I dislike this argument not only because it's used in virtually every political discussion on Slashdot, but also because it appears to be designed to encourage complicity. Sure, the argument states that change is just as simple as deciding to vote for some third party, but all of the existing third parties tend to only appeal to a very limited fringe group, so that's really no solution at all.
So, dismissing the idea that simply voting for a third party will change everything as realistically unfeasible, we're left with the central part of the argument, which is that both parties suck, so you might as well just throw up your hands and do whatever you've been doing. Neither party will ever change anything, the argument goes, so just vote for whoever you've always voted for and go on with life. Of course, this argument is designed to assure the current party in power stays in power.
However, it contradicts actual reality. It's possible, given their complicity in GWB's antics, even probable, that the Democrats would not be any better if they took power. However, the evidence we currently have is that while Bush has actively sought to come up with new ideas to destroy the country, the Democrats are responsible only for allowing it to happen. Yes, passively allowing someone else to screw everything up is a bad thing, but is it really just as bad as actively screwing things up? Isn't it at least possible that the Democrats might screw things up less if allowed to implement their own ideas rather than just being content to allow someone else to implement his ideas?
In reality, what we have now is the fact that Bush and his cronies have done a monumentally shitty job. We also have a theory that the Democrats would do an equally shitty job. You seem to be content to stay with the people in power because a shitty job will be done either way. I, on the other hand, would rather not reward a shitty job with more time in power, and would instead rather give the other party a chance to prove they are capable of doing a less shitty job.
An individual's best bet for political change these days remains to pick the party that most closely aligns with them and attempt to change it from the inside (a difficult and time-consuming task to be sure). Simply voting for the Loony Toon Party, knowing that it will never get more than 3% of the vote, is just not a practical solution.
Not really surprising. Spotted owls are notoriously poor prosecutors. They also have a well-known bias against rats and other vermin, making them unsuitable for political work.
But what sort of applications is it good for that require mobility? Sure, you could run a DNS server or something on it, but servers don't need to be mobile, so why buy a laptop for that? With those specs it's going to have a hard time running X alone, especially with a modern window manager, much less any sort of productivity tool like OpenOffice.
The race to the bottom in the laptop world may eventually bear fruit by reducing the cost of more capable laptops but that doesn't mean a laptop with specs like this is going to be very useful for most people. Hell, modern PDAs approach the specs of this thing.
A lot of the problems with Africa resulted from European powers trying both of your solutions, in order. First, they conquered them by force and set up their own governments under which the natives were subjugated and treated as inferior beings. Second, they took off and left the Africans to fend for themselves, with mostly disastrous results.
I don't know what the solution for Africa is, but invading doesn't work and ignoring them doesn't work either. No one seems to be willing to spend the time, effort, or money on figuring out any other ways to deal with it, so I guess they're just screwed.
It might have something to do with the fact that throughout its history Africa has been repeatedly exploited by various foreign powers that considered its native inhabitants to be lower forms of life.
I'm not saying Africa was a peaceful utopia before the Europeans got there, but centuries of exploitation certainly didn't do them any favors.
our infrastructure isn't even close to what is need to support a billion electric cars.
This is a red herring that gets brought up over and over. Our infrastructure wasn't even close to what was needed to support a billion gasoline-powered cars in 1900 either. Luckily for us, not everyone immediately went out and got a car, and not everyone will immediately go out and buy an electric car either. We can expand the infrastructure over time as electric car adoption increases, just like we've done with basically every other technology that required infrastructure to work.
I think you have that backwards. Efficient public transportation is not compatible with the low-density living typical in the suburbs. If you want to keep the suburban life, highly efficient private vehicles are the only way to go.
They probably don't want to appear as if they're rewarding people who they believe stole their intellectual property. That would just inspire others to create even more Scrabble clones in hope of getting bought by Hasbro.
That brings up a study I'd really like to see done: What is the correlation (positive or negative), if any, between prevalence of Open Source in a shop and the salaries they offer? Do most of them use open source so they can spend more on quality people, or do they do it because they're cheap and don't want to spend money on anything, people included?
