It isn't enough that this morning I got into my car, was about to put the key into the ignition when I noticed the funny smell. I looked down on the floor under the dash and saw a nice green puddle. A familiar sight, to be sure.
In the 10 years that I have been driving crappy cars I have experienced the puddle of lovely green disappointment twice. And no, I am not broke -- I can afford a new car but when you live in NYC, buying a new car when you are going to park it on the street is insanity.
At any rate -- now I can look forward to the same lovely green surprise from my COMPUTER? No thanks! Computers are getting complicated enough without having a puddle of green liquid-kryptonite potentially spilling all over my desk and carpet, thank-you-very-much.
Liquid cooling systems break down. Hell, for that matter all systems break down eventually. That's what happens with man-made systems. Funny things. Even God-made systems break down, just much slower.
Anyway, my point is that keep it as simple as possible if you want to avoid catastrophe. A little fan, an aluminum heatsink, and a motherboard sensor to tell you when the fan stops a-turnin'. What's so wrong with that? Why do people have to go and make things so complicated? Putting green liquid and water pumps and tubes and the like inside a computer is just an ugly, nonsensical thing to do in my book. You're basically asking for trouble. And as other people pointed out -- as the technology hits mainstream it will only get more crappily made and lead to a higher failure rate.
And for what? A few extra MHz? Before +200 MHz goes and makes that much of a difference in your life, you need to examine all the parts in your computer from the RAM to the motherboard chipset to the freakin' BIOS firmware version before you should think about that +200MHz.
Take an example from engineering/consumer history:
The VW Beetle was a car reknowned for reliability. One of its key features was its extremely simple mechanical design. It also happened to be air-cooled (I am not sure for the motivation for that design choice but I bet it had something to do with simplicity).
OTOH if you don't need that much money, I think my local Jack In The Box is hiring. (really.)
Really? How is that improving the situation then? I mean to actually LIVE off the minimum wage salary those horribly grueling jobs pay (And I mean GRUELING -- it's worse than just cleaning toilets as you have to deal with so much crap from customers PLUS clean the toilets at the end of the 8-hour shift anyway), you need to work 40 hours a week. The cost of living in most US States/Cities mandates that.
The poster is trying to work _less_ and have an easier time. I think he could probably get away with it if he were paid his present wage, but scaled down to part time. A Jack-In-The-Box worker has to work 40 hours a week and probably has less than what the poster would be making if he worked only part time at his office job. That's horribly sad for the Jack-In-The-Box people.
So no, I don't think working part-time at Jack-in-the-box is the answer.
I think the answer lies in society changing its paradigm. If employees required more free time as a precondition to employment (a large paradigm shift, granted, but not unthinkable) then employers would be forced to accomodate that need.
Why can't your average office job have multiple people working part-time for the same position? I know there is some overhead and inefficiency associated with such an arrangement, but in the end I argue that people will be _more_ productive during their part time hours (since their morale would be better).
I many cases I don't even think any productivity would be lost.
Also, then maybe people would get to see their kids more and spend more quality time with their family and who knows what the fringe benefits of that are for society in general?
We should do like the Europeans and figure out how to work less and still have a strong economy..
Well most of the people I know have parents that couldn't afford that. Then again, I come from NYC which has very different demographics and economics than, say, Bumblefuck, Iowa for instance. (There are fewer property-owners in NYC and most of us are forced to throw our money away on rent, etc.)
Anyway, you are nitpicking at a particular point.
Ok, so let's say your parents magically pay for your college education. Let's say they "planned ahead" as you argue every responsible citizen should.
How did they do this? One of two ways: either they scrimped and saved by working 20+ years to finance their children's upbringing plus put enough aside to pay for college *or* they are getting bank loans (my mortgaging their house, etc).
In the end, it doesn't matter who is paying for whom. If you have the burden of paying for your own education or for your children's education -- you still are pretty much forced into debt (and as a conequence: many long grueling unforgiving years of labor) if you hope to meet the minimal requirements for not being impoverished in this economic system.
As a side-note most parents didn't sufficiently plan ahead (most people didn't expect the costs of college to skyrocket as they have in the past 20 years) and usually children *are* forced into some form of debt in the vast majority of cases.
"Of course, whining is much easier than studying the game theory that explains all this..."
Heh.. this wouldn't be slashdot without your pedantic comment at the end.
