My experience with BSD development is that it comprises core teams of fairly smart geeks with tireless sycophants on the sidelines taken under the wings of the elders on the basis of their ability to suck up. This is why everything BSD beyond the kernel and a few specific userland apps is an also-ran.
And the BSD operating systems are "so damn solid" only in the sense that many parts are very mature and the pace of development is fairly slow, lagging well behind Linux for a good decade. This is not to say that stability isn't sometimes a good choice - which is why many people choose Debian.
Linux, meanwhile, is much more meritocratic. Your code good enough? We'll take it, even though we're not sure who you are. Big business wanting to contribute time, money and resources? We'll take it. Not up to scratch? We'll give you advice but we won't include you in anything mainline. Hell, we'll not only give you advice but we'll point you to the copious amount of documentation produced to help kernel and userland developers.
Here's a simple challenge for you: try writing a functional network card driver for Linux over a weekend. Now try the same in FreeBSD.
The US is a cheap imitation of European civilisation without all the R&D costs to recoup. (amirite? Europeans mod up and Americans mod down, because moderation is a way of showing whether you agree.)
It's been possible for ages to use the gift option as a way of bypassing Paypal fees.
But it sounds like a rather unsafe way to pay for your weed. Paypal didn't attain the absurd position of unregulated bank it holds today by not cooperating with the appropriate powers.
Where money goes only to the unregulated middlemen from Amazon to private government contractors (where most on your tax money goes these days) to Paypal to RIAA; where the productive approach slavery in the East or volunteerism in the West.
The UK has just introduced this excellent new Work Programme whereby people who are being paid an allowance to look for work must instead do work at one quarter of minimum wage, often for private companies. It's the spirit of the workhouse but you have to pay your own transport.
Along the way I've met lots of interesting people (and especially girls) who I've all told to that I do programming for a living and it's also how I can travel around the world and live on the road. If anything, that has made people interested. And I really don't myself as an uncool guy, nor do all the women I've met along.
If you use phrases of adolescent self-promotion such as "especially girls" and "all the women I've met", you're uncool.
It took me a while to realise that "Free Market" was a synonym for "God" in America: always the right option; solves all problems; inherently moral to follow and immoral to restrict; if it seems to be going wrong then it must be either something else's fault or a means to an end which we are not worthy to understand; etc.
Consequences are described in the language of propaganda of the winner.
When the Ukranian famine in the '30s was exacerbated by disinterest and consequent resource allocation enforced by government, reducing qualify of life and lifespan even while resources were available, we say that the evil Communist government killed its people.
When US healthcare denies treatment to tens of millions every year through disinterest and consequent resource allocation enforced by government, reducing quality of life and lifespan even while resources are available, we say YOU'RE NOT ENTITLED YOU COMMUNIST. (*)
However, the US is not as oppressive as Stalinist Russia, nor has it adopted any variant of Marxism-Leninism. It is, however, increasingly bringing to mind the Soviet philosophy of the '60s and '70s: state-capitalism and an increasing reliance on external markets while the home front comprises little more than management bureaucracy (when the Soviets started falling behind in tech, for example, it was because they outsourced design - Khrushchev gradually moved the Union from "make our own stuff" to "copy their stuff" in the mid '60s and they'd all but lost the interesting battles a decade later).
(*) The US is a little more dishonest. The USSR was happy to declare that things were being done in the interests of state. The US hides behind quasi-religious waffle about "natural property rights" as an excuse to deny things to people and let them suffer.
No, but the only reason I don't exceed the posted speed limit when I'm late is because I would be punished.
What's happening is that you're given the privilege (reward) to drive on public roads providing you abide by commonly agreed rules of the road. Now the laws have been bastardised for revenue generation - you get to break them infrequently in return for a modest payment, as many people do - but not for punishment. Your argument comes from the default position of entitlement: that society owes you a national, regional and local road network and you just have to be careful that no-one takes it away from you. The majority of adults don't think this way about stuff.
