The criterium was 'battles', not 'wars'. And as a hobbyist WWII nut, I can categorically state that the US Armed Forces did exceedingly well in battle in WWII. Occasionally they had their bad days (Kasserine Pass, the first days of the Battle of the Bulge), but by and large the GIs held, even if outnumbered. Go peddle your stories to the survivors of the 1st and 29nd Infantry Divisions, and see if they do not beat you to a pulp for your presumption.
Hell, the Airborne even held when their allies deserted them. Go google for Hell's Highway.
We haven't fought a victorious full-scale battle on our own since the Civil War.
Belleau Wood
Omaha Beach
Operation Cobra
Operation Market-Garden (Monty fucked up, but Ridgeway's Airborne divisions fought extremely well, the 82nd almost to the end of the operation on its own)
The siege of Bastogne
That amphibious landing in the Korean war and the subsequent campaign
I'm not even an American, and I know enough to know you're talking shit.
No, you were whining that you couldn't stop in time. I pointed out that there was another solution to your problem. But as you are so kind as to clarify, you were merely whining.
There are plenty of times where I am going the speed limit, and the light goes yellow. If I stop, I will stop in the intersection. If I continue at current speed (the limit) I will be 1/4 the way into the intersection when it goes red. Oh and if the road is the least bit wet? forget it. I'm probably going slower now, so it WILL be red before I enter, but there is no way to stop in time.
So? You know you do have another control available, right? Just hit the gas. If safety is your overriding concern here, then a minor speed limit violation is preferable if that creates a safer situation, i.e. running a yellow instead of a red.
You forget one thing: you are not alone on the road with nothing to worry about but that line. The moment I see a car creeping over that line on an intersection, I am presented with a choice: did he just overshoot his braking, or is he planning to run the intersection?
By not respecting the markings on the road, you are making driving difficult for everyone else. But we're not allowed to say anything about that? Fuck you, asshole.
If you set up a firewall, you can send RSTs as much as you want, since you represent the systems behind the firewall. Looking at the the physical traffic, it is indeed not the systems themselves declining the connection, however, at the logical and organisational levels, it is definitely your systems (and in case of a company, that means you the company) that are declining connection. Therefore, no forgery.
Comcast however, is doing no such thing. They are sending RST packets on behalf of unrelated third parties, unasked for, while pretending to be said third party. That is forgery.
Well, you know, Microsoft could take a lead from other institutions that use software to handle customer data, like banks, and implement a decent Change Management system. The software exists, the necessary procedures one should implement are all nicely documented (ITIL is not a panacaea, but it has merits), and both are used in live production environments. Trust me, I used to work in financials.
So, because Microsoft can't be arsed to implement correct procedures, and roll out decent software internally, their users have to suffer? I say Mr. Cherry is right. This should not have been possible.
Perhaps it is better if you learned to read before talking about the splinter in other people's eyes.
The DHCP RFC specifically states that clients capable of receiving unicast replies SHOULD NOT set the broadcast bit. A practice Microsoft has followed from Windows NT 3.51 up to Windows XP. MS acknowledges that Vista is capable of receiving unicast, as their fix is basically flipping the broadcast bit in the registry, so MS broke the SHOULD NOT rule. And since they have shown to be aware of that rule in previous implementations, the fact that the ISPs DHCP servers do not accept broadcast bits, even though strictly speaking in error, is sufficiently less severe that it is realistic to expect MS to fix their shit, not the ISP.
And until you can come up with a good explanation why MS decided to implement an obsolescent legacy standard in their top of the line OS, whereas they used the state of the art in their legacy OSes, STFU, OK?
You mean Ubuntu actually hardcodes the detected PCI-ID into the xorg.conf file? That's beyond dumb. Even Debian (Ubuntu's base distro) relies on Xorg's autodetection, so much so in fact that its automatic tools give you an almost empty xorg.conf.
The problems occur when you do something as simple as move the graphics card to a different slot after installation. X is not smart enough to figure out that it just needs to substitute a different PCI bus ID.
Bullshit.
X autodetects the videocard and uses it, no matter what slot it is in. The only way to turn this off is by hardcoding the PCI-ID in the xorg.conf file. Now, maybe some distros are dumb enough to do so, but that's not an X failure. The only possible failure is when X does not autodetect your card at all.
fairly easy call, since 95%+ of all desktop computers run some form of Windows
Not such an easy call. From what I know, knowledge of alternate operating systems is more widely spread in Germany; the stereotype of the technically adept German has at least some truth in it.
