The U.S. government has no money. In the entire history of the world, it is the entity most deeply in debt.
I've discovered that U.S. citizens do not want to believe that their government is corrupt. When they are presented with evidence of corruption, most avoid awareness.
When an individual runs out of money, is buried deep in debts that they cannot realistically repay, they are forced into bankruptcy (or prison, in nations that don't allow bankruptcy). What I'd like to know is: what happens when a country is buried in debts they cannot repay ? Is there a collections agency that deals with insolvable nations ?
According to the CIA, the U.S. government's external debt currently stands at almost 14 trillion dollars, or roughly $42000 per capita. That means every single U.S. citizen would have to cough up $42000 right now, to clear the debt - every single citizens, which includes children, elderly, unemployed, infirm, prison population etc. That's on top of your own living costs. Not gonna happen!
All these "stimulus packages" and grants only serve to artificially increase the GDP, which is a largely useless metric anyway since it does not distinguish between income and expense. It makes the country look good on paper, to all those pseudo-religious stock market suckers who are easily impressed by large meaningless numbers. In the end, the only thing these grants accomplish is to allow the government and banks to shave a little more off of each transaction, "creating jobs" and making the debt problem worse for everyone. Inflation will continue to rise.
If you like to shop at "Crooks'r'us" and you're getting Cheesy Poofs at $5.99, a dollar off the usual price of $6.99, do you consider that a better deal than buying the same product elsewhere for $4.99 regular price ?
The concept of "savings" is a relative metric. Upgrading from 17mpg to 19mpg may result in greater relative savings of fuel, but that doesn't mean upgrading from a 25mpg to a 28mpg is somehow less valuable. I think the previous poster had the right idea, in the latter case you're getting 3 extra miles out of every gallon, which is what consumers care most about.
Saving 0.62gal vs 0.43gal is a misleading comparison, because the former still burns more fuel than the latter. If you care about your money and your planet, you'll pick the highest-mpg vehicle that suits your need.
"Stay a while, and listen, eh?" "War. War never changes, eh?" "You are in a maze of twisty passages, all alike, eh?" "Look behind you! A three-headed monkey, eh?"
Why the hispanics ? It's always about them. I, for one, am alarmed at the distinct lack of Canadian NPCs in video games. Everyone has an american accent, they never wear tuques and the only things you meet in a snowstorm are giant alien worms and japanese scientists.
The reason why these "groups" are underrepresented is simple: there aren't as many of us Canadians (nor you loud hispanics) making the damned games. Do you complain at the distinct lack of hispanic actors in Korean indie films too ? Do you want some benevolent soul to splice random out-of-place content into every production you're not alerady a part of ?
Of all the things in the world that need rigorous scientific attention, this ain't one of them.
Money is not a substitute for respect. Money might buy you fancy cars and mail-order brides but it can't repair the daily ego damage of dealing with ungrateful users. There is also a non-negligible group of people for whom money is not a motivator. We're not starving, in fact most sysadmins could get higher paying jobs elsewhere with less stress, as many do after years of abuse. I've seen countless techies retrain into the plumbing or electrical fields. Same skill set, same or better money, less bullshit.
How would you like it if every single one of your clients blamed their every problem on you while yelling obscenities, claiming they are the most important person you'll ever meet and criticizing your supposed lack of intellect to everyone within earshot or email ? Repeat this for 6 to 12 hours a day, then throw in a few conference calls each week, where multiple users and their bosses tag-team you with the same selfish hysteric drivel. Then once a month or so, have someone's secretary shove or slap you in frustration, because she "needs" to print that email in the next 2 minutes even though it's been sitting in her inbox since last tuesday, and she thinks physical bullying will make the problem go away faster.
All this bullshit so you can perform in your completely useless jobs and collect your completely undeserved pay, and yet you can't even spare the breath to say "Thank you, mr computer guy"... A tiny gesture that can almost make up for the verbal abuse and the headaches you give us every single goddamned day. Do you yell at your doctor / lawyer / accountant / secretary ? Why not ? Why us and not them ? Why do we have to take your shit, just because we happen to be technology workers ?
A simple "Thank you" to defuse a ticking time bomb, and still you complain.
