You and a bunch of other ignant fools said "there is actually a disincentive to go out and look for work" here and all over the internet.
And to that, I say: CITATION NEEDED. Citation needed from some sort of authoritative source, not "the man in the pub" or "a radio talkshow host". You self-interested pieces of shit, show us the numbers that say people don't want to work, or that they're living high on the hog on unemployment, on their $400 a month. Show us the data. And not some Heritage Foundation fiction, show us something that isn't coming from a right-wing sewage tank.
We're waiting. We're waiting for all these mythical welfare queens--after decades of existing only in the lies and fictions of the hard right--to turn into reality at last. Only you look around and what do we have? People who want to work hard but the economy's been fucked so they're fucked too. Well, wait long enough and we're all fucked. The line between any two of us is much thinner than you realize, or maybe you're just scared to admit it.
And while we're waiting, let's talk about this "taxation is theft" crock of shit. Taxation is part of your obligation as SOMEONE LIVING IN SOCIETY. Taxation is a part of the social contract, the ethics of which go back much farther than that thoroughly-debunked pseudo-philosopher Rand you're cribbing this nonsense from.
You don't want taxes? Fine, let's take away all the societal support structures that make your money worth anything. Now you can hoard all the useless piles of metal you want, and your faith in its "intrinsic value" will sustain you until you starve to death.
I don't want to live in a world where other people's actions shape the decisions I make throughout the day, either.
Curiously enough, that's exactly why I'd love to see this sort of frivolous, deeply harmful shit stopped. These people are reckless, and the actions they take day after day make my life harder in a million tiny, indirect ways, along with your and virtually everyone else's life too.
(Note: you may not agree or see it that way, but the world doesn't need your consent or acknowledgement to be profoundly broken and in desperate need of structural repair. So if you're getting ready to type some sort of "no I'm cool everything's cool" reply, just spare us.)
It's just another one of those world-we-want vs world-we-have situations. I want a world where a bunch of shits in a room thousands of miles from me aren't chipping away the economy a billion tiny transactions a day.
In fact, I'd go so far as to say, that's the price you pay for living in society. You give up some freedom (can't wreck shit for millions), and in exchange you get police, fire, sanitation, the whole ball of wax.
Do I think I should be able to tell them not to do that, so long as we're all sharing this same society?
It's about the world we want to live in, which stands in ever-starker contrast to the world we do live in.
Do you want to live in a world where the best and brightest throw their efforts away with such mundane, trivial shit?
Again, not where-are-we-now, but where-do-we-want-to-be.
Do you want to live in a world where, thanks to some tricks of law and circumstance, a handful of people have such domination over billions?
Again, not where-are-we-now, but where-do-we-want-to-be.
You don't have to be a slaver (wtf??) to say, the world we live in is wrong, because a lot of people are suffering for what seem like really lousy reasons.
There is no such thing as a "free market" because all markets are, by definition, based on sets of rules. That idea of the "market" is already "not free" by its nature. It implies a set of rules.
In other words, there's no such thing as a "natural market" that we can strive for. There is no such thing as an "ideal market" that we can point to as free from human invention. ALL MARKETS ARE A HUMAN INVENTION. Things like "buyer beware" - someone came up with that. Things like "the government should only enforce contracts" - someone came up with that. Things like "don't lie about the ingredients in your prepared food" - someone came up with that.
When people toss around words like "free market" these days, you have to pay very close attention to who's saying it, because some people use it to mean "just enough regulation to help my big business donors" while others use it to mean "just enough regulation to support my every-man-for-himself fantasy".
Nowhere in anyone's discussion is an acknowledgment that there's not really any such thing as a "free market", that it's all a matter of picking useful rules. But that's what it is - picking useful rules that serve the people involved.
Hiya. Since there's a lot of hate in the comments here, let me just say:
Thank you for Firefox 4. It's faster and even less crashy than before. You guys did a great job. A whole lot of us really love the work you've done, including the UI tweaks.
First off, a lot of failure is people's fault. The left has to own up to this, and it is true, moral failures have a lot to do with it. Too much drinking, drugging, gambling, womanizing, entertaining oneself, the whole liberal idea that if it feels good do it, is just totally wrong.
