It's all security theater. If they really cared about the security of the country they would whittle down the list as fast as they can, so that they can concentrate on the true potential threats.
For nearly five years I was on some form of list and an analyst back in Washington DC had to waste an hour looking at my file every time I crossed the border just to confirm that, as in the previous n-1 times, I still pose no threat to the USA. Eventually I did get off the list (no reason given) and for the last two years or so I can go through without any hassle.
Mod the parent down. The link provided does not portend to "debunk the claim that increasing wealth results in a decreasing population." The article clearly shows that increasing wealth takes the reproduction rate down to 1.3 children per women after which it starts to bounce up a bit.
Suppose that humankind made a concerted attempt to voluntarily produce less children.
It already has. Most countries have population pyramids that now look more like population trees. Population is falling already in many countries that once were thought of as densely populated e.g. Japan. In about 60 years population will be dropping so rapidly that the biggest problem will be how to pay for the pensions and health cost of senior people.
However, talk of overpopulation is taboo. It is too closely tied to immigration.
It is not taboo. What it is not tolerated is bigots trying to stop immigration from brown countries under the guise of population control.
Well, maybe that all of our environmental problems come from the fact that (number of people on earth)*(what we consume on average) is way too high to be sustainable.
Do you have any proof of this fact?
Do you need more than basic math to understand that infinite growth in a finite world just isn't possible?
World population is slated to start falling in 2050 by the latest, if not earlier. It already is falling in many countries and will start falling falling in China in twenty years.
So, yes, we'll have to somehow slow down (i.e. less people or less consumption per capita).
So, no, in all likelihood we won't have to cut consumption per capita. The dramatic drop in population growth in western Europe is what allowed the absorption of eastern Europe into the EU with the subsequent increase in living standard in those countries. Northern Africa is already in the process of integrating and will do so in the next 20 years.
In fact by 2200 the population would have been so dramatic that it will look odd to us that at some point there was a shortage of raw materials, just like mass famines seem an odd historical thing in all regions save war thorn Africa.
Add to that list: Windows 2000 and Windows XP. Windows 2000 had major problems with hardware drivers.
That wasn't my experience at all. Of course YMMV and all that, but I found every release of the NT branch better than the previous. Vista tried to substantially change the underlying NT kernel and that might be one of the reasons for its failure. To be sure Vista is not the horrible monster that people speak off. That is typical/. hyperbole. It's just that Vista is not good enough to justify it's high price, it's high resource consumption and the quirkiness of switching to a slightly different OS.
yeah I can use it just fine but it eats up a lot of screen real estate and it isn't better
I've used every windows systems in one form or another since 1987 and have generally found the criticisms of/.er types way overstated. The "awful unstable new versions" of Windows were usually better, more stable, easier to use than the previous one.
The are a total of three exceptions to that: Windows 2.0, Windows Me and Windows Vista. Windows 2.0 was a first release (Windows 1.0 doesn't really count). Windows Me was the last iteration of a dead end branch put out by the marketing department. Windows Vista on the other hand was driven by the tech types and was supposed to be better. The only noticeable difference in the user experience are useless changes for change's sake, and idiotic Allow/deny dialogues.
Which facilitates massive movement of goods and people in a way rail never can.
Except that it can.
Now that rail companies have started to care about customers instead of behaving like the monopolies they once were, their traffic volumes are going through the roof. This is why Warren Buffet is so heavily invested in rail. His company Berkshire Hathaway owns major stakes in Union Pacific, Norfolk Southern and Burlington Northern Santa Fe.
No they do not. Tax rates for jet fuel are $0.04 per gallon (federal) and about $0.06 including state taxes. Compare this to $0.184 per gallon of gasoline (federal) and an average of $0.40 including state taxes.
No major airport in the US is run at a loss.
Construction is usually heavily subsidized, so the fact that operational costs are covered in no way refutes that airports are subsidized.
From around 1970-1990 it might have been true. Today news are lead and dominated by Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. The type of things they can say and get away with (just in terms of plain personal insults) far surpasses what any liberal journalist would be allowed to say.
Does the buoyancy of the balloon change with height or does the increase in volume perfectly cancels with the reduction in density of the air mass displaced?
First off, the assertion that the New Deal propelled America into a period of rapid economic growth is ridiculous - the economy remained in a depression until the onset of WWII.
