But we are witnessing the twilight of democracy in America.
From homeowners associations and schoolboards to the highest levels of Federal government. The ability to communicate (or spam) ideas quickly and cheaply as made it easier than ever to misinform and control the country and the world.
Just look at the multitude of "crisis" that we are "faced" with. From the violence in the media crowd to federal surplus, we are knee deep in bullshit.
#3: Africans don't get it
Answer: Some of them get it immediately. When John Perry Barlow toured Africa a couple of years ago, he showed a nomad tribesman the Internet from his laptop. Immediately the guy realised he could market his wares (rock salt and animal skins) to anyone in the world using this technology. This from somone who has probably never left his home village in the middle of the Sahara.
An African tribesman want to sell his product at market?? I thought the excuse for Africa never developing was that it is a strictly non-capitalist society??
You are/were one of the few middle or upper class people living in Africa. How many of your countrymen own a telephone?
There are any number of reasons why Africa will never be anything but a gaggle of third-world 'nations'. Until africa has stable governments, a manufacturing base and literacy little or no economic development will take place.
Hard currency in Africa comes from the export of raw materials such as timber, gold, diamonds, etc. As rich as many parts of Africa are in resources, they will never develop because they must import all but the simplest manufactured goods and tools. Study American history and you will find that former colonies cannot develop into legitimate powers until they develop an intellectual and manufacturing base.
Colonialism is still alive and well in sub-saharan Africa.
That is the truth, you can call me a racist if you wish, but that will not change the facts.
You should probaly not give the USPS the impression that you have been the 'victim' of this 'crime'.
Falsly reporting an incident to the Postal Inspectors is a big deal, and with thousands of idiot Slashdot readers spamming the USPS, they decide to make some examples. You may be opening yourself up for criminal charges.
I for one think it is time for Slashdot to grow up a little, and figure out what responsibility means.
The difference between email and telephone communication is that emails can be scanned quite easily for key words or phrases. You can't "grep" the human voice easily or reliably.
I believe that the mission of government is to ensure the rights of it's citizens. National defense and the police exist in order to maintain an enviroment where we can bitch, argue and otherwise pursue our business without fear.
Remember, criminals are the exception, not the rule. If the government restricts the rights of the people, it is no longer a government ruled "by the people, for the people".
So before you decide to support practices which help "protect you" or "fight crime", skim over the history of the 20th century. You will find that many politicians, including members of the German Nazi Party and Communist party of the USSR offered similar hollow promises.
Remember that just because one thing produces a lot of pollution does not mean that a million smaller things are going to produce less.
All seagoing ships dump sewage in the worlds oceans every day. The net effect on the water quality is nil. If a small city has a problem with their sewer plant that causes sewage to dump into a river for a few hours, millions of fish die.
I will still assert that spreading thousands of low-emission fuel cells all over the place will reduce pollution.
Also - you mention that NYC gets most of it's electricity from hydro. Hydro is a renewable resource. Natural Gas is not. Therefore it is costing nothing - other than plant and equipment - to make hydro power. There is no pollution that results from it. None. Zero.
Hydro power is neither free or pollution-free. Quebec flooded thousands of acres of land, forever altering landscapes and displacing alot of people. In addition, the plant and equipment costs are staggering. Thousands of watts of power are lost over high-tension lines.
The beauty of distributed generation is that increases the efficency and reliability of electricity. By having a hundred thousand mini-power plants all over a city you reduce the overhead in transmitting the power and reduce toxic emissions! In addition, whatever pollution is produced is less concentrated.
*ALOT* of electricity is wasted while it is being transported over long-distance transmission lines, since nobody wants a power plant near their home. A good percentage of the power delivered to New York City comes from hydro projects in Canada; about 35% of that power is lost in transmission.
Gas and Propane, on the other hand are forms of energy that can be transported with little or no loss of energy. Natural gas costs are very high right now because until recently recovering natural gas has not been very lucrative.
Also note that North America has massive supplies of untapped natural gas.
I think you can look at this issue much like computing -- it is cheaper to do complex scientific computation with a beowulf or similar cluster than it is to go out and by a Cray or other supercomputer.
Re:When will the world accept that x86 is a deaden
on
Pentium IV Problems?
·
· Score: 1
So are you trying to say that a Compaq Alpha, PowerPC or Sparc is cheaper than an Intel-based arch?
Have you been smoking crack?
