Bush administration has already squandered way more than this on a couple years of stupidity in Iraq
The "stupidity in Iraq" gave millions of people a good chance of better and freer life (and not just in Iraq) -- already.
It is possible, that the shuttle program will be judged just as beneficial, of course, but, technically, the shuttle did not achieve its goals -- as you rightly point out.
150 years ago, the people had access to most of the same arms as the military, not even remotely so today.
FARC? Nepalese Maoists? Granted, both have foreign helpers, but this was also true in the past.
On the other hand, over 200 years ago, young Napolean Bonaparte defeated a crowd in Paris by using canons. His forces were severely outnumbered and both sides had guns, but only he had canons and liked to use them (being an artillery officer)...
A democracy should put the people's rights first but election funding ensures that politicians/parties have to sell out before they can enter the game.
"Sell out" to whom? To machines? Any sell out is to people, and the fact, that people will wield more influence than others was always an accepted attribute of Democracy.
An optimist might even add, that a good Democracy will try to ensure, that better people have more influence. How exactly this better is defined is what differenciates different regimes.
Finally, wondering even further off-topic, ensuring the "people's rights" is trivial -- the majority can still take its rights. What a Democracy should most concern itself with, is the rights of the individual, however unpopular she/he may be umong the people...
Can one ask for a better quote, than the above? I mean, really... You used the F-word twice -- to convince me, New Yorkers are not rude?..
The rudeness, I'm talking about consists of talking in subway -- across the car above the heads of dozens of people (and I am not just talking about caffeinated kids -- on my almost daily subway trips, I've seen groups of adults of colors entering through different doors and continuing conversations, as if there is no one else). I'm talking about taxis stopping in the middle of the street -- dozens of cars behind them be damned. Of pedestrians (and bikers) ignoring the traffic lights and mindlessly "flipping" the upset drivers. And yes, of (not) yielding one's seat to an elderly or disabled (forget about the fairer sex). You have seen it happen? Are you sure, that has been a New Yorker?
There is NO city in this country where service is a good as in NYC. [...] Most New Yorkers just want all the useless salespeople to go away when we visit other parts of the country.
See, you can't even imagine a salesperson being useful -- and yet you claim to have the best service in the country... Pathetic.
But then maybe New Yorkers are just rude to you because you are such a jerk - ever think of that?
What insight... What exquisite politeness... No, they are not particularly rude to me -- it is just that, what passes as normal demeanor here, is quite obnoxious by the standards of most places in the world. Just ask any other immigrant...
If anything, this story is about how good modularization is. Simply updating one shared library (libz.so or zlib.dll) will fix the problem for all of your installed applications. No?
Abundant evidence of Robber Barons? We invented the term, and they're still all over the place, held in check by the laws we passed when they went too far to sustain, a century ago.
I asked for evidence of "extremely shortsighted capitalists who would otherwise ruin our city" -- and why is New York in particularly high danger of these folk. You twisted my words and did not provide any evidence. Point one
You've got the lame hick attitude that because people don't have time to do you favors, or speak your peculiar homespun dialect of manners, we're rude.
You are rude. The "manners" would not pass as such anywhere in the world. A matter of taste, I suppose...
Like how that "artificial government monopoly" was how we reined in an out-of-control unregulated business that was killing people in the streets, ripping them off, and clogging up the arteries of the city whose business is essential to the US and global economies.
Preventing "killing people in the streets, ripping them off" does not require medallions to cost as much as a decent house. The streets are still as clogged up as always, of course. Point two.
You aren't very good at math, either. $2.50:gal gas in 10MPG vehicles driving easily 200K miles a year is $50K saved per year.
Even if we accept your numbers (and $2.5 per gallon is a recent figure), that's still $50K per year total, not saved, math genius -- unless, of course, these hybrids use no fuel at all. (That's point three, BTW). And even if the hybrids manage to halve that, there will still be the cost of the medallion -- $800K at very modest 8% per yer makes $64K.