I don't see how game theory relates to this at all. Maybe it does, but the game theory I remember from my undergrad had nothing to do with the sociolo-economics involved in why the human species generally is better off in a hierarchical power system rather than in some other structure or non-structure.
Anyway, you do make a good point about everyone in society benefitting from proper organization.
Actually my ancestors come from a country in Eastern Europe that lacks the proper social order of the "Developed World" and is suffering even to this day for it. And it isn't even an anarchy -- just a poorly organized capitalist democracy.
A lot can be said for proper organization I suppose -- even if it does lead to tedium and boredom at times.
I guess you have to choose between the lesser of two evils: boredom or struggle. Most people choose boredom.
If you are really into struggling -- you can either move to the mountains, as you suggest or you can try your hand at fighting your way to the top, I suppose..
Either way I guess it's better than living in the caves like the Neanderthals -- as at least we ostensibly have a choice.
Most of us are forced into a binary scenario of either working a 40+ hour week or not having a job at all. How many of us wouldn't choose to work part-time if we could convince our employers to let us do that? Even if it meant half the pay?
When you have more free time you definitely don't feel a need to spend so much of your money on useless crap.
Just who is this full week serving? Whose needs?
I don't think we were born to do this -- to work 40 years for 40 hours per week getting 2-4 weeks per year of time to ourselves. It's insanity! It feels like a prison-sentence really!!
Even if one gets to the top of their profession, it still gets really boring after a while.
Our minds are too interesting for this type of mundanity. I would like to believe that our spirits are more beautiful than that -- that we aren't just some lowly cogs designed to perform one specific and uninteresting task or series of tasks each day.
It's chillingly sad if I am wrong.
However, this is the trend in society. Our economic system is going towards greater and greater division of labor -- so look to jobs getting more and more mundane as technology advances and as populations grow.
This immortality thing will only compound the problem, I think.
You know, I used to see things the way you do -- I really believed that we are the ones to blame for our own misery when it comes to working insane hours and getting very little time to ourselves. I really believed that we have to work so much (especially here in the US) because of our own greed -- essentially that we are to blame if we feel we work too much or too hard. It's our fault for being greedy bastards that want to buy all this cool stuff.
I have come to the opposite conclusion. The system really is designed to get you hooked in to a lifetime of unrewarding labor, and you really have minimal say in the matter.
Here's how it goes for most people born into the lower classes:
Age 0-18 - free education provided by the government where you are indoctrinated in various ways to tolerate long hours of tedium and monotony to better prepare you for whatever path of indentured servitude should you choose later in life. You are taught a bare minimum of real academic skills so as to make attending a university almost compulsory for all but the most menial of jobs. Additionally, the 'schoolwork' assigned to you is pointless, mundane, and at best only prepares you for the boring tasks you will be almost capriciously assigned later in life by your corporate masters.
Age 18 - Choose to either work for minimal pay as some form of "blue-collar" worker without a college education, or you can choose to attend college after which hopefully you will find a slightly less tedious job for better pay.
Age 18-22 - Become indebted to various banking conglomerates in order to pay for your college education. The debt is so large that it will take 10-20 years to pay off for most people.
Age 22+ - Graduate from college with a degree. At this point you are minimally competent to contribute labor and hopefully generate wealth for some corporation. Note that at this point you are tens of thousands of dollars in debt and you have little choice but to find work as quickly as possible. Spurred on by this form of motivation -- you accept your fate and begin to adapt to a life wasted in an office sitting at a desk solving minute and inconsequential problems so as to better lubricate the large corporate machine that you are but a cog in.
Profit-oriented capitalism basically guarantees that the majority of people work really hard to ensure profits for the corporation, which is owned by a few lucky individuals. Those profits are by and large created by the labor of the individuals at the bottom of the corporate hierarchy. Yet they see little or no part in the profits.
The few grow rich exploiting the labor of the many.
It's a story as old as time itself. Whether you be a Roman putting the conquered to work for you, or a feudal lord demanding labor of your peasants in exchange for the priviledge of using the land -- mankind has a real love for organizing itself into a hierarchy where a few lucky people are extravagently wealthy at the expense of the many.
If anyone can tell me why we like to organize ourselves in such a way I would be really grateful as this question has gone unanswered for me for quite some time now..
I don't troll. I believe that RMS is right and that proprietary software is a legalized scam. And I really like J2EE (technically) as a platform but I really dislike the power that Sun exerts over it and the MS-like lock-in that it represents.
