The problem at the heart of financial crises is fractional reserve banking. The empirically "stable" fraction is roughly 9.5% right now, and as "wealth" increases, that fraction decreases because real value isn't created to balance it out. The banks simply negotiate the most aggressive numbers they can get away with, and since all wealth is purely electronic, they can fabricate it out of thin air - they don't need to print it anymore!
The fact that money is so far removed from the concept of value, is the very reason the system has collapsed - you can only build so high on any given foundation.
The thing I'm finding with Layton's NDP is they're saying a lot of things that make sense, things that would benefit society at large, but they are the ONLY ones making such promises. This begs the question of how are they going to make it all happen ? The answer is: they aren't.
I don't think anyone is remotely concerned about the NDP winning the federal election. The NDP excels as being the 3rd wheel in minority governments, as they proved back in the Trudeau years. For that reason, it is highly unlikely that any prospect that doesn't already fit within the liberals' or neocons' agenda would ever squeak its way through parliament. They will be supporters, not leaders.
So Seth, would you care to share your family tree with us so we can point out exactly where your lineage comes from and the date on which they emigrated to the USA ?
Unless you run around with a feather in your hair and an axe in your hand, you're as much a foreigner as all of us. Or would you rather be living under the British Monarchy ?
The H-1B program is screwed up, there's no doubt about it. Don't blame the workers, blame the government, and when you're doing whining, try to think of things you can do about it, like writing letters to your MP, or setting up a support group for foreign workers so they don't let themselves be used and abused by the system.
economic terrorism (my definition): the calculated use of buying power against suppliers and consumers in order to attain goals that are political or religious or ideological in nature; this is done through intimidation, coercion or artificial flooding of the market.
Walmart is so big, they can (and do) boss anyone and everyone around. They dwarf all competitors, and can exert fine-grained control over the market itself by choking suppliers via big-money contracts with overreaching non-compete restrictions. Once you start selling to Walmart, you become their bitch and they effectively wind up controlling your bottom line.
To me, that's all sorts of wrong. It's the classic theme of a parasite growing so needy, it bleeds the host to death.
It is indeed a very nice machine, and if money were no object, I would be very tempted to get a top-end Mac Pro for myself. The problem is they make computers look ridiculously expensive.
There is no good reason for them to charge a fortune on upgrades, as it is plainly apparent to anyone doing the slightest bit of Googling that they are gouging like mad. There's no special "Apple quality" to 3rd party hardware, they just plug it in and resell. A Maxtor drive from Apple will blow up just as quickly as a Maxtor drive from TigerDirect.
From a PC builder's perspective, a Mac Pro consists of the following:
1. custom high-end motherboard (worth ~$400) 2. luxury tower chassis (worth ~$300) 3. top-end Intel Xeon processors ($500+ each) 4. the oh-so-lovely Mac OS ($300 ?) 5. a bunch of plain old PC components for the rest
Ram, hard drives, fans and power supplies: these are cheap commodities you can buy anywhere, so why is it that Apple places such an exorbitant premium on such items ? I'd be much more comfortable paying a premium for the Apple-made components... sure, charge a fortune for the case, board and OS - those are the unique components that make it a Mac, and even I would gladly pay the big bucks for that luxury, but don't insult people with 300% markup on everyday items.
Gouging on the upgrades only serves to make the Mac Pro absolutely uncompetitive in the high-end segment. If I'm in the market for an 8-core workstation with tons of Ram and disk space, an upgrade Mac costs on average 3 times as much as a same-spec PC from any leading vendor. Why spend $20K on a fully-kitted Mac Pro when a PC or hackintosh with the very same specs can be had for a third of that, and with a better warranty.
Destructive because of exploitative hiring practices, strong-armed buying tactics often putting their suppliers in financial peril for Walmart's profit, the systematic siphoning of money to China's manufacturing industry, and of course the ripple effects these have on communities and the economy at large.
Walmart is too big, too powerful, and too selfish. The term "economic terrorist" comes to mind.
The fact that your vengeful response got modded Insightful, tells me Slashdot needs to give out less mod points to less people.
I'm not drooling over Gentoo, and I'm certainly not evangelizing it to every half-bred techno-weenie on this dirt ball of a world. In fact, I wish they'd make it even _harder_ to get Gentoo, in order to weed out the non-hackers. This distro is not for them, and they will not be happy with it.