[Citation needed] (emphasis mine)
I had a Patriot 64gb SSD in a small, low-traffic Ubuntu server (several services were running but no specific tuning options were set) that died this weekend. Sunday afternoon, several Apache processes pegged the CPU at 100% between them (load average climbed steadily up to 40ish, and I was unable to start or kill anything else). Thinking that one of my users had written some bad PHP, I rebooted the machine. It wouldn't restart (Grub loading...please wait...). Booting into System Rescue CD, the partitions on the SSD were detected, but none could be mounted due to bad sectors all throughout. dd_rescue was able to retrieve the important data (that which hadn't been backed up..), but the time/money spent bringing the server back online seemed a totally unnecessary hassle. SSDs were supposed to be reliable (no moving parts, right??), but I'm definitely going to wait for a few years before buying another. The drive was less than a year old.
The skinning is not automatic. You have to explicitly use the Tile widgets that you want to have appear in the new themed hotness. Not all Tk widgets have a Tile equivalent, either, so your program will end up being a mix of Tile and Tk. Now...this isn't nearly as confusing as you might think, because there are really only a handful of widgets you end up using over and over again, and you learn which is which pretty quickly.
A good place to start is, of course, the wiki entry on Tile. The Tile documentation is also useful, because Tile widgets do behave differently from their Tk equivalents.
But in general, the transition to Tile is not a difficult one.
Tcl's strongest redeeming features are its consistency and its sensibility. Tcl very strongly has a principle of least surprise, thanks to these. That alone makes programming in Tcl a joy compared with many, many other things. You'll spend a lot less time wondering how your code will work on a foreign platform, which flags a given widget expects, and so on.
Tcl of 2007 is also not Ousterhout's Tcl of 1987. A lot has happened in the last 20 years, including totally pervasive unicode support (the [msgcat] library makes internationalization such a breeze, there's absolutely no reason not to make all your programs localizable from the start), some very healthy namespace functionality, an excellent networking library, and of course the relatively recent Tile toolkit.
Sadly that is part of the family of urban legends surrounding the New Coke fiasco. It is not true. Coke actually switched from cane sugar to HFCS several months before the introduction of New Coke. (You can still get Coke made with cane sugar in the U.S. if you get the glass-bottled kind imported from Mexico.) But in general, no one noticed or cared. New Coke came later and was an entirely different fiasco.
Snopes, as per usual, has good info on this subject.
An addendum: in all of the post-Soviet states, you still need to carry a passport with you at all times. To show your passport to militsiya and to explain where you are going is common. Also, traveling out of the Soviet Union was not impossible for ordinary citizens, just not common. This has more to do with money than position, although certainly they are related. (And, you still must to be approved for an exit visa if you wish to leave many of the post-Soviet states.)
There's but one language you'll find with rigorous support of unicode to make it a non-thought, and that's tcl. Add to unicode the excellent wiki, a grammar completely defined in eleven rules, and a versatile cross-platform GUI toolkit, and you've got a language that can't be beat for a great many situations.
Suggest you to start with this page to get a glimpse of what Tcl is all about!
Man! Everything you write gets that moderation action going on. Pretty nutty...
So, yeah, billions of consumers making informed choices sounds like a nice idea, until you then apply that notion to the rest of your post, which is that they might instead choose to fly planes for instead of drive cars for some sort of regular transportation? Of all the reams of nutty stuff you write here, I think this one probably takes the cake.
First, planes are dangerous! Their "running out of fuel" mode is substantially more dangerous than that of cars - falling out of the sky vs coasting to a halt?? Second, the basic operation of a motor vehicle by a billion consumers is pretty approachable, while that of a plane is somewhat less so. Third, roads get use by more than just cars, by things that have no air-travel analogue; weekend cycling trips, etc.
Hi Iamacat,
I tried to email you about your rocketlauncher yesterday but it's likely the message did not go through. How can I contact you about a bug in the program?