If you look carefully at the data the economy ebbed and flowed as Congress tampered with the New Deal. When in New Deal policies were going strong, the economy improved, when Congress resolve weakened and moved away from expansionary policies the economy took a downturn. Would the great depression come to a swift end without WWII? perhaps not, but clearly it was ameliorated by the New Deal and worsened by whenever anti-New Deal actions took place.
I have only made a few contributions to Wikipedia, and the experience of having my changes reverted has killed my interest in contributing again.
I had a similar experience. I contributed an interesting nugget of information that got reverted without comment or criticism by an "editor" who repeatedly does this in spite of it being a violation of policy.
For the $800 comment, do you have any idea what a top of the line blackberry costs without contract? It's about the same.
Actually it is about $500 or 40% less. In my world, that's a big difference dude.
Re:Actually it does win on features
on
Palm Pre Reviewed
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· Score: 0, Flamebait
It wins on features hands down - the features people actually use.
Features like accessing your email, keeping a usable calendar of appointments or a decent battery life? I think not.
The iPhone appeals to light status-concious users. It is all the rage in America, where the Apple brand has cult status among the fanbois, but is just another option in the lineup of smartphones everywhere else (Europe, Asia).
Just the other day, I watched someone spend four minutes trying to finger browse to a web site in a manner that would have taken seconds with access to a decent keyboard and a trackball (read blackberry bold).
Don't get me wrong. The iPhone is a decent option, but claiming it wins in options hand down is straight out fanboism.
Microsoft needs to dump Vista and Windows 7 all together and start over from nothing with the idea that leaner/faster is better.
This would be a big mistake. Vista/Win7 is stable and it runs. The best thing they can do is keep the code base and refactor and optimize like hell. The increase in clock rate is gone, so Microsoft programmers can no longer count on Intel making up for their sloppy code.
I picked up a foreign newspaper in one of my travels. Fully 50% of the articles were op-ed pieces written by experts on the subject. I left it in the coffee room at work and many weeks later people were still reading it with interest. Contrast this with your average daily, filled up with newswire reports, which no one wants to read the day after (as Mark Twain said "there is nothing older than yesterday's newspaper").
The "Dailies" are on the way out. Insightful, investigative journalism (a la NYT, Guardian, Le Monde) is here to stay.
The parent post is right. In Europe, where the availability of cell phones is similar to Japan, people don't give a crap about the iPhone. One rarely sees an iPhone in the street and people prefer to carry small, sleek, one-week charge's worth cell phones.
To be fair, the decline of the Unix server market started about 12 years ago with the release of NT4.0 and the first true industrial grade linux servers. One by one all the big unix manufactures have fallen (apollo, sgi, ncd, dec, hp, aix) and now sun.
It is not clear if anyone could have arrested Sun's decline, short of acquiring Dell eight years ago...
That is just a barebones implementation of ACL, left optional to the user. A proper ACL security model automatically associates an application owner to each file and only that owner can access it. This way your email reader cannot write into your bin directory and even if it did the shell wouldn't execute it since the file is labeled as "belongs to email reader".
You really need to look at big iron OSes to see what is security done right, from the ground up.
This boys and girls is what happens when one starts with a shitty OS and tries to make up for it on the browser (a la IE) or in the virtual machine (a la JVM).
An OS with a solid security model doesn't require all of these kludges. The sad reality is that the three dominant OSes in use considered security an afterthought, and yes that includes UNIX.
I'm going to sound like an old fogie, but back in my day any one could bring down an entire Unix system by simply typing the right stty combination, or one could write to any screen (wall) without being a superuser. How's that for proof that Unix wasn't designed with security in mind. ACLs (long overdue) are only now being implemented just about three decades late.
Yes, this post bashes windows *and* unix/linux. Mod me down, I don't care.
Consulting wikipedia should be treated the same way as asking a friend for pointers. It is definitely a good place to start, but one would never write a paper saying "this doesn't exist [citation: I asked Joe Blow and he said so]".
Slashdot Mirror
It's all security theater. If they really cared about the security of the country they would whittle down the list as fast as they can, so that they can concentrate on the true potential threats.