Still $25K per year saving, you say, math genius? Nope, you are forgetting maintainance costs, which will be higher on these hybrids, at least initially -- Toyota's quality is the best in the industry, but with the beatings, these cars get, they are bound to start breaking. And they are a lot more complex inside, than the "bad old" american cruisers.
But, unlike you, I'm not about to impose my opinion on other people's business -- if someone wants to switch their cab to hybrid, they are welcome. My point was, government should not be pushing anyone. Because, among other reasons, it often does that armed with faulty math of ignorant "dogooders".
That's what we do in NYC: we do things.
You are not on a meeting, sweetie, watch you rhethorics...
Now your "Che Guevara" taxi riders shows you don't know anything about Guevara, either. He'd be the last to call the cops on a cabbie, even if that cabbie was fool enough to like Bush.
My knowldege of Che Guevara is beside the point, but I certainly do know Che Guevara fans. Less than a year ago, a lady from New York made news, when she discovered a cabbie, who said he likes Bush. She was particularly upset, because the gentleman was Black -- she got out of the car and accused him of "assaulting her". Now, do I have a proof, she likes Comrade Che? I don't. Do I have good reasons to think, she does? Yes I do, of course...
Your [sic] one of those Red people we see on TV sometimes, who talk shit about "9/11"...
Why are you lying about me? I'm not your friend nor an associate -- so you can not know, can you? Perfectly consistent with your demented hatred of anything here.
Perfectly consistent with your demented hatred of New York's freedom, you're lying about what happens in the backs of taxis.
Oh, what other sins are perfectly consisted with my demented hatred?
But you made the mistake trying to bullshit a New Yorker.
Boy, did I hit a nerve. Thank you for confirming most of the negative observations I made about New Yorkers... You are rather stupid, (objectively -- just look at the points above), but very passionate. Puke...
Why is Slashdot even reporting this? "One of the dozen technologies selected"... Wake me up, when there is a prototype... Heck, a blueprint of a prototype...
NYC is the home of some extremely shortsighted capitalists who would otherwise ruin our city.
You have abundant evidence lined up, I'm sure...
Now, I don't know what in what godforsaken hole you make your burrow home.
I spend a lot of time in New York and "being truly free" is the last sentiment that comes to my mind, when I'm here. People tend to be rude, nasty, and obnoxious. They are noisy and would not yield a seat on a subway. Service in most businesses is awful.
Getting out of the city is what makes one appreciate America... Trully, Jefferson was dead right in his prediction:
When we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, we shall become as corrupt as Europe.
But come to NYC some time, and we'll show you how free you truly are, when the people have a government keeping the Robber Barons off your back.
Really? They do? All those trade union cum mafiosos do? You did not "keep them off" anybody's backs, you are proud of them -- and keep reminding the critics, how Mafia helped America invade Italy (!).
since they could save at least 50% on gas, why haven't the taxi fleet owners already upgraded, as they buy new vehicles?
Because the 50% (if that) is not sufficient to justify the cost of a new car?
Or because they have no money left after paying $800K for the taxi medallion -- through an artificially maintained government monopoly?
The cost of fuel is only a small part of what they are paying...
Are they all "Che Guevara fans"?
No "Che Guevara fans" ride in their taxis and complain to police, when they find out, the cabbie happens to like Bush.
I'm running all kinds of crud on the intranet that I don't want exposed to the Internet, such as NetBIOS on Windows and some permissive SAMBA shares on assorted servers.
So, you qualify for a need of firewall under the grandparent's system:
...
you're defending a grossly insecure system (Windows?)
you have unprotected communication on a network
...
Khmm, triggers a bug in Acroread-5.09
on
The New C Standard
·
· Score: 1
Or is it just me? Open the file, press Ctrl-F and start searching for calloc. On around page 782 the acroread will hang... Can anyone confirm?
