expecting that someone is just going to hand you an opportunity?
I'm suggesting that if you're armed with a stick, going up against an aircraft carrier will probably end badly for you. Likewise, the difference in wealth between the rich 1% and the poor 99% in this country.
Doesn't that mean there's an opportunity to make college affordable?
Yeah, if you own the college. Perhaps less so if you're a poor student just starting out in life and have to pick out a college and discover... there aren't any in your price range.
You expect to elevate yourself with a 9 to 5 job? Isn't there an opportunity to find people jobs?
We work the longest work days and have the fewest vacation days of any industrialized country on the planet. I'm not saying working a 9 to 5 job is the fastest way, but if I'm going to work a 9 to 5 job... it'll be better rewarded anywhere I move to but here.
How does how much others make affect your success?
It's called the production possibilities curve. You probably learned about it in Macroeconomics, before they started catering to the very rich, but self-involved, slashdot pundit. It goes something like this: There's a finite amount of pie available. If others take more of the pie, that means there's less for you.
Bullshit.
So... a shallow response to every one of my other points, and then a handwave on this one. You couldn't find anything to support your position -- could you? Large tracts of New Orleans taken over by aggressive wildlife, all curiously located in the traditionally "poor" parts of the city. Detroit, rotting from the inside out to the point they're demolishing entire blocks at a time and have called in emergency managers to stabilize the city's finances amid a mass exodus of the populace. To all this, you reply "Bullshit"? You could have just said "You win," it would have been both correct, and more dignified.
You don't suppose there's someway to elevate yourself by finding a way to help people respond to natural disasters?
You were asleep in statistics class, weren't you? If there's a 99% probability of failure, and a 1% chance of success, you don't charge forward on the notion that there's "some way to elevate yourself". And besides, you're ignoring the point: Which is that it shouldn't be your job, as a private citizen, to do that. It's the government's job. That's how it is in the other industrialized countries that haven't had their government taken over by a rich, self-absorbed elite class. When bad shit happens, everybody pitches in a few sheckles and the bad shit goes away. That's how civilization does it... not this degenerate version of it where we throw people to the wolves while screaming "Elevate yourself, mother fucker!"
And will continue to read about that until someone comes up with a way to fix it.
(reads previous comment) Yeah. Though we're probably thinking about fixing it in different ways: You're thinking if we just throw enough poor people under the bus, it'll "elevate itself". I'm thinking, why not put everyone IN the bus and then figure out how to move it?
Yes, please do.
Maybe you haven't noticed... but the only people moving to this country are from the 3rd world. Nobody in the industrialized world wants to come here. That tells me we're worse than any of the industrialized countries everyone is fleeing to, but better than the third world these people are coming from.
So, rest assured... you'll still continue to have plenty of people to leech off of to continue your self-indulgent lifestyle. But America as we knew it is dead, plain and simple. And anyone who's still hoping for class mobility is going to start by mobilizing themselves away from exploitative assholes like you, that destroyed it.
"...in the effort to show the reader how they can elevate themselves from the stuff in life that glues them to the status quo."
I can do this in a lot fewer words than a book: If you live in the United States and aren't already rich -- Move. That's it. One word. Move.
Everyone will tell you success isn't a guarantee. But you can put yourself in a better position to take advantage of any opportunities that do come along -- thus improving your chances. Right now, there are no opportunities in our country. College is too expensive, the job market is shit, the wealth gap is growing by leaps and bounds, our government turns a blind eye to major cities getting eaten by mother nature -- Detroit, New Orleans... every year there's a major natural disaster. And every year we get to read about our total abject failure in dealing with it. Our bridges are structurally deficient, our health care is shit.
Guys; The writing is on the wall... run. Move. Leave. Don't keep inhaling self-help books that ration out hope. If you want to be successful in life... get out now. Because otherwise, your life is going to be thrown away supporting the previous generation's bad choices.
Actually, I was just snarking the headline... but you know, it makes everyone look so damn smart, emoting several paragraphs on a 1 line comment that didn't have anything to do with your rants
You'd rather live in a society where...
