Because some of us have used both, and know people who are the release managers for both, and know what kind of shortcuts Ubuntu takes (things that will screw you over).
debian testing is far more stable than ubuntu stable.
So, the issues with Ubuntu are testing of dependencies? I agree. That is what questions and bugs I've filed suggest to me. There is too much of an urge to be bleeding edge than to provide stability, despite the Debian base. If Debian had an easier install, it might take the lead away from Cannonical.
Maybe it is a mark of its leader's net worth that he has the hubris to shuttle us from standard to standard, willly-nilly. That will hurt his cause and the cause of Linux generally. I continue to use Ubuntu, but only because of the large repositories, not because I don't fear that being jerked around won't eventually make me dump it. I tried Unity, didn't like it and went to Gnome Classic, but I don't really like KDE either, at least the more recent releases.
I've been using Ubuntu Since 8.10 and now I have 12.04. Ubuntu does suck, because it is too ambitious but in all the wrong ways. If Linux advocates like myself wanted Linux to take over the world, especially from Windows, we would not change the design of the GUI overnight and because of one man's ego, and we would not break as many things as new features we introduce. In fact the hallmark of good technology is that it vanishes, Linux just won't go away because too many geeks want to show how smart they are. This will never defeat Paul Alan and Microsoft who are cheap and greedy.
Little things do matter, even when you have some understanding of the way programs are written you don't appreciate it when the promoted windows manager PCmanFM has fewer features than what it is supposed to be better at and replace, nautalus, and has done stupid things like not leaving the last directory visited highlighted, and Ubuntu is not the only distro to make this change in file managers. Before you call me stupid and say don't use a file manager, let me say that I used xterm and the shell long before some of you were out of diapers, you need a good file manager for multimedia files. There is an Enlightenment terminal that does a good hybrid of the shell and a file manager but libraries it needs are being lost in the Gnome 3, Wayland shift. I couldn't get it to compile on Ubuntu.
I spend too much time trying to fix or work around lost functionality, either by writing shell scripts or installing alternative apps. This addes to administrative overhead is you have to change config with every release because the promoted upgrades broke functionality you got used to having. I don't have as nearly a tidy multimedia association now in 12.04 as I had in 9.04 or 10.10 and that is because of the drift in window manager, which might get even worse if Shuttleworthless wants to dump X.0rg.
Commercial engineering operations get too small when their product matures. Cononnical does not seem up to the task of supporting what it ships, and either you contact the Open Source developer or want to take on the complexity of fixing applications that aren't really supported, Open Source doesn't really change much except for the incentives to start projects, down the road the grind of maintaining them is the same and costs pretty much the same. So some geek works for 90 days on a new program but only does 75% of the job, loses interest and plunks the thing in a repository and every Linux distro picks it up and copies it. They may even say that it was better than what it superceded, until it gets sprung on us in a update; some engineer has decided that it should be the default application, but it is too new, too untested, and the developer doesn't care that he only did 3/4 of the job PCmanFM vs Nautalis is an example, so is Geeqie vs. Gqview. These two are image viewers. The older one, gqview, had a thumbnail compare of images of the same name and prompted you for overwright/rename, which feature was lost in the replacement. I actually still use the binary for gqview which was for U 9.10 even though geeqie is the sanctioned version on U. 12.04. I know that I am treading on thin ice if the legacy libraries go away. If Shuttleworthless starts dumping X11 libraries, I will probably dump Ubuntu.
This is great news if the innovation makes it into the low end of CCD detectors. It means that people with more modest cameras could shoot in very low light and get the response you could get from ASA 400 speed film like ekectachrome to shoot exosures of the sky. I was able to report pretty good constellation photos using very modest equipment, an OM-2 F 1.4 35mm lens to capture stars, including bright Messier objects, 35 years ago. I got M44 in Cancer once.
You play hell with a camera under $600 to get that amount of sensitivity from a digicam. I used to shoot 20 second exposures and get stars down to 7th magnitude on slide film. I'd love to do that again with a digicam and not pay a fortune.
The meteorite that landed in Morocco was described in Sky_and_Telescope for May 2013, pg 12, with a photo of a 5 cm rectangular bright green fragment. The bright green mineral is diopside. Spectra from Mercury messenger match Ensteite, both minerals have large amounts of Mg and Ca, but are typically lower in Fe. The chemistry of the meteorite and the geochemistry measured from space are close but not exact. Mercury has one of the most battered surfaces in the solar sytstem
and I thought that its greater average density would make for a large metal core, the most common metal being iron. Either there is a big probably frozen iron core but the crust is very well differentiated geochemically so that there isn't much Fe at the surface. Perhaps the period of intense bombardment that all bodies went through about 3.7 BYA (I think) caused the Fe to melt out of the crust.
The tone of the original post sounds like the person is not UNIX competent, i.e. can't use shell commands. And he doesn't give the quality of information a tech-support engineer would require, I know, I used to troubleshoot these kind of problems with customers over the phone, We don't know for instance if the guy was just impatient and stopped the file transfers and his system won't boot because he didn't wait for disk checks to complete. He apparently hasn't noticed recovery mode either, if he can use the shell. Certainly, using arch is bad advice because that requires use of the shell even if you find that the packages are not buggy. We just don't know enough to say what he should do, although faced with this situation, I was briefly with a Ubuntu 12,04 install, I would go to one of the live distros such as Knoppix 7 and boot into ram and examine the partition that got his Ubuntu install. I think that some of the rescue distros will force the disk checks on a recognizable filesystem, even NTFS, as they are often used to fix broken Windows installs. I would even bet that unless the guy clobbered the MBR on his first disk that if the OS boots at all, he should notice if the boot is trying to check the disk and wait, be patient. if the disk is truly not bootable, gparted or Knoppix can create a new MBR, I think they can run grub. Fixing that would be a good learning experience if the guy is intent on looking beneath the hood.
What places like the symphony need are simply content that is more relevant to those they want to attract. It's hard to sell traditional symphonic material to younger crowds, so provide that but also a bit of more contemporary stuff.
