> But that doesn't mean that you can really get something for nothing.
Spot on! 'Yall can stop reading the thread right after this guy's post because nothing more can really be said on 'network neutrality' OR this election season for that matter,
This whole economic crisis was caused by the belief that you could get something for nothing. Bankers thought they could pay tribute to Obama's goons at ACORN and just shuffle the books a bit to make those bad loans get lost in the paperword and have peace in their time. Now they are bankrupt and we are all so screwed. But people are so uninformed (by design... the media are in the tank like in to other election season) they are about to put one of the principle actors in causing the problem in charge of solving it... because he is promising something for nothing. He says he can hand out tax cuts to 95% of the country (although 40% already pay zero, see the math problem? No? Well you are officially part of the problem.), add on all manner of new programs, including FREE HEALTHCARE! and balance the budget.
But as in most posts referring to the The Chosen One, I am going to ask his supporters here if they can answer one important question in the hope somebody will take up the challenge before election day.
Every other serious candidate for POTUS has at least one major accomplishment they can point to. Something that distinguishes them from the ordinary politician of the sort sitting on city councils, state legislatures, etc. Name Obama's. Hint: Defeating Alan Keys for his Senate seate doesn't count, I could beat Keys since he went from slightly ecentric to batshit insane, as he had already done when opposing Obama.
> Politicians don't deserve the same freedoms as citizens.
Great attitude... if you want to ensure no honorable person runs for office. If your crappy attitude became widespread, would YOU run for office if you knew your personal privacy would be zero? And neither would anybody else... except crooks who have spent a lifetime learning how to hide and dodge wouldn't mind.
But if this is going to be the new standard, can we at least get Mr. Obama's college transcripts, writings and legislative records unsealed? Of screw taht, lets just get a Republican zillionaire to bankroll a few Russian hackers.... or just borrow a page from Mr. Obama's friends and do a 'direct action' and storm Columbia's offices and just fracking take em!
> Certainly any sort of jail time would be excessive to say the least.
Oh no. This kid need to do some time. Granted that here in bizarro world where a first offense murder only nets a couple of years, a long sentence would be out of place he still needs to see the inside of a cell. Just to send an unmistakable message to the next l33t k1dz that this crap is out of bounds.
> Iraq is not a war. It's an invasion and occupation.
And your point would be? The usual result of a war is the taking of somebody else's territory and the normal word for what happens after is occupation. By your 'logic' WWII was not a war, we just invaded and occupied Germany and Japan. And Hitler and Tojo didn't even start a 'War' they just invaded and occupied some minor countries. In a few years when you graduate and realize that not only do YOU not know squat, that your profs were 'tards too you will regret your words being imortalized in the slashdot archives.
> Just like Gaza and the West bank.
See? Ignorance on display. They could have peace any time they wanted it. It's easy. Requires some simple things:
1. Understand that War does solve things. They fought on the wrong side in WWII and lost. Thus the Jews got a big hunk of their territory gifted to them by the victors, to whom the spoils of war rightfully belonged. That is a done deal for the forseable future. So accept that 'driving the Jews into the Sea' isn't an option because of the ginormous disparity in military, political, diplomatic and economic strength between the two sides.
2. If for no other reason than needing the goodwill (and buttloads of military and economic aid) of the US and the West in general the Israelis are willing to make a deal. Being a Western Democracy (on paper ar least... more like a socialist theocracy in practice) they pretty much can be expected to honor a treaty.
Personally I think the Israelis have been more than tolerant with the abuse they have taken from the so called 'Palestinians'. My solution would be to demand a ballot measure in the occupied territories on a couple of general questions.
1. Does Israel have a 'right to exist?'
2. Are we willing to forsake violence in exchange for a two state solution?
If both questions passed (cold day in hell) it would be time to help em throw off the terrorist yoke and establish a real State.
If only one passed I'd call off all talks and tell em to first have a serious conversation with themselves about what they really want, because no deal can happen in the absence of a large majority in support of both questions. Odds are this would quickly gell public opinion to one of the other choices.
If both failed I'd empty the territories while I still could, driving every last one of em into the neighboring countries. Thus would I repay the same treatment the Jews living in the Middle East suffered upon the creation of Israel.
One way or another the decades long problem would be solved and there would be peace.
I actually clicked through and read about he virtual desktops. Just wow. I haven't followed Windows closely since 98SE and NT4 and it is amazing how little has changed. They still haven't caught up to things us Linux folk have had since FVWM in 1996. Virtual desktops should not be rocket science folks, the fact Windows is still struggling with them is shocking. More cash on hand than the Pope in Rome, as close to unlimited development resources as any mortal entity and they can't do easy stuff. No wonder they worked years and finally (still) birthed the horror called Vista.
They truly are kept alive by fear and ignorance. Ignorance in the mass consumer public that anything else even exists, and that 'all computers' are as unreliable as Windows and fear amongst those who DO know that their hard earned Windows Power User secret lore would be useless in a world without Windows.
I didn't dispute that. Capacity is just up way more.
Go back a decade to 1998. I can't find a consumer level drive with 10GB selling in 1998. We have 1TB drives now. So that is a factor of 100 increase in capacity. Speed has also increased but closer to a factor of 10 instead of 100. Ten years ago system RAM in a typical PC was 64MB or less while now 2GB is lowball for anything other than a netbook. That is a factor in the 30+ range. Swapping hurts more than it used to.
Also look at how big the working set of apps have grown in the past decade. Back then swapping out the entirety of (statically linked mind ya) Netscape Communicator after it had been leaking memory for a week of browsing wouldn't kill that much swap. Now the typical applets in the GNOME/KDE system tray gulp down more memory right at startup.
Forget the RAM X 2 rule. Capacity of drives are way up, base RAM load is way up. Drive transfer speed isn't up very much. Doesn't really matter how much ram you have, long before you get a Gig of swap utilized the system is going to be trashing to the point of being unusable under any but lab conditions.
Running with no swap can cause some problems, because it does help if the system can push out blocks of memory that aren't backed by a file and also haven't been used for awhile. Still on an all flash system with an adequate amount of RAM running without swap is probably the right move. On a machine with a spinning disc give it a 1GB swap and forget it.