Everything I can set up with the site is done through a web page admin panel; I don't have ssh or ftp access to the server at all. Without going into programming there's a ton of tweaking that can be done, but there are hooks into events in the system to do things at different points, which is how I'm able to grab the post-comments hook and use it to process the ABC tunes into grahpics instead of just going in as a regular comment.
Yes, try the software behind story5000.org, dubbed the collabotron. I hear tell there is going to be a free software version released within a few weeks. You can see examples:
The software has enough hooks to be rebuilt into anything - I am working on an ABC-tune converter at abc.story5000.org right now both as a convenience to me and mine (the fiddle community) and as a favor to the programmer to help suss out bugs.
He doesn't exist. The editors are pocketing the $600 ad revenue themselves. He almost never posts, and when he does there is very little stylistic denotation in his writing--it's bland, so it would not be difficult for anyone to step into the role. He has posted some self-portraits to his journal, but that doesn't mean anything; they could be got from anywhere. The whole thing is just a sleazy ploy to take a few extra bucks home each month.
Because economics are on the side of conventional energy sources. They're cheap because they're plentiful - at one point in America's oil history, it took one barrel of oil energy to extract one hundred barrels of oil energy from Louisiana soil. Typical returns on oil energy are 30 to 1. That is, you get thirty barrels of oil out for putting one in. Why bother asking? This is changing with oil, of course, as we're exhausting very quickly a supply that has been built up over millions and millions of years.
Slashdot Mirror
You and a bunch of other ignant fools said "there is actually a disincentive to go out and look for work" here and all over the internet.
And to that, I say: CITATION NEEDED. Citation needed from some sort of authoritative source, not "the man in the pub" or "a radio talkshow host". You self-interested pieces of shit, show us the numbers that say people don't want to work, or that they're living high on the hog on unemployment, on their $400 a month. Show us the data. And not some Heritage Foundation fiction, show us something that isn't coming from a right-wing sewage tank.
We're waiting. We're waiting for all these mythical welfare queens--after decades of existing only in the lies and fictions of the hard right--to turn into reality at last. Only you look around and what do we have? People who want to work hard but the economy's been fucked so they're fucked too. Well, wait long enough and we're all fucked. The line between any two of us is much thinner than you realize, or maybe you're just scared to admit it.
And while we're waiting, let's talk about this "taxation is theft" crock of shit. Taxation is part of your obligation as SOMEONE LIVING IN SOCIETY. Taxation is a part of the social contract, the ethics of which go back much farther than that thoroughly-debunked pseudo-philosopher Rand you're cribbing this nonsense from.
You don't want taxes? Fine, let's take away all the societal support structures that make your money worth anything. Now you can hoard all the useless piles of metal you want, and your faith in its "intrinsic value" will sustain you until you starve to death.
I don't want to live in a world where other people's actions shape the decisions I make throughout the day, either.
Curiously enough, that's exactly why I'd love to see this sort of frivolous, deeply harmful shit stopped. These people are reckless, and the actions they take day after day make my life harder in a million tiny, indirect ways, along with your and virtually everyone else's life too.
(Note: you may not agree or see it that way, but the world doesn't need your consent or acknowledgement to be profoundly broken and in desperate need of structural repair. So if you're getting ready to type some sort of "no I'm cool everything's cool" reply, just spare us.)
It's just another one of those world-we-want vs world-we-have situations. I want a world where a bunch of shits in a room thousands of miles from me aren't chipping away the economy a billion tiny transactions a day.
In fact, I'd go so far as to say, that's the price you pay for living in society. You give up some freedom (can't wreck shit for millions), and in exchange you get police, fire, sanitation, the whole ball of wax.
Do I think I should be able to tell them not to do that, so long as we're all sharing this same society?
You'll get one guess as to the right answer here.
It's about the world we want to live in, which stands in ever-starker contrast to the world we do live in.
Do you want to live in a world where the best and brightest throw their efforts away with such mundane, trivial shit?
Again, not where-are-we-now, but where-do-we-want-to-be.
Do you want to live in a world where, thanks to some tricks of law and circumstance, a handful of people have such domination over billions?
Again, not where-are-we-now, but where-do-we-want-to-be.
You don't have to be a slaver (wtf??) to say, the world we live in is wrong, because a lot of people are suffering for what seem like really lousy reasons.