The code has been "sanitized", meaning some details were deliberately changed to prevent people from blindy replicating the hack, otherwise every geek would quit their job and start selling hacked parking passes on street corners.
So now instead of collecting coins, they collect transaction logs on a PDA. That didn't save money.
If SF's municipal bureaucracy is anything like my city, nobody ever loses jobs, they just get less work to do. Public service unions are the dirtiest bastards IMO.
Throwaway hardware is indeed a plague on the PC industry. In reality, decent (low-end) parts can be acquired for the same price as the junk stuff, or maybe a 10-15% premium.
I'm no Dell or HP, but I've built far too many "luxury" budget PCs in the $400-450 range. By luxury I mean they're noiseless, stylish and 24/7 reliable. It's just a matter of spending a little time researching your components. Our office machines cost me $600, for a much faster CPU and triple-head video. $700 gets you a quad.
The big box vendors have fallen behind the times with their Celerons and Foxconn boards and Astec power supplies. They have to cut corners, yet their high volumes constrain them to a handful of manufacturers that can keep up, so quality suffers. It's also damn hard to sell one computer design to millions of people, make it customizable and have it work perfectly for all of them. They're not going to review the entire build for every single order, like a small guy would.
Even though people die either way, the attitude in a war is "us vs them", and a victory is clumsily defined as "they lost more men than we did".
In contrast, the practice of *ahem* recycling your own unproductive citizens is not so easily quantifiable, because you have no "them" statistic to measure up against. What's a successful campaign ? How many people must be reaped to ensure a positive impact on the remainder ?
There's also the issue of proximity: What if you have to send someone you know to the blender ? When you're dropping bombs over some foreign country, chances are you don't know any of them and don't really care what happens (as a war-mongering sociopath, that is). How will the system break when it is discovered that the Bush twins are selected for harvesting ? Politicians don't care about Farik Al-Something Something, they care about Jim Bob's vote and the tax dollar.
You're making the assumption that the people reading this are actual or potential customers. I've got no hard data, but given the quality, performance and reliability of McAfee's products, I'd venture a guess that no sane Slashdotter would dare use their software unless forced upon by some corporate idiocracy responsible for his/her paycheque.
I remember the good old days, when all of McAfee's commercial (paid) releases were available from their own FTP server, simply by logging in as "anonymous". No registration/serial required. What a fine bunch of tools... the company I mean, not the software.
That is awesome, and yet the/. of 2009 is so full of jealous pseudo-intellectuals that yours and most other insightful posts will likely be downmodded.
One tangent is that an accident most often involves two or more vehicles. I'll posit a guess that in many cases, only one of those vehicles was operated by a "rude" driver. Is it the rude driver's fault, or is it the meek one's fault ? Is the guilt shared ? Is it a non-guilty consequence arising from the difference in driving style/speed/expectation ?
The autobahn teaches us that it is not the speed that matters, it's the speed difference. If everyone's driving 200kph in the left lane, they all get to where they're going and nobody gets hurt. If one guy cuts in at 100kph, he will screw up the flow and likely kill a dozen speeders. Is it the speeders' fault ? They were just fine before granny came along.
Except Windows apps from today still run on a 10-year old Windows 2000 machine, for the most part.
Mac apps are, like their makers, excessively trendy so whenever a new OS X build is released, the great majority of developers "embrace" the new features and it seems very few are committed to backward compatibility. This much is true of both big-name vendors and homebrew/shareware authors ("Free" isn't so big yet in that sphere).
Good luck pulling Roberta and Ken Williams out of retirement. The "new" Sierra is just another whored-out name for Vivendi/Universal, just like Atari is a gimp name for Infogrames' shittier releases.
digital was up 50% while physical dropped 10%, but concert ticket sales grew by 13%
Isn't this exactly what the entire geek community has been saying for over a decade ? We don't give a fuck about the shiny discs, we give a fuck about the music and the artist.
Ideally there should be another choice: 3) send the dumb ones back to school.