Actually.. if you take this point of view truly seriously, it becomes obvious that many laws that protect corporations and eliminate competition can be viewed as legalized scams. I strongly believe this but convincing people in a culture where so many people are dependent on their 'corporate masters' (to use a cliche) is very difficult. So many of us are either involved in the scam or strive to be (eg we are in college and would really like to be employed by a scammer) that convincing people that software patents and much of copyright law is a scam is really rather like convincing a person that his wife is a whore, or his brother is a liar, or that his country sucks or that his family is retarded. It is difficult for a person to accept negative truths about something they are emotionally involved with.
People make excuses for those close to them or those things on which they depend.
The cognitive dissonance is too much for some people and they choose to look the other way...
However, if one can be impartial -- copyrights and patents on software are legalized scams. Any arguments that they 'benefit society' in some way are just regurgitations of the scammer's lie.
If you think I am too extreme in my views, perhaps I am. Perhaps you are right and I am wrong. However consider at least the question of whether we give the scammers too much power over the marketplace and whether we unnecessarily protect already-successful companies that have long since stopped actively contributing to the benefit of the market or the economy in general (I am thinking in particular of giants in the music industry or giants in the software industry that try and patent software techniques, etc).
Oh yeah it's populace.. you are right. Populus is latin but populace is English with just about the same meaning. Populous is a game and also an adjective.
...I wonder at what point the general american populous will realize that things have gone bad....
I believe the word you are looking for is the noun "people" as in "American people" not the adjective "populous", which means "densely populated".
Populous is an adjective -- from m-w.com which has no listing for populous (noun) but only one for populous (adjective):
Main Entry: populous
Pronunciation: 'pä-py&-l&s
Function: adjective
Etymology: Middle English, from Latin populosus, from populus people
1 a : densely populated b : having a large population 2 a : NUMEROUS b : filled to capacity - populously adverb - populousness noun
"Populus" is another word altogether (no "ou") and it is a latin word meaning "the people". Sometimes that word is used in English, but "populous" strictly is an adjective.
I'm going to ask you to forget you ever thought about this. You have a point - even if it is a bit trollish - but the more you put these ideas out there the more suits will use them. Think a suit doesn't have somebody watching the "new" or "the web" for him to spot technology and legal changes?
Well I disagree. First off, I don't think that the 'suits' that are paid to think about how to ruin our lives haven't already thought of this. I don't think that by censoring my thinking I am doing anyone any good. By asking the question that I did, I think that will eventually reveal that in fact Yahoo! doesn't really want to kill the 3rd party clients -- at least not yet. I think that if they really wanted to, they would have been more aggressive about it already. And believe me, by my posting that question here on/. I don't think I'm doing anyone any harm, as I guarantee you this was though of already as soon as libyahoo 0.0001 came out.
I think that in actuality they prefer for the time being that as many people as possible use their Y!IM network. Maybe sometime later in the future when they are a monopoly (if that ever happens) they will then proceed to kick the ass of every 3rd party client.. but until then, they secretly believe 'the more the merrier'.
That's the cool thing about having so many competing systems. And that's the problem with something like Microsoft where they managed to kill off all their competition. They become dicks and stop doing a good job as soon as that happens.
Well, does anyone know if this is just a protocol upgrade or if yahoo! is really trying to get rid of the third party clients?
If they want to get rid of 3rd party clients, then this is just another arms race, meaning we will eventually have open clients that work, after some finite delay.
In all honesty I can't blame yahoo! for trying. After all, for each person that doesn't see the ads associated with their official client, they lose revenue.
Yahoo! is a great site and they provide a LOT of stuff for free, so I don't blame them for trying to get some money back for all the free stuff they have given us over the years. I guess since IMing is so popular and so much time is spent in the IM client, to them that's a LOT of missing eyeballs over a long period of time that don't get to see the ads. That's a lot of money lost by the minute. And let's face it.. we are using their computers for free, and not giving anything back each time we use a third party client.
My question though, is that if they hate third party IM clients for cutting into their rev. stream, why don't they take the law out of their own hands and use the law to their advantage? Is there nothing that could be done, by drafting some clever EULA or something, that would make it illegal or something like that to use 3rd party clients? That might actually dampen the efforts with libyahoo and other projects that try to develop an open protocol lib. Sourceforge might even cease to host such projects, being that they are in the realm of piracy or accorting to the DMCA.