(It says something interesting about you that you suggest you're so important that you have to drive just a little bit faster to get somewhre a few minutes earlier. If those few minutes really were a matter of life or death, you'd already have permission in law to exceed the limit.)
The only reason I pay my income taxes is because I would be punished if I did not.
Those who make this declaration consistently fail to move somewhere without the protection of government. So many people like to say that they're paying under protest because the alternative would be an admission that they actually quite like the modern conveniences of society and are too scared to go out on their own. It is quite possible to have a mass campaign against and refusal to pay an unjust tax even in the modern West: Thatcher's attempt at a poll tax failed in the early 1990s beause of it. What's stopping y'all?
The only reason the local pub owner kicks everyone out by 2:00 AM is because he would be punished.
The landlord is granted a licence to operate by the local administration acting on behalf of the local people. In return, the local people expect some hours of peace. A good landlord wants the support and protection of his local community. Again, you're operating from a default position of entitlement: that anyone is entitled to start up a public house and run it with no consideration of the consequences to the community. Most adults don't think like this.
Why didn't you give classical, easy and good examples like marijuana prohibition? There it comes down to "weed will get you punished!"... yet everyone ignores the law because the threat of punishment just doesn't work.
The USSR had a written constitution guaranteeing freedom of speech
As, in its way, does the US.
Technically the two are different. The US's version is negative: it doesn't guarantee freedom of speech at all but merely restricts the government's ability to restrict speech - in practice the definition of "speech" is arbitrarily restricted and the locations on which free speech can be practiced severely limited. The USSR's version is positive: it describes vaguely how freedom of speech is "guaranteed", i.e. through certain media and locations - procedures and rules to access these resources could be and were used to restrict speech and you didn't get to say what you wanted everywhere else.
In neither country can you say what you think where you want.
...but everyone knew...
Because the constitution had other Articles which limited the possible interpretations of those Articles describing freedoms. And there were laws between the constitution and the people which countered the more general interpretations of certain Articles in the constitution and everyone knew about them. But people in the US are not aware of the limits on their freedom. There's the difference.
The Party's power depended on legal ambiguity and the absence of accountability.
It's true that the system of voting in the USSR wasn't, "Choose n hundred equally impotent representatives who then ignore you and follow the will of the lobbyists already being imposed through unelected civil servants." But there were elections of government bodies at various levels throughout its existence.
terrible things would probably happen to you and those you loved
A society where crime is "punished" is already sadistic and anti-science.
Punishment doesn't work, and no amount of sad, old men whining about how they're better off because their parents used to beat them is going to change our nature.
Loss of freedom for criminals definitely stops them (temporarily) from causing further harm, during which time they may or may not respond to efforts at rehabilitation.
And reward sometimes works. Though much less than the feudalists disguising themselves as capitalists would have you believe.
Nor is there any evidence that punishment works. There may be edge cases for which it has an effect, e.g. on psychopaths who really have no notion of social existence. But for a society, punishment does not work.
The only reason you don't rape and murder is because you'd be punished if you did, right?
The USSR was up front about the limits it put on freedom. The US understood that most people are ignored so it's OK to let them mouth off until they're actually listened to, at which point you abuse and restrict them.
The USSR also had job and housing security and good urban worker treatment. The developing system of internal identity checks and consequent restrictions on movement made it hard for all but the system faithful to gain the best positions in these cities, however. As in the USSR.
Chris Rock had a routine. He said some—too many of our men, they're proud, they brag about doing things they're supposed to do. They say 'Well, I- I'm not in jail.' Well you're not supposed to be in jail!
What chipset problems have already been identified? What else is likely to go wrong?
I keep thinking of building a "media center[sic]" computer with TV card but there always seems to be some horrible flaw in any setup I consider. Is there an exception yet?
Yes, a true communicator switches to any of Earth's languages at will and celebrates the variety, eagerly perfecting his ability in any new language which some committee or group of enthusiasts recently invented. This is a realisable and good use of the copious time every human has available: the sugary topping has always been more important than the meal below.