I guess that 95% of the music in the world uses no more of a harmonic language of the scale degrees of I, Vi, V, Vi. V/Vi, and an average duration of possibly five minutes, That can't be compared with the length or complexity of one of Gustav Mahler's Symphony outer movements, usually sonata form structures of immense size, the longest of which last longer than 75 minutes, I am thinking of part II of the Eighth Symphony or the Finale of the Sixth Symphony.
To perform and to listen to such large structures with their advanced harmonies requires a set of skills that many musicians and a few listeners possess, but not the rest of people. Too bad if you can't remember the key something is in for 30 minutes or more and feels the motion of the form surrounding it. Much less knowing how Mozart and the whole classical period composers use the augmented-sixth chord.
Lest you think I am being a snob, consider that Jazz uses a more advanced harmonic language, using chromatic chords that are current in classical literature. The problem is that in order to please the public the chords are often just chromatic and lack the functional uses they have in the serious literature. That is how Schubert, who died in 1828, can sound more advanced than most current music, and we aren't even talking about Wagner who formalized non-functional harmony.
It is the musicians who determine what is in the repretoire, not marketing people, or a web poll, and thanks for that. We give to people who have acute ability, excellent memory for sound and pitch, to set the standards for music they play for themselves and a select public. You might be talking about the cost or producing music with expensive ensambels, but just as the means to realize music change over time and reasimulate the tradition, that process will continue. We don't play Bach or Mozart, even Beethoven, with the same resources they wrote for, and that is OK. Some people might want to be true to original performance practices, but music that survives is resilliant to changes in how it is preformed.
Ubuntu was a simple choice to recommend for businesses between 2010 and 2012, but now I recommend Mint (Mate normally). That's all I have to say on this issue, Gnome 3 and then Unity have killed 'classic' Ubuntu distributions for me (even though Mint itself is based off of Ubuntu). I tried xubuntu for a few months, but it has various problems itself, so I had to stop with that.
What worries me about anything that depends on Ubuntu repositories is the desire of Canonical to do away with X11. Ubuntu has had a terrible record of supporting legacy applictions, so if those that depend on X11 are supported in some compatable display monitor and window managers, can you trust Canonical to guarentee a transition? I think not.
I'd buy a system with Linux on it and no Windows on it in a heartbeat, especially if it didn't have the secure boot crap that Microsoft is trying to push to make systems with its OEM installs hard to use with a second OS. Send me your pre-Windows 8 systems and I'll gladly install Linux, probably Knoppix, on them and I will troubleshoot hardware failures and leave the repair shops to con clueless Windows users.
But, I digress. I just upgraded U 11.10 to U 12.04 and what I notice is that Canonical is not sweating the small stuff, like correct configuration and documentation of its installed base, so they are ripe for eclipsing by any distro that pays attention to detail.
The problem with Canonical is the fat ego of its millionaire owner who really doesn't care about users, and his being in bed with Gnome empire builders and Red Hat hidden agenda. Not only are they seduced with sexy and the lure of tablets, but they can't do very much right. I've used all U releases from 8.10 to U 12.04 and the feature set has broken legacy at each step. Things I liked in U 10.10 are now broken, and like every other commercial tech support operation I've ever been part of or used, the marketing of the new features is more important than maintaining or fixing bugs in the installed base. This makes these dreamers and schemers vulnerable to disciplined competition.
I really hate businessmen in mature markets, and that is what the Linux world has become. When the greedy bastards who first worked at Apple or Microsoft get the idea that Linux is a money maker, they take over and spoil it, or try to. Mature markets bring fat egos and control freaks. It is time to take Linux back and make it more transparent for novices to try out and use. They shouldn't have to worry about installing or partitioning or even what window manager with what features to use. There shouldn't be fights breaking out over the UI, because that reflects the power grab rather than a freedom of choice and reduced complexity. I think Puppy is the right approach, but with a more industrial strength installation.
I've seen some of the smaller distros, tried out many of then, what I.d like to see is something that runs out of archives that live entirely within an NTFS filesystem or a single EXT4 or some other filesystem type where you don't have to manage partitions to install multiple linux ssystems. This is not mere virtualization, or use of disk images. Puppy has already shown with with a Gig or more of ram you can do useful things in RAM and flush changes to dated archives that can exist as revision control and backups that can be reloaded into memory. All the choices about window manager and applications can be reduced to loading a set of archives, along with system configuration, logs, and user files from other archives. Doing away with the install will end much of the nonsense.
The way this works is that the atmosphere polarizes the light from the sun, and that can be detected before the sun rises or after it sets. On an overcast day, the polarization can be detected as well, giving a way to determine the azimuth of the sun even when it can't be seen by eye.
Calcite is birefriigant, meaning that rays of different polarization pass through a single crystal with rhombic cleavage plans in two paths, which you can see. I would assume that two crystals attached by with different orientation of their crystallographic axies would produce interference which can easily be seen. That is the principle of the polarizing microscope in which one of the polarizers is allowed to rotate freely over the other producing the shifting interference colors.
If you are curious, get a piece of clear calcite with clean cleavages and look through it in various directions. You will soon see the birefrigance. It is not necessary to get a complete crystal, with euhedral faces, as they are usually pitted anyway, and large crystals cleaved in the right way are easy to get.
Yeah, that is the stupidity the House Speaker tried during the Debt Limit Debate. John Baynour got on prime time and made the false analogy of the federal debt with a credit card limit for a family. A family doesn't control the money supply are decide who to tax for its spending. There is a hidden agenda here. It is the libertarian fixation on money as a fixed asset. While other conservatives look the other way on market speculation they want us to believe that money is like the conservation of mas and energy, it isn't, and there is as much speculation and manipulation of treasury notes and exchange rates as with equities. The conservatives ought to be less consumed with fiscal restraint as with why even a less-regulated market economy, after the speculative bubble they helped create burst, doesn't produce opportunity for most Americans. It is because they are not working for most Americans. It is time to flush them from the scene,
I expect there will be no relief in sight until Americans start electing politicians that put the interests of Americans first. Not that I'm holding my breath.