While it would suck for me (as I love to use centericq over their stupid client), why don't they just make it illegal to use third party clients?
A hardware firewall? Last I checked all the important work that firewalls do is implemented in software running on the router.
A HARDWARE firewall? Do such things exist? And no.. don't tell me about the one that NVIDIA makes that claims to be hardware-accelerated, as that's all hype. It's actually just a software firewall. All firewalls are software firewalls. It just may happen that the software might be running on a dedicated system (like a Cisco Router) which does nothing but act like a firewall.
What are historical feelings about circumcision in western society? Check your facts.. circumcision was practiced wholesale in the 20th century only in Britain and the US. In recent years it is in the minority in Britain again (less than 20% of newborn boys in the UK are circumcised), and in the US it is done in decreasing numbers (about 60% as compared to 90% in the 1970s). The traditional feelings about circumcision in western society (meaning Western Europe) are that it is something the ancient Egyptians, modern Jews and modern Muslims do and not something that should be done by everyone.
UNIX? They're probably not even circumcised! Savages!
You have to realize that a lot of Europeans read/. Most of them are not circumcised. Therefore, you just called most of the Europeans that read/. a bunch of savages. Your sig, while it is really probably trying to be funny and cute by punning UNIX and EUNUCHS, is actually just betraying a lot of ignorance about the rest of the world outside the USA. And, while I think it's cute to see Americans being ignorant about anything outside of America.. it really is getting kind of played out, doncha think?
If you want a formal definition to make the argument more concrete, say that a computer must meet the requirements of a Turing machine, i.e. it must have:
- a set of states, including an input state - an alphabet - an input alphabet (subset of the alphabet above) - a set of state transitions
What you are describing is a Discrete Finite State Automaton. That is not quite a turing machine. A turing machine also has:
- a memory tape for saving/retreiving state information that is later to be processed by aforementioned state transition scheme.
Everyone in the software industry realizes Microsoft is this big 800 lb gorilla. They have such power over the personal computer market. They can make or break whole companies or new ideas because of their control over the consumer PC experience. I am so glad that they are getting smacked around a bit in Europe, because really their control over such a huge market is anti-capitalistic and harmful to the market. Monopolies rarely serve entities in the market other than the monopolist. It's good to see the Europeans understand this and are actually doing something about it.
I presume you mean this should be done to somehow defend Linux. However, Linux is a trademark of Linus Torvalds, and the code is owned by the people that wrote it. Having a UNIX timeline contain annotations on who owned what when has nothing to do with Linux -- really.
You can't prevent some crazy FUD company like SCO suing using baseless claims with such a timeline.
Basically, I am not sure how the existance of this timeline does anything to prevent SCO II: The Wrath of McBride, or SCO III: The Search for a Clue...
Perhaps, but I sure as hell would not be targeting unarmed civilians. As far as I'm concerned the Palestinians lost any and all moral high ground when they started going after bus stations and Olympic athletes and the like. People like that don't deserve freedom.
Then using your logic, Israel doesn't deserve freedom either. They have targeted innocent civilians too, and in a more brutal manner, some would argue.
Also, using your logic, many other people that now are free don't deserve their freedom. The Irish, for example, also targeted innocent civilians. Would anyone argue that "such people (the Irish) don't deserve to be free"? Some people believe that ALL people (except maybe for criminals in jail) deserve to be free. It's one of those things..
But back to Israel -- it has definitely killed civilians.. and LOTS and LOTS of them. There are like 50 UN resolutions condemning everything Israel has done from refusing to leave occupied territory to maiming and killing innocent villagers in raids and bombings.
Yeah!! What the hell?!?! Now I fear the Israelophiles will reply with arguments about stopping Terror (or, as Bush says, "tearr"), and about how Israel is the only democracy in the middle-east, blah blah blah blah. How it is our 'friend' (bombing of USS Liberty anyone?), blah blah blah.
Honestly why do we give so much money to Israel? Can anyone explain this to me? Why is US press coverage so clearly pro-Israeli and one-sided, rather than being fairer? Why is the entire United States brianwashed daily with anti-muslim propaganda?
It all makes me sick. Plus, if you go around saying this stuff in New York, you get labeled an anti-semite. Which is worse than being a Commie back in the 50's...
