The problem is that threat analysis judges people by what they can do, not by what they are assumed to want to do. So someone who knows about a hole in your system is a threat! They must be STOPPED!
I can see that it might well be more rational to judge people by the damage they do or can be shown to have been attempting to do, but that requires judgement. And it's always safer to say "It's HIS fault!", then to acknowledge that you may have made a mistake.
So I don't see things getting better or saner. People with power always want to make the scape-goats suffer publically. And there are MANY who deserve no better. Commercial and espionage groups (including criminals) making use of spyware, viruses, etc. don't deserve ANY sympathy. This doesn't mean that most users fall into this category...but these days if I see an unlocked car with it's lights on...I quickly walk past. I no longer try to either turn off the lights or contact the owner. It's (seen as?) too dangerous.
So it's not just an internet phenomenon. This is happening throughout society.
Did they sample the same people in both years? Then the ages were very different.
Otherwise that means about 750/year for two years. This would not have passed me in a stat class as an undergrad. I would have been told to increase my sample size. I also don't know just what the questions were, since they are ambiguous as to the reason (possibly the internet, possibly working longer hours. They don't eliminate that it might be something they haven't mentioned...like less disposable income, more dangerous streets, whatever...I'm just spinning, you can't find out by guessing, you need to ask.
But the headline doesn't even reflect the results of the study, poor as it was (unless it was the reporting that was poor).
People are inherently selfish...but the degree to which they express it varies significantly, and the strength with which they feel it also appears to vary significantly. Before Regan starting his propaganda that "Greed is good" selfishness was generally much less expressed, and when people were caught being selfish they were condemned socially. After the PR campaigns, however, there were large enclaves of society that would no longer demean a person for having been wantonly and flagrantly selfish, so people became less embarassed by it. I wouldn't say that this caused Enron, but it certainly contributed to the mild reaction that people had when Enron was revealed.
Personally I think the entire top management of Enron should serve life at hard labor, with entire confiscation of the personal wealth, in partial recompense for the damage they have done. They could never pay it off, but they should be made to TRY! And this goes for the board of directors, too. Were they served a harsher penalty, well, I wouldn't cavail. But the ENTIRE management AND the board of directors should be held personally responsible. If they hadn't allowed and encouraged the activity, it wouldn't have happened. They are at minimum accessories before, during, and after the fact.
Actually there have been small communistic religious groups, where status was the sought after goal, and the community agreed to award status in ways that reinforced the communal goal of a communist ethic.
These groups don't tend to last very long, but they have existed. They generally require a small isolated community and a charismatic and idealistic leader. And carefully selected followers.
I don't think that such goups could be stable for multiple generations even without exterior pressures, but they can happen, and while they are working the people who live in them have reported themselves as quite happy. (The breakups, however, can be very painful.)
I don't know enough about the Kibbutz phenomena to know whether or not they met the "communist ethic" criteria. If they did, then there is at least one social context where the "strong charismatic leader" requirement can be significantly weakened.
The bible was created to provide a particular community a set of standards, and guides. If you don't follow those standards and guides, then you are not a moral part of that community.
See it as an open source project. There MUST be coding standards. Just what they are is partially determined by necessity, and partially determined by taste, but the MUST exist. If you don't follow the standards, then your code won't be accepted by the project.
There is nothing particularlly significant about the codes and practices defined in the bible. They don't even WORK! (They did in a society that was basically without government, and which was mainly rural, with poor communicaiton and transportation...but that's not where we are living.) Because of this the Jews needed to invent the commentaries on the Talmud, and the Christians needed to invent church dogma (followed by schisms over details and nomenclature). Today governments attempt to make it impossible to have a viable moral code that isn't defined by them...but as they are basically aoral, their attempts are themselves amoral.
If you must go to a religion for your morals (and since that implies a community of shared beliefs, that means a religion), then I would recommend Judiasm, Buddhism, or Taoism. Avoid the sects that worship authority, as their morals are generally "contribute such power as you have to making the priesthood stronger". (Hey, priests are people too...and one of a persons deepest needs is to feel important. And in the authoritarian sects the priests tell you what the rules are.) Note, however, that all surviving religious groups tend to make demands that a large percentage of the people will find literally impossible to adhere to. (There's a sect of Sikhs [or Jains?] that believe that it's sinful to wear clothes. It still survives, and it's members aren't all practicing nudists...except, possibly, at religious occasions.)
After much study of various options I opted for Zen. NOT Zen Buddhism, and definitely not "school boy Zen". Trying to disentangle the Zen from the Buddhism was quite... interesting. I still haven't done it, and it's not "moral", because it's a personal activity and not a communal one. Things that you do which don't affect others can have no moral significance.
AFAICT, he's understating the situation. The nazi link, e.g., is not merely by methodological similarity, but also because some very high level nazi's made deals at the time of the surrender...and some of them went to work on for the agnecy that later became the CIA. (Nazism was dead...and they were experienced anti-communists... over time they worked their way up in the ranks.)
A "secret police" is a very dangerous (and necessary?) part of government. They are rather like an immune system that way. If the design isn't perfect, they are likely to attack the organism that produced them. (Well, that analogy is stretect further than it can stand. Unlike an immune system, secret police forces are capable of "owning" thier own resources out of sight of their controllers...and that can cause them to act quite independently, and without much concern for their putative parent body.)
My personal preference would be to have a less powerful "secret police" even at the cost of allowing some "disease organisms" to slip in, but this is clearly a matter of degree. More careful oversight is another important consideration...but who will watch the watchers? Corruption is a historical habit of human organizations.
Science did not flourish until the Deists decided that God was an honest pinball player. He built the machine, and he flipped the levers, but he didn't tilt the box or otherwise "miraculously" influence the flight of the ball. He left that all up to the initial starting conditions (and how far he pulled back the shot lever).