Argh. Strawman. As to the rest, nice rant. Have you considered jumping to conclusions as a career choice? You're really good at it.
How Colleges Are Pushing Out the Poor To Court the Rich
It might have something to do with making it too expensive for the poor. Just a thought...
Lets just clear something up right now, gun bans have NEVER worked and will NEVER work because of one simple flaw in the logic. you see criminals? DON'T FOLLOW LAWS which is why they are called criminals, fucking duh!
I guess we'd better just give up on making laws in the first place because they don't work. Your logic is so failed it's not even funny. We have regulations covering toxic waste disposal, food processing -- most aspects of your daily life has some level of government regulation, and it's better because of it. Businesses don't routinely dump tons of toxic chemicals on your head, pour it into your drinking water... food isn't sold to you rotting and putrid... all of this is because of government regulation. Your car has airbags, seat belts, and other life-saving features because of regulation.
I keep hearing over and over again from gun advocates that "laws don't work". Well, let me give you an example of a gun regulation-- it's regarding silencers. You have to fill out a form in order to buy one. This regulation has been so "ineffective" that very few people own silencers. Regulating guns in Australia has resulted in them having no mass shootings. Anywhere in the country. For about three years running now.
This "but criminals don't follow laws" argument is stupid; There's millions of people in jail right now. They may not have followed the law, but the law followed them.
Now I personally think people should be allowed to own a gun if they want. But if I'm going to construct an argument to support that, it's not going to be a bunch of blithering nonsense about how we need them because otherwise only criminals will have them. Gimme a break. Japan has very few shootings due to their gun control laws. Many countries have successfully instituted gun regulation.
So "gun regulation doesn't work" is a painfully stupid thing to say. It does work. This isn't up for discussion. Now, if you want to talk about why not to regulate, okay then... but "it doesn't work" isn't on the menu. Sorry.
It is my understanding that Executive Orders have to do with the internal operations of the government, not as a mechanism of usurping congress when it comes to laws that have an effect on the American public.
People seem to forget Executive Order 9066, which led to the creation of internment camps for "Japanese-americans" (or as I call them, citizens) during WWII. There's a great many more examples of executive orders going far beyond "internal operations of the government." And yes, Obama, like every other president has penned some questionable executive orders.
Of course, even snarking the President on slashdot is a hanging offense, so god help me for suggesting this; But it's clear that every administration. Every. Administration. Has used executive orders to expand the power of the executive branch, or as you put it "usurping congress". Whether this is a problem or not depends largely on your personal political preferences and which party controls the white house at the moment... but historically, they have a long tradition of going far beyond "internal operations of the government"... at least as I suspect you're thinking of it.
In an overdue but welcome move, President Obama today issued an executive order mandating "open and machine-readable data" for government-published information.
Yes, and after so much money and effort spent creating the databases and websites, they'll contain no data because it was all marked classified for national security reasons. /snark
Umm, its relatively common to cite cases from other districts, and not uncommon to cite cases from other countries, or at least the legal logic in there. Neither are binding, but judges do consider them.,/quote>
If the citation is about the logic of the argument, you're absolutely right. Some people say it better than you can, and courts recognize this. I agree completely. But you hit the nail on the head when you said it's not binding. What I was saying about form is if the brief that was submitted implied that case law from another circuit court had legal weight, the judge would be unamused in a "Picard facepalm" kind of way. It'd be the courtroom equivalent of calling tech support for a broken computer only to find it hadn't been plugged in. It's a stupid mistake, and will earn you some ribbing for it.
Sorry, the distinction I was making was a subtle one. Case law is, frankly, an archaic part of our judiciary that we have the British to thank for. Working with it is not unlike how I feel when I get a ticket for "network slowness" and when I arrive at the site I find they're using token-ring. It's like "FFFFFUUUUUuuuu..."
.. but it still establishes a persuasive precedent that other circuits are going to be reluctant to ignore.