A Sun Enterprise 3500 with 2 400mhz UltraSPARC's, 1 GB Ram and an 18GB hard disk costs about $55,000 with Solaris
A Dell PowerEdge 8450 with two 700mhz Xeons, 1GB RAM, two 36GB harddisks and a Windows NT costs about $30,000 or $26,000 if you ditch NT for linux.
I don't know the pricing of Compaq Alphaservers or IBM RS/6000's (with PowerPC), but I will assure you that they are more than $40k.
My company is looking to move to the Intel platforms to save money. Sun or RISC boxes do have performance advantages over Intel architecture, but we can buy two high-end Intel boxes for the same price as one lower-end Sun box. That is a no brainer.
I devoutely belive that the Intel/Linux platform is the future of enterprise computing.
Remember that Intel spends billions of chip R&D, and runs into problems because of the age and complexity of their design. Intel knows that too. They recoup their costs tenfold in the factory.
Intel has a world-class manufacturing capability that is unmatched in the industry. They are one of very few semiconductor companies that make money, consistently returning 60% gross margins. They are not going anywhere, even if Slashdot readers root for Transmeta or whatever.
Wow... an informative post.
Just wanted to point out that if you are used to Redhat Linux Mandrake is actually a pretty decent dist to think about for your next upgrade.
It is essentially the same thing as redhat, except it generally takes less time for me to customize the system to where I want it. The nice thing about the installer is that it allows you to select a security level from "Welcome to hackers" to "Super-Paranoid".
This security feature is not perfect, but it helps stop the careless mistakes we all make from time to time.
You don't have a ton of time to waste installing Solaris.
Solaris (at least 2.6) does not install non-essential things like traceroute, a c compiler, top, etc. Installing these things wastes alot of time.
Also, some people just like Linux better out of the box than Solaris.
Legalizing narcotics and turning them into an uncontrolled substance is a great academic argument that sounds really appealing depending on who is pushing the idea.
Unfortunately, reality is not that simple. Read up on how the British subjugated colonies in Asia, the availability of cheap drugs (opium in China's case) turned a generation of young people into doped up junkies. (who were in no shape to take up arms against the British)
How far should drug legalization go? Should I be able to pick up antibiotics at the drugstore without a persciption? How about morphine? Birth control pills?
Narcotics are not beer and cannot be traded as such. If you think that pamphlets in drug stores (which will be supplying addicts in your world) will get addicts off of a cheap supply of their fix, I suggest you lock yourself in your ivory tower.
That is very well said, and I see where you are coming from.
Keep in mind though that drug users and their adult family are not the only players in the drug 'game'. Completely innocent people are terrorized by drug-funded gangs, just because they live in the wrong neighborhood. Children are born to and raised by addicts; whether they be alcoholics or on narcotics or even perscription drugs.
I agree with you that drug users are not 'victims' by default, but the people in the periphery who suffer from users and traffickers are certainly 'victims' by your definition.
If you actually believe that drug abuse leaves no victims I need to question your intelligence. Look at some poor soul who is hopelessly addicted to heroin or crack and tell me there is no victim.
On the other hand, The civil rights movement is an excellent analog to the de-css issue. Unfortunately, it is very difficult to make the american public understand that organizations like the MPAA and RIAA are setting the precedents that will be used to take away our rights in the future. Most people do not view the ability to listen to music or watch movies as a fundamental right.
We are lucky to live through an age that will be studied by historians many years from today. We moving away from our current republican democracy towards rule by judicial fiat. The most interesting thing is that nobody gives a damn.
Are we all supposed to be suprised that this device comes with a software license that is similar to the licence included with almost every piece of software sold?
Did you expect these people to include the source code?
Are you shocked that a software license agreement says "...or removal of the Software from the Product.. is expressly prohibited, except to the extent that such activity is expressly permitted by applicable law..."?
Are you concerned that you will be prosecuted when you decide to port doom to your mp3 player? Try overwriting or appending your software to the device without "removing" the software you licenced. Or... try getting a life or a better job or something besides worrying about this...
One could argue that Amazon.com is in fact a different shop for every customer.
The products presented to you will vary according to what you have purchased in the past, what similar people have purchases and what you search for.
When I go to a Barnes and Noble or Borders bookstore I have to wade though picturebooks, self-help guides and childrens books before I reach what I am looking for. Amazon filters that stuff for me. Similarly, a mother buying children's books is not presented with computer books or history books.