Wealth and Capitalism doesn't respect national borders. On the one hand one can sing the praises of unregulated markets or even do the opposite and say that we must have national regulation of world markets, and not be mindful of unintended consequences.
So the invention of computers, the Internet, container shipping, and rapid international travel since 1960 has created the global economy we now have. If you are a true Capitalist, then you don't want barriers to off-shore labor since the bottom line doesn't discriminate; if your workers can work anywhere or come from anywhere, the only thing which will drive your decisions is to get just enough competence at as cheap a price as you can. And if those workers don't have all the rights of being a citizen them they can't as readily complain if you decide to abuse them. (This isn't as much of a problem in tech. but talk to any domestic worker on a visa.) .
But talk about unintended consequences, consider how tech drives the lopsided income distribution, the emergence of the 1% who own 60% of the assets in the U'.S. Some of those people are rich because of the post-peak-oil and have made sure that we are even more dependent on carbon fuels now that the supply i going down and the price going up. Many of the rest of those richest people got there because of tech, directly or indirectly.
Computers were going to make our lives easier, and they did, they were also going to make things possible that couldn't ever be done before, and they surely have done that, but they decimated labor. They destroyed many jobs, and the reason the income curve for the Middle Class in America has remained flat is that people either lost good jobs in a whole host of fields and were not able to get trained to do what was left. So, that is unintended consequences. People are being displaced because for a wide variety of reasons they cannot get retrained for the available jobs, and the productive work is highly skilled and done by many fewer people. Engineers did create great productivity, but they did not create opportunities for the people displaced. Think for a minute what the effect of AI will be on jobs that really require mental discipline? This is just beginning to have social and political consequences. Maybe Luddites were a couple of centuries early:-)
Many people like to claim that they lack talent with the relevant skills for the particular jobs. I think some of this is true, but most is BS. What it really means is that they don't want to spend even a minute training anyone. They'd rather have the person with the particulars already on the resume than hire someone who might need some minimal introduction. Ie, any older programmer is going to be able to figure out your new fad language of the year very quickly, and will be able to program it far better than your entry level worker who peppers the resume with buzzwords.
I went through "dot-gone" in Silicon Valley in 2005 and know about this directly. The code language is "Your skills are a little dated." or they see your grey hair and say that. Of course what this is saying is that not only do they want to be choosy and find someone who exactly fits the job spec. but that the reason it is a seller's market is that investment supports job creation and all the investors went on to something sexy. It has nothing to do with the value of what you know, and it is discrimatory and there is nothing you can do about it. The law is not enforced unless the act is extreme and obvious. As someone with physical handicaps who is now aged, I know that employers get trained by the law to learn what not to say, not to adhere to its intent. So, i agree that it is economics that drives this and that when you go interview you are mostly providing a reason to not get hired because the economy is crap, because investors are stupid, because people
do not know what has value.
This is where age discrimination comes in, and it's very subtle, and the people doing the discrimination don't even realize they're doing it. Managers want the exact match for a job, HR people are filtering based on keywords, executives want to give out lowest possible salary. It all adds up.
Hiring people, managers, and especially HR types can't admit what they are doing is unlawful, or that they are lazy or incompetent. Even worse are the job-search agencies, who perpetuate the myth that all the busy work that might apply to getting a sales and marketing job applies to tech. They waste your time and money. What it adds up to is that there are lots of parasites in the food chain, and like a gang war they are fighting over crumbs.
The visa system is up for abuse, and it is being abused. Those execs who disagree about this should be made to step up and prove that no other suitable workers could be found.
They won't make the effort unless it makes their busines unpopular. Business people hate bad publicity. Sometimes that is what it takes to change a long time practice.
This is a sign that plutocrats are working behind the scenes to play both ends against the middle. It is a distraction, it diverts attention away from the back-room deals the 1% are trying to make for themselves. This is no conspiracy theory, only how a powerful segment of the population think, they have access to libertarian-minded members of Congress and can make deals.
As for Conservatives, they re all elitists. Their core belief is that they belong to a minority that deserves more than everybody else for whatever reason they can invent, they are white, they are rich, they are productive, they are Christian, whatever distinction they can make. They also believe in scarcity, and that is where the article cited in this thread is most relevant, they believe that there isn't enough of the value in life to go around and they are going to make sure it is rationed to those they believe are most deserving. A quip I've heard is "The way to make a Republican is to teach him Economics!" which is not entirely true, but it does indicate a mindset. Maybe the point of the European who cited conservatives on the Left and Liberals on the Right is that elitism can happen across the political spectrum, but in America it seems to be concentrated on the Right. I think the uncritical love affair most Americans seem to have with Capitalism is the reason. Most Americans think that if it is a business decision it must be OK, or that to be offered a job directly reflects on their self-worth, when the existence of that job has little to do with their desire for it and more to do with some investor's desire to support its existence, which has little enough to do with its overall benefit to society.
Thank You, a good description. America, for its part has quite different political traditions from most European Nations and could learn a thing or two from them.
Americans ought to study political and economic history of Europe more. In fact American History is a tool of the political establishment in America to prevent Americans from thinking about the kinds of distinctions you cite, especially the possibly beneficial role of a coilition of three or more political parties.
America has been called a "Duopoly" which is at least a two-party system where third parties do not get any traction, but more than that it may be controlled by the same few powerful economic interests giving to both parties. On the National level the College of Electors mandated by the U.S. Constitution may be the institution most responsible for this lock on power. It should be abolished,
But underneath all this is the strangle hold business and Capitalism has on American politics. This probably makes most Europeans Smile: "Silly Americans, how can they be so naive about the abuse of economic power?" For Americans truly believe that hard work is always rewarded, even when it isn't. The Liberal vs. Conservative, Democratic Party Vs. Republican Party divide is more like Europen Football rivalry. It isn't based on much difference in substance.
I don't have that much doubt in the neuralogical work cited here, as far as it goes, but against the backdrop of how poorly political thinking is done in the U.S. and how much of the apearent discussion controlled by Big Money behind the scenes, the well is poisoned and most people in America don't get to think about what really underlies the world they live in.