We all know that is not going to happen because:
1. they don't wanna go to school in the first place 2. the educational system in its current state is not economically viable for these people (nor the society actually footing the bill) 3. like any parasite, they will get together and lobby for free handouts while opposing progress, like they have always done (churches, exclusive communities, 3rd world expats)
The fact of that matter is that at some point in the not-so-distant future, there will be some hard sacrifices to be made if we want to improve the quality of life on our little blue planet. The problem is no one wants to "play god" because of the unpredictable consequences of sending a large number of arbitrarily selected people to an early grave. Humans are selfish by nature and we are not willing to sacrifice our own well-being for that of another.
How is any law required for FOSS to exist ? You just need to publish your damned code on the internet and "TADA, it's free!"
Enforcing the GPL hasn't really been a very successful venture anyway. We whine and moan at transgressors, and sometimes they feel guilty and do the right thing, but in practice we're very much beholden to the honor system.
Under the Pirate Party's proposed legislation, what happens after the 5-year copyright has lapsed ? The works fall into the public domain. That's even better than GPL, that's 100% free do-what-you-want-with-it public domain. For code, that means anyone asking for the code should be able to obtain it for no more than the cost of transmission. Ideally it would be thrown up on something like Sourceforge.net for anyone to pick up and/or fork at their leisure. What's so evil about that ?
IANAL, but I was taken aback by this bit: "subscribers have to go to Karoo's office and sign a form admitting guilt and promising not to do it again".
Isn't that some sort of vicious breach of common law AND copyright law ? I get that this is an ISP and not a court of law, but a false accusation is a false accusation. They're tangling someone else's copyright interests with their own business model. Employers get into big trouble for far less offensive practices.
IMO, the reason why it's unacceptable is because this is a freaking upgrade. The preference is already set to whichever browser the user favors, why should it be reset ? The existing choice should be left alone.
If it's a fresh installation, fine go ahead and toggle it by default, that's a good way to minimize user confusion ("I just installed Thingy 8, where the hell is it?"). If it's an upgrade, just replace those damned files and leave my settings the way they are.
Slashdot Mirror
The U.S. government has no money. In the entire history of the world,
it is the entity most deeply in debt.
I've discovered that U.S. citizens do not want to believe that their
government is corrupt. When they are presented with evidence of corruption,
most avoid awareness.
When an individual runs out of money, is buried deep in debts that they cannot realistically repay, they are forced into bankruptcy (or prison, in nations that don't allow bankruptcy). What I'd like to know is: what happens when a country is buried in debts they cannot repay ? Is there a collections agency that deals with insolvable nations ?
According to the CIA, the U.S. government's external debt currently stands at almost 14 trillion dollars, or roughly $42000 per capita. That means every single U.S. citizen would have to cough up $42000 right now, to clear the debt - every single citizens, which includes children, elderly, unemployed, infirm, prison population etc. That's on top of your own living costs. Not gonna happen!
All these "stimulus packages" and grants only serve to artificially increase the GDP, which is a largely useless metric anyway since it does not distinguish between income and expense. It makes the country look good on paper, to all those pseudo-religious stock market suckers who are easily impressed by large meaningless numbers. In the end, the only thing these grants accomplish is to allow the government and banks to shave a little more off of each transaction, "creating jobs" and making the debt problem worse for everyone. Inflation will continue to rise.
If you like to shop at "Crooks'r'us" and you're getting Cheesy Poofs at $5.99, a dollar off the usual price of $6.99, do you consider that a better deal than buying the same product elsewhere for $4.99 regular price ?
The concept of "savings" is a relative metric. Upgrading from 17mpg to 19mpg may result in greater relative savings of fuel, but that doesn't mean upgrading from a 25mpg to a 28mpg is somehow less valuable. I think the previous poster had the right idea, in the latter case you're getting 3 extra miles out of every gallon, which is what consumers care most about.
Saving 0.62gal vs 0.43gal is a misleading comparison, because the former still burns more fuel than the latter. If you care about your money and your planet, you'll pick the highest-mpg vehicle that suits your need.
That's just a stereotype, eh?
"Stay a while, and listen, eh?"
"War. War never changes, eh?"
"You are in a maze of twisty passages, all alike, eh?"
"Look behind you! A three-headed monkey, eh?"
Why the hispanics ? It's always about them. I, for one, am alarmed at the distinct lack of Canadian NPCs in video games. Everyone has an american accent, they never wear tuques and the only things you meet in a snowstorm are giant alien worms and japanese scientists.