OK, that's an oversimplification of what they were claiming...but it's got the essence. And with those restricitions on "God did it!", scientific research became feasible. Without it... sorry. Can't do it.
Historically China has not been a particularly aggressive country. They have tended to be more inward looking...rather like the US before WWI. (Though even then we were less isolationist than China has usually been.)
I see a strong possibility that China will become economically dominant. I don't really see that they are militaristically aggressive. We won't like it if China is on top, as they won't have ANY concern about how we feel. This, however, is much different from painting them as militaristic world conquerors...that's much more like Britain (and thus like the US, though we also tend towards commercial dominance).
Don't think that everybody is the same. They really aren't, and the history of people's cultures has a life of it's own. Mao was a Chinese Emperor, and the current government appears to be a mandrinate. I expect their notions of importance are very inward focused...and if you allow a general victories, then he becomes a dangerous political opponent. (Well, I'm no Chinese History scholar. That last bit was mainly from the Byzantine Empire, but I do know that China has has such concerns before.)
I think that are saying that they don't have any exact measurement for 400 years ago. (Did you not the "probably even longer"?)
Looking at the article it appears that they concluded that some of the evidence was "likely, but not conclusive". I know of no evidence that implies or suggests that the average global temperature was ever warmer than the present for any period within the last several thousand years....and millions of years appears more probable.
A problem here is that certainly particular areas have seen warmer or cooler times, and it's difficult to get reasonable estimates of global temperature. Measuring the date of the oldest ice in Antartica that is currently melting gives a kind of an estimate...but not one that's easy to convert into any particular temperature. etc.
So when they say "The warmest in the last 400 years" they surprise me by having been able to come up with an acceptable measure of global temperature for 400 years ago. I don't interpret this as meaning that it was even warm 400 years ago. I interprest it as "That's as far back as we could get a decent estimate."
If I could, I'd mod you up. I believe nearly everything you said. I didn't say it because I don't actually have the personal experience to justify it. (I'm rather the opposite of an entrepreneur in temperment. I like to lock myself into a close and code. And it still seems true.)
It would be a mistake to accept this job. Move in with your parents for a few months while you search. I did, and it took me nearly 3 months to find a good job (well, this was a different time, and I was no phd...I went civil service). The time invested was well worth it to all.
Getting a job from tSCOg on your resume is almost certainly a very poor decision...presuming that they are hiring, which isn't clear to me. It looks more like some kind of "summer of code" look-alike attempt. I.e., my guess is that they hope to ONLY have to pay the prizes and to get lots of code submitted. (OTOH, I've only read summaries, as I wouldn't touch tSCOg with a 10-ft pole.
P.S.: A note on naming. The company's stock symbol is SCOX, so some refer to it by that name. The company's name is "The SCO Group". They are pretending to be an earlier company SCO (Santa Cruz Operations) which does not deserve to have their name so dragged through the mud, even if they did sell the rights to tSCOg (thus t for THE, SCO for SCO, and g for Group). That company is currently called Tarantella, and they gave up on their Unix business in the face of competition from Linux. They did not morph into this dispicable bunch of sleaze. They are still in business (though they were acquired by Sun...I believe that was last year).
They haven't forgotten. They're planning on changing their name again, too. I forget what the new one they announced is, but they'll probably change it again before they enter the marketing phase...presuming they live that long.
I've called for support on their printers...and they ended up on my "do not buy" list.
Yes, it was an end-user printer. So? I rate a company based first on my experiences with it, then on reports from other people. That inevitably means that if their consumer products are shoddy, I will consider the company a manufacturer of shoddy goods. And HP isn't quite there...the printer is cheap, but not shoddy. Their technical support, however, is shoddy.
I don't expect the kind of quality from a commercial product that I expect from a professional level product, but if a company cheats one set of users, then the company is a cheat and cannot be trusted with a more expensive purchase. It's true that some companies beleive in only cheating the mass-market customers...or at least that there are voices that proclaim so. (But voices are cheap, and astroturfing has been with us for a long time, and I don't know WHO wrote the post I'm replying to.)
OTOH, HP *used* to make quality merchandise. When it did so, it advertised the fact. I still remember their ad about the HP-51 (I think it was) calculator that fell off the hood of a jeep in Alaska, and was buried in the road all winter, chewed up by a snow-plow the next summer, and still worked. Been a long time since I've seen one of those ads.
I remember the disk drive company (not HP) back when auto-parking heads first came out that noted at the show that the drive they were running from had fallen down two flights of stairs onto a concrete loading deck while they were unpacking the exhibit. (Well, that's not remarkable anymore, but at the time it was startling.)
Computers have, in general, become more durable. HP seems to have been defying the trend. Perhaps their very expensive models are better...but I prefer to get to know a company through inexpensive purchases. If they work out, then I move them up the purchase pyramid. I rarely buy something expensive from a company as my first deal with them. HP has been moving DOWN the pyramid. They used to be near the top. Now... well, I still buy replacement ink-jet cartridges with their brand on it. Until I chose my next printer. After that they are likely to be totally OFF my purchase list. And it's their technical support that made that final difference...but it was decreasing quality that got them moved NEAR to the bottom.
Generally (invariably in my experience) you can be careful in setting up your partitions and then hand edit your grub files to multi-boot. This also works with MSWind (though MSWind, when last I used it, required that it be installed first, apparently on the first partition of the disk, though not necessarily on the first disk).
SuSE, however, recognized the existence of other distros on my system at install time, and asked whether they should be added. (I have a vague memory that Red Hat gave you the opportunity to add other boot locations by partition ID [e.g./dev/hda3], but it's been too long since I've done that, and I can't be sure.)
Now as to WHY they act this way....probably because it's easier, and it handles the most common case. I don't know how SuSE did it, for all I know they could have been reading the prior grub installation file.