I live in Northern California and have a geology degree. The article was informative, but it is just shy of giving the useful information from the refereed source, the lithology and formation of the Middle Miocene unit in Leguna Canyon from which the evidently considerable number of fossils comes from. I.d have to find some other source to get the geologic setting for that site.
This is interesting for the geology of California was quite different than it is now. The San Andreas system was just being formed as North America drifted west from the Atlantic spreading ridge and was overtaking the East Pacific Rise. As it did this strike-slip faults were formed when the ridge system and trench that stood off California since the early Jurassic, about 150 MY, were destroyed. The Miocene records the changing environmnts caused by the tectonic change from deep water fie grained oil bearing shales of the Monterey Shale to sandy deposits affected as land was created and eroded.
The fauna described is similar to the one that lives in these waters today, although more primitive, ancestral. It supplies important information about the range of animals that were known from other parts of the world. The lithology of the deposit would tell us more, Did the fauna live near shore which would be the case if then are found in sandy deposits whose grains are derived from land, or were they part of the abyssal shale that is so common in California, earlier in the Miocene?
The San Andreas strike slip, which amounts to 350 km of right lateral displacement in less than 30 MY has changed the areal distribution of Miocene sediments in California. Places that would have been adjacent to Orange County in Miocene time are now in central and northern California. The Monetrey Shale type locality is in southern Monterey County and it can be seen as far north as Santa Cruz, but it is also found very wide spread in the Southern San Jouquen Valley. During the Miocene most of its setting was an off-shore deep water environment off terraines that are today in southern California and Mexico. I expect that the Leguna Canyon setting is probably the inshore equivalent of these offshore abyssal envirornments, provided they are not too much younger. If that then the enironments for these younger Miocene units as all become more shallow water ones, a trend which continues into younger units as the land emerged into Pliocene time.
I only had to read maybe 3 posts on this thread to realize that it has gotten off on the wrong heading.
This is not about automobile fuel tradeoffs. Far more energy is needed to run the electric grid than to run cars, and what drivers of passenger cars do is far less impactful than what commercial machines of all sorts do to the environment. The Conservatives who are trying to deceive you about energy, many of whom also backed the GOP in the last election, are hard-bitten energy executives who want to protect the investment they have in producing ever more expensive carbon-based fuels for a system that is not built out to take advantage of any alternatives, even if they were super abundant, and they are using their considerable clout and greed to try to pull the wool over our eyes.
We are already well into the predicted effects of global warming due to excess C02 and Methane in the atmosphere caused by human activity. The weather shifts were predicted by NOAA as far back as 2003, so the only mystery here is when the Permian Mass Extinction like-event will play out on us in full. A bunch of greedy bastards don't care if 75% of the life on the planet gets exterminated as long as they and their elites can find a place to stay and lock out all the other poor people who don't share their libertarian views. After all, this is about elites ripping the rest of us off and then running from the results.
I have really disliked Microsoft for a long time. The reason is really how lazy and uncreative they are. There products are boring and their OS is a huge security hole. I was using software back in 1982 that I was sure Bill Gates stole from. I always thought that he was just a greedy bastard from Harvard, which is what I think of Mark Zuckerberg. They are all bastards, sociopaths, really.
Still, success in business does not justify any of it, whether Google is reading my e-mails or whether Microsoft gets to install its crap OS on every PC and charge you for it whether you use it or not. If we had a decent Congress, that would have been made illegal years ago. But we don't. what we have is a nation and a government that uncritically worships business and most people, even many who post here, believe that if it was done in the course of pursuing profit,that it must be OK. Let me tell you, it isn't.
I hope that the ad is an act of desperation, that Microsoft is finally aware that it is going to lose big time and that it is on the attack because it has really lost a critical battle, but what I really hope is that the power ambitions of all these companies is thwarted at the point where abuse of power starts to show. I am not rooting for Google, either. I have seen how greed is shaping search and how mining my data to target ads at me is going to turn me off. It is time for another giant slayer to appear, to make search unbiased again, to undermine the business model and to keep greedy investors from poisoning the well.
Conservatives can want revolution, but it matters who the revolution is for. For Conservatives and especially Libertarians is is change to favor an elite, An elite that thinks it deserves the benefits of civilization more than many other groups in society, an elite that imagines itself as more productive and more worthy than groups its labels as unproductive or as not contributing enough.
What distinguishes Conservatives from other persuasions is that they see inclusiveness and universality, you know, the idea that most people are more or less alike and have the same st of needs and urges, as a threat, and that they want to dictate the rules for who can be included.
This is a point of view predicated on scarcity, of money, of the benefits of life, or specie. So groups who worship gold or business, view themselves as special and entitled. Elites can come from many sources. they can come from religion, wealth, race, education, profession, and ideology. There are Communist elites, for example, but regardless of the political classification, it is the them vs. us mentality that is diagnostic.
Even if you don't like Ubuntu with Unity, at least the cost of it isn't bundled with the price of the whole system.
Unity is about as brain dead as the start screen on Windows 8, and for the same reason. At least Windows 8 runs on a tablet for which that is reasonable.
The OEM deal Microsoft has with PC vendors is a reason I have no faith in the laws of the U.S. that were designed to protect consumers from monopoly. That deal should have been declared illegal long ago.
That said, Windows is largely crap, and the biggest reason is that it is basically a huge security hole that can't be plugged. If Norton can nag you about installing their anti-virus software on a new Windows install, evey hacker can get the keys to your kingdom as well. I wouldn't go so far as to assert that Linux is not hackable, just like users can be persuaded to reveal the root password. but it seems to be harder to rootkit than to get access on a Windows system.
A little courage can save you lots of money. You might even be money ahead to buy a recent refurbished laptop with a clean disk or no disk and put a new disk in and install some version of Linux and try the Windows-like apps which should meet most of your needs. Don't let some bozo install Windows or charge you for a Windows install when there are plenty of fine Linux distributions that you can test from live DVD before you decide to install one. They run entirely in memory and do not touch the hard drive, and you get get the flavor and test them before you install. I have run some recent versions on an ancient box with no disk at all and with less than a gig of ram. You can easily try these and see if you like what they do at no risk.