The reason why these "groups" are underrepresented is simple: there aren't as many of us Canadians (nor you loud hispanics) making the damned games. Do you complain at the distinct lack of hispanic actors in Korean indie films too ? Do you want some benevolent soul to splice random out-of-place content into every production you're not alerady a part of ?
Of all the things in the world that need rigorous scientific attention, this ain't one of them.
Money is not a substitute for respect. Money might buy you fancy cars and mail-order brides but it can't repair the daily ego damage of dealing with ungrateful users. There is also a non-negligible group of people for whom money is not a motivator. We're not starving, in fact most sysadmins could get higher paying jobs elsewhere with less stress, as many do after years of abuse. I've seen countless techies retrain into the plumbing or electrical fields. Same skill set, same or better money, less bullshit.
How would you like it if every single one of your clients blamed their every problem on you while yelling obscenities, claiming they are the most important person you'll ever meet and criticizing your supposed lack of intellect to everyone within earshot or email ? Repeat this for 6 to 12 hours a day, then throw in a few conference calls each week, where multiple users and their bosses tag-team you with the same selfish hysteric drivel. Then once a month or so, have someone's secretary shove or slap you in frustration, because she "needs" to print that email in the next 2 minutes even though it's been sitting in her inbox since last tuesday, and she thinks physical bullying will make the problem go away faster.
All this bullshit so you can perform in your completely useless jobs and collect your completely undeserved pay, and yet you can't even spare the breath to say "Thank you, mr computer guy"... A tiny gesture that can almost make up for the verbal abuse and the headaches you give us every single goddamned day. Do you yell at your doctor / lawyer / accountant / secretary ? Why not ? Why us and not them ? Why do we have to take your shit, just because we happen to be technology workers ?
A simple "Thank you" to defuse a ticking time bomb, and still you complain.
The code has been "sanitized", meaning some details were deliberately changed to prevent people from blindy replicating the hack, otherwise every geek would quit their job and start selling hacked parking passes on street corners.
So now instead of collecting coins, they collect transaction logs on a PDA. That didn't save money.
If SF's municipal bureaucracy is anything like my city, nobody ever loses jobs, they just get less work to do. Public service unions are the dirtiest bastards IMO.
Throwaway hardware is indeed a plague on the PC industry. In reality, decent (low-end) parts can be acquired for the same price as the junk stuff, or maybe a 10-15% premium.
I'm no Dell or HP, but I've built far too many "luxury" budget PCs in the $400-450 range. By luxury I mean they're noiseless, stylish and 24/7 reliable. It's just a matter of spending a little time researching your components. Our office machines cost me $600, for a much faster CPU and triple-head video. $700 gets you a quad.
The big box vendors have fallen behind the times with their Celerons and Foxconn boards and Astec power supplies. They have to cut corners, yet their high volumes constrain them to a handful of manufacturers that can keep up, so quality suffers. It's also damn hard to sell one computer design to millions of people, make it customizable and have it work perfectly for all of them. They're not going to review the entire build for every single order, like a small guy would.
Rest in peace, Sierra. I lost all respect after Tribes anyway.
Wars yes, self-genocide no.
Even though people die either way, the attitude in a war is "us vs them", and a victory is clumsily defined as "they lost more men than we did".
In contrast, the practice of *ahem* recycling your own unproductive citizens is not so easily quantifiable, because you have no "them" statistic to measure up against. What's a successful campaign ? How many people must be reaped to ensure a positive impact on the remainder ?
There's also the issue of proximity: What if you have to send someone you know to the blender ? When you're dropping bombs over some foreign country, chances are you don't know any of them and don't really care what happens (as a war-mongering sociopath, that is). How will the system break when it is discovered that the Bush twins are selected for harvesting ? Politicians don't care about Farik Al-Something Something, they care about Jim Bob's vote and the tax dollar.
You're making the assumption that the people reading this are actual or potential customers. I've got no hard data, but given the quality, performance and reliability of McAfee's products, I'd venture a guess that no sane Slashdotter would dare use their software unless forced upon by some corporate idiocracy responsible for his/her paycheque.
I remember the good old days, when all of McAfee's commercial (paid) releases were available from their own FTP server, simply by logging in as "anonymous". No registration/serial required. What a fine bunch of tools... the company I mean, not the software.