I'd be surprised if Windows has more than 80% market penetration in Germany.
I am actually agreeing with much of what you say. Of necessity in this medium I tend to use a lot of shorthand soundbites for what would otherwise be a lengthy exercise in what amounts to casting pearls before the swine (most of the time). Especially the bit where you point out that Marx did not view himself as an economist. I still maintain that his political theory focuses too much on the trappings of power (the distribution of resources, most especially means of production), and therefore tends to overlook to do a proper analysis how power relationships work beyond the capitalist/proletariat relationship, but as I indicated, I am a Socialist of the Libertarian bent, so I tend to side with the Anarchist philosophers on this matter, so it is natural that I cut Marx very little slack beyond his insights on class.
Now, to the meat. First, I agree that the Manifesto is not the whole of Marx' work (it is not even entirely his), but that is why I said that there is an implied assumption in his work that the proletarian State is necessarily better than the bourgeois State, and especially the assumption that it will voluntarily relinquish power. No amount of text criticism is going to polish that implication away. His behaviour in getting the Anarchists thrown out of the International tends to confirm the view that Marx was an authoritarian at heart.
Second, his critique of capitalism falls flat, IMO, on his purely economic reasoning. Marx correctly deduces that material status correlates with power, and that capitalism brings power to different groups (the bourgeoisie instead of the feudal overlords), but then he continues on with a wholly economic analysis of the social ills of his day, totally ignoring the effect of power concentration and the ills of unrestricted authority of one human over another. To compound his error, he only sees economic outcomes of his analysis (Verelendung for example) and proscribes only economic solutions (expropriation in the proletarian State). His blindness to all but economic force is a nice mirror image of the modern day Libertarians who refuse to admit even the existence of such a thing. His actual work on economics is good, but sometimes shaky, and could have done with a bit more rigorous analysis. As J.K. Galbraith says, the problem with Marx is not so much that he was wrong, but that he was right on so many things. This means that his followers tend to overlook his failings, or try to explain them away.
And yes, actual feudalism is not returning (although the existence of dynasties in modern politics is worrying), but modern day oligopoly capitalism does have enough parallels that feudalism is a useful analogy.
Precisely the point. Spain did have a policy against ethnic minorities under Franco, and his successors continued that policy long after his death, even if they softened it up a bit.
Now, today, Spain may not oppress minorities anymore, but the past is recent enough that holding them up as a good example is not the smartest thing to do.
neither spain nor france is oppressing the Basque, systematically trying to eliminate their language, culture, or religion,
You seem to have missed the existence of one Francisco Franco and his policies toward ethnic minorities such as the Basque and the Catalans. Policies which the succeeding governments, if watered down, continued. How long did it take to finally recognise Basque and Catalan as official languages besides Castilian Spanish?
Marx's critiques of 'capitalism' were never valid.
And then you provide a Wikipedia link. You prove parent poster right, your condemnation of Marxism is built on hearsay, not on a reasoned position. You could have taken the time to expound on your views, but instead you weasel out from under your obligation by hiding against doing just a 'causal [sic] Slashdot post'. Whereas, if I may point this out, parent did do the difficult work of putting down a well-reasoned request at great length.
Marx has made some critical mistakes, but the main one IMO (as a Libertarian Socialist) is his assumption that the proletarian State after the revolution would not be subject to the same corruption of power as the bourgeois State. He does not say it out loud, but his vision of the State withering away (in the Manifesto) is a clear indication of his implied (mis)assumption.
As the critiques from such people as Bakunin point out, the problem is not the distribution of resources. That is merely reflection of the distribution of power. Of course, having more resources conveys more power, but the converse is also true. In the end, Capitalism may not devolve in just monopolies, but in a new kind of feudalism. Something of that is already obvious in modern society, where there is an implied worship of power qua power, see the way criticism of CEO pay is often shouted down with cries of "but they deserve it!". MBAs serve as the new noble patents in this kind of world.
Skype has some rather paranoid anti-debugging measures
This, to me, would be enough reason to ban Skype from all systems under my control. What does it have to hide that I, as legitimate administrator, am not allowed to know?
Not that this is the only reason why a security-conscious administrator should not allow Skype on the network, of course.
[...]the MANAGER -> the LEADER who should be providing these metrics to you and not making YOU do HIS work!
