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User: Doc+Ruby

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  1. Packet Switched Rail on Obama Calling For $53B For High Speed Rail · · Score: 1

    What would be really ambitious, and really what a 21st Century America needs, would be packet switched rail, instead of slightly faster circuit switched rail. Each car a destination car, temporarily joined for efficiency through common segments of their overall routes. Transfer between trains while they're joined together in motion, rather than requiring big stations and stops for every transfer point. Link up and split apart as each car's routes permit. Multiple sync points to complete routes so that schedules can be looser. Like a rail internet.

    And plenty of roadcar carrier railcars, so commuters and long distance haulers can just roll on and off, perhaps also while in motion, especially along major commute lines.

  2. Re:Just what we need on Obama Calling For $53B For High Speed Rail · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The Soviet rail system is vast and excellent in performance, under much worse terrain and weather conditions than in the US. If only the US had such a rail system, we'd be the envy of the world.

    As for the unions, I suppose you're thrilled that you don't have to work weekends starting from age 5. But you're probably scared that your job will be outsourced to somewhere with no environmental or labor protection. Somehow you don't think "shareholders" is as bad a word as "unions".

  3. Re:Local Economic Networks on Is Setting Up an Offshore IT Help Desk Ethical? · · Score: 1

    Of course it is. Ethics are behavior rules based on a value, "right" or "wrong". Just because your ethics aren't based on self interest doesn't mean another's aren't. Or maybe yours are, but you don't realize it.

  4. Local Economic Networks on Is Setting Up an Offshore IT Help Desk Ethical? · · Score: 1

    My ethics indeed make the wellbeing of people geographically closer to me, especially within governmental boundaries (town, county, state, country), more important than that of distant people. Because I am more likely to have a more direct connection to them, either knowing them, or someone they know. Their wellbeing feeds back more directly to mine. The economics are similar, despite globalism: the closer they are, the more likely I'm investing in my own community, therefore in myself.

    Tribalism is when arbitrary group membership that doesn't actually influence your own wellbeing (including that of people you care about) still governs your decisions.

    Not to mention that all the labor being exported out of the US is propping up foreign regimes that leave their workers and other residents exploited by labor and environmental abuse, which cuts costs. That's totally unethical.

    Ethicist Randy Cohen is just another NY Times writer who's so bought into globalism that he doesn't recognize the actual dynamics within globalism, and whose interests are actually served. Besides, considering the kind of global whitewashes and outright lying campaigns the NY Times manufactures every day, an ethicist with time to address any subject outside accurate, relevant journalism is probably the most obvious wrongdoer in this whole story.

  5. Re:Exchange vs Zimbra on Open-source Challenge To Exchange Gains Steam · · Score: 1

    Zimbra isn't Zarafa.

  6. Re:Custom App Development? on Open-source Challenge To Exchange Gains Steam · · Score: 1

    If you publish the source code, it's open source. Which doesn't mean that you get to write to the source from which the executable is compiled. Or, for that matter, execute the binary at the hosting service, which can require payment or other requirements to do so.

  7. Re:Using the Open Souce? on Open-source Challenge To Exchange Gains Steam · · Score: 1

    If you have staff on hand who are capable of modifying sourcecode than chances are you already have people capable of running the server, and so a hosted service isn't your best choice.

    That statement is quite incorrect. Development and operations are two very different things. I have a development department, but I don't want to spend any of their time on the time sink that is operating a server, even if we've developed some of its code. Developer time costs more than operations time, and losing it to operations prevents it from developing product that therefore means lost revenue even greater than the developer cost.

  8. Outlook + SIP Phones? on Open-source Challenge To Exchange Gains Steam · · Score: 1

    Anyone offering hosted Exchange or an alternative "Outlook server" integrated with support for desktop VOIP phones (US48 unlimited minutes, or $0.02:min), at under $35 per month, that has 99.999% annual uptime and good customer service? With an API for integrating my custom apps to its features?

  9. Exchange vs Zimbra on Open-source Challenge To Exchange Gains Steam · · Score: 1

    If I switch my 50 user office from Exchange to Zimbra, what will I lose in functions? Will I be able to point Zimbra at a database whose schema I can edit and populate with other apps, whose objects I can CRUD from other apps, including ones I write?

  10. Custom App Development? on Open-source Challenge To Exchange Gains Steam · · Score: 1

    Do any of these hosted Exchange replacements allow custom app development to the server's API? Or are they just another black box that just replaces Exchange with some other magic box?`

  11. Server Administrator? on Open-source Challenge To Exchange Gains Steam · · Score: 1

    With these hosted servers, is the administrator they provide any good (skilled, responsive)? Does their customer service quickly resolve issues that can't be immediately processed by the GUI?