Another possible answer to your question is: I maintain between 3 and 4 distros on my system most of the time. This means that I am continually running into this problem when I install a new system. With SuSE I didn't, and I was pleasantly surprised.
With some groups, I'm willing to extend trust. MS, however, has a track record. They will need to PROVE that they are trustworthy before I will trust them. Even then it will be an iffy kind of thing for a decade or so.
But proof comes first.
1) Stop campaigning for closed standards. This is the first step towards earning trust. 2) Stop attempting to corrupt existing standards. This can be done simultaneous with 1. 3) Stop spreading FUD. If you continue to act like an enemy, there's no way I'll be willing to trust you.
Those steps are negative, but essential. Until those conditions are met there is no possible positive action that I would trust.
4) Do something positive. There are lots of options here, but if a government forces you to it, then it doesn't count as a positive action from you. Merely neutral (at best). Possible examples of positive actions are: 1) Pushing an open standard, and adopting it in your own programs. 2) Opening the file format specifications beyond what the EU is demanding. (Alternatively, creating a new Open file format specification and adopting it...but this is 1 again.) 3) Releasing a version of MSWind that doesn't automatically remove the ability of other OSs on the same drive to boot. (Yeah, Linux isn't so good about this either. SuSE seems to do this, but most distros presume that they are the grand PooBah *AND* the Lord High Executioner wrapped into one bundle.) 4) Other. (I said there were lots of choices. There's really too many to enumerate.)
So far they haven't identified any code as "disputed". None. (Well...possibly some that's been sealed by the court, but I doubt it. IBM would probably have challenged, and I can't see any reason for the court to allow the seal to remain.)
Well, he got names from various countries.... Were they experts? He said so. I don't know the people, I've never heard of the groups they are claimed to represent, and I've never seen anything published by them, or by anyone with ideas similar to those they are propounding, in a source that I have moderate respect for.
Now I'm no expert. He could be right. Claiming it, however, doesn't prove it. Anyone can put up a web page and make claimes. I have heard people requesting more specific data...but the number of such people has been decreasing strongly over the last decade as study after study has rolled in showing that the temperature IS rising, and the CO2 IS rising, and the ice IS melting. (Also that the great conveyor MAY BE slowing. That's still being disputed. If it is, it's the most serious finding yet...and it probably means that Greenland is melting even faster than we had thought.)
I did find some technical flaws in the arguments that Gore presented, and he was definitely presenting a popularized layman's view rather than a technical argument. (Anyone who expects a movie to be the equivalent to a technical report needs their head examined.) Gore *MAY* have overstated the case a few times. Possibly. I wouldn't bet heavily on it. This is a gread deal different that being wrong in his general thrust. And he wasn't presenting a scientific paper, so anyone who wants to argue that it should have been one will just have to be unsatisfied...or they can go read the actual scientific papers. (I tend to read popularized summaries...I'm not an expert in the field...but they are generally consistent both with each other and with the *thrust*, if not the details, of Gore's movie.)
Is anyone really surprised that someone would pan the movie, and pretend to be doing so from on a "scientific basis"? The opponents of this movie are frequently the same people who want to teach "intelligent design" as if it were a scientific theory. They either don't know what science is, or they don't care. Their "official scientists" are less scientific than Lysenko (who at least TRIED to be scientific...even if he got it all wrong).
Now it's possible that I am unfairly maligning the author. But based on what I've read from sources that I consider to be at least marginally trustworthy, I doubt it. If I'm wrong, please point out a reputable source where I can check. I live near a major university, so if it's in a refereed print periodical there's a fair chance that I'll be able to check it out. The web page, while it quoted many authorities, didn't give any sources that I recognize and trust.
GPL *IS* GPL. That's what it is. In most cases nobody on earth has the right to change it.
If MS wants to operate with GPL code, write a GPL wrapper that allows the kind of interconnection they want. It's not a super-secret trick. Lots of programs have done this before.
If that doesn't suit them, then they are lying through their teeth about what they want, and I see no reason that anyone should go along with them.
Given their past history I would give odds that lying is the correct answer.
C and C++ are just poorly designed languages for medium to large projects. The problem isn't native code, it's language design.
My current favorite language design is D (Digital Mars D). Unfortunately, it's still Beta and doesn't have any libraries to speak of, and won't link to GCC libraries. (There's an offshoot of it that will, called gdc, but building it requires recompiling gcc.)
Python and Ruby are very nice languages, but I would prefer not to choose them, and take the performance hit. Python, however, at least has the libraries (and so does Ruby in some areas). Python and Ruby are nicer languages than D, but they intrinsically have the performance hit of an interpreter (virtual machine). This causes much problems when you are trying to multi-process your code. So far my best answer is multiple independent processes that communicate over sockets...at one VM/process...I'm really hoping that D either matures rapidly or acquires the ability to link to gcc C libraries. If your code slows by a factor of two every time your processor speed doubles...then you aren't getting ANYWHERE.
This is obviously preparing her to run for office as a "protector of the people".
You don't think she's any more trustworthy now than before do you? When someone has proven repeatedly that they cannot be trusted, why would you trust their "conversion"?
I'll wait for some proof a bit stronger than a public statement before I start taking anything she says are worthy of belief. "Actions speak louder than words" may not be true, but I find them much more convincing.
In the case of China, this may, or may not, be a valid argument. In the case of India is it not. The people getting these jobs are not low caste. What is happening here is that India has an extremely low cost of living (as figured via international exchange rates) so people there can work for what would here be starvation wages and still be rather well off. (Some have said rather wealthy, but I doubt they are doing as well as a successful merchant trader.)
This isn't slave trading at the India end. What it is at the US end, however, may be something a bit different.
This doesn't make this a just thing to do. It means that the specific accusation that you have levelled at them is inappropriate.