Well, you can setup a timer event to interrupt the CPU, and then the timer expires your ISR can kick of the scheduler to do a task switch, but no, you cannot really preload all those values so that the CPU does the task switch faster..:(
Slashdot Mirror
It isn't enough that this morning I got into my car, was about to put the key into the ignition when I noticed the funny smell. I looked down on the floor under the dash and saw a nice green puddle. A familiar sight, to be sure.
In the 10 years that I have been driving crappy cars I have experienced the puddle of lovely green disappointment twice. And no, I am not broke -- I can afford a new car but when you live in NYC, buying a new car when you are going to park it on the street is insanity.
At any rate -- now I can look forward to the same lovely green surprise from my COMPUTER? No thanks! Computers are getting complicated enough without having a puddle of green liquid-kryptonite potentially spilling all over my desk and carpet, thank-you-very-much.
Liquid cooling systems break down. Hell, for that matter all systems break down eventually. That's what happens with man-made systems. Funny things. Even God-made systems break down, just much slower.
Anyway, my point is that keep it as simple as possible if you want to avoid catastrophe. A little fan, an aluminum heatsink, and a motherboard sensor to tell you when the fan stops a-turnin'. What's so wrong with that? Why do people have to go and make things so complicated? Putting green liquid and water pumps and tubes and the like inside a computer is just an ugly, nonsensical thing to do in my book. You're basically asking for trouble. And as other people pointed out -- as the technology hits mainstream it will only get more crappily made and lead to a higher failure rate.
And for what? A few extra MHz? Before +200 MHz goes and makes that much of a difference in your life, you need to examine all the parts in your computer from the RAM to the motherboard chipset to the freakin' BIOS firmware version before you should think about that +200MHz.
Take an example from engineering/consumer history:
The VW Beetle was a car reknowned for reliability. One of its key features was its extremely simple mechanical design. It also happened to be air-cooled (I am not sure for the motivation for that design choice but I bet it had something to do with simplicity).
Keep is simple, and less things can go wrong.
Amen! MUDs are EVIL!
So are MMORPGs. I quit my job and divorced my wife because of Ultima Online alone!
However I *did* make 5x GM, so it was wayy worth it.. I'll take 5x GM in old skool UO (circa 1998) over sex and money any day!!
Really? How is that improving the situation then? I mean to actually LIVE off the minimum wage salary those horribly grueling jobs pay (And I mean GRUELING -- it's worse than just cleaning toilets as you have to deal with so much crap from customers PLUS clean the toilets at the end of the 8-hour shift anyway), you need to work 40 hours a week. The cost of living in most US States/Cities mandates that.
The poster is trying to work _less_ and have an easier time. I think he could probably get away with it if he were paid his present wage, but scaled down to part time. A Jack-In-The-Box worker has to work 40 hours a week and probably has less than what the poster would be making if he worked only part time at his office job. That's horribly sad for the Jack-In-The-Box people.
So no, I don't think working part-time at Jack-in-the-box is the answer.
I think the answer lies in society changing its paradigm. If employees required more free time as a precondition to employment (a large paradigm shift, granted, but not unthinkable) then employers would be forced to accomodate that need.
Why can't your average office job have multiple people working part-time for the same position? I know there is some overhead and inefficiency associated with such an arrangement, but in the end I argue that people will be _more_ productive during their part time hours (since their morale would be better).
I many cases I don't even think any productivity would be lost.
Also, then maybe people would get to see their kids more and spend more quality time with their family and who knows what the fringe benefits of that are for society in general?
We should do like the Europeans and figure out how to work less and still have a strong economy..
Well most of the people I know have parents that couldn't afford that. Then again, I come from NYC which has very different demographics and economics than, say, Bumblefuck, Iowa for instance. (There are fewer property-owners in NYC and most of us are forced to throw our money away on rent, etc.)
Anyway, you are nitpicking at a particular point.
Ok, so let's say your parents magically pay for your college education. Let's say they "planned ahead" as you argue every responsible citizen should.
How did they do this? One of two ways: either they scrimped and saved by working 20+ years to finance their children's upbringing plus put enough aside to pay for college *or* they are getting bank loans (my mortgaging their house, etc).
In the end, it doesn't matter who is paying for whom. If you have the burden of paying for your own education or for your children's education -- you still are pretty much forced into debt (and as a conequence: many long grueling unforgiving years of labor) if you hope to meet the minimal requirements for not being impoverished in this economic system.
As a side-note most parents didn't sufficiently plan ahead (most people didn't expect the costs of college to skyrocket as they have in the past 20 years) and usually children *are* forced into some form of debt in the vast majority of cases.