Welcome to the real world. In corporate management, it appears that it is the job of the manager to order his subordinates to find out what his job is. Actual productivity is irrelevant. It is all a shell game to provide the semblance of useful work for the new feudal overlords.
Which is why I quit. SMEs have their problems, and they are not entirely free of the MBA Morons, but it's a damn sight better than any Fortune x00 company.
Rats, you're right. Separate volume channel is the same as extending the number of bits per sample. As for the binary notation, I was just going along with his silly example to point out that it is in fact the total amount of bits available that determines quality, not the amount actually used.
If you want a good disk-based player, buy a Cowon iAudio M5 (or its successor, the X5). It has a really good D/A converter that can handle CD-level S/N ratios, its standard earbuds are OK (better buds are always a good idea), and it gets up to 14 hours on a single charge. Cowon honestly warns that 14 hours is what they get in factory testing, but I found that in real life usage the M5 comes close to factory performance. With the battery in good shape, 12 hours is the normal expected life of a single charge.
And the good thing is, both the M5 and the X5 come in Longplay versions with double the battery capacity. All in all, not a bad deal for a player that plays just about every format.
Ah! Another M5 fan. Mine is slowly dying (battery is not holding full charge anymore), but with some decent earbuds (I use OEM Akai buds, sold by Creative and Sennheiser under their name) it is a wonderful little machine. I was actually surprised to hear that its D/A converter could handle classical to the point that I could hear the bows hitting the violin strings, over the wind noise whipping around my motorcycle helmet.
That, coupled with the fact that it will play just about any format thrown at it, makes it one of the best portable audio players around, IMO.
When you're listening to a soft passage, you're really listening to 8-bit audio or worse, because the high bits are all zero.
That is nonsense. You are still listening to 16-bit audio. The fact that the high bits are zero is entirely the point: because it is 16-bit, it still has 8 bits left over for the quiet parts. If it were really 8-bit at that point, it would need to stuff that into 4-bits.
I agree however if 16-bit CD encoding had a seperate channel for volume, so that it could compress the sound into the full 16 bits and record the compression amount in the volume channel, dynamically readjusting to normal volume on output, but that has practical limitations as reducing the capacity of the medium (a big deal in the eighties), and reduction of the S/N ratio (if you record at higher gain, you get more noise). CD Audio is a compromise, but so are all recording methods. CD Audio is just the most acceptable compromise at the moment.
And you will be surprised at just how much of that 90% is essential to the music.
Which is why only my pop/rock music gets encoded in lossy formats. There usually is not enough subtlety to care anyway. But my classical goes into FLAC, because every lost harmonic counts in the fortissimo passages, not to mention the actual destruction of notes in the quiet parts when using compression.
Slashdot Mirror
The OCMH disagrees with you. So post some proofs besides your assertions, or STFU.
MartThe criterium was 'battles', not 'wars'. And as a hobbyist WWII nut, I can categorically state that the US Armed Forces did exceedingly well in battle in WWII. Occasionally they had their bad days (Kasserine Pass, the first days of the Battle of the Bulge), but by and large the GIs held, even if outnumbered. Go peddle your stories to the survivors of the 1st and 29nd Infantry Divisions, and see if they do not beat you to a pulp for your presumption.
Hell, the Airborne even held when their allies deserted them. Go google for Hell's Highway.
And no, I am not an American.
MartI'm not even an American, and I know enough to know you're talking shit.
MartNo, you were whining that you couldn't stop in time. I pointed out that there was another solution to your problem. But as you are so kind as to clarify, you were merely whining.
MartSo? You know you do have another control available, right? Just hit the gas. If safety is your overriding concern here, then a minor speed limit violation is preferable if that creates a safer situation, i.e. running a yellow instead of a red.
MartYou forget one thing: you are not alone on the road with nothing to worry about but that line. The moment I see a car creeping over that line on an intersection, I am presented with a choice: did he just overshoot his braking, or is he planning to run the intersection?
By not respecting the markings on the road, you are making driving difficult for everyone else. But we're not allowed to say anything about that? Fuck you, asshole.
MartIf you set up a firewall, you can send RSTs as much as you want, since you represent the systems behind the firewall. Looking at the the physical traffic, it is indeed not the systems themselves declining the connection, however, at the logical and organisational levels, it is definitely your systems (and in case of a company, that means you the company) that are declining connection. Therefore, no forgery.