I'm not at all sure that the median US legal residents (citizens + legal non-citizen residents) have a higher standard of living. Remember how the mean is calculated if you are claiming that the mean citizen has a higher standard of living. I'm not certain that you are wrong, as one super-wealthy person can counterbalance a large number of people living below poverty, but I suspect that even with THAT estimate you are wrong. And the mean is a terrifically unfair estimate to use in this case. I would be more likely to go with the mode than with the mean. The median is better...but that ignores the suffering experienced by someone who lives below poverty, when, e.g., medical care is unavailable, because one can't afford the bus ride to get to the doctor. I don't really think that an extremely wealthy person gains enough extra enjoyment from their extreme wealth to properly counterbalance even two people living below the poverty level.
What causes this isn't capitalism, it's power politics. If the social costs of extreme wealth were properly assesed to their source, then there would not be the extreme difference between the wealthy and the impoverished. But those with the power, in it's various forms (including money) craft the rules of the game to benefit themselves. This isn't capitalism. This is socialism of, by, and for the wealthy and powerful.
When you see extremes of wealth and poverty in the same civilization, you know the game is rigged. You many not know the details, but the fact is evident.
Sorry, but I'm not a scientist. If the agricultural land in an area is degrading, if the water supplies are decreasing (measured by underground aquifers and depth to fresh water), then that area is beyond it's long term carrying capacity. If the number of non-human species is decreasing, then that land is *probably* beyond it's long term carrying capacity. And where you draw the boundaries to define an area is a matter of guesswork that can flip the sign of a close answer. Unfortunately, most areas aren't that close.
I'm sure that other factors should also be considered, but I'm not a specialist, so I allow those to suffice for my evaluations...unless I run across a report from someone that I accept as a genuine expert.
In fact, I such a non-expert that I base my evaluation of land quality on what happens when you leave a piece of land alone for a year or two. If it fills up with "noxious weeds" (e.g. thistle) or stays empty then I consider it very degraded. If it fills with wild grasses and oats, and small shrubs (I did say only a year or two) then it's just degraded. etc. (Even that is wrong, since a lot of what that's measuring is water. But water's important, and land that retains water isn't doing that bad. People may not like swamps, we didn't evolve to live there, but swamp lands are very important, and a healthy swamp is a true benefit, acting to impound water and to slow flooding, among other significances. If everything were swampland, then I would consider swamps degraded, but as the number of swamps has been drastically curtailed below natural frequency, and the water table has dropped percipitously, so that most places that could be swamps are too dry for most of the year...swamps that exist should probably be preserved.
A lot of it is a matter of proportion. Unfortunately, people tend to look at things as a matter of short term convenience...I can easily understand this. When I'm dealing with things close up, I tend to act the same way. At the same time, I realize that over the long term this is a destructive pattern that degrades the long term use of the land. (DON'T get romantic about this: primitive cultures are equivalently destructive, but with less potential for impact. Ask yourself where the mastodon went. Where are the "Cedars of Lebanon", praised in the Bible? [Eaten by goats!] Or what caused the Sahara Desert. [Goats and sheep.] Yes, climate cycles are involved, but in prior cycles the Sahara area turned into grassland rather than desert.)
People did not evolve an environmental sensitivity. We tend to have, at best, an intellectual appreciation of it's importance. This doesn't mean that it's not important, it means that our major centers of population tend to shift around from area to area as we destroy each new one in succession. Now, unfortunately, we have become populous enough to blanket the entire earth at once. This means that if we DON'T protect the environment we are living in, we don't have any new place to move to. That could be quite distressing. Think of megadeaths per year during a war caused by a famine. (When there's not enough food, people are likely to fight over who gets to eat it. It's happening now in various places.) A population decline by reproducing at less than replacement value is a much better solution, though that, also, creates strong social stresses. (And preferrentially reproducing boys will cause percipitous decline, while creating intense social stress...but China has done it before. It appears to be a part of their cultural tradition. Unfortunately I don't know my Chinese history well enough to be aware of whether it is a part of what seems to cause the country to periodically break apart into independant provinces (traditionally governed by "warlords").
Of course, accepting those arguments rather destroys the idea of thinking of the courts as either the guardians of justice or the guardians or our rights, or anything else that is traditionally used to justify their existence. It instead turns them into the guardians of the status quo, provided it's supported by those in power. (I.e., not EVEN just the guardians of the status quo, but only a restricted subset of that which doesn't much need guarding.)
But he quoted various laws (that I never agreed to or authorized any of my "representatives" to agree do [Here representatives refers to "representational democracy" and refers to not only members of the House, but also to Senators and elected members of both the judiciary and the executive branch]). There is a totally insane number of laws, so I accept that he quoted the laws accurately. That has nothing to do with justice, but only with legalism.
If I accept that he ruled as the laws and procedures require, then I am simultaneously accepting that the court system is intrinsically void of justice. That though justice may occasionally be found there, it is purely by happenstance. His ruling made NO appeal to justice. ALL that was mentioned was laws and precedents. Now there are enough varied precedents that generally lawyers on both sides of any case can quote precedents to support their point of view, so any appeal to precedent without a simultaneous demonstration of how this precedent yield justice in this situation is immediately suspect. When the decision itself appears to be without justice, then it is imperative that the court demonstrate how it actually *is* just. I did not find that in the file.
Obviously, IANAL. I *am* a citizen. And decisions like this one have left me two steps short of voting the straight anarchist ticket. (A useless gesture, admittedly, and that's good, since any avowed anarchist who is a party member is an obvious hipocrite...well, unless they are syndicalist or some such. They make me want to agree with the Nihilists, but I remember how that led to Stalin.)
Given judgements like this, I can understand why the feds are so anxious to render jury trials impotent. Corrupt to the core.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is that threat analysis judges people by what they can do, not by what they are assumed to want to do. So someone who knows about a hole in your system is a threat! They must be STOPPED!