Where are my mod points when I need them ? :P
That is awesome, and yet the /. of 2009 is so full of jealous pseudo-intellectuals that yours and most other insightful posts will likely be downmodded.
One tangent is that an accident most often involves two or more vehicles. I'll posit a guess that in many cases, only one of those vehicles was operated by a "rude" driver. Is it the rude driver's fault, or is it the meek one's fault ? Is the guilt shared ? Is it a non-guilty consequence arising from the difference in driving style/speed/expectation ?
The autobahn teaches us that it is not the speed that matters, it's the speed difference. If everyone's driving 200kph in the left lane, they all get to where they're going and nobody gets hurt. If one guy cuts in at 100kph, he will screw up the flow and likely kill a dozen speeders. Is it the speeders' fault ? They were just fine before granny came along.
Except Windows apps from today still run on a 10-year old Windows 2000 machine, for the most part.
Mac apps are, like their makers, excessively trendy so whenever a new OS X build is released, the great majority of developers "embrace" the new features and it seems very few are committed to backward compatibility. This much is true of both big-name vendors and homebrew/shareware authors ("Free" isn't so big yet in that sphere).
I second this. A bunch of us still play Forsaken, though the multiplayer is buggy as hell (many levels just crash on load). It's still a blast.
I've been meaning to write one myself, but I haven't written a single line of game code in years...
Good luck pulling Roberta and Ken Williams out of retirement. The "new" Sierra is just another whored-out name for Vivendi/Universal, just like Atari is a gimp name for Infogrames' shittier releases.
Isn't this exactly what the entire geek community has been saying for over a decade ? We don't give a fuck about the shiny discs, we give a fuck about the music and the artist.
For vastly larger amounts of data, you'd have a database and use the barcode to reference that data.
You don't need megabytes of optically encoded data on a cereal box, nor a book for that matter.
Ideally there should be another choice: 3) send the dumb ones back to school.
We all know that is not going to happen because:
1. they don't wanna go to school in the first place
2. the educational system in its current state is not economically viable for these people (nor the society actually footing the bill)
3. like any parasite, they will get together and lobby for free handouts while opposing progress, like they have always done (churches, exclusive communities, 3rd world expats)
The fact of that matter is that at some point in the not-so-distant future, there will be some hard sacrifices to be made if we want to improve the quality of life on our little blue planet. The problem is no one wants to "play god" because of the unpredictable consequences of sending a large number of arbitrarily selected people to an early grave. Humans are selfish by nature and we are not willing to sacrifice our own well-being for that of another.
How is any law required for FOSS to exist ? You just need to publish your damned code on the internet and "TADA, it's free!"
Enforcing the GPL hasn't really been a very successful venture anyway. We whine and moan at transgressors, and sometimes they feel guilty and do the right thing, but in practice we're very much beholden to the honor system.
Under the Pirate Party's proposed legislation, what happens after the 5-year copyright has lapsed ? The works fall into the public domain. That's even better than GPL, that's 100% free do-what-you-want-with-it public domain. For code, that means anyone asking for the code should be able to obtain it for no more than the cost of transmission. Ideally it would be thrown up on something like Sourceforge.net for anyone to pick up and/or fork at their leisure. What's so evil about that ?
IANAL, but I was taken aback by this bit: "subscribers have to go to Karoo's office and sign a form admitting guilt and promising not to do it again".
Isn't that some sort of vicious breach of common law AND copyright law ? I get that this is an ISP and not a court of law, but a false accusation is a false accusation. They're tangling someone else's copyright interests with their own business model. Employers get into big trouble for far less offensive practices.
What's arabic for "WHOOSH" ?
Except the Cadillac doesn't specifically forbid Ford executives from riding in it, nor does Airborne refuse to deliver to UPS clients.
IMO, the reason why it's unacceptable is because this is a freaking upgrade. The preference is already set to whichever browser the user favors, why should it be reset ? The existing choice should be left alone.
If it's a fresh installation, fine go ahead and toggle it by default, that's a good way to minimize user confusion ("I just installed Thingy 8, where the hell is it?"). If it's an upgrade, just replace those damned files and leave my settings the way they are.
They did. It's called Fallout.