"Of course, whining is much easier than studying the game theory that explains all this..."
Heh.. this wouldn't be slashdot without your pedantic comment at the end.
I don't see how game theory relates to this at all. Maybe it does, but the game theory I remember from my undergrad had nothing to do with the sociolo-economics involved in why the human species generally is better off in a hierarchical power system rather than in some other structure or non-structure.
Anyway, you do make a good point about everyone in society benefitting from proper organization.
Actually my ancestors come from a country in Eastern Europe that lacks the proper social order of the "Developed World" and is suffering even to this day for it. And it isn't even an anarchy -- just a poorly organized capitalist democracy.
A lot can be said for proper organization I suppose -- even if it does lead to tedium and boredom at times.
I guess you have to choose between the lesser of two evils: boredom or struggle. Most people choose boredom.
If you are really into struggling -- you can either move to the mountains, as you suggest or you can try your hand at fighting your way to the top, I suppose..
Either way I guess it's better than living in the caves like the Neanderthals -- as at least we ostensibly have a choice.
That's pretty funny man. I love any punts involving the C-word.
Reminds me of the Curb Your Enthusiasm episode "Beloved Aunt" where there's a typo in the obituary and she is a "Beloved C--t".
Such simple obvious humor but it's hilarious!!
LOL. Perhaps you are right -- I slipped through the cracks and managed to miss a large part of the propaganda that "they" have designed for me. :)
I whole-heartedly agree with you!
Most of us are forced into a binary scenario of either working a 40+ hour week or not having a job at all. How many of us wouldn't choose to work part-time if we could convince our employers to let us do that? Even if it meant half the pay?
When you have more free time you definitely don't feel a need to spend so much of your money on useless crap.
Just who is this full week serving? Whose needs?
I don't think we were born to do this -- to work 40 years for 40 hours per week getting 2-4 weeks per year of time to ourselves. It's insanity! It feels like a prison-sentence really!!
Even if one gets to the top of their profession, it still gets really boring after a while.
Our minds are too interesting for this type of mundanity. I would like to believe that our spirits are more beautiful than that -- that we aren't just some lowly cogs designed to perform one specific and uninteresting task or series of tasks each day.
It's chillingly sad if I am wrong.
However, this is the trend in society. Our economic system is going towards greater and greater division of labor -- so look to jobs getting more and more mundane as technology advances and as populations grow.
This immortality thing will only compound the problem, I think.
You know, I used to see things the way you do -- I really believed that we are the ones to blame for our own misery when it comes to working insane hours and getting very little time to ourselves. I really believed that we have to work so much (especially here in the US) because of our own greed -- essentially that we are to blame if we feel we work too much or too hard. It's our fault for being greedy bastards that want to buy all this cool stuff.
I have come to the opposite conclusion. The system really is designed to get you hooked in to a lifetime of unrewarding labor, and you really have minimal say in the matter.
Here's how it goes for most people born into the lower classes:
Age 0-18 - free education provided by the government where you are indoctrinated in various ways to tolerate long hours of tedium and monotony to better prepare you for whatever path of indentured servitude should you choose later in life. You are taught a bare minimum of real academic skills so as to make attending a university almost compulsory for all but the most menial of jobs. Additionally, the 'schoolwork' assigned to you is pointless, mundane, and at best only prepares you for the boring tasks you will be almost capriciously assigned later in life by your corporate masters.
Age 18 - Choose to either work for minimal pay as some form of "blue-collar" worker without a college education, or you can choose to attend college after which hopefully you will find a slightly less tedious job for better pay.
Age 18-22 - Become indebted to various banking conglomerates in order to pay for your college education. The debt is so large that it will take 10-20 years to pay off for most people.
Age 22+ - Graduate from college with a degree. At this point you are minimally competent to contribute labor and hopefully generate wealth for some corporation. Note that at this point you are tens of thousands of dollars in debt and you have little choice but to find work as quickly as possible. Spurred on by this form of motivation -- you accept your fate and begin to adapt to a life wasted in an office sitting at a desk solving minute and inconsequential problems so as to better lubricate the large corporate machine that you are but a cog in.
Profit-oriented capitalism basically guarantees that the majority of people work really hard to ensure profits for the corporation, which is owned by a few lucky individuals. Those profits are by and large created by the labor of the individuals at the bottom of the corporate hierarchy. Yet they see little or no part in the profits.