I can see that it might well be more rational to judge people by the damage they do or can be shown to have been attempting to do, but that requires judgement. And it's always safer to say "It's HIS fault!", then to acknowledge that you may have made a mistake.
So I don't see things getting better or saner. People with power always want to make the scape-goats suffer publically. And there are MANY who deserve no better. Commercial and espionage groups (including criminals) making use of spyware, viruses, etc. don't deserve ANY sympathy. This doesn't mean that most users fall into this category...but these days if I see an unlocked car with it's lights on...I quickly walk past. I no longer try to either turn off the lights or contact the owner. It's (seen as?) too dangerous.
So it's not just an internet phenomenon. This is happening throughout society.
Did they sample the same people in both years? Then the ages were very different.
Otherwise that means about 750/year for two years. This would not have passed me in a stat class as an undergrad. I would have been told to increase my sample size. I also don't know just what the questions were, since they are ambiguous as to the reason (possibly the internet, possibly working longer hours. They don't eliminate that it might be something they haven't mentioned...like less disposable income, more dangerous streets, whatever...I'm just spinning, you can't find out by guessing, you need to ask.
But the headline doesn't even reflect the results of the study, poor as it was (unless it was the reporting that was poor).
Both.
People are inherently selfish...but the degree to which they express it varies significantly, and the strength with which they feel it also appears to vary significantly. Before Regan starting his propaganda that "Greed is good" selfishness was generally much less expressed, and when people were caught being selfish they were condemned socially. After the PR campaigns, however, there were large enclaves of society that would no longer demean a person for having been wantonly and flagrantly selfish, so people became less embarassed by it. I wouldn't say that this caused Enron, but it certainly contributed to the mild reaction that people had when Enron was revealed.
Personally I think the entire top management of Enron should serve life at hard labor, with entire confiscation of the personal wealth, in partial recompense for the damage they have done. They could never pay it off, but they should be made to TRY! And this goes for the board of directors, too. Were they served a harsher penalty, well, I wouldn't cavail. But the ENTIRE management AND the board of directors should be held personally responsible. If they hadn't allowed and encouraged the activity, it wouldn't have happened. They are at minimum accessories before, during, and after the fact.
Actually there have been small communistic religious groups, where status was the sought after goal, and the community agreed to award status in ways that reinforced the communal goal of a communist ethic.
These groups don't tend to last very long, but they have existed. They generally require a small isolated community and a charismatic and idealistic leader. And carefully selected followers.
I don't think that such goups could be stable for multiple generations even without exterior pressures, but they can happen, and while they are working the people who live in them have reported themselves as quite happy. (The breakups, however, can be very painful.)
I don't know enough about the Kibbutz phenomena to know whether or not they met the "communist ethic" criteria. If they did, then there is at least one social context where the "strong charismatic leader" requirement can be significantly weakened.
The bible was created to provide a particular community a set of standards, and guides. If you don't follow those standards and guides, then you are not a moral part of that community.
... interesting. I still haven't done it, and it's not "moral", because it's a personal activity and not a communal one. Things that you do which don't affect others can have no moral significance.
See it as an open source project. There MUST be coding standards. Just what they are is partially determined by necessity, and partially determined by taste, but the MUST exist. If you don't follow the standards, then your code won't be accepted by the project.
There is nothing particularlly significant about the codes and practices defined in the bible. They don't even WORK! (They did in a society that was basically without government, and which was mainly rural, with poor communicaiton and transportation...but that's not where we are living.) Because of this the Jews needed to invent the commentaries on the Talmud, and the Christians needed to invent church dogma (followed by schisms over details and nomenclature). Today governments attempt to make it impossible to have a viable moral code that isn't defined by them...but as they are basically aoral, their attempts are themselves amoral.
If you must go to a religion for your morals (and since that implies a community of shared beliefs, that means a religion), then I would recommend Judiasm, Buddhism, or Taoism. Avoid the sects that worship authority, as their morals are generally "contribute such power as you have to making the priesthood stronger". (Hey, priests are people too...and one of a persons deepest needs is to feel important. And in the authoritarian sects the priests tell you what the rules are.) Note, however, that all surviving religious groups tend to make demands that a large percentage of the people will find literally impossible to adhere to. (There's a sect of Sikhs [or Jains?] that believe that it's sinful to wear clothes. It still survives, and it's members aren't all practicing nudists...except, possibly, at religious occasions.)
After much study of various options I opted for Zen. NOT Zen Buddhism, and definitely not "school boy Zen". Trying to disentangle the Zen from the Buddhism was quite
AFAICT, he's understating the situation. The nazi link, e.g., is not merely by methodological similarity, but also because some very high level nazi's made deals at the time of the surrender...and some of them went to work on for the agnecy that later became the CIA. (Nazism was dead...and they were experienced anti-communists... over time they worked their way up in the ranks.)
A "secret police" is a very dangerous (and necessary?) part of government. They are rather like an immune system that way. If the design isn't perfect, they are likely to attack the organism that produced them. (Well, that analogy is stretect further than it can stand. Unlike an immune system, secret police forces are capable of "owning" thier own resources out of sight of their controllers...and that can cause them to act quite independently, and without much concern for their putative parent body.)
My personal preference would be to have a less powerful "secret police" even at the cost of allowing some "disease organisms" to slip in, but this is clearly a matter of degree. More careful oversight is another important consideration...but who will watch the watchers? Corruption is a historical habit of human organizations.
Science did not flourish until the Deists decided that God was an honest pinball player. He built the machine, and he flipped the levers, but he didn't tilt the box or otherwise "miraculously" influence the flight of the ball. He left that all up to the initial starting conditions (and how far he pulled back the shot lever).
OK, that's an oversimplification of what they were claiming...but it's got the essence. And with those restricitions on "God did it!", scientific research became feasible. Without it... sorry. Can't do it.