If you insist on running some Windows app, that is doable on most Linux systems with have emulation for Windows, which is most of them.
[...] But the reality is that some people are born maladapted to modern technological culture, and the question is, "What do you do about it, if anything?" Moralistic, "Oh my god, the nazis!" hand wringing helps nothing. Morality is subjective, changeable with time and culture. Is genetic engineering for greater intelligence moral or immoral, and says who? You?
Sounds like Lebensborn to me
.
As a practical matter, as resources shrink, particularly energy resources shirink over time, decisions like this will be made, if not in the USA, then certainly in other countries. You can deal with them as rationally as possible, or you can continue whingeing, disclaiming all responsibility and doing nothing while overpopulation continues and EVERYBODY starves.
Nazi Germany was driven by the engineering mentality. There was a technological solution for everything. But note that I didn't use the word "scientific". Because of the closed mindset Hitler and the government lost sight of the science that was intended to defeat him and then reduce Germany to even more of a cinder that it was. It was labeled as "jewish" and dismissed.
At worse we have started the ball rolling on a mass extinction event that no-one will escape. It is not simply that fortunes or
national treasuries will be lost, or that some Uber class of people, so-called "smart" people, will be able to survive, for it was
those leaders in technology and business who are causing the disaster, and it might wipe out the human race altogether.
As you sound paranoid, be careful that in setting yourself up as wise and above the frey that the great unwashed don't come gunning for you as the cause of their suffering.The same happened to Hitler.
Yes, "Stealing is Theft", but the wisdom of giving things away might be that it is cheaper than trying to control them. It is a trade-off. It might be better to allow some people to "steal" then to enforce that everybody pay, and it might create better good will. An example of that you pay for "free" stuff and it might be better to give it way: There is a site that gives away "free" fonts, but I have stopped going to the site because they want information from me in exchange for downloading the font file. Now not all of the fonts on the site are free and it is obvious that they will probably begin sending me e-mails about products I'd have to pay for. Now it isn't the case that I am interested in a new font very often. I'm not a designer who needs to try out lots of fonts and has a budget to spend on getting fonts. In addition I have to trust that the site owners will otherwise respect my privacy, which is by no means a given. So I had decided not to visit that site again. They should consider that if they are going to offer free fonts that there be no strings ( pardon the pun) attached. I think that pay walls from journals could be open more both to stimulate use of research and because the return as articles age does not merit the cost of keeping them behind it.
And you do know about copyright exceptions for educators? Maybe colleges and universities have to pay someone for the right to allow faculty and students to copy materials under copyright in their library collections. This is allowed because restricting use of these materials is worse than preventing out-right theft. Contrast that with the effort by the recording industry to force public libraries to charge a fee for lending CDs against the possibility that the CDs would be illegally copied. That didn't fly because it was not practical to reinburse the recording companies.
Because the cost of distribution got very cheap and the artist and the record companies lost control of media and can't get it back. They've tried; remember the Sony DRM debacle? Fact is, not much has really changed. Musicians still get paid nothing as they have for the past 300 years. What has changed is that a very profitable middleman has been eliminated, one who screwed artists, and as for the resulting flood of crap, only time is the solution for that.
Most music that has ever been written has been forgotten and will remain forgotten. I know serious music (Classical) and I remember a craze for obscure composers of the 18th century and before that happened at about that same time as the fad for authentic performance practice. What that taught us is that there is a reason most of what Antonio Vivaldi wrote and all of Karl Ditters con Dittersdorf was not worth playing, excuse my exaggeration, and that what gets performed is still controlled by performers and the ensambles they form. The serious music corpus is not nearly as large as the popular one, and that the works that get played over and over are revisited for the reason that they have value for musicians, The same will apply to the body of pop. Just give it time.
Oh, and journal publishers are making SO much money on thousands of arcane research articles that maybe five people read in a year? Copyright ought to have a lower bond on usage, it expires if the annual use is lower than the cost of printing or casting into some tangible product. It should pass into the public domain. The only reason a publisher can enforce copyright is that articles are in a printed form, otherwise they are fair game, and if that removes incentives to publish them then researchers can get peer-reviewed and then put the article in the public domain. Who needs publishers, anyway?
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Because some of us have used both, and know people who are the release managers for both, and know what kind of shortcuts Ubuntu takes (things that will screw you over).
debian testing is far more stable than ubuntu stable.
So, the issues with Ubuntu are testing of dependencies? I agree. That is what questions and bugs I've filed suggest to me. There is too much of an urge to be bleeding edge than to provide stability, despite the Debian base. If Debian had an easier install, it might take the lead away from Cannonical.
Maybe it is a mark of its leader's net worth that he has the hubris to shuttle us from standard to standard, willly-nilly. That will hurt his cause and the cause of Linux generally. I continue to use Ubuntu, but only because of the large repositories, not because I don't fear that being jerked around won't eventually make me dump it. I tried Unity, didn't like it and went to Gnome Classic, but I don't really like KDE either, at least the more recent releases.
I've been using Ubuntu Since 8.10 and now I have 12.04. Ubuntu does suck, because it is too ambitious but in all the wrong ways. If Linux advocates like myself wanted Linux to take over the world, especially from Windows, we would not change the design of the GUI overnight and because of one man's ego, and we would not break as many things as new features we introduce. In fact the hallmark of good technology is that it vanishes, Linux just won't go away because too many geeks want to show how smart they are. This will never defeat Paul Alan and Microsoft who are cheap and greedy.
Little things do matter, even when you have some understanding of the way programs are written you don't appreciate it when the promoted windows manager PCmanFM has fewer features than what it is supposed to be better at and replace, nautalus, and has done stupid things like not leaving the last directory visited highlighted, and Ubuntu is not the only distro to make this change in file managers. Before you call me stupid and say don't use a file manager, let me say that I used xterm and the shell long before some of you were out of diapers, you need a good file manager for multimedia files. There is an Enlightenment terminal that does a good hybrid of the shell and a file manager but libraries it needs are being lost in the Gnome 3, Wayland shift. I couldn't get it to compile on Ubuntu.