The exception being in cases where the a system is doing suspend to disc into the swap. I don't have any Linux machines that will do suspend to disc so don't ask me about any details.
Go look at the CBO estimated cost of the broadband bill. $40M in federal grants per year just to get better data? I don't care to read through the text to find where that much money is actually going because I don't care. Listen up maggots, we have a huge deficit. Killing special interest pork like this is the only way we can hope to balance the budget.
Just look at the list of co-sponsors. A rogue's gallery of porkers.
> I am in disbelief over anyones the acceptance of the idea.
Who said we have to accept the idea. We aren't likely to be given a choice. Watch what is happening in the vertical markets. For now, if you insist on it, you can find somebody to actually sell you an application. But they would rather sell you a subsccription and want to host on their servers. I can only assume some people are actually buying when so many people are trying to sell.
But then Obama and ACORN didn't have to twist bankers arms too much to get em to loan money to people who had damned near zero chance of repaying the loan. Giving outside (and likely offshore and under little legal oversight) vendors control over critical business knowledge and customer info will almost certainly end up as a disaster on the same scale.... will Congress demand the taxpayers bail that disaster out when the time comes? Except this one probably won't explode in an orgy of destruction. No, for all too many businesses the database IS the business and they will one day wake up to simply find themselves quietly cut out of the loop as redundant.
So I guess we know the answer to which is more plentiful, stupidity beats hydrogen by a nice margin.
This is just good system administration happening. The systems can't handle the load so the admins have programmed the mailservers to drop a percentage down/dev/null until the load drops back to manageble levels.
My mail server (and almost certainly yours) has many such throttles built in, It will stop accepting mail if the load average is too great, if available mail spool is too low, etc.
> There's a lot of potential there, not just for P2P, but for kinds of social > interaction that the internet is just too big for.
You do realize what you are talking about, reinventing the BBS as the center of networked life. And yea, perhaps it is about time for the pendulum to swing back towards local communities. Building WWANs of the sort being discussed in this thread would require some level of co-operation between neighbors so it would be natural to put up a local BBS/webforum/wiki/whatever to communicate. Once it exists it is natural to add more topics fo local interest.
> Great idea. Quick question: how will that wifi network connect to the Internet?
Ok, work with me here. Imagine the bandwidth cap drops to 100GB/month. Hard drives are still cheap and huge and will be cheaper and even bigger by the time this problem ripens. 802.11n will also be commonplace by then. Ok, so everyone participating in a neighborhood net is expected to buy the current reflashable linky, at least 1TB of drive and a 10dbi omni antenna, The AP does all of your bittorrent action, something ASUS is selling now, a browser plugin offloads all.torrent links to the AP, you monitor your downloads on a webpage it provides and when it hits 100% you access the files via a samba share.
Ok, now put this AP on a 10/8 net and it can see the neighbors and your outbound net. It's torrent client has been modified to prefer local peers by a ratio close to the number of members. It also assists in torrents a neighbor is working even if you aren't interested in the file, at a lower priority on the pipe to the outside world. It does something else interesting, it only caches the blocks it downloaded, thus distributing a cache of those files amongst the peers and greatly increasing the effectiveness of the cache. If you later decide you want one of those files your client gets the rest almost exclusively from the local nodes.
Now imagine a future where video over the Internet was about to launch but the cable companies and telcos squashed it in favor of their video on demand pay per view crap. Get fifty neighbors together and together they have an aggregate bandwidth cap of 5TB. If everyone is watching a totally different set of shows it won't help much, but there will almost certainly be a fairly good overlap. When a new episode of moderately popular show X is available the dozen or so people who want it will be downloading it in parallel across their net links and swapping the blocks across a much faster 802.11n WWAN aided to a lessor extent by the 38 peers who aren't interested in that program. And cutting the hit on their bandwidth cap by that same factor of 12+ but offset by helping download stuff you didn't want to help somebody else. And if anybody else later decides they want to watch it before it times out of the caches their cost is zero. By having one smart host do almost all heavy downloading it can know the caps and adjust it's activity to avoid hitting them.
If they try to charge those kind of rates we will just route around them. We use the large ISPs because we find them the best bargsin. Jack up prices to that sort of level and there will be other options.
Get rates up enough and lots of alternatives get practical. Wide area wireless, new competitors like the power company using their universal right of way to lay fiber, etc. Kinda like everybody bitched and moaned at $50/barrel oil and didn't change much but as it kept going up we are talking serious about hybrids, biofuels, drilling in places that would have been political suicide to talk about, building nukes (Nukes! Who could have predicted the greens ever allowing that!), etc.
Get bandwidth expensive enough and we could just do local neighborhood p2p filesharing. Imagine a 10.0.0.0/8 wifi network covering a neighborhood and sharing the big popular downloads among themselves. Also would make the **AA goons job a lot harder.
But oh no, it just has to be global warming. It get shot somewhere: Global Warming! Record cold? That's Global Climate Change for ya. Floods? Drought? Plague of Locusts? Manmade Global Warming every time and the ONLY solution is the destruction of Western Civilization, replacing the values of the Enlightenment with Socialism and Planning.
As it currently is overregulated your arguement and the other ones I didn't quote are quite accurate. I'm not talking about that though. I'm talking about moving heaven and earth to make nukes cheap and cost effective. Build pebble beds or one of the modern safe designs and get the licensing process down to "You want to build? Show me basic site security and use one of these pre-approved designs and you can break ground tomorrow." I'm talking mass production of the sub systems, no environmental impact studies, no NIMBY lawsuits to wade through, etc.
> Need more energy, erect 50 wind turbines a month every month.
None of which are good for base load. If wind turbines can survive in the open marketplace (i.e. no government handouts like Pickens wants) who am I to question the invisible hand. But I wouldn't put down a major bet they could compete against nukes if nukes were given a chance. It is hard to compete with the logical consequences of E=MC^2.
> And McCain has called to spend billions in subsidies to build nuclear power plants.