Most C coders seem to achieve obfuscation without any additional incentive.
Nonsense. C is simple and, while some smart programmers think it's necessary to over-use the preprocessor (even the Linux kernel is sometimes guilty), it's a language you can learn once and apply productively for the rest of your life.
Contrast this with the ten dozen other fly-by-night half-baked languages which have flooded the marketplace over the past year, each with their uninteresting quirks of syntactic sugar, competing on the basis of some uniquely uninteresting difference which can almost always be trivially implemented in any of the alternatives. They are hard to read in the same way that German is hard to read to someone who has only been reading German for a year: skill and speed comes through practice with the language, not from the ego of its authors.
Humans are a social species. Advancement is 90% talking the talk. If you're black, you may sound like you talk the talk of the Token Ethnic Minority if you're lucky, otherwise you just sound like you're not talking the talk at all. No matter how well you can walk the walk.
Grants get you some education but they're not likely to get you a job. Or a promotion. For example, there have been several studies done where CVs of various qualities were sent to random firms with stereotypical names from various races (and genders and ages). Guess which races were least likely to be called for interview? And this is already the least likely cause of differing opportunities, because over half the jobs (and a much greater proportion than half of good jobs) are obtained through networking. And, guess what? Tyrone and Sheneequa probably didn't mingle with Steven and Susan.
Look at it from everyone else's PoV: we need them as long as the US has them. Because the only experience we have of nuclear warfare is from when the US decided to use them.
Slashdot Mirror
Bullshit.
My experience with BSD development is that it comprises core teams of fairly smart geeks with tireless sycophants on the sidelines taken under the wings of the elders on the basis of their ability to suck up. This is why everything BSD beyond the kernel and a few specific userland apps is an also-ran.
And the BSD operating systems are "so damn solid" only in the sense that many parts are very mature and the pace of development is fairly slow, lagging well behind Linux for a good decade. This is not to say that stability isn't sometimes a good choice - which is why many people choose Debian.
Linux, meanwhile, is much more meritocratic. Your code good enough? We'll take it, even though we're not sure who you are. Big business wanting to contribute time, money and resources? We'll take it. Not up to scratch? We'll give you advice but we won't include you in anything mainline. Hell, we'll not only give you advice but we'll point you to the copious amount of documentation produced to help kernel and userland developers.
Here's a simple challenge for you: try writing a functional network card driver for Linux over a weekend. Now try the same in FreeBSD.
The US is a cheap imitation of European civilisation without all the R&D costs to recoup. (amirite? Europeans mod up and Americans mod down, because moderation is a way of showing whether you agree.)
I don't see why China can't follow the example.
Well, we replaced social democracy with it in Europe during the '80s and '90s. We can return to social democracy.
...instead of adverts, please. For example, I'll pay 10 cents a month for Slashdot. The alternative is 0 cents adblocked.
Let's return to peer-to-peer exchanges rather than everything via the Google behemoth, please.
It's been possible for ages to use the gift option as a way of bypassing Paypal fees.
But it sounds like a rather unsafe way to pay for your weed. Paypal didn't attain the absurd position of unregulated bank it holds today by not cooperating with the appropriate powers.
Where money goes only to the unregulated middlemen from Amazon to private government contractors (where most on your tax money goes these days) to Paypal to RIAA; where the productive approach slavery in the East or volunteerism in the West.
The UK has just introduced this excellent new Work Programme whereby people who are being paid an allowance to look for work must instead do work at one quarter of minimum wage, often for private companies. It's the spirit of the workhouse but you have to pay your own transport.
Which boot do you want to lick today?
Apple has made "programmers" more likely to be nothing more than businessmen who have read a few coding books.
Headline might as well me "Prostitution makes partners sexy".
Along the way I've met lots of interesting people (and especially girls) who I've all told to that I do programming for a living and it's also how I can travel around the world and live on the road. If anything, that has made people interested. And I really don't myself as an uncool guy, nor do all the women I've met along.