You don't waltz onto a construction site, jump in a backhoe and then yell the foreman's ears off because it doesn't have air conditioning and ABS brakes. Well Gentoo is that backhoe. Only trained people should use it, everyone else can happily putter around in their Ubuntu sedans and Fedora Civic hatchbacks...
Quite frankly, if I wanted to play Nethack, I'd unmask it and compile it like any other package.
There's a reason why it's hard masked, and while some people may take offense to their beloved Nethack being called "insecure", I'm quite thankful that someone takes package management seriously enough to point out potential issues with the software I use.
It's funny how Gentoo polarizes people so much. Yes, there are quite a few imbeciles with five-mile-long CFLAGS, and there are some packages that get updated twice a day for no good reason at all, but overall it's been the most consistent, reliable, satisfying distro I've ever used. I actually like seeing the dozen patches applied to each package, as it shows there's someone actually using and criticizing the software to make it better. It also saves me a ton of effort, as I would have had to find and install those patches anyway, and many of them come directly from Gentoo users.
I guess it also matters that I'm a developer myself. When Gentoo breaks, I can usually fix it on my own with minimal effort. Obviously a non-programmer would go spam Yahoo Answers and rip all their hair out... and that's fine, everyone's free to use whatever suits them best.
NVidia's chipsets are just an alternative to Intel, VIA, SIS etc. They're no longer "superior", unless you're hooked on SLI, in which case they're the only option.
The only chipset that was markedly superior to the competition was the NForce2, when it was released. It was an affordable chipset that offered top-tier features at half the cost of feature-equivalent alternatives. Soundstorm was absolutely fantastic with its realtime AC3 encoding, unique at the time. That was six years ago, and they've been sucking miserably ever since.
If NVidia weren't clutching to their SLI patents so tightly, they probably would have exited the market entirely. Their reputation got mangled by shoddy drivers, it took them four years to stop their ATA drivers from randomly scrambling data, making them the laughing stock of the industry.
It's quite simple: if you want gaming performance, don't look at the chipset, look at a decent PCI-Express graphics card. There's no shortage of them, but what the Mac needs is driver support. The day people can trot down to any computer shop, pick up a GeForce BFG9000 or a Radeon EleventyOneHD, and drop it in their Mac - that's the day you'll start seeing real games on the Mac.
It probably really was customer feedback and the fact that this was making Walmart look bad
This is Walmart we're talking about. They could rape dead babies on the 6pm news every thursday, people would still shop and work there. They are the biggest, most financially destructive corporation on the planet. Who gives a crap about public image ? They have the money, and the power.
There is a standary policy, at least from my perspective:
I treat all sites as hostile. I give them only the information they need for me to use them satisfactorily. I go in with the expectation that they're going to fuck me over, sell everything to spammers and ad agencies, the government, whoever dangles a carrot.
If that means on Site X my name is John Fhqwhgads, then so be it.
Trusting anything on the internet is asking for trouble.
I run several different distros, each one suited to a different environment / usage pattern.
My desktop is Gentoo, I update every day, and it runs like a dragster.
My servers run CentOS. Easy to maintain, kind of retarded thanks to RPM, but usable. Most importantly, it's such a widely popular distro that I can delegate tasks to practically sysadmin, in a pinch.
My boss really likes BSD for firewalls and DNS servers. It's rock-solid, low-overhead and we can pretty much forget about the machine once it's deployed. Don't even care to update it unless a vulnerability is discovered...
I would like to use Gentoo on servers, but that would require a fork. Gentoo itself is a bleeding-edge tweaker's delight. They break stuff all the time, and the user is expected to figure it out on their own. That's fine for a desktop machine, and the payoff is usually worth the effort, but on servers every minute counts. If you're down for two hours because some dutch kid broke the latest build, you're in hell!
Now if someone could spin off an ultra-stable fork of Gentoo, with the necessary glue to ensure smooth upgrades, and an official binary package repo for those time-critical panic moments, I could definitely see it gaining a foothold in the datacenter.
Yes of course, but he got screwed because the concept of "owning" software was alien to him. He didn't understand the financial value because in his home country, software had no dollar value.