For nearly five years I was on some form of list and an analyst back in Washington DC had to waste an hour looking at my file every time I crossed the border just to confirm that, as in the previous n-1 times, I still pose no threat to the USA. Eventually I did get off the list (no reason given) and for the last two years or so I can go through without any hassle.
Mod the parent down. The link provided does not portend to "debunk the claim that increasing wealth results in a decreasing population." The article clearly shows that increasing wealth takes the reproduction rate down to 1.3 children per women after which it starts to bounce up a bit.
Suppose that humankind made a concerted attempt to voluntarily produce less children.
It already has. Most countries have population pyramids that now look more like population trees. Population is falling already in many countries that once were thought of as densely populated e.g. Japan. In about 60 years population will be dropping so rapidly that the biggest problem will be how to pay for the pensions and health cost of senior people.
However, talk of overpopulation is taboo. It is too closely tied to immigration.
It is not taboo. What it is not tolerated is bigots trying to stop immigration from brown countries under the guise of population control.
Well, maybe that all of our environmental problems come from the fact that (number of people on earth)*(what we consume on average) is way too high to be sustainable.
Do you have any proof of this fact?
Do you need more than basic math to understand that infinite growth in a finite world just isn't possible?
World population is slated to start falling in 2050 by the latest, if not earlier. It already is falling in many countries and will start falling falling in China in twenty years.
So, yes, we'll have to somehow slow down (i.e. less people or less consumption per capita).
So, no, in all likelihood we won't have to cut consumption per capita. The dramatic drop in population growth in western Europe is what allowed the absorption of eastern Europe into the EU with the subsequent increase in living standard in those countries. Northern Africa is already in the process of integrating and will do so in the next 20 years.
In fact by 2200 the population would have been so dramatic that it will look odd to us that at some point there was a shortage of raw materials, just like mass famines seem an odd historical thing in all regions save war thorn Africa.
Add to that list: Windows 2000 and Windows XP. Windows 2000 had major problems with hardware drivers.
That wasn't my experience at all. Of course YMMV and all that, but I found every release of the NT branch better than the previous. Vista tried to substantially change the underlying NT kernel and that might be one of the reasons for its failure. To be sure Vista is not the horrible monster that people speak off. That is typical /. hyperbole. It's just that Vista is not good enough to justify it's high price, it's high resource consumption and the quirkiness of switching to a slightly different OS.
yeah I can use it just fine but it eats up a lot of screen real estate and it isn't better
I've used every windows systems in one form or another since 1987 and have generally found the criticisms of /.er types way overstated. The "awful unstable new versions" of Windows were usually better, more stable, easier to use than the previous one.
The are a total of three exceptions to that: Windows 2.0, Windows Me and Windows Vista. Windows 2.0 was a first release (Windows 1.0 doesn't really count). Windows Me was the last iteration of a dead end branch put out by the marketing department. Windows Vista on the other hand was driven by the tech types and was supposed to be better. The only noticeable difference in the user experience are useless changes for change's sake, and idiotic Allow/deny dialogues.
Which facilitates massive movement of goods and people in a way rail never can.
Except that it can.
Now that rail companies have started to care about customers instead of behaving like the monopolies they once were, their traffic volumes are going through the roof. This is why Warren Buffet is so heavily invested in rail. His company Berkshire Hathaway owns major stakes in Union Pacific, Norfolk Southern and Burlington Northern Santa Fe.
Actually, airlines pay substantial fuel taxes
No they do not. Tax rates for jet fuel are $0.04 per gallon (federal) and about $0.06 including state taxes. Compare this to $0.184 per gallon of gasoline (federal) and an average of $0.40 including state taxes.
No major airport in the US is run at a loss.
Construction is usually heavily subsidized, so the fact that operational costs are covered in no way refutes that airports are subsidized.
From around 1970-1990 it might have been true. Today news are lead and dominated by Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. The type of things they can say and get away with (just in terms of plain personal insults) far surpasses what any liberal journalist would be allowed to say.
Does the buoyancy of the balloon change with height or does the increase in volume perfectly cancels with the reduction in density of the air mass displaced?
Replying to undo accidental moderation.
First off, the assertion that the New Deal propelled America into a period of rapid economic growth is ridiculous - the economy remained in a depression until the onset of WWII.