Another disagreement I have with McCain. Eliminate the government interferrence with nukes, eliminate the subsidies to competing sources. The government should, as a general rule, not be in the business of picking winners and losers in the economy. I'll put up with a little meddling in the energy problem because a) much of the current problem is a government creation and b) sending billions and billions to people who want to cut our heads off is not just an economic policy problem, that is a national defense problem also.
I won't be voting for McCain. Like most elections I will be voting against the Democratic Socialist Party's candidate. The Libertarians missed the filing deadline so even if they had a sane candidate I can't do a protest vote this year. So like the website of the same name says, get drunk and vote for McCain. Bleh. At least Palin looks like she might be good after she levels up another time or two so if the McCainiac bows out for health reasons in a couple of years it could work out.
> You wont get much gain from any investment in alternative energy for years to come...
Exactly. Which is why we need to be building nuke plants NOW and working out ways to ramp up the fuel supply while keeping a close handle of the extra fissile material that will entail and ramming Yucca Mountain into operation.
Longer term we do need a better answer and should be working on that, but let the market pick the winner instead of ignorant and corrupt congresscritters. Although personally I think we can forget all that gaywad wind and solar crap and just concentrate on perfecting a really good electrical storage method for cars and flogging the R&D on fusion to charge up up from. We shouldn't run out of Uranium before we perfect fusion.... even though it has been 20-30 years away from production for the last 30-40 years.
> A lockup of credit markets is a bad thing, and so far I haven't seen any of the naysayers offer > any way to prevent it other than the bailout.
You haven't been listening then... or just listening to the MSM. There have been good alternatives proposed. Not sure if they would work, not sure the proposed bailout will either, I haven't seen the books of Freddie, Fannie and the banks the contagion spread to but some sound like they just might work and are certainly more market based and less taxpayer funded. Personally I won't support any plan that doesn't include teh one reform that might prevent a repeat: A phaseout of Freddie and Fannie.
I won't get into an argument whether creating Freddie and Fannie were or were not good ideas back during the Great Depression[1] but can someone justify their continued existence or their mutation into monsters who accounted for 40% of all home mortgages? Programs created to help the poorest get a home slowly redefined 'poor' to mean 40% of homeowners? No 'reform' will prevent them doing it again, only push it off a generation or two. Eliminate them.
[1] Remember the Depression didn't get 'Great' until the New Deal experimentation drug it out into a great mess that took a World War to finally cure.
> My ideal notebook would not be Intel architecture.
Exactly right. But not a $100 laptop like that HiVision thingy coming next month. Why is it accepted wisdom that only the cheapest model can run Linux? Linux on a netbook works just great and Linux doesn't care about the CPU arch much. But we do need video playback and flash plugin support so the MIPS in those Chinese netbooks aren't going to cut it. You need an ARM.
My 'ideal' netbook:
Start with a Thinkpad keyboard. Notice the eraserhead pointer. Must have. Now eliminate the stupid pad and you can cut the form factor down a lot. Yes you have to be wider to have a full notebook keyboard but if you will note the resulting formfactor is ideal for putting a wide display on without any wasted space. Give it 1280x720 or 1280x768 so it can playback HD video. Make sure the rest of the system can keep up, but it isn't required that it get great battery life while doing something that extreme.
With an ARM and a LED backlight it should be possible to get a good battery life on 'ordinary' document creation and web browsing without larding the thing down with too many batteries. You really need to be able to run 6-8 hours to avoid the need to carry the charger around all day.
What will be totally cool will be when eInk gets perfected with color and fast response time. Imagine what that will do to runtime when the backlight can go and everything but the WiFi can stay powered down 90% of the time.
> Mind pointing me to a Dell that costs less than $3000?
You mean most of what they sell? Most of their machines are expandable and aren't bolted to a display. You can get whatever CPU, memory and storage you want and you don't have to buy laptop drives for a desktop. All laptops are expensive and limited compared to a desktop, regardless whether it is Apple badged or not.
> POSs that break as soon as you look at them.
Ok, we agree on that. It's why I have never bought a Dell and have no plans to. That and their connector conspiracy games.
> Oh, and your lack of information is showing - there are plenty of brand new Macs > on the market for much less than $3000.
Mind pointing me toward a mac between the Mini and the Pro starting at $2,600? No, the iMacs and laptops don't count. Underpowered, overpriced and no expansion.
Hell, the mini doesn't really count, it is more of a settop box looking for a purpose in life. A Mini would make a fair Myth frontend except it would be overpriced for what it can do videowise. Wouldn't make a good backend or combined front+back because there isn't anyplace to add tuners and the storage possibilities of laptop drives aren't interesting for a Myth media store.
That is why the hackintosh is such a compelling idea, the idea of getting a real workstation machine with real drive bays and expansion slots in the $300-$2000 + $300 for dongle+OSX range gives certain geeks wood. Too bad Apple refuses to offer a product in that range.
And if you pick your hardware carefully that dongle is a waste of money, all it does is give ya an EFI loader and there are cheaper ways to get that. If you were really frugal one could probably build a hackintosh with a boxed OSX and bring in the project for $300. At those price points it opens OS X ownership to whole new classes of user.
Not really. I was attempting to a) prove the subject of this slashdot topic in general and b) demonstrate that it applies at least equally well to the left to counter the unspoken assumption evident in almost every post that "he he Republicans are stupid. ha ha we are so reality based."
> Your unquestioning use of 'communist' as a pejorative is one thing; Marxists are not the same as Soviets...
Not at all. I simply assert some facts that are totally indisputable and yet are almost totally in the memory hole. Considering who runs the MSM it is fairly safe to assume THEY consider labels like 'marxist' and 'communist' to be very bad things to hang on their annointed candidate. Could you imagine if a mainstream bio piece on Sen. Obama included the 100% factual phrase "third generation communist"? It would a) spark a scorched earth flamewar of biblical proportions, b) end the career of everyone involved in the production and airing of the story and c) end Mr. Obama's career for life.
As for which label to affix to the bastards this week, that is like nailing Jello to a wall. Since almost every American (even self described liberals) find being identified with communism fatal they constantly shift the vocabulary to hide their beliefs. Socialist, Communist, Marxist, Liberal, Progressive, etc. All come and go as enough people associate a particular word with the same old set of ideas.