I would upgrade to the newer acroread-7.x, but that can not be used for easy pdf-to-ps conversion (e.g. acroread -toPostScript < file.pdf > file.ps) without a valid DISPLAY...
Searching Slashdot for "FCC power broadband" brings up a number of articles with varying opinions.
I also remember one blasting FCC for the very thinking about it -- some highly moderated comments were particularly opinionated. The repuglican FCC, you see, was obviously in it for the benefit of the Big Business (TM) at as expense of the Little Guy (TM).
Well, Google is among the Biggest businesses these days, and yet it is still quite popular here... Khmm...
With the latest unilateral 10% pay cut I was handed, I'll just pay 10% less rent to my landlord (with equal unilaterality), 10% less to each utility company, etc. If I have to make less, then so do they. Right?
Oh, boy, is somebody angry. Nobody owes you a living...
Since you're so implicitly keen on the use of force in this fashion
Me? Keen on using force? No... You seem to be threatening me with it though -- in 20 years time.
Anyway, compared to a Thai or a Mexican you are still very, very, dare I say it stinky rich. So quit whining.
you'd better be armed when some real force gets used to fix this artificial disenfranchisement
Why is it artificial? Is your landlord conspiring with your employer to squeze you out?
And how exactly are you going to "fix" it with force? Through a Great Month Socialist Revolution?
Capitalism is a great idea. Unfortunately, predatory-, looting-, crony- or hyper-capitalism is NOT [a good idea].
Not sure, what you mean by "predatory" and "hyper-", but as for "looting" and "crony-" -- we have nothing of the kind.
You cannot have a real society composed of masters and slaves
Personal merit is what primarily separates people in America. Masters and slaves are not really possible in such a society.
Use SKEM to automatically block IP-addresses, which your spam-filter(s) suspect of spamming.
SKEM (/usr/ports/mail/milter-skem on FreeBSD) will not eliminate spam, but it will throttle the volume of it arriving from rogue servers and hi-jacked PCs, while the worst effect of a false-positive is delayed (rather than rejected) legitimate e-mail.
Don't take this personally, but is it possible that they chose the inferior approach because you did a lousy job communicating with the managers?
My immediate manager agreed with me. He reviewed my comparision 'white-paper' before it was published to the internal mailing list -- the tables in it spoke for themselves. Our in-house solution could only approach (not reach) PVM's performance, when the invidual tasks where very compute-intensive (when the communication delays mattered least).
In addition, our own 'daemons' -- using Java RMI -- are quite chatty even when not doing anything. Which means, large chunks can never be paged by the OS. It is all around much worse than PVM and, probably, any decent MPI implementation.
But the all-trumping counter-arguments were: "Well, this is, what we devised here and will be able to support, whereas nobody knows, what this PVM thingie is all about..." Followed by: "The two guys, who wrote it, are really nice people.."
It is almost a 'meme' -- when people start on projects like this, they tend to think, off-the-shelf software (free and otherwise) is not for them and they need to write their own...
PVM offers both the spec and the implementation, MPI offers a newer spec with several solid implementations. But no, NIH-syndrom prevails and another piece of half-baked software is born.
Where I work, the monstrosity uses Java RMI to pass the input data and computation results around -- encapsulated in XML, no less...
It is very hard to fight -- I did a comparision implementing the same task in PVM and in our own software. Depending on the weight of the individual computation being distributed, PVM was from 10 to 300% faster and used 5 times less bandwidth. Upper management saw the white paper...
Guess, what we continue to develop and push to our clients?
Except, at a point nobody enjoys their job or they don't have a job.
Well, according to the article, those who still have a job seem to enjoy it. Their pay is up too. As to the amoung of employment, it is still above the pre-dotcom era, and is likely to stay there.
The barrier to innovation or self-employment by the normal individual is very high
Wait, is this caused by automation too? I'd say, quite the opposite. The biggest problem of the human labor is scaling it -- humans scale very poorly. Automation allows to do more with less people, thus significantly easing the life of small enterprises.