Amazon's databases are really a great resource that should be open to sociologists for study. You can learn alot about people in general by what they read!
I shop at Amazon alot. I buy several books and the odd dvd or piece of consumer electronics.
In my experience, Amazon's prices have been quite reasonable; rarely the cheapest, usually in the middle of the pack. The reason I shop at Amazon is that I recieve consistent prompt and correct shipping and good customer service when something goes wrong.
Amazon's expert systems also tend to suggest items that I actually want; it is like having access to a dedicated account rep without all the bs. I have also recieved almost $100 in gift certificates and coupons from Amazon in the last three months, which keeps me coming back as well.
I am a busy person, and try to fit some sort of life into my hectic schedule. I do not have the time to visit pricewatch or fifty web sites to save $5 on a book which may not arrive promptly or be subject to stiff restocking fees.
As far as your car dealership analogy goes, all I can say is that you get what you deserve. If twenty people are looking at 10 PT Crusiers, nobody is going to pay less than invoice. Simple supply and demand.
If you want a good deal on a car, leave your conspiracy theories at home and buy a one or two year old car, where the original owner (aka sucker) took the 40% depreciation hit or buy a car that isn't the 'hottest' model in the showroom.
Women and minorities are ripped off in stores and car dealerships because (for the most part)they want the 'peace of mind' of a new car or fall for the extended warranty ripoff. That is how companies like Kia and Hyundai sell cars; suckers get their 'new' car, dealers make big profits on overpriced spare parts and labor.
The whole point of the previous post is that small and medium sized business cannot afford to run Linux in production, not big businesses.
A small factory or farm or retail shot or whatever cannot afford to have a $35+k/year sysadmin or mcse wannabe on staff. With windows, however, a resonably knowledgeable non-computer person can fix most problems with tech support.
Slashdot Mirror
But we are witnessing the twilight of democracy in America.
From homeowners associations and schoolboards to the highest levels of Federal government. The ability to communicate (or spam) ideas quickly and cheaply as made it easier than ever to misinform and control the country and the world.
Just look at the multitude of "crisis" that we are "faced" with. From the violence in the media crowd to federal surplus, we are knee deep in bullshit.
#3: Africans don't get it Answer: Some of them get it immediately. When John Perry Barlow toured Africa a couple of years ago, he showed a nomad tribesman the Internet from his laptop. Immediately the guy realised he could market his wares (rock salt and animal skins) to anyone in the world using this technology. This from somone who has probably never left his home village in the middle of the Sahara.
An African tribesman want to sell his product at market?? I thought the excuse for Africa never developing was that it is a strictly non-capitalist society??
You are/were one of the few middle or upper class people living in Africa. How many of your countrymen own a telephone?
There are any number of reasons why Africa will never be anything but a gaggle of third-world 'nations'. Until africa has stable governments, a manufacturing base and literacy little or no economic development will take place.
Hard currency in Africa comes from the export of raw materials such as timber, gold, diamonds, etc. As rich as many parts of Africa are in resources, they will never develop because they must import all but the simplest manufactured goods and tools. Study American history and you will find that former colonies cannot develop into legitimate powers until they develop an intellectual and manufacturing base.
Colonialism is still alive and well in sub-saharan Africa.
That is the truth, you can call me a racist if you wish, but that will not change the facts.
You should probaly not give the USPS the impression that you have been the 'victim' of this 'crime'.
Falsly reporting an incident to the Postal Inspectors is a big deal, and with thousands of idiot Slashdot readers spamming the USPS, they decide to make some examples. You may be opening yourself up for criminal charges.
I for one think it is time for Slashdot to grow up a little, and figure out what responsibility means.
Don't the "criminals" know that?
The drug dealers and terrorists that carnivore is supposedly targeting are not stupid. Neither is the FBI.
The difference between email and telephone communication is that emails can be scanned quite easily for key words or phrases. You can't "grep" the human voice easily or reliably. I believe that the mission of government is to ensure the rights of it's citizens. National defense and the police exist in order to maintain an enviroment where we can bitch, argue and otherwise pursue our business without fear. Remember, criminals are the exception, not the rule. If the government restricts the rights of the people, it is no longer a government ruled "by the people, for the people". So before you decide to support practices which help "protect you" or "fight crime", skim over the history of the 20th century. You will find that many politicians, including members of the German Nazi Party and Communist party of the USSR offered similar hollow promises.