> That being the case, what grounds do you have to believe that Obama would govern as a communist, > rather than simply governing with a view to the theory of classes?
Well 'governing with a view to the theory of classes' pretty much means governing as a communist. The only remaining difference is a matter of understanding what is politically possible. Considering how politically savvy Mr. Obama is and the extent to which he has hidden his actual political beliefs indicate he would fly under the radar as much as possible. But he WOULD be governing with a view towards shifting the political gound to make a more socialist/communist society possible. And considering he has the most left voting record in the Senate it is fairly reasonable to believe he would be pushing 'Change (to Communism)' just as hard as he thought he could get away with.
> If the librarian-firing incident is as it appears, then we have a demonstration of Ms. Palin's > willingness to use her 'principles' to make decisions, in government, even when it is > inappropriate to do so.
Well lets first remember that zero books were removed from the shelves. Removing a subordinate you have serious differences on policy with isn't censorship, it is governing. Not that there is even credible evidence that the librarian was fired. It happens in most changes in administration. We just got a new mayor after twenty years of the old guy. In the year or two since we have seen most of the officials replaced. Our librarian wasn't one of them, but only because the library is a parish level entity.
But on to the specifics you complain about. If I had firing authority over a librarian who placed "Heather Has Two Mommies" on the shelves of a tiny semi-rural library she would indeed be questioned about such a waste of scarce resources. If the book was bought because people wished to read it for themselves due to the controversy about it at the time and it was thus placed in the adult section, ok. But to place it in the children's section? NO fricking way. Not spending scarce public resources on material 90% of taxpayers will be disgusted by is just bad policy. Censorship is passing a law forbidding the local bookseller from stocking it.
> After all, communism has had some terrible goals, and some with merit.
No. Communism has lead directly to mass graves and police states everywhere it has been allowed to go to it's logical conclusion. Not most of the time. Every time. 100%. Western Europe appears to have realized that in time and is pulling back from the brink.
> Either the machine is open, or it isn't. If it's not, then Google has been deceiving us.
Google has been deceiving you. YOu have also been deceiving yourself. It depends on what your definition of Open is and who you are talking too. Google was talking to handset makers and carriers and Android is indeed Open to them. They were NOT talking to you, the end user. Android is 100% closed to you. It will be SIM locked. Apps will be signed and T-Mobile and perhaps Google will have an absolute veto that isn't subject to appeal over any apps loaded into the device. Any such apps will, at any rate, be sandboxed into the JAVA tarpit where performance isn't an option.
The only question is whether they can lock a phone better than Apple?
> This is a bullshit comparison that doesn't go deeper than "NDA bad, Linux good."
Well what were you expecting? You can't actually talk about the iPhone SDK because of the aformentioned NDA. I'm just amazed His Steveness didn't think to add a clause forbidding ANY reviews or comparisions without written permission.
> So? Does being "raised a Muslim" violate any legal or ethical principles?
No. Lying about the whole thing raises some pretty big ones though.
> Even if he had been raised as a practicing Muslim, would that say anything about his character today?
Even if? You still doubt that he was a practicing Muslim? Considering the evidence, including his own damned autobiography, being unwilling to believe it shows you perfectly fit into today's topic.
Just to be clear, the fact that he WAS a practicing Muslim isn't in doubt. That by itself should not be a disqualification for POTUS, although votors are free to take it into account, especially the fact he feels he has to lie about it. There is equally no doubt that he isn't a practicing Muslim anymore.
Because Marxists can't be Muslims anymore than they can be Christians. His stepfather was unquestionably a Muslim and enrolled him for proper Islamic teaching. However, Mr. Obama's father was a Marxist, by his own words. His mother was almost certainly a Communist. His grandparents, at least on his mother's side... the typical white people who did most of his upbringing, were at least socialists and probably communists. His childhood mentor was a card carrying Communist Party USA member. By Obama's own words we know he sought out the company of Marxists and communists in college to be 'authentic', that socializing or being taught be anyone else would have made him a 'sellout.' His words. He chooses a church that was more socialist and revolutionary than religious, apparently one that was part of an unholy trinity between Wright's TUCC, Phalager[sp]'s mutant Catholic black revolution theology and Farrakahn's mutant Black Revolutionary Islam. The common thread between these otherwise incompatible religions being Marxism. Then throw in Ayers, an admitted "small c communist.' who apparently 'made' Mr. Obama by putting in charge of $150M to build a political empire with money intended to improve education.
Now somebody prove this thread's idea right by sticking yer fingers in your ears and yelling McCarthy at me. Every one of the absolute facts cited here, admittedly cited in such a way to make Mr. Obama look very bad, is a real fact you can look up for yourself. Many have video evidence on YouTube right now.
> It aint 1998, and we aren't talking applets here.
No, but here in 2008 I have yet to encounter Java and not realize it within a minute of using it. And that is on big honking Intel chip, I really doubt there is a PentiumIII or IV class processor in a phone.
Been over ten years waiting for the hardware to catch up to Java and I suspect I'm not the only one who still has the attitude of, "Crap, It's a Java app. Guess I can use that until I find a real program to do [foo]." Java apps are still slow, bloated and total ram hogs. And I seriously doubt that even the Gods of Google can fix that.
Yup. If it gets totally pwned I'll look again at it, till then I keep my Visor and basic cell phone.
If I'm going to buy a computer I want to own it. They can keep control over the processor that does the cell phone modulation and network connectivity only because I realize that no carrier will ever allow a rogue firmware near their network because they were never designed to be secure against that sort of thing. But I won't accept SIM locking, if that can't be broken it's no sale. Most importantly the computing core must be 100% mine. I want to be able to entirely replace the kernel and all of userland if I decide the vendor supplied stuff sucks or they abandon my platform and I want newer versions of stuff. I want to be able to build and install ANY application without limit. Basically I want Open Source for ME, not just for the cell companies and handset makers. And not just at the JAVA layer, I want to be able to build and install native apps if I want to.
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> But that doesn't mean that you can really get something for nothing.