If you use phrases of adolescent self-promotion such as "especially girls" and "all the women I've met", you're uncool.
It took me a while to realise that "Free Market" was a synonym for "God" in America: always the right option; solves all problems; inherently moral to follow and immoral to restrict; if it seems to be going wrong then it must be either something else's fault or a means to an end which we are not worthy to understand; etc.
Consequences are described in the language of propaganda of the winner.
When the Ukranian famine in the '30s was exacerbated by disinterest and consequent resource allocation enforced by government, reducing qualify of life and lifespan even while resources were available, we say that the evil Communist government killed its people.
When US healthcare denies treatment to tens of millions every year through disinterest and consequent resource allocation enforced by government, reducing quality of life and lifespan even while resources are available, we say YOU'RE NOT ENTITLED YOU COMMUNIST. (*)
However, the US is not as oppressive as Stalinist Russia, nor has it adopted any variant of Marxism-Leninism. It is, however, increasingly bringing to mind the Soviet philosophy of the '60s and '70s: state-capitalism and an increasing reliance on external markets while the home front comprises little more than management bureaucracy (when the Soviets started falling behind in tech, for example, it was because they outsourced design - Khrushchev gradually moved the Union from "make our own stuff" to "copy their stuff" in the mid '60s and they'd all but lost the interesting battles a decade later).
(*) The US is a little more dishonest. The USSR was happy to declare that things were being done in the interests of state. The US hides behind quasi-religious waffle about "natural property rights" as an excuse to deny things to people and let them suffer.
No, but the only reason I don't exceed the posted speed limit when I'm late is because I would be punished.
What's happening is that you're given the privilege (reward) to drive on public roads providing you abide by commonly agreed rules of the road. Now the laws have been bastardised for revenue generation - you get to break them infrequently in return for a modest payment, as many people do - but not for punishment. Your argument comes from the default position of entitlement: that society owes you a national, regional and local road network and you just have to be careful that no-one takes it away from you. The majority of adults don't think this way about stuff.
(It says something interesting about you that you suggest you're so important that you have to drive just a little bit faster to get somewhre a few minutes earlier. If those few minutes really were a matter of life or death, you'd already have permission in law to exceed the limit.)
The only reason I pay my income taxes is because I would be punished if I did not.
Those who make this declaration consistently fail to move somewhere without the protection of government. So many people like to say that they're paying under protest because the alternative would be an admission that they actually quite like the modern conveniences of society and are too scared to go out on their own. It is quite possible to have a mass campaign against and refusal to pay an unjust tax even in the modern West: Thatcher's attempt at a poll tax failed in the early 1990s beause of it. What's stopping y'all?
The only reason the local pub owner kicks everyone out by 2:00 AM is because he would be punished.
The landlord is granted a licence to operate by the local administration acting on behalf of the local people. In return, the local people expect some hours of peace. A good landlord wants the support and protection of his local community. Again, you're operating from a default position of entitlement: that anyone is entitled to start up a public house and run it with no consideration of the consequences to the community. Most adults don't think like this.
Why didn't you give classical, easy and good examples like marijuana prohibition? There it comes down to "weed will get you punished!" ... yet everyone ignores the law because the threat of punishment just doesn't work.
The USSR had a written constitution guaranteeing freedom of speech
As, in its way, does the US.
Technically the two are different. The US's version is negative: it doesn't guarantee freedom of speech at all but merely restricts the government's ability to restrict speech - in practice the definition of "speech" is arbitrarily restricted and the locations on which free speech can be practiced severely limited. The USSR's version is positive: it describes vaguely how freedom of speech is "guaranteed", i.e. through certain media and locations - procedures and rules to access these resources could be and were used to restrict speech and you didn't get to say what you wanted everywhere else.
In neither country can you say what you think where you want.
...but everyone knew...