I don't have enough data in my personal work history to make an intelligent guess, although the size of the company involved may have a lot to do with the answer. However, I think it would be valuable information to have. After all, specializing in a given technology because you hear there are lots of jobs asking for it is not a wise move if all of those jobs max out at 8 bucks an hour (exaggeration to illustrate the point, not what I really think Open Source admins make).
I patented the use of curse words for humor value in Slashdot comments years ago. If I ever decide to enforce that patent, all of you fuckers are doomed.
Sure, which is why we need to invest in renewable alternatives for large-scale power production. Getting the non-renewable fuels out of our cars is one step in the process, getting them out of our power plants is another step. Just because we haven't perfected the second step yet doesn't mean we should not be trying to solve the first step.
The Volt, as advertised, is a big step in the right direction. It is not the whole solution, but it's at least getting us on our way to part of the solution, which is better than what we've got so far.
If the Volt is everything it is rumored to be, I would buy it even if gas were back down at 50 cents a gallon. The reasons are simple: not only is it better for the environment, but it requires far less (maybe even none depending on how you drive) of a non-renewable resource like oil. So long as oil remains a non-renewable resource, any dips in price will be strictly temporary.
I would hope that at least some of us have learned our lesson from this most recent fuel crisis: oil is simply not a sustainable way to get our energy over the long term.
Slashdot Mirror
If you drill it, it will come.
Well, that really depends on your technique.
It will detect the lack of a TPM and notify the FBI that you are probably a terrorist.
Psh...if you were using a compiled language like C you probably would have gotten first post.
I dislike this argument not only because it's used in virtually every political discussion on Slashdot, but also because it appears to be designed to encourage complicity. Sure, the argument states that change is just as simple as deciding to vote for some third party, but all of the existing third parties tend to only appeal to a very limited fringe group, so that's really no solution at all.
So, dismissing the idea that simply voting for a third party will change everything as realistically unfeasible, we're left with the central part of the argument, which is that both parties suck, so you might as well just throw up your hands and do whatever you've been doing. Neither party will ever change anything, the argument goes, so just vote for whoever you've always voted for and go on with life. Of course, this argument is designed to assure the current party in power stays in power.
However, it contradicts actual reality. It's possible, given their complicity in GWB's antics, even probable, that the Democrats would not be any better if they took power. However, the evidence we currently have is that while Bush has actively sought to come up with new ideas to destroy the country, the Democrats are responsible only for allowing it to happen. Yes, passively allowing someone else to screw everything up is a bad thing, but is it really just as bad as actively screwing things up? Isn't it at least possible that the Democrats might screw things up less if allowed to implement their own ideas rather than just being content to allow someone else to implement his ideas?
In reality, what we have now is the fact that Bush and his cronies have done a monumentally shitty job. We also have a theory that the Democrats would do an equally shitty job. You seem to be content to stay with the people in power because a shitty job will be done either way. I, on the other hand, would rather not reward a shitty job with more time in power, and would instead rather give the other party a chance to prove they are capable of doing a less shitty job.
An individual's best bet for political change these days remains to pick the party that most closely aligns with them and attempt to change it from the inside (a difficult and time-consuming task to be sure). Simply voting for the Loony Toon Party, knowing that it will never get more than 3% of the vote, is just not a practical solution.
Not really surprising. Spotted owls are notoriously poor prosecutors. They also have a well-known bias against rats and other vermin, making them unsuitable for political work.
When Newton said "if I see farther than other men, it is because I stand on the shoulders of giants" (and he wasn't the first to say that)
I totally agree. Someone really should have sued Newton for copyright infringement for that quote.
Moraelin, I would like to purchase your sacred GPS device. I have a terrible cold, and it seems like just the thing to help.
Didn't your parents ever talk with you about the birds and the trees? Remember, it's okay to love trees, just don't *love* trees.
Here you go. And for only $19.95!
But what sort of applications is it good for that require mobility? Sure, you could run a DNS server or something on it, but servers don't need to be mobile, so why buy a laptop for that? With those specs it's going to have a hard time running X alone, especially with a modern window manager, much less any sort of productivity tool like OpenOffice.