Spot on! 'Yall can stop reading the thread right after this guy's post because nothing more can really be said on 'network neutrality' OR this election season for that matter,
This whole economic crisis was caused by the belief that you could get something for nothing. Bankers thought they could pay tribute to Obama's goons at ACORN and just shuffle the books a bit to make those bad loans get lost in the paperword and have peace in their time. Now they are bankrupt and we are all so screwed. But people are so uninformed (by design... the media are in the tank like in to other election season) they are about to put one of the principle actors in causing the problem in charge of solving it... because he is promising something for nothing. He says he can hand out tax cuts to 95% of the country (although 40% already pay zero, see the math problem? No? Well you are officially part of the problem.), add on all manner of new programs, including FREE HEALTHCARE! and balance the budget.
But as in most posts referring to the The Chosen One, I am going to ask his supporters here if they can answer one important question in the hope somebody will take up the challenge before election day.
Every other serious candidate for POTUS has at least one major accomplishment they can point to. Something that distinguishes them from the ordinary politician of the sort sitting on city councils, state legislatures, etc. Name Obama's. Hint: Defeating Alan Keys for his Senate seate doesn't count, I could beat Keys since he went from slightly ecentric to batshit insane, as he had already done when opposing Obama.
> Politicians don't deserve the same freedoms as citizens.
Great attitude... if you want to ensure no honorable person runs for office. If your crappy attitude became widespread, would YOU run for office if you knew your personal privacy would be zero? And neither would anybody else... except crooks who have spent a lifetime learning how to hide and dodge wouldn't mind.
But if this is going to be the new standard, can we at least get Mr. Obama's college transcripts, writings and legislative records unsealed? Of screw taht, lets just get a Republican zillionaire to bankroll a few Russian hackers.... or just borrow a page from Mr. Obama's friends and do a 'direct action' and storm Columbia's offices and just fracking take em!
> Certainly any sort of jail time would be excessive to say the least.
Oh no. This kid need to do some time. Granted that here in bizarro world where a first offense murder only nets a couple of years, a long sentence would be out of place he still needs to see the inside of a cell. Just to send an unmistakable message to the next l33t k1dz that this crap is out of bounds.
> Iraq is not a war. It's an invasion and occupation.
And your point would be? The usual result of a war is the taking of somebody else's territory and the normal word for what happens after is occupation. By your 'logic' WWII was not a war, we just invaded and occupied Germany and Japan. And Hitler and Tojo didn't even start a 'War' they just invaded and occupied some minor countries. In a few years when you graduate and realize that not only do YOU not know squat, that your profs were 'tards too you will regret your words being imortalized in the slashdot archives.
> Just like Gaza and the West bank.
See? Ignorance on display. They could have peace any time they wanted it. It's easy. Requires some simple things:
1. Understand that War does solve things. They fought on the wrong side in WWII and lost. Thus the Jews got a big hunk of their territory gifted to them by the victors, to whom the spoils of war rightfully belonged. That is a done deal for the forseable future. So accept that 'driving the Jews into the Sea' isn't an option because of the ginormous disparity in military, political, diplomatic and economic strength between the two sides.
2. If for no other reason than needing the goodwill (and buttloads of military and economic aid) of the US and the West in general the Israelis are willing to make a deal. Being a Western Democracy (on paper ar least... more like a socialist theocracy in practice) they pretty much can be expected to honor a treaty.
Personally I think the Israelis have been more than tolerant with the abuse they have taken from the so called 'Palestinians'. My solution would be to demand a ballot measure in the occupied territories on a couple of general questions.
1. Does Israel have a 'right to exist?'
2. Are we willing to forsake violence in exchange for a two state solution?
If both questions passed (cold day in hell) it would be time to help em throw off the terrorist yoke and establish a real State.
If only one passed I'd call off all talks and tell em to first have a serious conversation with themselves about what they really want, because no deal can happen in the absence of a large majority in support of both questions. Odds are this would quickly gell public opinion to one of the other choices.
If both failed I'd empty the territories while I still could, driving every last one of em into the neighboring countries. Thus would I repay the same treatment the Jews living in the Middle East suffered upon the creation of Israel.
One way or another the decades long problem would be solved and there would be peace.
I actually clicked through and read about he virtual desktops. Just wow. I haven't followed Windows closely since 98SE and NT4 and it is amazing how little has changed. They still haven't caught up to things us Linux folk have had since FVWM in 1996. Virtual desktops should not be rocket science folks, the fact Windows is still struggling with them is shocking. More cash on hand than the Pope in Rome, as close to unlimited development resources as any mortal entity and they can't do easy stuff. No wonder they worked years and finally (still) birthed the horror called Vista.
They truly are kept alive by fear and ignorance. Ignorance in the mass consumer public that anything else even exists, and that 'all computers' are as unreliable as Windows and fear amongst those who DO know that their hard earned Windows Power User secret lore would be useless in a world without Windows.
> hard drive speeds are way up.
I didn't dispute that. Capacity is just up way more.
Go back a decade to 1998. I can't find a consumer level drive with 10GB selling in 1998. We have 1TB drives now. So that is a factor of 100 increase in capacity. Speed has also increased but closer to a factor of 10 instead of 100. Ten years ago system RAM in a typical PC was 64MB or less while now 2GB is lowball for anything other than a netbook. That is a factor in the 30+ range. Swapping hurts more than it used to.
Also look at how big the working set of apps have grown in the past decade. Back then swapping out the entirety of (statically linked mind ya) Netscape Communicator after it had been leaking memory for a week of browsing wouldn't kill that much swap. Now the typical applets in the GNOME/KDE system tray gulp down more memory right at startup.
Forget the RAM X 2 rule. Capacity of drives are way up, base RAM load is way up. Drive transfer speed isn't up very much. Doesn't really matter how much ram you have, long before you get a Gig of swap utilized the system is going to be trashing to the point of being unusable under any but lab conditions.
Running with no swap can cause some problems, because it does help if the system can push out blocks of memory that aren't backed by a file and also haven't been used for awhile. Still on an all flash system with an adequate amount of RAM running without swap is probably the right move. On a machine with a spinning disc give it a 1GB swap and forget it.
The exception being in cases where the a system is doing suspend to disc into the swap. I don't have any Linux machines that will do suspend to disc so don't ask me about any details.