I spend too much time trying to fix or work around lost functionality, either by writing shell scripts or installing alternative apps. This addes to administrative overhead is you have to change config with every release because the promoted upgrades broke functionality you got used to having. I don't have as nearly a tidy multimedia association now in 12.04 as I had in 9.04 or 10.10 and that is because of the drift in window manager, which might get even worse if Shuttleworthless wants to dump X.0rg.
Commercial engineering operations get too small when their product matures. Cononnical does not seem up to the task of supporting what it ships, and either you contact the Open Source developer or want to take on the complexity of fixing applications that aren't really supported, Open Source doesn't really change much except for the incentives to start projects, down the road the grind of maintaining them is the same and costs pretty much the same. So some geek works for 90 days on a new program but only does 75% of the job, loses interest and plunks the thing in a repository and every Linux distro picks it up and copies it. They may even say that it was better than what it superceded, until it gets sprung on us in a update; some engineer has decided that it should be the default application, but it is too new, too untested, and the developer doesn't care that he only did 3/4 of the job PCmanFM vs Nautalis is an example, so is Geeqie vs. Gqview. These two are image viewers. The older one, gqview, had a thumbnail compare of images of the same name and prompted you for overwright/rename, which feature was lost in the replacement. I actually still use the binary for gqview which was for U 9.10 even though geeqie is the sanctioned version on U. 12.04. I know that I am treading on thin ice if the legacy libraries go away. If Shuttleworthless starts dumping X11 libraries, I will probably dump Ubuntu.
This is great news if the innovation makes it into the low end of CCD detectors. It means that people with more modest cameras could shoot in very low light and get the response you could get from ASA 400 speed film like ekectachrome to shoot exosures of the sky. I was able to report pretty good constellation photos using very modest equipment, an OM-2 F 1.4 35mm lens to capture stars, including bright Messier objects, 35 years ago. I got M44 in Cancer once.
You play hell with a camera under $600 to get that amount of sensitivity from a digicam. I used to shoot 20 second exposures and get stars down to 7th magnitude on slide film. I'd love to do that again with a digicam and not pay a fortune.
The meteorite that landed in Morocco was described in Sky_and_Telescope for May 2013, pg 12, with a photo of a 5 cm rectangular bright green fragment. The bright green mineral is diopside. Spectra from Mercury messenger match Ensteite, both minerals have large amounts of Mg and Ca, but are typically lower in Fe. The chemistry of the meteorite and the geochemistry measured from space are close but not exact. Mercury has one of the most battered surfaces in the solar sytstem and I thought that its greater average density would make for a large metal core, the most common metal being iron. Either there is a big probably frozen iron core but the crust is very well differentiated geochemically so that there isn't much Fe at the surface. Perhaps the period of intense bombardment that all bodies went through about 3.7 BYA (I think) caused the Fe to melt out of the crust.
It's because data centers don't have sparkly vampires
Sure they do, don't you remember vampire ethernets?
The tone of the original post sounds like the person is not UNIX competent, i.e. can't use shell commands. And he doesn't give the quality of information a tech-support engineer would require, I know, I used to troubleshoot these kind of problems with customers over the phone, We don't know for instance if the guy was just impatient and stopped the file transfers and his system won't boot because he didn't wait for disk checks to complete. He apparently hasn't noticed recovery mode either, if he can use the shell. Certainly, using arch is bad advice because that requires use of the shell even if you find that the packages are not buggy. We just don't know enough to say what he should do, although faced with this situation, I was briefly with a Ubuntu 12,04 install, I would go to one of the live distros such as Knoppix 7 and boot into ram and examine the partition that got his Ubuntu install. I think that some of the rescue distros will force the disk checks on a recognizable filesystem, even NTFS, as they are often used to fix broken Windows installs. I would even bet that unless the guy clobbered the MBR on his first disk that if the OS boots at all, he should notice if the boot is trying to check the disk and wait, be patient. if the disk is truly not bootable, gparted or Knoppix can create a new MBR, I think they can run grub. Fixing that would be a good learning experience if the guy is intent on looking beneath the hood.
What places like the symphony need are simply content that is more relevant to those they want to attract. It's hard to sell traditional symphonic material to younger crowds, so provide that but also a bit of more contemporary stuff.
I guess that 95% of the music in the world uses no more of a harmonic language of the scale degrees of I, Vi, V, Vi. V/Vi, and an average duration of possibly five minutes, That can't be compared with the length or complexity of one of Gustav Mahler's Symphony outer movements, usually sonata form structures of immense size, the longest of which last longer than 75 minutes, I am thinking of part II of the Eighth Symphony or the Finale of the Sixth Symphony.
To perform and to listen to such large structures with their advanced harmonies requires a set of skills that many musicians and a few listeners possess, but not the rest of people. Too bad if you can't remember the key something is in for 30 minutes or more and feels the motion of the form surrounding it. Much less knowing how Mozart and the whole classical period composers use the augmented-sixth chord.
Lest you think I am being a snob, consider that Jazz uses a more advanced harmonic language, using chromatic chords that are current in classical literature. The problem is that in order to please the public the chords are often just chromatic and lack the functional uses they have in the serious literature. That is how Schubert, who died in 1828, can sound more advanced than most current music, and we aren't even talking about Wagner who formalized non-functional harmony.
It is the musicians who determine what is in the repretoire, not marketing people, or a web poll, and thanks for that. We give to people who have acute ability, excellent memory for sound and pitch, to set the standards for music they play for themselves and a select public. You might be talking about the cost or producing music with expensive ensambels, but just as the means to realize music change over time and reasimulate the tradition, that process will continue. We don't play Bach or Mozart, even Beethoven, with the same resources they wrote for, and that is OK. Some people might want to be true to original performance practices, but music that survives is resilliant to changes in how it is preformed.
Ubuntu was a simple choice to recommend for businesses between 2010 and 2012, but now I recommend Mint (Mate normally). That's all I have to say on this issue, Gnome 3 and then Unity have killed 'classic' Ubuntu distributions for me (even though Mint itself is based off of Ubuntu). I tried xubuntu for a few months, but it has various problems itself, so I had to stop with that.