Comcast however, is doing no such thing. They are sending RST packets on behalf of unrelated third parties, unasked for, while pretending to be said third party. That is forgery.
And yes, I am a firewall administrator.
MartWell, you know, Microsoft could take a lead from other institutions that use software to handle customer data, like banks, and implement a decent Change Management system. The software exists, the necessary procedures one should implement are all nicely documented (ITIL is not a panacaea, but it has merits), and both are used in live production environments. Trust me, I used to work in financials.
So, because Microsoft can't be arsed to implement correct procedures, and roll out decent software internally, their users have to suffer? I say Mr. Cherry is right. This should not have been possible.
MartPerhaps it is better if you learned to read before talking about the splinter in other people's eyes.
The DHCP RFC specifically states that clients capable of receiving unicast replies SHOULD NOT set the broadcast bit. A practice Microsoft has followed from Windows NT 3.51 up to Windows XP. MS acknowledges that Vista is capable of receiving unicast, as their fix is basically flipping the broadcast bit in the registry, so MS broke the SHOULD NOT rule. And since they have shown to be aware of that rule in previous implementations, the fact that the ISPs DHCP servers do not accept broadcast bits, even though strictly speaking in error, is sufficiently less severe that it is realistic to expect MS to fix their shit, not the ISP.
And until you can come up with a good explanation why MS decided to implement an obsolescent legacy standard in their top of the line OS, whereas they used the state of the art in their legacy OSes, STFU, OK?
MartYou mean Ubuntu actually hardcodes the detected PCI-ID into the xorg.conf file? That's beyond dumb. Even Debian (Ubuntu's base distro) relies on Xorg's autodetection, so much so in fact that its automatic tools give you an almost empty xorg.conf.
MartBullshit.
X autodetects the videocard and uses it, no matter what slot it is in. The only way to turn this off is by hardcoding the PCI-ID in the xorg.conf file. Now, maybe some distros are dumb enough to do so, but that's not an X failure. The only possible failure is when X does not autodetect your card at all.
MartNot such an easy call. From what I know, knowledge of alternate operating systems is more widely spread in Germany; the stereotype of the technically adept German has at least some truth in it.
I'd be surprised if Windows has more than 80% market penetration in Germany.
MartI am actually agreeing with much of what you say. Of necessity in this medium I tend to use a lot of shorthand soundbites for what would otherwise be a lengthy exercise in what amounts to casting pearls before the swine (most of the time). Especially the bit where you point out that Marx did not view himself as an economist. I still maintain that his political theory focuses too much on the trappings of power (the distribution of resources, most especially means of production), and therefore tends to overlook to do a proper analysis how power relationships work beyond the capitalist/proletariat relationship, but as I indicated, I am a Socialist of the Libertarian bent, so I tend to side with the Anarchist philosophers on this matter, so it is natural that I cut Marx very little slack beyond his insights on class.
MartThanks for the kind words.
Now, to the meat. First, I agree that the Manifesto is not the whole of Marx' work (it is not even entirely his), but that is why I said that there is an implied assumption in his work that the proletarian State is necessarily better than the bourgeois State, and especially the assumption that it will voluntarily relinquish power. No amount of text criticism is going to polish that implication away. His behaviour in getting the Anarchists thrown out of the International tends to confirm the view that Marx was an authoritarian at heart.
Second, his critique of capitalism falls flat, IMO, on his purely economic reasoning. Marx correctly deduces that material status correlates with power, and that capitalism brings power to different groups (the bourgeoisie instead of the feudal overlords), but then he continues on with a wholly economic analysis of the social ills of his day, totally ignoring the effect of power concentration and the ills of unrestricted authority of one human over another. To compound his error, he only sees economic outcomes of his analysis (Verelendung for example) and proscribes only economic solutions (expropriation in the proletarian State). His blindness to all but economic force is a nice mirror image of the modern day Libertarians who refuse to admit even the existence of such a thing. His actual work on economics is good, but sometimes shaky, and could have done with a bit more rigorous analysis. As J.K. Galbraith says, the problem with Marx is not so much that he was wrong, but that he was right on so many things. This means that his followers tend to overlook his failings, or try to explain them away.
And yes, actual feudalism is not returning (although the existence of dynasties in modern politics is worrying), but modern day oligopoly capitalism does have enough parallels that feudalism is a useful analogy.
MartPrecisely the point. Spain did have a policy against ethnic minorities under Franco, and his successors continued that policy long after his death, even if they softened it up a bit.