1. In soviet russia, the patent system abuses you!
and
2. In soviet russia, they didn't really give a crap about patents in the first place. The concept of "owning software" did not fit in their mindset, everyone just copied anything they wanted. All russian software was owned by the government, and by extension the people.
In reality, that "big check" goes to the many people that handle the licensing. The artist gets, at most, a few pennies per play.
That's part of the problem: the system exists primarily to support itself, compensating the artists is a secondary objective.
I think radio stations are largely responsible for the great divide between those who collect royalties, and those who want/expect free music wherever they go. If you tune your car radio to WFKU-FM, you don't pay a penny (though the ads are obnoxious). If a restaurant plays music for its patrons, they're expected to pay licensing fees and/or subscribe to a commercial muzak service. Like many things in the music industry, the distinction was fabricated decades ago, and the business model is pretty much an exercise in hypocrisy.
I think we still are far off from using all electrics for a long time, till the top mileage increases to that of a current gas engine.
Okay, well I'm getting about 300 to 350 km per tank on my crappy little hatchback with its crappy little fuel tank. Electrics gets what, 200 km per charge ? I don't know how things are down there in the USA, but for me in Canada, I don't drive 200 km daily - not even close.
The only way I could go over the 200 km daily is if I was going on a road trip, and frankly I prefer renting a car for the weekend - much less to worry about. If it gets vandalized or stolen, I just let the rental place deal with it...
I get the impression I could survive quite happily with a pure electric vehicle, anything to not have to give $100 a week to those shifty-eyed dudes at the fill station.
A lifetime non-compete is something that should never be considered, not unless they are paying you enough to:
1. never work again -and- 2. negate the side-effects of you being unable to compete, e.g. enough money to hire a developer to complete the work for you
It's a very dangerous thing to do, no matter how small the project, because of the legal precedent. Non-competes are already in a bit of a gray area, and they're certainly not a good thing in the grand scheme of human progress.
It's not like there's a shortage of jobs out there. You can earn a living doing less despicable things for the same pay, while continuing to work on the open-source project.
One thing you could do is suggest a license change to the project's maintainer, as it sounds like the BSD license is precisely what's enabling these profiteers.
Seeing with our skin... just because it makes "Star Trek Sense (tm)" doesn't mean it's possible. There are a million attention whores in every field of science. Most of them are full of shit. It's just the nature of science, everything comes with a proof, and those proofs can get to your head, make you think you can do anything... well we're not quite there yet, and this is too much of a leap to be believable. This guy's chasing funding so he can be in the spotlight and pretend to work for the next 10-15 years.
Ever hear about that brown guy who believed his "ionic flanger" would enable space travel, cure all diseases and generate perpetual energy via "electromagnetic harmonics" ? No, you didn't, because they took away his funding and put him in a padded cell after he blew up his home!
Wake me when someone has a working prototype. Actually scratch that, wake me when we get time machines so I can leap forward a few centuries and see if they finally invent skin sight. Frankly I think we'll have "conventional" cyborg vision way sooner, making skin sight irrelevant.
Sure, how many judges do you know that have been tried and found guilty of accepting bribes ? One, two maybe ? Oh, is it zero ? Right, because no judge would dare inconvenience one of their own, especially when the tide of corruption is unstoppable, why bother with such a damaging case ?
It's the kind of thing that puts your career to sleep, much like that young hotshot cop who thinks he's going to clean up the force. Next thing you know, he's doing traffic in some dead boring district because nobody wants him snooping around.
It's essentially a BIOS-borne rootkit. Even if you wipe or replace the drive, the BIOS will install a fresh copy on the drive. When Windows loads up, the rootkit wakes up and starts doing its dirty thing.
It's very hackish, as the BIOS code is rather simple. It depends on Windows to handle the network comms to phone home.
The only way to completely eliminate CompuTrace is to flash the BIOS.
Slashdot Mirror
I get mod points 6 days out of 7, and today by some rift in the time-space /. continuum, I have none.
+99 Truthiness
The problem at the heart of financial crises is fractional reserve banking. The empirically "stable" fraction is roughly 9.5% right now, and as "wealth" increases, that fraction decreases because real value isn't created to balance it out. The banks simply negotiate the most aggressive numbers they can get away with, and since all wealth is purely electronic, they can fabricate it out of thin air - they don't need to print it anymore!