What worries me about anything that depends on Ubuntu repositories is the desire of Canonical to do away with X11. Ubuntu has had a terrible record of supporting legacy applictions, so if those that depend on X11 are supported in some compatable display monitor and window managers, can you trust Canonical to guarentee a transition? I think not.
I'd buy a system with Linux on it and no Windows on it in a heartbeat, especially if it didn't have the secure boot crap that Microsoft is trying to push to make systems with its OEM installs hard to use with a second OS. Send me your pre-Windows 8 systems and I'll gladly install Linux, probably Knoppix, on them and I will troubleshoot hardware failures and leave the repair shops to con clueless Windows users.
But, I digress. I just upgraded U 11.10 to U 12.04 and what I notice is that Canonical is not sweating the small stuff, like correct configuration and documentation of its installed base, so they are ripe for eclipsing by any distro that pays attention to detail.
The problem with Canonical is the fat ego of its millionaire owner who really doesn't care about users, and his being in bed with Gnome empire builders and Red Hat hidden agenda. Not only are they seduced with sexy and the lure of tablets, but they can't do very much right. I've used all U releases from 8.10 to U 12.04 and the feature set has broken legacy at each step. Things I liked in U 10.10 are now broken, and like every other commercial tech support operation I've ever been part of or used, the marketing of the new features is more important than maintaining or fixing bugs in the installed base. This makes these dreamers and schemers vulnerable to disciplined competition.
I really hate businessmen in mature markets, and that is what the Linux world has become. When the greedy bastards who first worked at Apple or Microsoft get the idea that Linux is a money maker, they take over and spoil it, or try to. Mature markets bring fat egos and control freaks. It is time to take Linux back and make it more transparent for novices to try out and use. They shouldn't have to worry about installing or partitioning or even what window manager with what features to use. There shouldn't be fights breaking out over the UI, because that reflects the power grab rather than a freedom of choice and reduced complexity. I think Puppy is the right approach, but with a more industrial strength installation.
I've seen some of the smaller distros, tried out many of then, what I.d like to see is something that runs out of archives that live entirely within an NTFS filesystem or a single EXT4 or some other filesystem type where you don't have to manage partitions to install multiple linux ssystems. This is not mere virtualization, or use of disk images. Puppy has already shown with with a Gig or more of ram you can do useful things in RAM and flush changes to dated archives that can exist as revision control and backups that can be reloaded into memory. All the choices about window manager and applications can be reduced to loading a set of archives, along with system configuration, logs, and user files from other archives. Doing away with the install will end much of the nonsense.
The way this works is that the atmosphere polarizes the light from the sun, and that can be detected before the sun rises or after it sets. On an overcast day, the polarization can be detected as well, giving a way to determine the azimuth of the sun even when it can't be seen by eye.
Calcite is birefriigant, meaning that rays of different polarization pass through a single crystal with rhombic cleavage plans in two paths, which you can see. I would assume that two crystals attached by with different orientation of their crystallographic axies would produce interference which can easily be seen. That is the principle of the polarizing microscope in which one of the polarizers is allowed to rotate freely over the other producing the shifting interference colors.
If you are curious, get a piece of clear calcite with clean cleavages and look through it in various directions. You will soon see the birefrigance. It is not necessary to get a complete crystal, with euhedral faces, as they are usually pitted anyway, and large crystals cleaved in the right way are easy to get.
Yeah, that is the stupidity the House Speaker tried during the Debt Limit Debate. John Baynour got on prime time and made the false analogy of the federal debt with a credit card limit for a family. A family doesn't control the money supply are decide who to tax for its spending. There is a hidden agenda here. It is the libertarian fixation on money as a fixed asset. While other conservatives look the other way on market speculation they want us to believe that money is like the conservation of mas and energy, it isn't, and there is as much speculation and manipulation of treasury notes and exchange rates as with equities. The conservatives ought to be less consumed with fiscal restraint as with why even a less-regulated market economy, after the speculative bubble they helped create burst, doesn't produce opportunity for most Americans. It is because they are not working for most Americans. It is time to flush them from the scene,
I don't believe the accounting! Especially with Paul Berg and all those Libertarian congressmen doing the accounting.
I expect there will be no relief in sight until Americans start electing politicians that put the interests of Americans first. Not that I'm holding my breath.
Wealth and Capitalism doesn't respect national borders. On the one hand one can sing the praises of unregulated markets or even do the opposite and say that we must have national regulation of world markets, and not be mindful of unintended consequences.
So the invention of computers, the Internet, container shipping, and rapid international travel since 1960 has created the global economy we now have. If you are a true Capitalist, then you don't want barriers to off-shore labor since the bottom line doesn't discriminate; if your workers can work anywhere or come from anywhere, the only thing which will drive your decisions is to get just enough competence at as cheap a price as you can. And if those workers don't have all the rights of being a citizen them they can't as readily complain if you decide to abuse them. (This isn't as much of a problem in tech. but talk to any domestic worker on a visa.) .
But talk about unintended consequences, consider how tech drives the lopsided income distribution, the emergence of the 1% who own 60% of the assets in the U'.S. Some of those people are rich because of the post-peak-oil and have made sure that we are even more dependent on carbon fuels now that the supply i going down and the price going up. Many of the rest of those richest people got there because of tech, directly or indirectly.
Computers were going to make our lives easier, and they did, they were also going to make things possible that couldn't ever be done before, and they surely have done that, but they decimated labor. They destroyed many jobs, and the reason the income curve for the Middle Class in America has remained flat is that people either lost good jobs in a whole host of fields and were not able to get trained to do what was left. So, that is unintended consequences. People are being displaced because for a wide variety of reasons they cannot get retrained for the available jobs, and the productive work is highly skilled and done by many fewer people. Engineers did create great productivity, but they did not create opportunities for the people displaced. Think for a minute what the effect of AI will be on jobs that really require mental discipline? This is just beginning to have social and political consequences. Maybe Luddites were a couple of centuries early :-)
Many people like to claim that they lack talent with the relevant skills for the particular jobs. I think some of this is true, but most is BS. What it really means is that they don't want to spend even a minute training anyone. They'd rather have the person with the particulars already on the resume than hire someone who might need some minimal introduction. Ie, any older programmer is going to be able to figure out your new fad language of the year very quickly, and will be able to program it far better than your entry level worker who peppers the resume with buzzwords.