Now, today, Spain may not oppress minorities anymore, but the past is recent enough that holding them up as a good example is not the smartest thing to do.
MartYou seem to have missed the existence of one Francisco Franco and his policies toward ethnic minorities such as the Basque and the Catalans. Policies which the succeeding governments, if watered down, continued. How long did it take to finally recognise Basque and Catalan as official languages besides Castilian Spanish?
MartAnd then you provide a Wikipedia link. You prove parent poster right, your condemnation of Marxism is built on hearsay, not on a reasoned position. You could have taken the time to expound on your views, but instead you weasel out from under your obligation by hiding against doing just a 'causal [sic] Slashdot post'. Whereas, if I may point this out, parent did do the difficult work of putting down a well-reasoned request at great length.
Mart
Marx has made some critical mistakes, but the main one IMO (as a Libertarian Socialist) is his assumption that the proletarian State after the revolution would not be subject to the same corruption of power as the bourgeois State. He does not say it out loud, but his vision of the State withering away (in the Manifesto) is a clear indication of his implied (mis)assumption.
As the critiques from such people as Bakunin point out, the problem is not the distribution of resources. That is merely reflection of the distribution of power. Of course, having more resources conveys more power, but the converse is also true. In the end, Capitalism may not devolve in just monopolies, but in a new kind of feudalism. Something of that is already obvious in modern society, where there is an implied worship of power qua power, see the way criticism of CEO pay is often shouted down with cries of "but they deserve it!". MBAs serve as the new noble patents in this kind of world.
MartThis, to me, would be enough reason to ban Skype from all systems under my control. What does it have to hide that I, as legitimate administrator, am not allowed to know?
Not that this is the only reason why a security-conscious administrator should not allow Skype on the network, of course.
MartWelcome to the real world. In corporate management, it appears that it is the job of the manager to order his subordinates to find out what his job is. Actual productivity is irrelevant. It is all a shell game to provide the semblance of useful work for the new feudal overlords.
Which is why I quit. SMEs have their problems, and they are not entirely free of the MBA Morons, but it's a damn sight better than any Fortune x00 company.
MartRats, you're right. Separate volume channel is the same as extending the number of bits per sample. As for the binary notation, I was just going along with his silly example to point out that it is in fact the total amount of bits available that determines quality, not the amount actually used.
MartIf you want a good disk-based player, buy a Cowon iAudio M5 (or its successor, the X5). It has a really good D/A converter that can handle CD-level S/N ratios, its standard earbuds are OK (better buds are always a good idea), and it gets up to 14 hours on a single charge. Cowon honestly warns that 14 hours is what they get in factory testing, but I found that in real life usage the M5 comes close to factory performance. With the battery in good shape, 12 hours is the normal expected life of a single charge.
And the good thing is, both the M5 and the X5 come in Longplay versions with double the battery capacity. All in all, not a bad deal for a player that plays just about every format.
Cowon homepage
MartAh! Another M5 fan. Mine is slowly dying (battery is not holding full charge anymore), but with some decent earbuds (I use OEM Akai buds, sold by Creative and Sennheiser under their name) it is a wonderful little machine. I was actually surprised to hear that its D/A converter could handle classical to the point that I could hear the bows hitting the violin strings, over the wind noise whipping around my motorcycle helmet.
That, coupled with the fact that it will play just about any format thrown at it, makes it one of the best portable audio players around, IMO.
MartThat is nonsense. You are still listening to 16-bit audio. The fact that the high bits are zero is entirely the point: because it is 16-bit, it still has 8 bits left over for the quiet parts. If it were really 8-bit at that point, it would need to stuff that into 4-bits.
I agree however if 16-bit CD encoding had a seperate channel for volume, so that it could compress the sound into the full 16 bits and record the compression amount in the volume channel, dynamically readjusting to normal volume on output, but that has practical limitations as reducing the capacity of the medium (a big deal in the eighties), and reduction of the S/N ratio (if you record at higher gain, you get more noise). CD Audio is a compromise, but so are all recording methods. CD Audio is just the most acceptable compromise at the moment.
MartAnd you will be surprised at just how much of that 90% is essential to the music.
Which is why only my pop/rock music gets encoded in lossy formats. There usually is not enough subtlety to care anyway. But my classical goes into FLAC, because every lost harmonic counts in the fortissimo passages, not to mention the actual destruction of notes in the quiet parts when using compression.
Mart