The race to the bottom in the laptop world may eventually bear fruit by reducing the cost of more capable laptops but that doesn't mean a laptop with specs like this is going to be very useful for most people. Hell, modern PDAs approach the specs of this thing.
A lot of the problems with Africa resulted from European powers trying both of your solutions, in order. First, they conquered them by force and set up their own governments under which the natives were subjugated and treated as inferior beings. Second, they took off and left the Africans to fend for themselves, with mostly disastrous results.
I don't know what the solution for Africa is, but invading doesn't work and ignoring them doesn't work either. No one seems to be willing to spend the time, effort, or money on figuring out any other ways to deal with it, so I guess they're just screwed.
It might have something to do with the fact that throughout its history Africa has been repeatedly exploited by various foreign powers that considered its native inhabitants to be lower forms of life.
I'm not saying Africa was a peaceful utopia before the Europeans got there, but centuries of exploitation certainly didn't do them any favors.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airplane!
resolv.conf will be written over by DHCP unless you set PEERDNS=no in the /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-ethX file.
our infrastructure isn't even close to what is need to support a billion electric cars.
This is a red herring that gets brought up over and over. Our infrastructure wasn't even close to what was needed to support a billion gasoline-powered cars in 1900 either. Luckily for us, not everyone immediately went out and got a car, and not everyone will immediately go out and buy an electric car either. We can expand the infrastructure over time as electric car adoption increases, just like we've done with basically every other technology that required infrastructure to work.
I think you have that backwards. Efficient public transportation is not compatible with the low-density living typical in the suburbs. If you want to keep the suburban life, highly efficient private vehicles are the only way to go.
They probably don't want to appear as if they're rewarding people who they believe stole their intellectual property. That would just inspire others to create even more Scrabble clones in hope of getting bought by Hasbro.
That brings up a study I'd really like to see done: What is the correlation (positive or negative), if any, between prevalence of Open Source in a shop and the salaries they offer? Do most of them use open source so they can spend more on quality people, or do they do it because they're cheap and don't want to spend money on anything, people included?
I don't have enough data in my personal work history to make an intelligent guess, although the size of the company involved may have a lot to do with the answer. However, I think it would be valuable information to have. After all, specializing in a given technology because you hear there are lots of jobs asking for it is not a wise move if all of those jobs max out at 8 bucks an hour (exaggeration to illustrate the point, not what I really think Open Source admins make).
How can you not know that? He transmitted the results all over the world via ESP! Didn't you get them?
I'm blind in one eye you blue-tinted insensitive clods!
I patented the use of curse words for humor value in Slashdot comments years ago. If I ever decide to enforce that patent, all of you fuckers are doomed.
I was actually thinking of the scene in the Simpsons episode "Realty Bites" where Snake escapes from prison to get his car back from Homer:
Snake: Ohhh, that's L'il Bandit.. and she's in pain! Screw the honor system, my car needs me!
[Snake opens the gate bearing a sign, "NO ESCAPING PLEASE," and runs out into the street.]
Kearney: Hey, you're ruining it for the rest of us!
He's going to totally ruin the honor system for everyone else.
Sure, which is why we need to invest in renewable alternatives for large-scale power production. Getting the non-renewable fuels out of our cars is one step in the process, getting them out of our power plants is another step. Just because we haven't perfected the second step yet doesn't mean we should not be trying to solve the first step.
The Volt, as advertised, is a big step in the right direction. It is not the whole solution, but it's at least getting us on our way to part of the solution, which is better than what we've got so far.
If the Volt is everything it is rumored to be, I would buy it even if gas were back down at 50 cents a gallon. The reasons are simple: not only is it better for the environment, but it requires far less (maybe even none depending on how you drive) of a non-renewable resource like oil. So long as oil remains a non-renewable resource, any dips in price will be strictly temporary.
I would hope that at least some of us have learned our lesson from this most recent fuel crisis: oil is simply not a sustainable way to get our energy over the long term.