The fact that money is so far removed from the concept of value, is the very reason the system has collapsed - you can only build so high on any given foundation.
The thing I'm finding with Layton's NDP is they're saying a lot of things that make sense, things that would benefit society at large, but they are the ONLY ones making such promises. This begs the question of how are they going to make it all happen ? The answer is: they aren't.
I don't think anyone is remotely concerned about the NDP winning the federal election. The NDP excels as being the 3rd wheel in minority governments, as they proved back in the Trudeau years. For that reason, it is highly unlikely that any prospect that doesn't already fit within the liberals' or neocons' agenda would ever squeak its way through parliament. They will be supporters, not leaders.
So Seth, would you care to share your family tree with us so we can point out exactly where your lineage comes from and the date on which they emigrated to the USA ?
Unless you run around with a feather in your hair and an axe in your hand, you're as much a foreigner as all of us. Or would you rather be living under the British Monarchy ?
The H-1B program is screwed up, there's no doubt about it. Don't blame the workers, blame the government, and when you're doing whining, try to think of things you can do about it, like writing letters to your MP, or setting up a support group for foreign workers so they don't let themselves be used and abused by the system.
You know, constructive things.
Stay tuned to WFUK News for a tonight's breaking story: Government officials find air in the sky!
I'm Kent Brockman, and that's news to me!
economic terrorism (my definition): the calculated use of buying power against suppliers and consumers in order to attain goals that are political or religious or ideological in nature; this is done through intimidation, coercion or artificial flooding of the market.
Walmart is so big, they can (and do) boss anyone and everyone around. They dwarf all competitors, and can exert fine-grained control over the market itself by choking suppliers via big-money contracts with overreaching non-compete restrictions. Once you start selling to Walmart, you become their bitch and they effectively wind up controlling your bottom line.
To me, that's all sorts of wrong. It's the classic theme of a parasite growing so needy, it bleeds the host to death.
It is indeed a very nice machine, and if money were no object, I would be very tempted to get a top-end Mac Pro for myself. The problem is they make computers look ridiculously expensive.
There is no good reason for them to charge a fortune on upgrades, as it is plainly apparent to anyone doing the slightest bit of Googling that they are gouging like mad. There's no special "Apple quality" to 3rd party hardware, they just plug it in and resell. A Maxtor drive from Apple will blow up just as quickly as a Maxtor drive from TigerDirect.
From a PC builder's perspective, a Mac Pro consists of the following:
1. custom high-end motherboard (worth ~$400)
2. luxury tower chassis (worth ~$300)
3. top-end Intel Xeon processors ($500+ each)
4. the oh-so-lovely Mac OS ($300 ?)
5. a bunch of plain old PC components for the rest
Ram, hard drives, fans and power supplies: these are cheap commodities you can buy anywhere, so why is it that Apple places such an exorbitant premium on such items ? I'd be much more comfortable paying a premium for the Apple-made components... sure, charge a fortune for the case, board and OS - those are the unique components that make it a Mac, and even I would gladly pay the big bucks for that luxury, but don't insult people with 300% markup on everyday items.
Gouging on the upgrades only serves to make the Mac Pro absolutely uncompetitive in the high-end segment. If I'm in the market for an 8-core workstation with tons of Ram and disk space, an upgrade Mac costs on average 3 times as much as a same-spec PC from any leading vendor. Why spend $20K on a fully-kitted Mac Pro when a PC or hackintosh with the very same specs can be had for a third of that, and with a better warranty.
Destructive because of exploitative hiring practices, strong-armed buying tactics often putting their suppliers in financial peril for Walmart's profit, the systematic siphoning of money to China's manufacturing industry, and of course the ripple effects these have on communities and the economy at large.
Walmart is too big, too powerful, and too selfish. The term "economic terrorist" comes to mind.
The fact that your vengeful response got modded Insightful, tells me Slashdot needs to give out less mod points to less people.
I'm not drooling over Gentoo, and I'm certainly not evangelizing it to every half-bred techno-weenie on this dirt ball of a world. In fact, I wish they'd make it even _harder_ to get Gentoo, in order to weed out the non-hackers. This distro is not for them, and they will not be happy with it.