If you look carefully at the data the economy ebbed and flowed as Congress tampered with the New Deal. When in New Deal policies were going strong, the economy improved, when Congress resolve weakened and moved away from expansionary policies the economy took a downturn. Would the great depression come to a swift end without WWII? perhaps not, but clearly it was ameliorated by the New Deal and worsened by whenever anti-New Deal actions took place.
I have only made a few contributions to Wikipedia, and the experience of having my changes reverted has killed my interest in contributing again.
I had a similar experience. I contributed an interesting nugget of information that got reverted without comment or criticism by an "editor" who repeatedly does this in spite of it being a violation of policy.
I enjoy privacy.
I doubt you get much of that on the highway during your daily one-hour-each way commute to work.
Same applies to people who move to the burbs because "they like a big yard", but they are too tired to ever make use of it.
For the $800 comment, do you have any idea what a top of the line blackberry costs without contract? It's about the same.
Actually it is about $500 or 40% less. In my world, that's a big difference dude.
It wins on features hands down - the features people actually use.
Features like accessing your email, keeping a usable calendar of appointments or a decent battery life? I think not.
The iPhone appeals to light status-concious users. It is all the rage in America, where the Apple brand has cult status among the fanbois, but is just another option in the lineup of smartphones everywhere else (Europe, Asia).
Just the other day, I watched someone spend four minutes trying to finger browse to a web site in a manner that would have taken seconds with access to a decent keyboard and a trackball (read blackberry bold).
Don't get me wrong. The iPhone is a decent option, but claiming it wins in options hand down is straight out fanboism.
Microsoft needs to dump Vista and Windows 7 all together and start over from nothing with the idea that leaner/faster is better.
This would be a big mistake. Vista/Win7 is stable and it runs. The best thing they can do is keep the code base and refactor and optimize like hell. The increase in clock rate is gone, so Microsoft programmers can no longer count on Intel making up for their sloppy code.
I picked up a foreign newspaper in one of my travels. Fully 50% of the articles were op-ed pieces written by experts on the subject. I left it in the coffee room at work and many weeks later people were still reading it with interest. Contrast this with your average daily, filled up with newswire reports, which no one wants to read the day after (as Mark Twain said "there is nothing older than yesterday's newspaper").
The "Dailies" are on the way out. Insightful, investigative journalism (a la NYT, Guardian, Le Monde) is here to stay.
Repeat after me: slashdot is not wikipedia.
Original research must appear somewhere in journals and the like. When it appears it becomes news. Slashdot is, guess what? news for nerds.
Now someone please mod the parent down.
No troll there.
The parent post is right. In Europe, where the availability of cell phones is similar to Japan, people don't give a crap about the iPhone. One rarely sees an iPhone in the street and people prefer to carry small, sleek, one-week charge's worth cell phones.
Is it April 1st already?
To be fair, the decline of the Unix server market started about 12 years ago with the release of NT4.0 and the first true industrial grade linux servers. One by one all the big unix manufactures have fallen (apollo, sgi, ncd, dec, hp, aix) and now sun.
It is not clear if anyone could have arrested Sun's decline, short of acquiring Dell eight years ago...
That is just a barebones implementation of ACL, left optional to the user. A proper ACL security model automatically associates an application owner to each file and only that owner can access it. This way your email reader cannot write into your bin directory and even if it did the shell wouldn't execute it since the file is labeled as "belongs to email reader".
You really need to look at big iron OSes to see what is security done right, from the ground up.
This boys and girls is what happens when one starts with a shitty OS and tries to make up for it on the browser (a la IE) or in the virtual machine (a la JVM).
An OS with a solid security model doesn't require all of these kludges. The sad reality is that the three dominant OSes in use considered security an afterthought, and yes that includes UNIX.
I'm going to sound like an old fogie, but back in my day any one could bring down an entire Unix system by simply typing the right stty combination, or one could write to any screen (wall) without being a superuser. How's that for proof that Unix wasn't designed with security in mind. ACLs (long overdue) are only now being implemented just about three decades late.
Yes, this post bashes windows *and* unix/linux. Mod me down, I don't care.
Consulting wikipedia should be treated the same way as asking a friend for pointers. It is definitely a good place to start, but one would never write a paper saying "this doesn't exist [citation: I asked Joe Blow and he said so]".