Go look at the CBO estimated cost of the broadband bill. $40M in federal grants per year just to get better data? I don't care to read through the text to find where that much money is actually going because I don't care. Listen up maggots, we have a huge deficit. Killing special interest pork like this is the only way we can hope to balance the budget.
Just look at the list of co-sponsors. A rogue's gallery of porkers.
> I am in disbelief over anyones the acceptance of the idea.
Who said we have to accept the idea. We aren't likely to be given a choice. Watch what is happening in the vertical markets. For now, if you insist on it, you can find somebody to actually sell you an application. But they would rather sell you a subsccription and want to host on their servers. I can only assume some people are actually buying when so many people are trying to sell.
But then Obama and ACORN didn't have to twist bankers arms too much to get em to loan money to people who had damned near zero chance of repaying the loan. Giving outside (and likely offshore and under little legal oversight) vendors control over critical business knowledge and customer info will almost certainly end up as a disaster on the same scale.... will Congress demand the taxpayers bail that disaster out when the time comes? Except this one probably won't explode in an orgy of destruction. No, for all too many businesses the database IS the business and they will one day wake up to simply find themselves quietly cut out of the loop as redundant.
So I guess we know the answer to which is more plentiful, stupidity beats hydrogen by a nice margin.
This is just good system administration happening. The systems can't handle the load so the admins have programmed the mailservers to drop a percentage down /dev/null until the load drops back to manageble levels.
My mail server (and almost certainly yours) has many such throttles built in, It will stop accepting mail if the load average is too great, if available mail spool is too low, etc.
> There's a lot of potential there, not just for P2P, but for kinds of social
> interaction that the internet is just too big for.
You do realize what you are talking about, reinventing the BBS as the center of networked life. And yea, perhaps it is about time for the pendulum to swing back towards local communities. Building WWANs of the sort being discussed in this thread would require some level of co-operation between neighbors so it would be natural to put up a local BBS/webforum/wiki/whatever to communicate. Once it exists it is natural to add more topics fo local interest.
> Great idea. Quick question: how will that wifi network connect to the Internet?
Ok, work with me here. Imagine the bandwidth cap drops to 100GB/month. Hard drives are still cheap and huge and will be cheaper and even bigger by the time this problem ripens. 802.11n will also be commonplace by then. Ok, so everyone participating in a neighborhood net is expected to buy the current reflashable linky, at least 1TB of drive and a 10dbi omni antenna, The AP does all of your bittorrent action, something ASUS is selling now, a browser plugin offloads all .torrent links to the AP, you monitor your downloads on a webpage it provides and when it hits 100% you access the files via a samba share.
Ok, now put this AP on a 10/8 net and it can see the neighbors and your outbound net. It's torrent client has been modified to prefer local peers by a ratio close to the number of members. It also assists in torrents a neighbor is working even if you aren't interested in the file, at a lower priority on the pipe to the outside world. It does something else interesting, it only caches the blocks it downloaded, thus distributing a cache of those files amongst the peers and greatly increasing the effectiveness of the cache. If you later decide you want one of those files your client gets the rest almost exclusively from the local nodes.
Now imagine a future where video over the Internet was about to launch but the cable companies and telcos squashed it in favor of their video on demand pay per view crap. Get fifty neighbors together and together they have an aggregate bandwidth cap of 5TB. If everyone is watching a totally different set of shows it won't help much, but there will almost certainly be a fairly good overlap. When a new episode of moderately popular show X is available the dozen or so people who want it will be downloading it in parallel across their net links and swapping the blocks across a much faster 802.11n WWAN aided to a lessor extent by the 38 peers who aren't interested in that program. And cutting the hit on their bandwidth cap by that same factor of 12+ but offset by helping download stuff you didn't want to help somebody else. And if anybody else later decides they want to watch it before it times out of the caches their cost is zero. By having one smart host do almost all heavy downloading it can know the caps and adjust it's activity to avoid hitting them.
If they try to charge those kind of rates we will just route around them. We use the large ISPs because we find them the best bargsin. Jack up prices to that sort of level and there will be other options.
Get rates up enough and lots of alternatives get practical. Wide area wireless, new competitors like the power company using their universal right of way to lay fiber, etc. Kinda like everybody bitched and moaned at $50/barrel oil and didn't change much but as it kept going up we are talking serious about hybrids, biofuels, drilling in places that would have been political suicide to talk about, building nukes (Nukes! Who could have predicted the greens ever allowing that!), etc.
Get bandwidth expensive enough and we could just do local neighborhood p2p filesharing. Imagine a 10.0.0.0/8 wifi network covering a neighborhood and sharing the big popular downloads among themselves. Also would make the **AA goons job a lot harder.
> You do know that the depths of the ocean tend to be very cold, right?
Normally..... unless there is volcanic activity in the region like is currently going on around the north pole.
Study finds Arctic seabed afire with lava-spewing volcanoes:canada.com
But oh no, it just has to be global warming. It get shot somewhere: Global Warming! Record cold? That's Global Climate Change for ya. Floods? Drought? Plague of Locusts? Manmade Global Warming every time and the ONLY solution is the destruction of Western Civilization, replacing the values of the Enlightenment with Socialism and Planning.
> Nuke power is even slower.
As it currently is overregulated your arguement and the other ones I didn't quote are quite accurate. I'm not talking about that though. I'm talking about moving heaven and earth to make nukes cheap and cost effective. Build pebble beds or one of the modern safe designs and get the licensing process down to "You want to build? Show me basic site security and use one of these pre-approved designs and you can break ground tomorrow." I'm talking mass production of the sub systems, no environmental impact studies, no NIMBY lawsuits to wade through, etc.
> Need more energy, erect 50 wind turbines a month every month.
None of which are good for base load. If wind turbines can survive in the open marketplace (i.e. no government handouts like Pickens wants) who am I to question the invisible hand. But I wouldn't put down a major bet they could compete against nukes if nukes were given a chance. It is hard to compete with the logical consequences of E=MC^2.
> And McCain has called to spend billions in subsidies to build nuclear power plants.
