No, the US has *not* always been like any other system of government. The fact that we're on Slashdot having this damn discussion proves it. No, we're not perfect in the US -- there are bits of tyranny lurking around, but to say that we're the same as the Chinese or the Cubans or the Soviets or Mugabe's Zimbabwe? Ludicrous; the fact that you think that the US is just as tyrannical as these real tyrannies says something pretty sad.
How are people who charge interest on loans rent-seekers?
Alice has some money, which someone gave her in exchange for doing something for them. Alice doesn't want to buy anything right now.
Bob doesn't have any money, but he's been offered a job that he needs a car to get to, so he wants a car.
Charlie goes to Alice and says "Hey, Alice... if you give me your money, I'll give it back to you later, plus 5% extra." Alice would prefer this, so she accepts.
Then Charlie goes to Bob and says "Hey, Bob... I've got some money. I see that you want to buy a car now, but if you had one you could pay for it in a few years. How about I loan you the money now, and you pay me back later, plus 6% extra?" This would make Bob happy, so he accepts.
Charlie, meanwhile, pockets the 1% difference; if he didn't get to do this, it wouldn't be worth his time to track down enough Alices and Bobs to make the whole thing work, plus make sure all the Bobs pay him back like they promised, plus keep up with all the accounting.
All three of these people are benefiting from this arrangement. Who's a lazy rent-seeker?
("coerced" is probably too strong a term -- everyone in the research group uses Macs, so it was more peer pressure.:P)
Still, I don't see how folks are productive with them. I see people holding the "left" arrow key for five seconds in the terminal to scroll to the beginning of the line since Apple doesn't believe in the "home" key, highlighting things and then doing "command-click, choose copy from menu, command-click, choose paste from menu" instead of having proper middle-click-to-paste support, and other such things that seem a great deal harder than on Linux.
Then there's the fact that Apple seems to have merged the concepts of "show me the programs that are on this computer and let me launch them" with "show me the windows that are open and let me switch to them", with the result that figuring out which of 8 terminals is the one I want is more involved than it needs to be. I'm not sure why it does this; is the differentiation between the actions "switch to my Firefox window" and "launch Firefox" really too complicated for the average user?
Really? I'm the other way; I'm a scientist, and my boss coerced me into using OSX. I hated it so much that he finally relented and let me use a Mint desktop. I wanted to use Mint because I had work to do, after all.
Apple has avoided the Ubuntu trap of attempting to cram phone, tablet, and desktop into a single OS which thus becomes crap, and has instead written independent crap for each.
I have occasionally said only partially in jest that the best thing that could happen to Washington DC would be for the British to come back and finish the job they started in 1814.
They also don't have CUDA. Some people in my field have considered doing high performance computing on Radeons and generally stick with the thing that's easier to code for.
I work with high-performance computing in physics -- all of my peers know the difference between energy and power. Sometimes people use "flops" as an abbreviation for "floating point operations" ("It takes XYZ flops per site to compute the Wilson Dirac operator" or "The flops/bytes ratio describes the balance between processing and communication in the algorithm") without the "per second".
That's exactly the problem with Apple -- it's their platform and their device. On a real open software platform (including Windows), they could just... sell their software directly to folks who own devices. But Apple won't let you do that, since if you buy an iThing, it doesn't belong to you; it's still Apple's.
Fuck that model -- if I pay for a computer it's mine, and how I get software on it is nobody's business but mine.
Do that, causing a backup in the security line... then send a suicide bomber with a wheelie-suitcase full of explosives, shrapnel, and warfarin powder into the line. Cue giant bloody mess with many, many dead people.
So, if you read the WaPo story, it mentions that the defendant is from Fairfax and the contractor/plaintiff is from DC itself. Fairfax, for those who don't know, is in the Northern Virginia area agglomeration of "cities" along I-66 where people who work in the District and don't want to deal with the clusterfuck that is DC live. (Then they only have to deal with the clusterfuck that is commuting to DC, but they can at least live in jurisdictions with saner laws and have decent schools to send their kids to.)