Because the constitution had other Articles which limited the possible interpretations of those Articles describing freedoms. And there were laws between the constitution and the people which countered the more general interpretations of certain Articles in the constitution and everyone knew about them. But people in the US are not aware of the limits on their freedom. There's the difference.
The Party's power depended on legal ambiguity and the absence of accountability.
It's true that the system of voting in the USSR wasn't, "Choose n hundred equally impotent representatives who then ignore you and follow the will of the lobbyists already being imposed through unelected civil servants." But there were elections of government bodies at various levels throughout its existence.
terrible things would probably happen to you and those you loved
Stalin's been dead a while.
A society where crime is "punished" is already sadistic and anti-science.
Punishment doesn't work, and no amount of sad, old men whining about how they're better off because their parents used to beat them is going to change our nature.
Loss of freedom for criminals definitely stops them (temporarily) from causing further harm, during which time they may or may not respond to efforts at rehabilitation.
And reward sometimes works. Though much less than the feudalists disguising themselves as capitalists would have you believe.
Nor is there any evidence that punishment works. There may be edge cases for which it has an effect, e.g. on psychopaths who really have no notion of social existence. But for a society, punishment does not work.
The only reason you don't rape and murder is because you'd be punished if you did, right?
The USSR was up front about the limits it put on freedom. The US understood that most people are ignored so it's OK to let them mouth off until they're actually listened to, at which point you abuse and restrict them.
The USSR also had job and housing security and good urban worker treatment. The developing system of internal identity checks and consequent restrictions on movement made it hard for all but the system faithful to gain the best positions in these cities, however. As in the USSR.
Chris Rock had a routine. He said some—too many of our men, they're proud, they brag about doing things they're supposed to do. They say 'Well, I- I'm not in jail.' Well you're not supposed to be in jail!
Good stuff, ta.
When will the Fourth Reich fall?
What chipset problems have already been identified? What else is likely to go wrong?
I keep thinking of building a "media center[sic]" computer with TV card but there always seems to be some horrible flaw in any setup I consider. Is there an exception yet?
Yes, a true communicator switches to any of Earth's languages at will and celebrates the variety, eagerly perfecting his ability in any new language which some committee or group of enthusiasts recently invented. This is a realisable and good use of the copious time every human has available: the sugary topping has always been more important than the meal below.
Most C coders seem to achieve obfuscation without any additional incentive.
Nonsense. C is simple and, while some smart programmers think it's necessary to over-use the preprocessor (even the Linux kernel is sometimes guilty), it's a language you can learn once and apply productively for the rest of your life.
Contrast this with the ten dozen other fly-by-night half-baked languages which have flooded the marketplace over the past year, each with their uninteresting quirks of syntactic sugar, competing on the basis of some uniquely uninteresting difference which can almost always be trivially implemented in any of the alternatives. They are hard to read in the same way that German is hard to read to someone who has only been reading German for a year: skill and speed comes through practice with the language, not from the ego of its authors.
When I was in the US I learnt fairly quickly that "subtle" has a subtly (in the US sense) different meaning over there.
"Plus" is just a mispronunciation of "Buzz". Perhaps the whooshing sound over your head obscured this.
Go away and read A Mathematician's Apology. Please.
Humans are a social species. Advancement is 90% talking the talk. If you're black, you may sound like you talk the talk of the Token Ethnic Minority if you're lucky, otherwise you just sound like you're not talking the talk at all. No matter how well you can walk the walk.
Grants get you some education but they're not likely to get you a job. Or a promotion. For example, there have been several studies done where CVs of various qualities were sent to random firms with stereotypical names from various races (and genders and ages). Guess which races were least likely to be called for interview? And this is already the least likely cause of differing opportunities, because over half the jobs (and a much greater proportion than half of good jobs) are obtained through networking. And, guess what? Tyrone and Sheneequa probably didn't mingle with Steven and Susan.
Look at it from everyone else's PoV: we need them as long as the US has them. Because the only experience we have of nuclear warfare is from when the US decided to use them.