You do, however, have to be a decent human being.
Hey, so do socialists.
That's great. So we're all on the same page.
I guess the only thing we disagree on is what's "necessary" when it comes to regulations.
But at least we've got a starting point, right?
cheers,
There is no such thing as a "free market" because all markets are, by definition, based on sets of rules . That idea of the "market" is already "not free" by its nature. It implies a set of rules.
In other words, there's no such thing as a "natural market" that we can strive for. There is no such thing as an "ideal market" that we can point to as free from human invention. ALL MARKETS ARE A HUMAN INVENTION. Things like "buyer beware" - someone came up with that. Things like "the government should only enforce contracts" - someone came up with that. Things like "don't lie about the ingredients in your prepared food" - someone came up with that.
When people toss around words like "free market" these days, you have to pay very close attention to who's saying it, because some people use it to mean "just enough regulation to help my big business donors" while others use it to mean "just enough regulation to support my every-man-for-himself fantasy".
Nowhere in anyone's discussion is an acknowledgment that there's not really any such thing as a "free market", that it's all a matter of picking useful rules. But that's what it is - picking useful rules that serve the people involved.
This should be required reading for anyone interested in getting into internet debates with libertarians:
http://world.std.com/~mhuben/libindex.html - Critiques of libertarianism.
(It should also be required reading for anyone who actually buys into that incoherent nonsense.)
Hiya. Since there's a lot of hate in the comments here, let me just say:
Thank you for Firefox 4. It's faster and even less crashy than before. You guys did a great job. A whole lot of us really love the work you've done, including the UI tweaks.
Cheers,
An FF4 fan.
First off, a lot of failure is people's fault. The left has to own up to this, and it is true, moral failures have a lot to do with it. Too much drinking, drugging, gambling, womanizing, entertaining oneself, the whole liberal idea that if it feels good do it, is just totally wrong. [Citation needed] (emphasis mine)
I had a Patriot 64gb SSD in a small, low-traffic Ubuntu server (several services were running but no specific tuning options were set) that died this weekend. Sunday afternoon, several Apache processes pegged the CPU at 100% between them (load average climbed steadily up to 40ish, and I was unable to start or kill anything else). Thinking that one of my users had written some bad PHP, I rebooted the machine. It wouldn't restart (Grub loading...please wait...). Booting into System Rescue CD, the partitions on the SSD were detected, but none could be mounted due to bad sectors all throughout. dd_rescue was able to retrieve the important data (that which hadn't been backed up..), but the time/money spent bringing the server back online seemed a totally unnecessary hassle. SSDs were supposed to be reliable (no moving parts, right??), but I'm definitely going to wait for a few years before buying another. The drive was less than a year old.
The skinning is not automatic. You have to explicitly use the Tile widgets that you want to have appear in the new themed hotness. Not all Tk widgets have a Tile equivalent, either, so your program will end up being a mix of Tile and Tk. Now...this isn't nearly as confusing as you might think, because there are really only a handful of widgets you end up using over and over again, and you learn which is which pretty quickly.
A good place to start is, of course, the wiki entry on Tile. The Tile documentation is also useful, because Tile widgets do behave differently from their Tk equivalents.
But in general, the transition to Tile is not a difficult one.
Not so.
Tcl's strongest redeeming features are its consistency and its sensibility. Tcl very strongly has a principle of least surprise, thanks to these. That alone makes programming in Tcl a joy compared with many, many other things. You'll spend a lot less time wondering how your code will work on a foreign platform, which flags a given widget expects, and so on.
Tcl of 2007 is also not Ousterhout's Tcl of 1987. A lot has happened in the last 20 years, including totally pervasive unicode support (the [msgcat] library makes internationalization such a breeze, there's absolutely no reason not to make all your programs localizable from the start), some very healthy namespace functionality, an excellent networking library, and of course the relatively recent Tile toolkit.
There are also new projects being developed with Tcl all the time.
Far from being an outdated or dying language, Tcl today is just a well-kept secret, sitting out in plain sight.