I have lived in DC for a year, and a relative has lived here for many years. She recently wanted to have some work done on her house, and caught the contractor shooting speedballs (heroin/cocaine) in her bathroom, then running up and down the stairs and onto the roof while under the effects. This didn't surprise me, really, at all; given how much of *that* goes on, I don't doubt the allegations are true.
This town is a shithole, and it's a shithole full of people who will sue anyone at the drop of a hat for anything, or really take any opportunity to get ahead at someone else's expense, fair or not. "Slit Grandma's throat for a nickel" isn't just an exaggeration around here. The phone books have a "You could sue a doctor and make a pile of money! Call us!" ads on the spine; there are ambulance-chaser billboards all over; etc.
The argument is that people should protect their password hashes better, to prevent someone from getting them and shipping them off to Curiosity to be cracked with a pile of Tesla boards or Martian quantum computers or whatever.
I'm aware of the demographics, believe me. I live here. That's exactly the point: whether a place is safe or not has very little to do with gun laws and a lot to do with these other factors. If you banned guns in Tucson, the streets would still be pretty safe. If you legalized guns in Washington, the streets would still be quite dangerous. It's the people, not the laws.
Slashdot Mirror
No, the US has *not* always been like any other system of government. The fact that we're on Slashdot having this damn discussion proves it. No, we're not perfect in the US -- there are bits of tyranny lurking around, but to say that we're the same as the Chinese or the Cubans or the Soviets or Mugabe's Zimbabwe? Ludicrous; the fact that you think that the US is just as tyrannical as these real tyrannies says something pretty sad.
How are people who charge interest on loans rent-seekers?
Alice has some money, which someone gave her in exchange for doing something for them. Alice doesn't want to buy anything right now.
Bob doesn't have any money, but he's been offered a job that he needs a car to get to, so he wants a car.
Charlie goes to Alice and says "Hey, Alice ... if you give me your money, I'll give it back to you later, plus 5% extra." Alice would prefer this, so she accepts.
Then Charlie goes to Bob and says "Hey, Bob ... I've got some money. I see that you want to buy a car now, but if you had one you could pay for it in a few years. How about I loan you the money now, and you pay me back later, plus 6% extra?" This would make Bob happy, so he accepts.
Charlie, meanwhile, pockets the 1% difference; if he didn't get to do this, it wouldn't be worth his time to track down enough Alices and Bobs to make the whole thing work, plus make sure all the Bobs pay him back like they promised, plus keep up with all the accounting.
All three of these people are benefiting from this arrangement. Who's a lazy rent-seeker?
I can innovate by putting barbecue sauce on peach ice cream. Doesn't mean it's a good idea.
KDE seems pretty straightforward. Other than performance/bloat concerns, what's wrong with KDE? It's a pretty ordinary GUI that works pretty well.
("coerced" is probably too strong a term -- everyone in the research group uses Macs, so it was more peer pressure. :P)
Still, I don't see how folks are productive with them. I see people holding the "left" arrow key for five seconds in the terminal to scroll to the beginning of the line since Apple doesn't believe in the "home" key, highlighting things and then doing "command-click, choose copy from menu, command-click, choose paste from menu" instead of having proper middle-click-to-paste support, and other such things that seem a great deal harder than on Linux.
Then there's the fact that Apple seems to have merged the concepts of "show me the programs that are on this computer and let me launch them" with "show me the windows that are open and let me switch to them", with the result that figuring out which of 8 terminals is the one I want is more involved than it needs to be. I'm not sure why it does this; is the differentiation between the actions "switch to my Firefox window" and "launch Firefox" really too complicated for the average user?
Really? I'm the other way; I'm a scientist, and my boss coerced me into using OSX. I hated it so much that he finally relented and let me use a Mint desktop. I wanted to use Mint because I had work to do, after all.
Apple has avoided the Ubuntu trap of attempting to cram phone, tablet, and desktop into a single OS which thus becomes crap, and has instead written independent crap for each.