Remember that just because one thing produces a lot of pollution does not mean that a million smaller things are going to produce less.
All seagoing ships dump sewage in the worlds oceans every day. The net effect on the water quality is nil. If a small city has a problem with their sewer plant that causes sewage to dump into a river for a few hours, millions of fish die.
I will still assert that spreading thousands of low-emission fuel cells all over the place will reduce pollution.
Also - you mention that NYC gets most of it's electricity from hydro. Hydro is a renewable resource. Natural Gas is not. Therefore it is costing nothing - other than plant and equipment - to make hydro power. There is no pollution that results from it. None. Zero.
Hydro power is neither free or pollution-free. Quebec flooded thousands of acres of land, forever altering landscapes and displacing alot of people. In addition, the plant and equipment costs are staggering. Thousands of watts of power are lost over high-tension lines.
The beauty of distributed generation is that increases the efficency and reliability of electricity. By having a hundred thousand mini-power plants all over a city you reduce the overhead in transmitting the power and reduce toxic emissions! In addition, whatever pollution is produced is less concentrated.
*ALOT* of electricity is wasted while it is being transported over long-distance transmission lines, since nobody wants a power plant near their home. A good percentage of the power delivered to New York City comes from hydro projects in Canada; about 35% of that power is lost in transmission.
Gas and Propane, on the other hand are forms of energy that can be transported with little or no loss of energy. Natural gas costs are very high right now because until recently recovering natural gas has not been very lucrative.
Also note that North America has massive supplies of untapped natural gas.
I think you can look at this issue much like computing -- it is cheaper to do complex scientific computation with a beowulf or similar cluster than it is to go out and by a Cray or other supercomputer.
So are you trying to say that a Compaq Alpha, PowerPC or Sparc is cheaper than an Intel-based arch?
Have you been smoking crack?
A Sun Enterprise 3500 with 2 400mhz UltraSPARC's, 1 GB Ram and an 18GB hard disk costs about $55,000 with Solaris
A Dell PowerEdge 8450 with two 700mhz Xeons, 1GB RAM, two 36GB harddisks and a Windows NT costs about $30,000 or $26,000 if you ditch NT for linux.
I don't know the pricing of Compaq Alphaservers or IBM RS/6000's (with PowerPC), but I will assure you that they are more than $40k.
My company is looking to move to the Intel platforms to save money. Sun or RISC boxes do have performance advantages over Intel architecture, but we can buy two high-end Intel boxes for the same price as one lower-end Sun box. That is a no brainer.
I devoutely belive that the Intel/Linux platform is the future of enterprise computing.
Remember that Intel spends billions of chip R&D, and runs into problems because of the age and complexity of their design. Intel knows that too. They recoup their costs tenfold in the factory.
Intel has a world-class manufacturing capability that is unmatched in the industry. They are one of very few semiconductor companies that make money, consistently returning 60% gross margins. They are not going anywhere, even if Slashdot readers root for Transmeta or whatever.
Following your logic, I think we should avoid packages all together and integrate every conceivable function into rpm.
Just think, you could have rpmquake, even have a windows port as part of rpm!
Yes I am on crack
Wow... an informative post. Just wanted to point out that if you are used to Redhat Linux Mandrake is actually a pretty decent dist to think about for your next upgrade. It is essentially the same thing as redhat, except it generally takes less time for me to customize the system to where I want it. The nice thing about the installer is that it allows you to select a security level from "Welcome to hackers" to "Super-Paranoid". This security feature is not perfect, but it helps stop the careless mistakes we all make from time to time.
The problem with your argument is that rampant copyright violations IS Napster's problem.
Napster will not exist in 6 months; you are living in some sort of altered Slashdot reality.
Slashdot is above stupid little concepts, like being correct. Don't believe any "news" story posted here until you see it somewhere else.
When will we actually see a Transmeta chip?
You don't have a ton of time to waste installing Solaris. Solaris (at least 2.6) does not install non-essential things like traceroute, a c compiler, top, etc. Installing these things wastes alot of time. Also, some people just like Linux better out of the box than Solaris.
Here is the 2nd completely false slashdot story in two days!!! Go slashdot --- maybe slashdot should make up it's own news.
may want to check up on your stories once in awhile.