  12. Using the Open Souce? on Open-source Challenge To Exchange Gains Steam · · Score: 1

    It's nice that the source on these hosted applications is open - no sarcasm intended. But since they're hosted, the source is open "read only": as a user, if I change the source to do something different, I can't commit it to the source of the hosted app to change it. Only the hosts can. Unless some host is running instances of the server per hosting customer that can be revised, which I've never heard of.

    And then who's going to be the newly featured server admin? That's the really expensive and hard part of having an Exchange server.

  13. Microsoft Admits It's In the Bugs Business on Microsoft Seeks Do-Let-The-Bed-Bugs-Bite Patent · · Score: 1

    After all these years, anyone trusting Microsoft to avoid risk because it has "bug recovery" that it promises will be a perfect failsafe deserves to die a slow, horrible death.

    If we let Microsoft directly go and mutate bugs to unleash on the world, we will deserve to suffer into extinction. They're cutting out the middleman, and going directly to live, stinging, buggy bugs, for crying out loud!

  14. JBoss Version Features? on Tomcat 7 Finalized · · Score: 1

    I'm stuck developing and deploying apps to JBoss 4.0.5.GA . I have problems when I deploy a WAR file that contains struts jars and other jars that conflict with the jars already installed in the JBoss. Is there a chart of feature comparisons between all the version of JBoss (and the underlying Tomcat) that could show which version has features to help me avoid those problems? FWIW, I use Eclipse Helios for development and testing, while another group runs ant against a build.xml I supply to deploy (and I'd like Eclipse to automatically generate and maintain the build.xml ).

  15. Born Yesterday on Rushkoff Proposes We Fork the Internet · · Score: 1

    For once the fate of a network — its fairness, its rule set, its capacity for social or economic reformation — is in the hands of policymakers and the corporations funding them — that network loses its power to effect change. The mere fact that lawmakers and lobbyists now control the future of the net should be enough to turn us elsewhere.

    The Internet was created by policymakers and corporations, and spent its first 15-25 years (depending on when you start counting it the "Internet") in the hands of no one else. When the Federal government divested the Merit Corporation that was the government vehicle for managing the Internet, it became even more in the hands of corporations rather than even policymakers.

    Moreover, the only power that can stop corporations from doing whatever they want ("profit and power to perpetuate it") with the Internet is policymakers. Treating them as the enemy is giving up any claim on power over them.

    Rushkoff's treatment of Internet governance is so naive as to seem downright autistic.

  16. Re:No problem! on Our Lazy Solar Dynamo — Hello Dalton Minimum? · · Score: 1

    Yes, the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet ("MRGO" to New Orleanians) was the source of the Industrial Canal breach. The surge through MRGO came from Lake Borgne, not from the Mississippi. Lake Borgne's surge came from the excited Gulf, and from Lake Ponchartrain while Katrina sat on it. Not from the Mississippi.

    I didn't have to dig through a lot of citations, because it's common knowledge in New Orleans what happened to MRGO. Knowledge we got from plenty of reliable sources, though the Corps of Engineers continues to deny it - and its own guilt. Knowledge I refresh when I visit New Orleans again every Spring for a couple of weeks, as I have for over a decade.

    But you go ahead and keep looking for some story that "it's environmentalists' fault". You might stumble across the years of environmentalists trying to shut down MRGO because it undercuts the local ecosystem's protection of New Orleans by wetlands. But you probably won't admit it.

    It's perfectly obvious that the facts are a foreigner to you. Stay out of New Orleans. Your kind of scold did enough already to keep the city from defending from the actual threats.

    Goodbye. You're welcome to continue getting it wrong on your own now.

  17. Re:No problem! on Our Lazy Solar Dynamo — Hello Dalton Minimum? · · Score: 1

    Yeah, that's why you thought that somehow a surge up the Mississippi had anything to do with the New Orleans levees breaking. Even though it didn't. Anyone can check the facts.

    My "ethos" is that when I know what I'm talking about and you don't, then I'm right and you're wrong - and you shouldn't open your mouth. Evidently that's not your "ethos". Your "ethos" is to yap no matter the facts or your familiarity with them.

    Goodbye.

  18. Re:Savvy business dealings on Chinese Intellectual Property Acquisition Tactics Exposed · · Score: 1

    What I mean by "fucking with" is "abusing". You don't have to dominantly abuse to abuse. Though the abuse of China by the West was designed to dominate it, and eventually did.