Historically China has not been a particularly aggressive country. They have tended to be more inward looking...rather like the US before WWI. (Though even then we were less isolationist than China has usually been.)
I see a strong possibility that China will become economically dominant. I don't really see that they are militaristically aggressive. We won't like it if China is on top, as they won't have ANY concern about how we feel. This, however, is much different from painting them as militaristic world conquerors...that's much more like Britain (and thus like the US, though we also tend towards commercial dominance).
Don't think that everybody is the same. They really aren't, and the history of people's cultures has a life of it's own. Mao was a Chinese Emperor, and the current government appears to be a mandrinate. I expect their notions of importance are very inward focused...and if you allow a general victories, then he becomes a dangerous political opponent. (Well, I'm no Chinese History scholar. That last bit was mainly from the Byzantine Empire, but I do know that China has has such concerns before.)
If it's a non-issue in the news, ask yourself "Who owns the news?".
Hint: It's not the reporters. It's not the editor. They are employees, who serve at the whim of higher management.
I think that are saying that they don't have any exact measurement for 400 years ago. (Did you not the "probably even longer"?)
Looking at the article it appears that they concluded that some of the evidence was "likely, but not conclusive". I know of no evidence that implies or suggests that the average global temperature was ever warmer than the present for any period within the last several thousand years....and millions of years appears more probable.
A problem here is that certainly particular areas have seen warmer or cooler times, and it's difficult to get reasonable estimates of global temperature. Measuring the date of the oldest ice in Antartica that is currently melting gives a kind of an estimate...but not one that's easy to convert into any particular temperature. etc.
So when they say "The warmest in the last 400 years" they surprise me by having been able to come up with an acceptable measure of global temperature for 400 years ago. I don't interpret this as meaning that it was even warm 400 years ago. I interprest it as "That's as far back as we could get a decent estimate."
If I could, I'd mod you up. I believe nearly everything you said. I didn't say it because I don't actually have the personal experience to justify it. (I'm rather the opposite of an entrepreneur in temperment. I like to lock myself into a close and code. And it still seems true.)
It would be a mistake to accept this job. Move in with your parents for a few months while you search. I did, and it took me nearly 3 months to find a good job (well, this was a different time, and I was no phd...I went civil service). The time invested was well worth it to all.
Getting a job from tSCOg on your resume is almost certainly a very poor decision...presuming that they are hiring, which isn't clear to me. It looks more like some kind of "summer of code" look-alike attempt. I.e., my guess is that they hope to ONLY have to pay the prizes and to get lots of code submitted. (OTOH, I've only read summaries, as I wouldn't touch tSCOg with a 10-ft pole.
P.S.: A note on naming. The company's stock symbol is SCOX, so some refer to it by that name. The company's name is "The SCO Group". They are pretending to be an earlier company SCO (Santa Cruz Operations) which does not deserve to have their name so dragged through the mud, even if they did sell the rights to tSCOg (thus t for THE, SCO for SCO, and g for Group). That company is currently called Tarantella, and they gave up on their Unix business in the face of competition from Linux. They did not morph into this dispicable bunch of sleaze. They are still in business (though they were acquired by Sun...I believe that was last year).
They haven't forgotten. They're planning on changing their name again, too. I forget what the new one they announced is, but they'll probably change it again before they enter the marketing phase...presuming they live that long.
I've called for support on their printers...and they ended up on my "do not buy" list.
... well, I still buy replacement ink-jet cartridges with their brand on it. Until I chose my next printer. After that they are likely to be totally OFF my purchase list. And it's their technical support that made that final difference...but it was decreasing quality that got them moved NEAR to the bottom.
Yes, it was an end-user printer. So? I rate a company based first on my experiences with it, then on reports from other people. That inevitably means that if their consumer products are shoddy, I will consider the company a manufacturer of shoddy goods. And HP isn't quite there...the printer is cheap, but not shoddy. Their technical support, however, is shoddy.
I don't expect the kind of quality from a commercial product that I expect from a professional level product, but if a company cheats one set of users, then the company is a cheat and cannot be trusted with a more expensive purchase. It's true that some companies beleive in only cheating the mass-market customers...or at least that there are voices that proclaim so. (But voices are cheap, and astroturfing has been with us for a long time, and I don't know WHO wrote the post I'm replying to.)
OTOH, HP *used* to make quality merchandise. When it did so, it advertised the fact. I still remember their ad about the HP-51 (I think it was) calculator that fell off the hood of a jeep in Alaska, and was buried in the road all winter, chewed up by a snow-plow the next summer, and still worked. Been a long time since I've seen one of those ads.
I remember the disk drive company (not HP) back when auto-parking heads first came out that noted at the show that the drive they were running from had fallen down two flights of stairs onto a concrete loading deck while they were unpacking the exhibit. (Well, that's not remarkable anymore, but at the time it was startling.)
Computers have, in general, become more durable. HP seems to have been defying the trend. Perhaps their very expensive models are better...but I prefer to get to know a company through inexpensive purchases. If they work out, then I move them up the purchase pyramid. I rarely buy something expensive from a company as my first deal with them. HP has been moving DOWN the pyramid. They used to be near the top. Now
Generally (invariably in my experience) you can be careful in setting up your partitions and then hand edit your grub files to multi-boot. This also works with MSWind (though MSWind, when last I used it, required that it be installed first, apparently on the first partition of the disk, though not necessarily on the first disk).
/dev/hda3], but it's been too long since I've done that, and I can't be sure.)
SuSE, however, recognized the existence of other distros on my system at install time, and asked whether they should be added. (I have a vague memory that Red Hat gave you the opportunity to add other boot locations by partition ID [e.g.
Now as to WHY they act this way....probably because it's easier, and it handles the most common case. I don't know how SuSE did it, for all I know they could have been reading the prior grub installation file.