What's so wrong with full employment and preserving meaningful physical labour.
Nothing -- as long as it is not preserved artificially. As is done by, for example, farmer subsidies and other examples of protectionism.
That's what utopia is like, not where all our work is done by machines and we relax on the sofa eating chips.
I'd rather relax on the sofa eating chips (or play badminton), than perform the easily automatable (hence mundane and mind-numbing) jobs. And when I work, I'd rather work on automating things, than on doing them myself...
So does Wal-Mart when they force US manufacturers to move production to China to meet their low price demands....
And I have no problems with that either.
so the US consumers require even lower prices, so offshore more goods and services so there are still fewer jobs
US, heck, ALL consumers require lower prices anyway... This was always the case. Can't blame Walmart for it.
It's a vicious circle.
Why is it "vicious"? Why does an American schmuck deserve higher pay than a Thai or a Mexican one? By birthright?..
That said, Americans still benefit the most. Shedding the mind-numbing jobs to the less developed countries, we have more opportunities for new, cutting edge, challenging professions.
Silicon Valley may have lost many sysadmin jobs to automation and/or off-shore outsourcing, but the remaining ones are, actually, interesting and -- according to the article -- well paying.
Pittsburgh miners went through this last century. I sympathize with their pain, but I'm glad it is over.
Re:Nobody is perfect, not even NewEgg
on
Shopping Online
·
· Score: 1
That's the problem -- I'm sure if simply requested to return/exchange the item, their semi-automated process would've handled it brilliantly.
But I don't want to dismember my main computer and send the case back. And I only discovered the problem, when I put most of the machine together back in April...
The ability to handle unusual problems is the measure of quality... And NewEgg did not cut it.
Slashdot Mirror
It is free music, alright. The objection is to the government entity (BBC is a government entity) distributing it.
I don't necessarily agree with their objections, but timothy's shrieking is annoying. At least, Mr. Katz was funny...
It is possible, that the shuttle program will be judged just as beneficial, of course, but, technically, the shuttle did not achieve its goals -- as you rightly point out.
On the other hand, over 200 years ago, young Napolean Bonaparte defeated a crowd in Paris by using canons. His forces were severely outnumbered and both sides had guns, but only he had canons and liked to use them (being an artillery officer)...
(NRA, anyone?)
Georgia 2003, Ukraine 2004? Entirely peaceful, though... "Sell out" to whom? To machines? Any sell out is to people, and the fact, that people will wield more influence than others was always an accepted attribute of Democracy.An optimist might even add, that a good Democracy will try to ensure, that better people have more influence. How exactly this better is defined is what differenciates different regimes.
Finally, wondering even further off-topic, ensuring the "people's rights" is trivial -- the majority can still take its rights. What a Democracy should most concern itself with, is the rights of the individual, however unpopular she/he may be umong the people...
The rudeness, I'm talking about consists of talking in subway -- across the car above the heads of dozens of people (and I am not just talking about caffeinated kids -- on my almost daily subway trips, I've seen groups of adults of colors entering through different doors and continuing conversations, as if there is no one else). I'm talking about taxis stopping in the middle of the street -- dozens of cars behind them be damned. Of pedestrians (and bikers) ignoring the traffic lights and mindlessly "flipping" the upset drivers. And yes, of (not) yielding one's seat to an elderly or disabled (forget about the fairer sex). You have seen it happen? Are you sure, that has been a New Yorker?
See, you can't even imagine a salesperson being useful -- and yet you claim to have the best service in the country... Pathetic.
What insight... What exquisite politeness... No, they are not particularly rude to me -- it is just that, what passes as normal demeanor here, is quite obnoxious by the standards of most places in the world. Just ask any other immigrant...If anything, this story is about how good modularization is. Simply updating one shared library (libz.so or zlib.dll) will fix the problem for all of your installed applications. No?
My script would poll the site every hour or so and notify me, if anything not seen before appeared.