Legalizing narcotics and turning them into an uncontrolled substance is a great academic argument that sounds really appealing depending on who is pushing the idea. Unfortunately, reality is not that simple. Read up on how the British subjugated colonies in Asia, the availability of cheap drugs (opium in China's case) turned a generation of young people into doped up junkies. (who were in no shape to take up arms against the British) How far should drug legalization go? Should I be able to pick up antibiotics at the drugstore without a persciption? How about morphine? Birth control pills? Narcotics are not beer and cannot be traded as such. If you think that pamphlets in drug stores (which will be supplying addicts in your world) will get addicts off of a cheap supply of their fix, I suggest you lock yourself in your ivory tower.
That is very well said, and I see where you are coming from.
Keep in mind though that drug users and their adult family are not the only players in the drug 'game'. Completely innocent people are terrorized by drug-funded gangs, just because they live in the wrong neighborhood. Children are born to and raised by addicts; whether they be alcoholics or on narcotics or even perscription drugs.
I agree with you that drug users are not 'victims' by default, but the people in the periphery who suffer from users and traffickers are certainly 'victims' by your definition.
If you actually believe that drug abuse leaves no victims I need to question your intelligence. Look at some poor soul who is hopelessly addicted to heroin or crack and tell me there is no victim.
On the other hand, The civil rights movement is an excellent analog to the de-css issue. Unfortunately, it is very difficult to make the american public understand that organizations like the MPAA and RIAA are setting the precedents that will be used to take away our rights in the future. Most people do not view the ability to listen to music or watch movies as a fundamental right.
We are lucky to live through an age that will be studied by historians many years from today. We moving away from our current republican democracy towards rule by judicial fiat. The most interesting thing is that nobody gives a damn.
Enjoy speaking freely while you can.
Why is the above comment moderated up?
Are we all supposed to be suprised that this device comes with a software license that is similar to the licence included with almost every piece of software sold?
Did you expect these people to include the source code?
Are you shocked that a software license agreement says "...or removal of the Software from the Product.. is expressly prohibited, except to the extent that such activity is expressly permitted by applicable law..."?
Are you concerned that you will be prosecuted when you decide to port doom to your mp3 player? Try overwriting or appending your software to the device without "removing" the software you licenced. Or... try getting a life or a better job or something besides worrying about this...
One could argue that Amazon.com is in fact a different shop for every customer.
The products presented to you will vary according to what you have purchased in the past, what similar people have purchases and what you search for.
When I go to a Barnes and Noble or Borders bookstore I have to wade though picturebooks, self-help guides and childrens books before I reach what I am looking for. Amazon filters that stuff for me. Similarly, a mother buying children's books is not presented with computer books or history books.
Amazon's databases are really a great resource that should be open to sociologists for study. You can learn alot about people in general by what they read!
I shop at Amazon alot. I buy several books and the odd dvd or piece of consumer electronics. In my experience, Amazon's prices have been quite reasonable; rarely the cheapest, usually in the middle of the pack. The reason I shop at Amazon is that I recieve consistent prompt and correct shipping and good customer service when something goes wrong. Amazon's expert systems also tend to suggest items that I actually want; it is like having access to a dedicated account rep without all the bs. I have also recieved almost $100 in gift certificates and coupons from Amazon in the last three months, which keeps me coming back as well. I am a busy person, and try to fit some sort of life into my hectic schedule. I do not have the time to visit pricewatch or fifty web sites to save $5 on a book which may not arrive promptly or be subject to stiff restocking fees. As far as your car dealership analogy goes, all I can say is that you get what you deserve. If twenty people are looking at 10 PT Crusiers, nobody is going to pay less than invoice. Simple supply and demand. If you want a good deal on a car, leave your conspiracy theories at home and buy a one or two year old car, where the original owner (aka sucker) took the 40% depreciation hit or buy a car that isn't the 'hottest' model in the showroom. Women and minorities are ripped off in stores and car dealerships because (for the most part)they want the 'peace of mind' of a new car or fall for the extended warranty ripoff. That is how companies like Kia and Hyundai sell cars; suckers get their 'new' car, dealers make big profits on overpriced spare parts and labor.
The whole point of the previous post is that small and medium sized business cannot afford to run Linux in production, not big businesses.
A small factory or farm or retail shot or whatever cannot afford to have a $35+k/year sysadmin or mcse wannabe on staff. With windows, however, a resonably knowledgeable non-computer person can fix most problems with tech support.
The constitution plainly states that the Federal gov't and only the Federal gov't may regulate interstate commerce.