You don't waltz onto a construction site, jump in a backhoe and then yell the foreman's ears off because it doesn't have air conditioning and ABS brakes. Well Gentoo is that backhoe. Only trained people should use it, everyone else can happily putter around in their Ubuntu sedans and Fedora Civic hatchbacks...
Quite frankly, if I wanted to play Nethack, I'd unmask it and compile it like any other package.
There's a reason why it's hard masked, and while some people may take offense to their beloved Nethack being called "insecure", I'm quite thankful that someone takes package management seriously enough to point out potential issues with the software I use.
It's funny how Gentoo polarizes people so much. Yes, there are quite a few imbeciles with five-mile-long CFLAGS, and there are some packages that get updated twice a day for no good reason at all, but overall it's been the most consistent, reliable, satisfying distro I've ever used. I actually like seeing the dozen patches applied to each package, as it shows there's someone actually using and criticizing the software to make it better. It also saves me a ton of effort, as I would have had to find and install those patches anyway, and many of them come directly from Gentoo users.
I guess it also matters that I'm a developer myself. When Gentoo breaks, I can usually fix it on my own with minimal effort. Obviously a non-programmer would go spam Yahoo Answers and rip all their hair out... and that's fine, everyone's free to use whatever suits them best.
NVidia's chipsets are just an alternative to Intel, VIA, SIS etc. They're no longer "superior", unless you're hooked on SLI, in which case they're the only option.
The only chipset that was markedly superior to the competition was the NForce2, when it was released. It was an affordable chipset that offered top-tier features at half the cost of feature-equivalent alternatives. Soundstorm was absolutely fantastic with its realtime AC3 encoding, unique at the time. That was six years ago, and they've been sucking miserably ever since.
If NVidia weren't clutching to their SLI patents so tightly, they probably would have exited the market entirely. Their reputation got mangled by shoddy drivers, it took them four years to stop their ATA drivers from randomly scrambling data, making them the laughing stock of the industry.
It's quite simple: if you want gaming performance, don't look at the chipset, look at a decent PCI-Express graphics card. There's no shortage of them, but what the Mac needs is driver support. The day people can trot down to any computer shop, pick up a GeForce BFG9000 or a Radeon EleventyOneHD, and drop it in their Mac - that's the day you'll start seeing real games on the Mac.
It probably really was customer feedback and the fact that this was making Walmart look bad
This is Walmart we're talking about. They could rape dead babies on the 6pm news every thursday, people would still shop and work there. They are the biggest, most financially destructive corporation on the planet. Who gives a crap about public image ? They have the money, and the power.
There is a standary policy, at least from my perspective:
I treat all sites as hostile. I give them only the information they need for me to use them satisfactorily. I go in with the expectation that they're going to fuck me over, sell everything to spammers and ad agencies, the government, whoever dangles a carrot.
If that means on Site X my name is John Fhqwhgads, then so be it.
Trusting anything on the internet is asking for trouble.
I run several different distros, each one suited to a different environment / usage pattern.
My desktop is Gentoo, I update every day, and it runs like a dragster.
My servers run CentOS. Easy to maintain, kind of retarded thanks to RPM, but usable. Most importantly, it's such a widely popular distro that I can delegate tasks to practically sysadmin, in a pinch.
My boss really likes BSD for firewalls and DNS servers. It's rock-solid, low-overhead and we can pretty much forget about the machine once it's deployed. Don't even care to update it unless a vulnerability is discovered...
I would like to use Gentoo on servers, but that would require a fork. Gentoo itself is a bleeding-edge tweaker's delight. They break stuff all the time, and the user is expected to figure it out on their own. That's fine for a desktop machine, and the payoff is usually worth the effort, but on servers every minute counts. If you're down for two hours because some dutch kid broke the latest build, you're in hell!
Now if someone could spin off an ultra-stable fork of Gentoo, with the necessary glue to ensure smooth upgrades, and an official binary package repo for those time-critical panic moments, I could definitely see it gaining a foothold in the datacenter.
Amateur! I carry my alien spit in a real live alien.
Yes of course, but he got screwed because the concept of "owning" software was alien to him. He didn't understand the financial value because in his home country, software had no dollar value.