The US has, in general, done a better job of protecting freedom of speech than the EU.
Just sayin'.
I have occasionally said only partially in jest that the best thing that could happen to Washington DC would be for the British to come back and finish the job they started in 1814.
They also don't have CUDA. Some people in my field have considered doing high performance computing on Radeons and generally stick with the thing that's easier to code for.
Out of curiosity (and I ask because I genuinely don't know), how many flops/watt do modern smartphones do? What about the GPU coprocessors in them?
Modern GPU's are great, but they're not even optimized that strongly for power consumption.
I work with high-performance computing in physics -- all of my peers know the difference between energy and power. Sometimes people use "flops" as an abbreviation for "floating point operations" ("It takes XYZ flops per site to compute the Wilson Dirac operator" or "The flops/bytes ratio describes the balance between processing and communication in the algorithm") without the "per second".
You can, in principle, make and sell a locked-down Linux machine. Nobody does, but you could, and that's not Linux's fault.
You can probably buy locked-down Android phones. You don't *have* to.
He's not sending mail from the open proxies. He's sending mail telling people where the open proxies ARE.
I reviewed a paper for Physical Review D a bit ago and got paid nothing.
This, exactly. The Google Play store is a service Google provides to developers. It's not a straitjacket.
That's exactly the problem with Apple -- it's their platform and their device. On a real open software platform (including Windows), they could just ... sell their software directly to folks who own devices. But Apple won't let you do that, since if you buy an iThing, it doesn't belong to you; it's still Apple's.
Fuck that model -- if I pay for a computer it's mine, and how I get software on it is nobody's business but mine.
Do that, causing a backup in the security line ... then send a suicide bomber with a wheelie-suitcase full of explosives, shrapnel, and warfarin powder into the line. Cue giant bloody mess with many, many dead people.
So you mean that someone can plant a bag of fertilizer somewhere by a road and waste vast amounts of the US military's time searching for the bomb?
Sounds like a great way to bleed us dry!
So, if you read the WaPo story, it mentions that the defendant is from Fairfax and the contractor/plaintiff is from DC itself. Fairfax, for those who don't know, is in the Northern Virginia area agglomeration of "cities" along I-66 where people who work in the District and don't want to deal with the clusterfuck that is DC live. (Then they only have to deal with the clusterfuck that is commuting to DC, but they can at least live in jurisdictions with saner laws and have decent schools to send their kids to.)
I have lived in DC for a year, and a relative has lived here for many years. She recently wanted to have some work done on her house, and caught the contractor shooting speedballs (heroin/cocaine) in her bathroom, then running up and down the stairs and onto the roof while under the effects. This didn't surprise me, really, at all; given how much of *that* goes on, I don't doubt the allegations are true.
This town is a shithole, and it's a shithole full of people who will sue anyone at the drop of a hat for anything, or really take any opportunity to get ahead at someone else's expense, fair or not. "Slit Grandma's throat for a nickel" isn't just an exaggeration around here. The phone books have a "You could sue a doctor and make a pile of money! Call us!" ads on the spine; there are ambulance-chaser billboards all over; etc.
Hence battery horse correct staple, as xkcd pointed out: longer-than-14-character passwords with low entropy per character do pretty well.
The argument is that people should protect their password hashes better, to prevent someone from getting them and shipping them off to Curiosity to be cracked with a pile of Tesla boards or Martian quantum computers or whatever.
Aren't a lot of Israelis brown people too? Not all Jews are European...
My nuts? What about my nuts?
Fucking AC's these days can't even sort out they're pronouns.
You're such a troll, but I'll bite.
I'm aware of the demographics, believe me. I live here. That's exactly the point: whether a place is safe or not has very little to do with gun laws and a lot to do with these other factors. If you banned guns in Tucson, the streets would still be pretty safe. If you legalized guns in Washington, the streets would still be quite dangerous. It's the people, not the laws.
And I don't work with cyclotrons, so try again.