Why is Slashdot even reporting this? "One of the dozen technologies selected"... Wake me up, when there is a prototype... Heck, a blueprint of a prototype...
Getting out of the city is what makes one appreciate America... Trully, Jefferson was dead right in his prediction:
Really? They do? All those trade union cum mafiosos do? You did not "keep them off" anybody's backs, you are proud of them -- and keep reminding the critics, how Mafia helped America invade Italy (!). Because the 50% (if that) is not sufficient to justify the cost of a new car?Or because they have no money left after paying $800K for the taxi medallion -- through an artificially maintained government monopoly?
The cost of fuel is only a small part of what they are paying...
No "Che Guevara fans" ride in their taxis and complain to police, when they find out, the cabbie happens to like Bush.Why then, does the government need to do it? Oh, wait, this is New York we are talking about...
The city of Rent Control and of more Che Guevarra fans, than there are in South America (proportionally).
Flamebait my behind...
I would upgrade to the newer acroread-7.x, but that can not be used for easy pdf-to-ps conversion (e.g. acroread -toPostScript < file.pdf > file.ps) without a valid DISPLAY...
Are there any after all?
I also remember one blasting FCC for the very thinking about it -- some highly moderated comments were particularly opinionated. The repuglican FCC, you see, was obviously in it for the benefit of the Big Business (TM) at as expense of the Little Guy (TM).
Well, Google is among the Biggest businesses these days, and yet it is still quite popular here... Khmm...
Or will the words like "Democracy" continue to be blocked by the search engines?
Anyway, compared to a Thai or a Mexican you are still very, very, dare I say it stinky rich. So quit whining.
Why is it artificial? Is your landlord conspiring with your employer to squeze you out?And how exactly are you going to "fix" it with force? Through a Great Month Socialist Revolution?
Not sure, what you mean by "predatory" and "hyper-", but as for "looting" and "crony-" -- we have nothing of the kind. Personal merit is what primarily separates people in America. Masters and slaves are not really possible in such a society.SKEM ( /usr/ports/mail/milter-skem on FreeBSD) will not eliminate spam, but it will throttle the volume of it arriving from rogue servers and hi-jacked PCs, while the worst effect of a false-positive is delayed (rather than rejected) legitimate e-mail.
In addition, our own 'daemons' -- using Java RMI -- are quite chatty even when not doing anything. Which means, large chunks can never be paged by the OS. It is all around much worse than PVM and, probably, any decent MPI implementation.
But the all-trumping counter-arguments were: "Well, this is, what we devised here and will be able to support, whereas nobody knows, what this PVM thingie is all about..." Followed by: "The two guys, who wrote it, are really nice people.."
PVM offers both the spec and the implementation, MPI offers a newer spec with several solid implementations. But no, NIH-syndrom prevails and another piece of half-baked software is born.
Where I work, the monstrosity uses Java RMI to pass the input data and computation results around -- encapsulated in XML, no less...
It is very hard to fight -- I did a comparision implementing the same task in PVM and in our own software. Depending on the weight of the individual computation being distributed, PVM was from 10 to 300% faster and used 5 times less bandwidth. Upper management saw the white paper...
Guess, what we continue to develop and push to our clients?
Why is it "vicious"? Why does an American schmuck deserve higher pay than a Thai or a Mexican one? By birthright?..
That said, Americans still benefit the most. Shedding the mind-numbing jobs to the less developed countries, we have more opportunities for new, cutting edge, challenging professions.
Silicon Valley may have lost many sysadmin jobs to automation and/or off-shore outsourcing, but the remaining ones are, actually, interesting and -- according to the article -- well paying.
Pittsburgh miners went through this last century. I sympathize with their pain, but I'm glad it is over.
But I don't want to dismember my main computer and send the case back. And I only discovered the problem, when I put most of the machine together back in April...
The ability to handle unusual problems is the measure of quality... And NewEgg did not cut it.