Another disagreement I have with McCain. Eliminate the government interferrence with nukes, eliminate the subsidies to competing sources. The government should, as a general rule, not be in the business of picking winners and losers in the economy. I'll put up with a little meddling in the energy problem because a) much of the current problem is a government creation and b) sending billions and billions to people who want to cut our heads off is not just an economic policy problem, that is a national defense problem also.
I won't be voting for McCain. Like most elections I will be voting against the Democratic Socialist Party's candidate. The Libertarians missed the filing deadline so even if they had a sane candidate I can't do a protest vote this year. So like the website of the same name says, get drunk and vote for McCain. Bleh. At least Palin looks like she might be good after she levels up another time or two so if the McCainiac bows out for health reasons in a couple of years it could work out.
> You wont get much gain from any investment in alternative energy for years to come...
Exactly. Which is why we need to be building nuke plants NOW and working out ways to ramp up the fuel supply while keeping a close handle of the extra fissile material that will entail and ramming Yucca Mountain into operation.
Longer term we do need a better answer and should be working on that, but let the market pick the winner instead of ignorant and corrupt congresscritters. Although personally I think we can forget all that gaywad wind and solar crap and just concentrate on perfecting a really good electrical storage method for cars and flogging the R&D on fusion to charge up up from. We shouldn't run out of Uranium before we perfect fusion.... even though it has been 20-30 years away from production for the last 30-40 years.
> A lockup of credit markets is a bad thing, and so far I haven't seen any of the naysayers offer
> any way to prevent it other than the bailout.
You haven't been listening then... or just listening to the MSM. There have been good alternatives proposed. Not sure if they would work, not sure the proposed bailout will either, I haven't seen the books of Freddie, Fannie and the banks the contagion spread to but some sound like they just might work and are certainly more market based and less taxpayer funded. Personally I won't support any plan that doesn't include teh one reform that might prevent a repeat: A phaseout of Freddie and Fannie.
I won't get into an argument whether creating Freddie and Fannie were or were not good ideas back during the Great Depression[1] but can someone justify their continued existence or their mutation into monsters who accounted for 40% of all home mortgages? Programs created to help the poorest get a home slowly redefined 'poor' to mean 40% of homeowners? No 'reform' will prevent them doing it again, only push it off a generation or two. Eliminate them.
[1] Remember the Depression didn't get 'Great' until the New Deal experimentation drug it out into a great mess that took a World War to finally cure.
> My ideal notebook would not be Intel architecture.
Exactly right. But not a $100 laptop like that HiVision thingy coming next month. Why is it accepted wisdom that only the cheapest model can run Linux? Linux on a netbook works just great and Linux doesn't care about the CPU arch much. But we do need video playback and flash plugin support so the MIPS in those Chinese netbooks aren't going to cut it. You need an ARM.
My 'ideal' netbook:
Start with a Thinkpad keyboard. Notice the eraserhead pointer. Must have. Now eliminate the stupid pad and you can cut the form factor down a lot. Yes you have to be wider to have a full notebook keyboard but if you will note the resulting formfactor is ideal for putting a wide display on without any wasted space. Give it 1280x720 or 1280x768 so it can playback HD video. Make sure the rest of the system can keep up, but it isn't required that it get great battery life while doing something that extreme.
With an ARM and a LED backlight it should be possible to get a good battery life on 'ordinary' document creation and web browsing without larding the thing down with too many batteries. You really need to be able to run 6-8 hours to avoid the need to carry the charger around all day.
What will be totally cool will be when eInk gets perfected with color and fast response time. Imagine what that will do to runtime when the backlight can go and everything but the WiFi can stay powered down 90% of the time.
> Mind pointing me to a Dell that costs less than $3000?
You mean most of what they sell? Most of their machines are expandable and aren't bolted to a display. You can get whatever CPU, memory and storage you want and you don't have to buy laptop drives for a desktop. All laptops are expensive and limited compared to a desktop, regardless whether it is Apple badged or not.
> POSs that break as soon as you look at them.
Ok, we agree on that. It's why I have never bought a Dell and have no plans to. That and their connector conspiracy games.
> Oh, and your lack of information is showing - there are plenty of brand new Macs
> on the market for much less than $3000.
Mind pointing me toward a mac between the Mini and the Pro starting at $2,600? No, the iMacs and laptops don't count. Underpowered, overpriced and no expansion.
Hell, the mini doesn't really count, it is more of a settop box looking for a purpose in life. A Mini would make a fair Myth frontend except it would be overpriced for what it can do videowise. Wouldn't make a good backend or combined front+back because there isn't anyplace to add tuners and the storage possibilities of laptop drives aren't interesting for a Myth media store.
That is why the hackintosh is such a compelling idea, the idea of getting a real workstation machine with real drive bays and expansion slots in the $300-$2000 + $300 for dongle+OSX range gives certain geeks wood. Too bad Apple refuses to offer a product in that range.
And if you pick your hardware carefully that dongle is a waste of money, all it does is give ya an EFI loader and there are cheaper ways to get that. If you were really frugal one could probably build a hackintosh with a boxed OSX and bring in the project for $300. At those price points it opens OS X ownership to whole new classes of user.
> You are building a massive strawman here.
Not really. I was attempting to a) prove the subject of this slashdot topic in general and b) demonstrate that it applies at least equally well to the left to counter the unspoken assumption evident in almost every post that "he he Republicans are stupid. ha ha we are so reality based."
> Your unquestioning use of 'communist' as a pejorative is one thing; Marxists are not the same as Soviets...
Not at all. I simply assert some facts that are totally indisputable and yet are almost totally in the memory hole. Considering who runs the MSM it is fairly safe to assume THEY consider labels like 'marxist' and 'communist' to be very bad things to hang on their annointed candidate. Could you imagine if a mainstream bio piece on Sen. Obama included the 100% factual phrase "third generation communist"? It would a) spark a scorched earth flamewar of biblical proportions, b) end the career of everyone involved in the production and airing of the story and c) end Mr. Obama's career for life.
As for which label to affix to the bastards this week, that is like nailing Jello to a wall. Since almost every American (even self described liberals) find being identified with communism fatal they constantly shift the vocabulary to hide their beliefs. Socialist, Communist, Marxist, Liberal, Progressive, etc. All come and go as enough people associate a particular word with the same old set of ideas.