The few grow rich exploiting the labor of the many.
It's a story as old as time itself. Whether you be a Roman putting the conquered to work for you, or a feudal lord demanding labor of your peasants in exchange for the priviledge of using the land -- mankind has a real love for organizing itself into a hierarchy where a few lucky people are extravagently wealthy at the expense of the many.
If anyone can tell me why we like to organize ourselves in such a way I would be really grateful as this question has gone unanswered for me for quite some time now..
I completely agree with this quote:
Actually.. if you take this point of view truly seriously, it becomes obvious that many laws that protect corporations and eliminate competition can be viewed as legalized scams. I strongly believe this but convincing people in a culture where so many people are dependent on their 'corporate masters' (to use a cliche) is very difficult. So many of us are either involved in the scam or strive to be (eg we are in college and would really like to be employed by a scammer) that convincing people that software patents and much of copyright law is a scam is really rather like convincing a person that his wife is a whore, or his brother is a liar, or that his country sucks or that his family is retarded. It is difficult for a person to accept negative truths about something they are emotionally involved with.
People make excuses for those close to them or those things on which they depend.
The cognitive dissonance is too much for some people and they choose to look the other way...
However, if one can be impartial -- copyrights and patents on software are legalized scams. Any arguments that they 'benefit society' in some way are just regurgitations of the scammer's lie.
If you think I am too extreme in my views, perhaps I am. Perhaps you are right and I am wrong. However consider at least the question of whether we give the scammers too much power over the marketplace and whether we unnecessarily protect already-successful companies that have long since stopped actively contributing to the benefit of the market or the economy in general (I am thinking in particular of giants in the music industry or giants in the software industry that try and patent software techniques, etc).
Oh yeah it's populace.. you are right. Populus is latin but populace is English with just about the same meaning. Populous is a game and also an adjective.
Damn homonyms indeed!!
I believe the word you are looking for is the noun "people" as in "American people" not the adjective "populous", which means "densely populated".
Populous is an adjective -- from m-w.com which has no listing for populous (noun) but only one for populous (adjective):
"Populus" is another word altogether (no "ou") and it is a latin word meaning "the people". Sometimes that word is used in English, but "populous" strictly is an adjective.
I'm going to ask you to forget you ever thought about this. You have a point - even if it is a bit trollish - but the more you put these ideas out there the more suits will use them. Think a suit doesn't have somebody watching the "new" or "the web" for him to spot technology and legal changes?
/. I don't think I'm doing anyone any harm, as I guarantee you this was though of already as soon as libyahoo 0.0001 came out.
Well I disagree. First off, I don't think that the 'suits' that are paid to think about how to ruin our lives haven't already thought of this. I don't think that by censoring my thinking I am doing anyone any good. By asking the question that I did, I think that will eventually reveal that in fact Yahoo! doesn't really want to kill the 3rd party clients -- at least not yet. I think that if they really wanted to, they would have been more aggressive about it already. And believe me, by my posting that question here on
I think that in actuality they prefer for the time being that as many people as possible use their Y!IM network. Maybe sometime later in the future when they are a monopoly (if that ever happens) they will then proceed to kick the ass of every 3rd party client.. but until then, they secretly believe 'the more the merrier'.
That's the cool thing about having so many competing systems. And that's the problem with something like Microsoft where they managed to kill off all their competition. They become dicks and stop doing a good job as soon as that happens.
Well, does anyone know if this is just a protocol upgrade or if yahoo! is really trying to get rid of the third party clients?
If they want to get rid of 3rd party clients, then this is just another arms race, meaning we will eventually have open clients that work, after some finite delay.
In all honesty I can't blame yahoo! for trying. After all, for each person that doesn't see the ads associated with their official client, they lose revenue.
Yahoo! is a great site and they provide a LOT of stuff for free, so I don't blame them for trying to get some money back for all the free stuff they have given us over the years. I guess since IMing is so popular and so much time is spent in the IM client, to them that's a LOT of missing eyeballs over a long period of time that don't get to see the ads. That's a lot of money lost by the minute. And let's face it.. we are using their computers for free, and not giving anything back each time we use a third party client.
My question though, is that if they hate third party IM clients for cutting into their rev. stream, why don't they take the law out of their own hands and use the law to their advantage? Is there nothing that could be done, by drafting some clever EULA or something, that would make it illegal or something like that to use 3rd party clients? That might actually dampen the efforts with libyahoo and other projects that try to develop an open protocol lib. Sourceforge might even cease to host such projects, being that they are in the realm of piracy or accorting to the DMCA.