Elorg never patented Tetris because:
1. In soviet russia, the patent system abuses you!
and
2. In soviet russia, they didn't really give a crap about patents in the first place. The concept of "owning software" did not fit in their mindset, everyone just copied anything they wanted. All russian software was owned by the government, and by extension the people.
In reality, that "big check" goes to the many people that handle the licensing. The artist gets, at most, a few pennies per play.
That's part of the problem: the system exists primarily to support itself, compensating the artists is a secondary objective.
I think radio stations are largely responsible for the great divide between those who collect royalties, and those who want/expect free music wherever they go. If you tune your car radio to WFKU-FM, you don't pay a penny (though the ads are obnoxious). If a restaurant plays music for its patrons, they're expected to pay licensing fees and/or subscribe to a commercial muzak service. Like many things in the music industry, the distinction was fabricated decades ago, and the business model is pretty much an exercise in hypocrisy.
You mean the ones that have incorporated their own record labels in order to keep control over their life's work ?
Yeah, I'm sure they're soooo dependent on the two dozen middlemen that stand between their studios and their fans.
I think we still are far off from using all electrics for a long time, till the top mileage increases to that of a current gas engine.
Okay, well I'm getting about 300 to 350 km per tank on my crappy little hatchback with its crappy little fuel tank. Electrics gets what, 200 km per charge ? I don't know how things are down there in the USA, but for me in Canada, I don't drive 200 km daily - not even close.
The only way I could go over the 200 km daily is if I was going on a road trip, and frankly I prefer renting a car for the weekend - much less to worry about. If it gets vandalized or stolen, I just let the rental place deal with it...
I get the impression I could survive quite happily with a pure electric vehicle, anything to not have to give $100 a week to those shifty-eyed dudes at the fill station.
A lifetime non-compete is something that should never be considered, not unless they are paying you enough to:
1. never work again
-and-
2. negate the side-effects of you being unable to compete, e.g. enough money to hire a developer to complete the work for you
It's a very dangerous thing to do, no matter how small the project, because of the legal precedent. Non-competes are already in a bit of a gray area, and they're certainly not a good thing in the grand scheme of human progress.
It's not like there's a shortage of jobs out there. You can earn a living doing less despicable things for the same pay, while continuing to work on the open-source project.
One thing you could do is suggest a license change to the project's maintainer, as it sounds like the BSD license is precisely what's enabling these profiteers.
Seeing with our skin... just because it makes "Star Trek Sense (tm)" doesn't mean it's possible. There are a million attention whores in every field of science. Most of them are full of shit. It's just the nature of science, everything comes with a proof, and those proofs can get to your head, make you think you can do anything... well we're not quite there yet, and this is too much of a leap to be believable. This guy's chasing funding so he can be in the spotlight and pretend to work for the next 10-15 years.
Ever hear about that brown guy who believed his "ionic flanger" would enable space travel, cure all diseases and generate perpetual energy via "electromagnetic harmonics" ? No, you didn't, because they took away his funding and put him in a padded cell after he blew up his home!
Wake me when someone has a working prototype. Actually scratch that, wake me when we get time machines so I can leap forward a few centuries and see if they finally invent skin sight. Frankly I think we'll have "conventional" cyborg vision way sooner, making skin sight irrelevant.
the penalty for bribery is very severe.
Sure, how many judges do you know that have been tried and found guilty of accepting bribes ? One, two maybe ? Oh, is it zero ? Right, because no judge would dare inconvenience one of their own, especially when the tide of corruption is unstoppable, why bother with such a damaging case ?
It's the kind of thing that puts your career to sleep, much like that young hotshot cop who thinks he's going to clean up the force. Next thing you know, he's doing traffic in some dead boring district because nobody wants him snooping around.
It's essentially a BIOS-borne rootkit. Even if you wipe or replace the drive, the BIOS will install a fresh copy on the drive. When Windows loads up, the rootkit wakes up and starts doing its dirty thing.
It's very hackish, as the BIOS code is rather simple. It depends on Windows to handle the network comms to phone home.
The only way to completely eliminate CompuTrace is to flash the BIOS.
Getting kicked in the nuts also counts. I'll bet that happened quite a bit to that sad worthless waste of flesh.