Sadly that is part of the family of urban legends surrounding the New Coke fiasco. It is not true. Coke actually switched from cane sugar to HFCS several months before the introduction of New Coke. (You can still get Coke made with cane sugar in the U.S. if you get the glass-bottled kind imported from Mexico.) But in general, no one noticed or cared. New Coke came later and was an entirely different fiasco.
Snopes, as per usual, has good info on this subject.
Thanks,
An addendum: in all of the post-Soviet states, you still need to carry a passport with you at all times. To show your passport to militsiya and to explain where you are going is common. Also, traveling out of the Soviet Union was not impossible for ordinary citizens, just not common. This has more to do with money than position, although certainly they are related. (And, you still must to be approved for an exit visa if you wish to leave many of the post-Soviet states.)
Subject says it all - tcl has the best unicode support you'll find in a scripting language. Python? Sorry, nice try, tcl has it beat.
Tcl is also sophisticated enough to support numerous programming paradigms with ease, but its complete syntax is just eleven rules long. Add to that the astoundingly helpful wiki and a powerful cross-platform GUI toolkit and you won't often need to turn to other languages for your programming needs.
There's but one language you'll find with rigorous support of unicode to make it a non-thought, and that's tcl. Add to unicode the excellent wiki, a grammar completely defined in eleven rules, and a versatile cross-platform GUI toolkit, and you've got a language that can't be beat for a great many situations.
Suggest you to start with this page to get a glimpse of what Tcl is all about!
Yeah, and you know what they say about Irish music..if you've heard one tune, you've heard them both! (ba-dum ching)
tcl and tclkits - they're exactly what you're describing!
Man! Everything you write gets that moderation action going on. Pretty nutty...
So, yeah, billions of consumers making informed choices sounds like a nice idea, until you then apply that notion to the rest of your post, which is that they might instead choose to fly planes for instead of drive cars for some sort of regular transportation? Of all the reams of nutty stuff you write here, I think this one probably takes the cake.
First, planes are dangerous! Their "running out of fuel" mode is substantially more dangerous than that of cars - falling out of the sky vs coasting to a halt?? Second, the basic operation of a motor vehicle by a billion consumers is pretty approachable, while that of a plane is somewhat less so. Third, roads get use by more than just cars, by things that have no air-travel analogue; weekend cycling trips, etc.
Blah blah blah
One thing to note: entrapment is only entrapment if done by law enforcement officers. The rules are different for them, you know.
Hi Iamacat, I tried to email you about your rocketlauncher yesterday but it's likely the message did not go through. How can I contact you about a bug in the program?
I somehow selected and deleted this:
Everything I can set up with the site is done through a web page admin panel; I don't have ssh or ftp access to the server at all. Without going into programming there's a ton of tweaking that can be done, but there are hooks into events in the system to do things at different points, which is how I'm able to grab the post-comments hook and use it to process the ABC tunes into grahpics instead of just going in as a regular comment.
Yes, try the software behind story5000.org, dubbed the collabotron. I hear tell there is going to be a free software version released within a few weeks. You can see examples:
A simple collaboration
A reconfigured area
The software has enough hooks to be rebuilt into anything - I am working on an ABC-tune converter at abc.story5000.org right now both as a convenience to me and mine (the fiddle community) and as a favor to the programmer to help suss out bugs.
He doesn't exist. The editors are pocketing the $600 ad revenue themselves. He almost never posts, and when he does there is very little stylistic denotation in his writing--it's bland, so it would not be difficult for anyone to step into the role. He has posted some self-portraits to his journal, but that doesn't mean anything; they could be got from anywhere. The whole thing is just a sleazy ploy to take a few extra bucks home each month.
Because economics are on the side of conventional energy sources. They're cheap because they're plentiful - at one point in America's oil history, it took one barrel of oil energy to extract one hundred barrels of oil energy from Louisiana soil. Typical returns on oil energy are 30 to 1. That is, you get thirty barrels of oil out for putting one in. Why bother asking? This is changing with oil, of course, as we're exhausting very quickly a supply that has been built up over millions and millions of years.
Source: http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/
Plugging into the Virgin train..for pleasure you say? Why am I not in the UK already!!