    I'll also note, since so many commenting in this discussion have filled in the vacuum with straw men, that the West was not the only abuser of China, that China was not defenseless against the abuse, that indeed China often defended successfully against the abuse, and that China has itself engaged in its own abuse, both of itself and of other countries. None of those points are really relevant to what I have discussed, but rather than get dragged down those distracting roads again I'll satisfy others' needs to address them up front.

  19. Re:No problem! on Our Lazy Solar Dynamo — Hello Dalton Minimum? · · Score: 1

    No, because Nagin isn't a Democrat. If you look at where he donated his own money, it was mostly to Republican candidates. The only Democrats he donated to were people from New Orleans running elsewhere in the country, his cronies - still outnumbered by Democrats. He donated to Bush's 2000 run even before the primaries. He endorsed Republican Bobby Jindal for LA governor, instead of Democrat Kathleen Blanco (who won).

    The Corps of Engineers was required to build a Cat 5 levee system, but built a Cat 3 levee system that failed while a Cat 1-2 storm sat on Lake Pontchartrain. The Mississippi River had absolutely nothing to do with the collapse of those levees. I lived in New Orleans for years prior to Katrina, and I can tell you the the levee boards who ignored the fact that the levees were inadequate so they could siphon off the money for their own crony projects are stacked with local hereditary business leaders. Which means "mostly Republicans".

    So no, jcr's argument is a straw man - and your "logic" to reverse that is fallacious, anyway. But I actually know what I'm talking about, and you don't. The "eco-movement" isn't to blame. The Republicans, in name and in practice, are.

  20. Re:capitalists take note on Chinese Intellectual Property Acquisition Tactics Exposed · · Score: 1

    I agree with you.

  21. Re:Industrial Policy on Chinese Intellectual Property Acquisition Tactics Exposed · · Score: 1

    It's not fascism when the state controls the corporations. Or all the other differences of China from actual fascism.

    It's not "communism", either, but there is no actual communism practiced, or ever has been: universal mutual ownership of all property; no government; etc. But as "Communism" is defined by what is practiced in its name, China's certainly is, and indeed does use many of the techniques and structures true communism prescribes for a socialist transition to communism: state monopoly on power governed by a party monopoly on government; propaganda; central economic planning; mass extermination of political threats; etc.

  22. Re:Industrial Policy on Chinese Intellectual Property Acquisition Tactics Exposed · · Score: 1

    The top US capitalists net benefit. The other 99.9%+ of Americans net lose. That's why we do it.

  23. Re:Savvy business dealings on Chinese Intellectual Property Acquisition Tactics Exposed · · Score: 1

    Taiwan and S Korea were totally fucked until the US invested huge amounts of time, capital and military to create an example in the Cold War that continued to underwrite US global trade even after the Cold War ended. They continue to be primary examples of US hegemony, including huge amounts of US troops. Those countries' fortunes changed when the West stopped fucking them over and changed the way they're used for Western (oligarch's) benefit.

    China fucked China by being unable to withstand the West fucking with China through missionaries, spies, invaders, drug dealers and governors. I guess if you want to blame the victim for being too weak to defend from the attacker, it gets pretty old hearing about it.

    Besides, I didn't blame the West for their inadequacies now. You did, in a straw man. What gets really old for me is Westerners rewriting history to get out of guilt for past Western actions that shouldn't be claimed by hardly anyone now, as it's not their fault. Unless you identify with the old time fuckers, and covet their power, which is usually the case with people threatened by repeating the facts of history.

  24. Re:Industrial Policy on Chinese Intellectual Property Acquisition Tactics Exposed · · Score: 1

    Not really, since in the US it is possible for corporate overlords to fail and be replaced by others without taking the entire country with it (despite the notable exceptions of the banks and the carmakers). In China, that is not possible. The flexibility for some people to fail without their failure damaging others who didn't volunteer to take part is essential to a national interest. We can see that in China, where its own homegrown attempts to develop rail technology failed, and had to get bailed out by importing the tech for the domestic producers to copy. In China that is the rule, while in the US that is the exception.

  25. Re:capitalists take note on Chinese Intellectual Property Acquisition Tactics Exposed · · Score: 1

    Not really, except that all of economic history is a continuum rather than a series of strict categorical systems. There is no "communism" as economics, which is the collective ownership of all property, total elimination of all classes, and indeed no government. Chinese "Communism" is an extreme evolution of socialism that perverts socialism, as it clearly values capital more than society, which is the essential valuation of capitalism rather than socialism - not an extreme, but a regression. Corporatism isn't a perversion of capitalism, but rather an extreme of it. There is also a difference between a corporation and a state, even one ruled by a party monopoly without democracy: the state does not maximize the value return on property, even in China, though that's what corporations do.