> That being the case, what grounds do you have to believe that Obama would govern as a communist,
> rather than simply governing with a view to the theory of classes?
Well 'governing with a view to the theory of classes' pretty much means governing as a communist. The only remaining difference is a matter of understanding what is politically possible. Considering how politically savvy Mr. Obama is and the extent to which he has hidden his actual political beliefs indicate he would fly under the radar as much as possible. But he WOULD be governing with a view towards shifting the political gound to make a more socialist/communist society possible. And considering he has the most left voting record in the Senate it is fairly reasonable to believe he would be pushing 'Change (to Communism)' just as hard as he thought he could get away with.
> If the librarian-firing incident is as it appears, then we have a demonstration of Ms. Palin's
> willingness to use her 'principles' to make decisions, in government, even when it is
> inappropriate to do so.
Well lets first remember that zero books were removed from the shelves. Removing a subordinate you have serious differences on policy with isn't censorship, it is governing. Not that there is even credible evidence that the librarian was fired. It happens in most changes in administration. We just got a new mayor after twenty years of the old guy. In the year or two since we have seen most of the officials replaced. Our librarian wasn't one of them, but only because the library is a parish level entity.
But on to the specifics you complain about. If I had firing authority over a librarian who placed "Heather Has Two Mommies" on the shelves of a tiny semi-rural library she would indeed be questioned about such a waste of scarce resources. If the book was bought because people wished to read it for themselves due to the controversy about it at the time and it was thus placed in the adult section, ok. But to place it in the children's section? NO fricking way. Not spending scarce public resources on material 90% of taxpayers will be disgusted by is just bad policy. Censorship is passing a law forbidding the local bookseller from stocking it.
> After all, communism has had some terrible goals, and some with merit.
No. Communism has lead directly to mass graves and police states everywhere it has been allowed to go to it's logical conclusion. Not most of the time. Every time. 100%. Western Europe appears to have realized that in time and is pulling back from the brink.
> Either the machine is open, or it isn't. If it's not, then Google has been deceiving us.
Google has been deceiving you. YOu have also been deceiving yourself. It depends on what your definition of Open is and who you are talking too. Google was talking to handset makers and carriers and Android is indeed Open to them. They were NOT talking to you, the end user. Android is 100% closed to you. It will be SIM locked. Apps will be signed and T-Mobile and perhaps Google will have an absolute veto that isn't subject to appeal over any apps loaded into the device. Any such apps will, at any rate, be sandboxed into the JAVA tarpit where performance isn't an option.
The only question is whether they can lock a phone better than Apple?
> This is a bullshit comparison that doesn't go deeper than "NDA bad, Linux good."
Well what were you expecting? You can't actually talk about the iPhone SDK because of the aformentioned NDA. I'm just amazed His Steveness didn't think to add a clause forbidding ANY reviews or comparisions without written permission.
> So? Does being "raised a Muslim" violate any legal or ethical principles?
No. Lying about the whole thing raises some pretty big ones though.
> Even if he had been raised as a practicing Muslim, would that say anything about his character today?
Even if? You still doubt that he was a practicing Muslim? Considering the evidence, including his own damned autobiography, being unwilling to believe it shows you perfectly fit into today's topic.
Just to be clear, the fact that he WAS a practicing Muslim isn't in doubt. That by itself should not be a disqualification for POTUS, although votors are free to take it into account, especially the fact he feels he has to lie about it. There is equally no doubt that he isn't a practicing Muslim anymore.
Because Marxists can't be Muslims anymore than they can be Christians. His stepfather was unquestionably a Muslim and enrolled him for proper Islamic teaching. However, Mr. Obama's father was a Marxist, by his own words. His mother was almost certainly a Communist. His grandparents, at least on his mother's side... the typical white people who did most of his upbringing, were at least socialists and probably communists. His childhood mentor was a card carrying Communist Party USA member. By Obama's own words we know he sought out the company of Marxists and communists in college to be 'authentic', that socializing or being taught be anyone else would have made him a 'sellout.' His words. He chooses a church that was more socialist and revolutionary than religious, apparently one that was part of an unholy trinity between Wright's TUCC, Phalager[sp]'s mutant Catholic black revolution theology and Farrakahn's mutant Black Revolutionary Islam. The common thread between these otherwise incompatible religions being Marxism. Then throw in Ayers, an admitted "small c communist.' who apparently 'made' Mr. Obama by putting in charge of $150M to build a political empire with money intended to improve education.
Now somebody prove this thread's idea right by sticking yer fingers in your ears and yelling McCarthy at me. Every one of the absolute facts cited here, admittedly cited in such a way to make Mr. Obama look very bad, is a real fact you can look up for yourself. Many have video evidence on YouTube right now.
> It aint 1998, and we aren't talking applets here.
No, but here in 2008 I have yet to encounter Java and not realize it within a minute of using it. And that is on big honking Intel chip, I really doubt there is a PentiumIII or IV class processor in a phone.
Been over ten years waiting for the hardware to catch up to Java and I suspect I'm not the only one who still has the attitude of, "Crap, It's a Java app. Guess I can use that until I find a real program to do [foo]." Java apps are still slow, bloated and total ram hogs. And I seriously doubt that even the Gods of Google can fix that.
> As expected, it's Tivoised...
Yup. If it gets totally pwned I'll look again at it, till then I keep my Visor and basic cell phone.
If I'm going to buy a computer I want to own it. They can keep control over the processor that does the cell phone modulation and network connectivity only because I realize that no carrier will ever allow a rogue firmware near their network because they were never designed to be secure against that sort of thing. But I won't accept SIM locking, if that can't be broken it's no sale. Most importantly the computing core must be 100% mine. I want to be able to entirely replace the kernel and all of userland if I decide the vendor supplied stuff sucks or they abandon my platform and I want newer versions of stuff. I want to be able to build and install ANY application without limit. Basically I want Open Source for ME, not just for the cell companies and handset makers. And not just at the JAVA layer, I want to be able to build and install native apps if I want to.