Another possible answer to your question is: I maintain between 3 and 4 distros on my system most of the time. This means that I am continually running into this problem when I install a new system. With SuSE I didn't, and I was pleasantly surprised.
With some groups, I'm willing to extend trust. MS, however, has a track record. They will need to PROVE that they are trustworthy before I will trust them. Even then it will be an iffy kind of thing for a decade or so.
But proof comes first.
1) Stop campaigning for closed standards. This is the first step towards earning trust.
2) Stop attempting to corrupt existing standards. This can be done simultaneous with 1.
3) Stop spreading FUD. If you continue to act like an enemy, there's no way I'll be willing to trust you.
Those steps are negative, but essential. Until those conditions are met there is no possible positive action that I would trust.
4) Do something positive. There are lots of options here, but if a government forces you to it, then it doesn't count as a positive action from you. Merely neutral (at best).
Possible examples of positive actions are:
1) Pushing an open standard, and adopting it in your own programs.
2) Opening the file format specifications beyond what the EU is demanding. (Alternatively, creating a new Open file format specification and adopting it...but this is 1 again.)
3) Releasing a version of MSWind that doesn't automatically remove the ability of other OSs on the same drive to boot. (Yeah, Linux isn't so good about this either. SuSE seems to do this, but most distros presume that they are the grand PooBah *AND* the Lord High Executioner wrapped into one bundle.)
4) Other. (I said there were lots of choices. There's really too many to enumerate.)
But proof comes before belief.
So far they haven't identified any code as "disputed". None. (Well...possibly some that's been sealed by the court, but I doubt it. IBM would probably have challenged, and I can't see any reason for the court to allow the seal to remain.)
Well, he got names from various countries.... Were they experts? He said so. I don't know the people, I've never heard of the groups they are claimed to represent, and I've never seen anything published by them, or by anyone with ideas similar to those they are propounding, in a source that I have moderate respect for.
Now I'm no expert. He could be right. Claiming it, however, doesn't prove it. Anyone can put up a web page and make claimes. I have heard people requesting more specific data...but the number of such people has been decreasing strongly over the last decade as study after study has rolled in showing that the temperature IS rising, and the CO2 IS rising, and the ice IS melting. (Also that the great conveyor MAY BE slowing. That's still being disputed. If it is, it's the most serious finding yet...and it probably means that Greenland is melting even faster than we had thought.)
I did find some technical flaws in the arguments that Gore presented, and he was definitely presenting a popularized layman's view rather than a technical argument. (Anyone who expects a movie to be the equivalent to a technical report needs their head examined.) Gore *MAY* have overstated the case a few times. Possibly. I wouldn't bet heavily on it. This is a gread deal different that being wrong in his general thrust. And he wasn't presenting a scientific paper, so anyone who wants to argue that it should have been one will just have to be unsatisfied...or they can go read the actual scientific papers. (I tend to read popularized summaries...I'm not an expert in the field...but they are generally consistent both with each other and with the *thrust*, if not the details, of Gore's movie.)
Is anyone really surprised that someone would pan the movie, and pretend to be doing so from on a "scientific basis"? The opponents of this movie are frequently the same people who want to teach "intelligent design" as if it were a scientific theory. They either don't know what science is, or they don't care. Their "official scientists" are less scientific than Lysenko (who at least TRIED to be scientific...even if he got it all wrong).
Now it's possible that I am unfairly maligning the author. But based on what I've read from sources that I consider to be at least marginally trustworthy, I doubt it. If I'm wrong, please point out a reputable source where I can check. I live near a major university, so if it's in a refereed print periodical there's a fair chance that I'll be able to check it out. The web page, while it quoted many authorities, didn't give any sources that I recognize and trust.
GPL *IS* GPL. That's what it is. In most cases nobody on earth has the right to change it.
If MS wants to operate with GPL code, write a GPL wrapper that allows the kind of interconnection they want. It's not a super-secret trick. Lots of programs have done this before.
If that doesn't suit them, then they are lying through their teeth about what they want, and I see no reason that anyone should go along with them.
Given their past history I would give odds that lying is the correct answer.
C and C++ are just poorly designed languages for medium to large projects. The problem isn't native code, it's language design.
My current favorite language design is D (Digital Mars D). Unfortunately, it's still Beta and doesn't have any libraries to speak of, and won't link to GCC libraries. (There's an offshoot of it that will, called gdc, but building it requires recompiling gcc.)
Python and Ruby are very nice languages, but I would prefer not to choose them, and take the performance hit. Python, however, at least has the libraries (and so does Ruby in some areas). Python and Ruby are nicer languages than D, but they intrinsically have the performance hit of an interpreter (virtual machine). This causes much problems when you are trying to multi-process your code. So far my best answer is multiple independent processes that communicate over sockets...at one VM/process...I'm really hoping that D either matures rapidly or acquires the ability to link to gcc C libraries. If your code slows by a factor of two every time your processor speed doubles...then you aren't getting ANYWHERE.
This is obviously preparing her to run for office as a "protector of the people".
You don't think she's any more trustworthy now than before do you? When someone has proven repeatedly that they cannot be trusted, why would you trust their "conversion"?
I'll wait for some proof a bit stronger than a public statement before I start taking anything she says are worthy of belief. "Actions speak louder than words" may not be true, but I find them much more convincing.
In the case of China, this may, or may not, be a valid argument. In the case of India is it not.
The people getting these jobs are not low caste. What is happening here is that India has an extremely low cost of living (as figured via international exchange rates) so people there can work for what would here be starvation wages and still be rather well off. (Some have said rather wealthy, but I doubt they are doing as well as a successful merchant trader.)
This isn't slave trading at the India end. What it is at the US end, however, may be something a bit different.
This doesn't make this a just thing to do. It means that the specific accusation that you have levelled at them is inappropriate.