That's now how the case law system works. While the judges from other circuit courts may research out a case in their own jurisdiction comparatively like this, they are neither expected nor required to -- and rarely do because of high workloads. It is the job of the prosecution and defense to cite specific applicable case law. Citing the case law from another district is worth the same as citing a court in another country, in a strictly legal sense, and may even earn them a chastizing by the judge for poor form in attempting it.
If, on the other hand, they the other court sided with the 9th, the non-binding precedent would become almost impossible to override.
You apparently aren't aware of a major legal battle brewing in this country over gay marriage. If anything showcases our marble-cake judiciary, it would be this. California rules one way. Maryland rules another. They both appeal to the circuit courts. Three of those courts rule one way, two rule a different way, a few refuse to hear it, and others remand it back to lower courts after finding substantive problems with the original case. There is no "impossible to override"; Case law is hereditary. The highest court to rule on it takes precidence, but courts on an equal level can have conflicting and contradictory rulings and they each stand on their own within their jurisdiction if and until a higher court rules on it.
It can be said that over a long enough timeframe, these inconsistencies are settled and case law tends towards unity, but the caveat here is over a long enough timeframe. Justice is neither swift, nor efficient, in our judiciary system. And arguments can be made to keep it that way, but it is beyond the scope of this discussion to have.
So, no, they don't have eleven more chances, nor even 10. At best they have one remaining chance, and it's a very, very long shot: go to trial in a district court in a different circuit, win that, win the appeal and then win in DC. Given that AFAIK they haven't found a single judge who didn't slap them down, I think that's vanishingly unlikely.
I could provide a detailed exposition on how flawed the logic is here, but having already blown away your supports, there's no point. But if I haven't made it clear enough by now that you're mistaken, consider this: How long have these copyright cases been appearing on the pages of this website? Days? Weeks? Months? Years? Decades? History suggests that the problem will not simply dry up and shove off because a dozen judges in a single court has had enough.
Any defense lawyer can cite them in a new lawsuit and it will be thrown out on summary judgement
You're missing my point; Their business model doesn't require this court to approve, merely a court. And until the people behind it are hung out to dry, they can just keep reincorporating in other jurisdictions and continuing. They still have eleven more chances at the circuit court level, if you include the DC and federal circuit courts. Though it's unlikely this would be heard by the federal circuit court, it is on the same jurisdictional level, technically.
That's the thing about our judiciary branch: It has a nearly limitless appeals process. This represents a victory in one court for one approach to the problem. So long as they can eek out profit or retain funding... they can keep this up, effectively forever.
But ignoring that, you still have the corporate shield against personal liability to contend with. You have to put real people's asses on the line to stop this: Levying fines against corporations is pointless... you can just declare bankrupcy, and in the very next stroke, incorporate a new business with a fresh ledger and continue on your merry.
Reminds me of the Monty Python skit. But I digress. We might be able to stick a fork in this business and call it done, but they haven't targetted the individuals behind it; They can simply incorporate under a new name, in a new jurisdiction, and continue on their merry. And there's a lot of other ways to troll people with official-looking legal letters of demand that have proven successful as well, when you look at it from a profit perspective.
The courts will have to do a lot more than this to stop them: They need to make people personally liable, not just the company names they use as shields.
These files have been available for a day and have propagated to many other sites. So much for control.
Who said this was about control? This is about sending a message: The current administration lost its battle for gun control. Badly. So they used their newfound internet "kill switch" powers that were meant to protect us against terrorists to send a political message. A rather impotent one, if you ask me. Rather than going toe to toe with Goliath again, aka the NRA and the Republicans, they decided to put the smack down on an out of the way website without the financial means to fight back.
It's a dick move, nothing more. Just wait until they find out that the internet also has recipes for how to build high velocity explosives, primitive shaped charges, napalm, and drones. Oh wait...
Your ignorance of Linux is showing. Please refrain from commenting about things you do not understand.
Blame the idiot that said 'ldconfig' does that, you arrogant bastard, not me.