While it would suck for me (as I love to use centericq over their stupid client), why don't they just make it illegal to use third party clients?
A hardware firewall? Last I checked all the important work that firewalls do is implemented in software running on the router.
A HARDWARE firewall? Do such things exist? And no.. don't tell me about the one that NVIDIA makes that claims to be hardware-accelerated, as that's all hype. It's actually just a software firewall. All firewalls are software firewalls. It just may happen that the software might be running on a dedicated system (like a Cisco Router) which does nothing but act like a firewall.
What are historical feelings about circumcision in western society? Check your facts.. circumcision was practiced wholesale in the 20th century only in Britain and the US. In recent years it is in the minority in Britain again (less than 20% of newborn boys in the UK are circumcised), and in the US it is done in decreasing numbers (about 60% as compared to 90% in the 1970s). The traditional feelings about circumcision in western society (meaning Western Europe) are that it is something the ancient Egyptians, modern Jews and modern Muslims do and not something that should be done by everyone.
Check your facts.
UNIX? They're probably not even circumcised! Savages!
/. Most of them are not circumcised. Therefore, you just called most of the Europeans that read /. a bunch of savages. Your sig, while it is really probably trying to be funny and cute by punning UNIX and EUNUCHS, is actually just betraying a lot of ignorance about the rest of the world outside the USA. And, while I think it's cute to see Americans being ignorant about anything outside of America.. it really is getting kind of played out, doncha think?
You have to realize that a lot of Europeans read
What you are describing is a Discrete Finite State Automaton. That is not quite a turing machine. A turing machine also has:
- a memory tape for saving/retreiving state information that is later to be processed by aforementioned state transition scheme.
Everyone in the software industry realizes Microsoft is this big 800 lb gorilla. They have such power over the personal computer market. They can make or break whole companies or new ideas because of their control over the consumer PC experience. I am so glad that they are getting smacked around a bit in Europe, because really their control over such a huge market is anti-capitalistic and harmful to the market. Monopolies rarely serve entities in the market other than the monopolist. It's good to see the Europeans understand this and are actually doing something about it.
I presume you mean this should be done to somehow defend Linux. However, Linux is a trademark of Linus Torvalds, and the code is owned by the people that wrote it. Having a UNIX timeline contain annotations on who owned what when has nothing to do with Linux -- really.
You can't prevent some crazy FUD company like SCO suing using baseless claims with such a timeline.
Basically, I am not sure how the existance of this timeline does anything to prevent SCO II: The Wrath of McBride, or SCO III: The Search for a Clue...
It's not possible to negotiate with Islam. No amount of diplomacy will placate them.
You are an idiot.
Then using your logic, Israel doesn't deserve freedom either. They have targeted innocent civilians too, and in a more brutal manner, some would argue.
Also, using your logic, many other people that now are free don't deserve their freedom. The Irish, for example, also targeted innocent civilians. Would anyone argue that "such people (the Irish) don't deserve to be free"? Some people believe that ALL people (except maybe for criminals in jail) deserve to be free. It's one of those things..
But back to Israel -- it has definitely killed civilians.. and LOTS and LOTS of them. There are like 50 UN resolutions condemning everything Israel has done from refusing to leave occupied territory to maiming and killing innocent villagers in raids and bombings.
Wake up and smell the rotting corpses, Guppy.
Yeah!! What the hell?!?! Now I fear the Israelophiles will reply with arguments about stopping Terror (or, as Bush says, "tearr"), and about how Israel is the only democracy in the middle-east, blah blah blah blah. How it is our 'friend' (bombing of USS Liberty anyone?), blah blah blah.
Honestly why do we give so much money to Israel? Can anyone explain this to me? Why is US press coverage so clearly pro-Israeli and one-sided, rather than being fairer? Why is the entire United States brianwashed daily with anti-muslim propaganda?
It all makes me sick. Plus, if you go around saying this stuff in New York, you get labeled an anti-semite. Which is worse than being a Commie back in the 50's...
So what do we do about it? Sounds like a great opportunity to get rich revolutionizing the music tech industry!!
Well, you can setup a timer event to interrupt the CPU, and then the timer expires your ISR can kick of the scheduler to do a task switch, but no, you cannot really preload all those values so that the CPU does the task switch faster.. :(