I'm not at all sure that the median US legal residents (citizens + legal non-citizen residents) have a higher standard of living. Remember how the mean is calculated if you are claiming that the mean citizen has a higher standard of living. I'm not certain that you are wrong, as one super-wealthy person can counterbalance a large number of people living below poverty, but I suspect that even with THAT estimate you are wrong. And the mean is a terrifically unfair estimate to use in this case. I would be more likely to go with the mode than with the mean. The median is better...but that ignores the suffering experienced by someone who lives below poverty, when, e.g., medical care is unavailable, because one can't afford the bus ride to get to the doctor. I don't really think that an extremely wealthy person gains enough extra enjoyment from their extreme wealth to properly counterbalance even two people living below the poverty level.
What causes this isn't capitalism, it's power politics. If the social costs of extreme wealth were properly assesed to their source, then there would not be the extreme difference between the wealthy and the impoverished. But those with the power, in it's various forms (including money) craft the rules of the game to benefit themselves. This isn't capitalism. This is socialism of, by, and for the wealthy and powerful.
When you see extremes of wealth and poverty in the same civilization, you know the game is rigged. You many not know the details, but the fact is evident.
Sorry, but I'm not a scientist. If the agricultural land in an area is degrading, if the water supplies are decreasing (measured by underground aquifers and depth to fresh water), then that area is beyond it's long term carrying capacity. If the number of non-human species is decreasing, then that land is *probably* beyond it's long term carrying capacity. And where you draw the boundaries to define an area is a matter of guesswork that can flip the sign of a close answer. Unfortunately, most areas aren't that close.
I'm sure that other factors should also be considered, but I'm not a specialist, so I allow those to suffice for my evaluations...unless I run across a report from someone that I accept as a genuine expert.
In fact, I such a non-expert that I base my evaluation of land quality on what happens when you leave a piece of land alone for a year or two. If it fills up with "noxious weeds" (e.g. thistle) or stays empty then I consider it very degraded. If it fills with wild grasses and oats, and small shrubs (I did say only a year or two) then it's just degraded. etc. (Even that is wrong, since a lot of what that's measuring is water. But water's important, and land that retains water isn't doing that bad. People may not like swamps, we didn't evolve to live there, but swamp lands are very important, and a healthy swamp is a true benefit, acting to impound water and to slow flooding, among other significances. If everything were swampland, then I would consider swamps degraded, but as the number of swamps has been drastically curtailed below natural frequency, and the water table has dropped percipitously, so that most places that could be swamps are too dry for most of the year...swamps that exist should probably be preserved.
A lot of it is a matter of proportion. Unfortunately, people tend to look at things as a matter of short term convenience...I can easily understand this. When I'm dealing with things close up, I tend to act the same way. At the same time, I realize that over the long term this is a destructive pattern that degrades the long term use of the land. (DON'T get romantic about this: primitive cultures are equivalently destructive, but with less potential for impact. Ask yourself where the mastodon went. Where are the "Cedars of Lebanon", praised in the Bible? [Eaten by goats!] Or what caused the Sahara Desert. [Goats and sheep.] Yes, climate cycles are involved, but in prior cycles the Sahara area turned into grassland rather than desert.)
People did not evolve an environmental sensitivity. We tend to have, at best, an intellectual appreciation of it's importance. This doesn't mean that it's not important, it means that our major centers of population tend to shift around from area to area as we destroy each new one in succession. Now, unfortunately, we have become populous enough to blanket the entire earth at once. This means that if we DON'T protect the environment we are living in, we don't have any new place to move to. That could be quite distressing. Think of megadeaths per year during a war caused by a famine. (When there's not enough food, people are likely to fight over who gets to eat it. It's happening now in various places.) A population decline by reproducing at less than replacement value is a much better solution, though that, also, creates strong social stresses. (And preferrentially reproducing boys will cause percipitous decline, while creating intense social stress...but China has done it before. It appears to be a part of their cultural tradition. Unfortunately I don't know my Chinese history well enough to be aware of whether it is a part of what seems to cause the country to periodically break apart into independant provinces (traditionally governed by "warlords").
Legalistically, he gave reasonable arguments.
Of course, accepting those arguments rather destroys the idea of thinking of the courts as either the guardians of justice or the guardians or our rights, or anything else that is traditionally used to justify their existence. It instead turns them into the guardians of the status quo, provided it's supported by those in power. (I.e., not EVEN just the guardians of the status quo, but only a restricted subset of that which doesn't much need guarding.)
But he quoted various laws (that I never agreed to or authorized any of my "representatives" to agree do [Here representatives refers to "representational democracy" and refers to not only members of the House, but also to Senators and elected members of both the judiciary and the executive branch]). There is a totally insane number of laws, so I accept that he quoted the laws accurately. That has nothing to do with justice, but only with legalism.
If I accept that he ruled as the laws and procedures require, then I am simultaneously accepting that the court system is intrinsically void of justice. That though justice may occasionally be found there, it is purely by happenstance. His ruling made NO appeal to justice. ALL that was mentioned was laws and precedents. Now there are enough varied precedents that generally lawyers on both sides of any case can quote precedents to support their point of view, so any appeal to precedent without a simultaneous demonstration of how this precedent yield justice in this situation is immediately suspect. When the decision itself appears to be without justice, then it is imperative that the court demonstrate how it actually *is* just. I did not find that in the file.
Obviously, IANAL. I *am* a citizen. And decisions like this one have left me two steps short of voting the straight anarchist ticket. (A useless gesture, admittedly, and that's good, since any avowed anarchist who is a party member is an obvious hipocrite...well, unless they are syndicalist or some such. They make me want to agree with the Nihilists, but I remember how that led to Stalin.)
Given judgements like this, I can understand why the feds are so anxious to render jury trials impotent. Corrupt to the core.