I went through "dot-gone" in Silicon Valley in 2005 and know about this directly. The code language is "Your skills are a little dated." or they see your grey hair and say that. Of course what this is saying is that not only do they want to be choosy and find someone who exactly fits the job spec. but that the reason it is a seller's market is that investment supports job creation and all the investors went on to something sexy. It has nothing to do with the value of what you know, and it is discrimatory and there is nothing you can do about it. The law is not enforced unless the act is extreme and obvious. As someone with physical handicaps who is now aged, I know that employers get trained by the law to learn what not to say, not to adhere to its intent. So, i agree that it is economics that drives this and that when you go interview you are mostly providing a reason to not get hired because the economy is crap, because investors are stupid, because people do not know what has value.
This is where age discrimination comes in, and it's very subtle, and the people doing the discrimination don't even realize they're doing it. Managers want the exact match for a job, HR people are filtering based on keywords, executives want to give out lowest possible salary. It all adds up.
Hiring people, managers, and especially HR types can't admit what they are doing is unlawful, or that they are lazy or incompetent. Even worse are the job-search agencies, who perpetuate the myth that all the busy work that might apply to getting a sales and marketing job applies to tech. They waste your time and money. What it adds up to is that there are lots of parasites in the food chain, and like a gang war they are fighting over crumbs.
The visa system is up for abuse, and it is being abused. Those execs who disagree about this should be made to step up and prove that no other suitable workers could be found.
They won't make the effort unless it makes their busines unpopular. Business people hate bad publicity. Sometimes that is what it takes to change a long time practice.
This is a sign that plutocrats are working behind the scenes to play both ends against the middle. It is a distraction, it diverts attention away from the back-room deals the 1% are trying to make for themselves. This is no conspiracy theory, only how a powerful segment of the population think, they have access to libertarian-minded members of Congress and can make deals.
As for Conservatives, they re all elitists. Their core belief is that they belong to a minority that deserves more than everybody else for whatever reason they can invent, they are white, they are rich, they are productive, they are Christian, whatever distinction they can make. They also believe in scarcity, and that is where the article cited in this thread is most relevant, they believe that there isn't enough of the value in life to go around and they are going to make sure it is rationed to those they believe are most deserving. A quip I've heard is "The way to make a Republican is to teach him Economics!" which is not entirely true, but it does indicate a mindset. Maybe the point of the European who cited conservatives on the Left and Liberals on the Right is that elitism can happen across the political spectrum, but in America it seems to be concentrated on the Right. I think the uncritical love affair most Americans seem to have with Capitalism is the reason. Most Americans think that if it is a business decision it must be OK, or that to be offered a job directly reflects on their self-worth, when the existence of that job has little to do with their desire for it and more to do with some investor's desire to support its existence, which has little enough to do with its overall benefit to society.
Thank You, a good description. America, for its part has quite different political traditions from most European Nations and could learn a thing or two from them. Americans ought to study political and economic history of Europe more. In fact American History is a tool of the political establishment in America to prevent Americans from thinking about the kinds of distinctions you cite, especially the possibly beneficial role of a coilition of three or more political parties.
America has been called a "Duopoly" which is at least a two-party system where third parties do not get any traction, but more than that it may be controlled by the same few powerful economic interests giving to both parties. On the National level the College of Electors mandated by the U.S. Constitution may be the institution most responsible for this lock on power. It should be abolished,
But underneath all this is the strangle hold business and Capitalism has on American politics. This probably makes most Europeans Smile: "Silly Americans, how can they be so naive about the abuse of economic power?" For Americans truly believe that hard work is always rewarded, even when it isn't. The Liberal vs. Conservative, Democratic Party Vs. Republican Party divide is more like Europen Football rivalry. It isn't based on much difference in substance.
I don't have that much doubt in the neuralogical work cited here, as far as it goes, but against the backdrop of how poorly political thinking is done in the U.S. and how much of the apearent discussion controlled by Big Money behind the scenes, the well is poisoned and most people in America don't get to think about what really underlies the world they live in.
I live in Northern California and have a geology degree. The article was informative, but it is just shy of giving the useful information from the refereed source, the lithology and formation of the Middle Miocene unit in Leguna Canyon from which the evidently considerable number of fossils comes from. I.d have to find some other source to get the geologic setting for that site.
This is interesting for the geology of California was quite different than it is now. The San Andreas system was just being formed as North America drifted west from the Atlantic spreading ridge and was overtaking the East Pacific Rise. As it did this strike-slip faults were formed when the ridge system and trench that stood off California since the early Jurassic, about 150 MY, were destroyed. The Miocene records the changing environmnts caused by the tectonic change from deep water fie grained oil bearing shales of the Monterey Shale to sandy deposits affected as land was created and eroded.
The fauna described is similar to the one that lives in these waters today, although more primitive, ancestral. It supplies important information about the range of animals that were known from other parts of the world. The lithology of the deposit would tell us more, Did the fauna live near shore which would be the case if then are found in sandy deposits whose grains are derived from land, or were they part of the abyssal shale that is so common in California, earlier in the Miocene?
The San Andreas strike slip, which amounts to 350 km of right lateral displacement in less than 30 MY has changed the areal distribution of Miocene sediments in California. Places that would have been adjacent to Orange County in Miocene time are now in central and northern California. The Monetrey Shale type locality is in southern Monterey County and it can be seen as far north as Santa Cruz, but it is also found very wide spread in the Southern San Jouquen Valley. During the Miocene most of its setting was an off-shore deep water environment off terraines that are today in southern California and Mexico. I expect that the Leguna Canyon setting is probably the inshore equivalent of these offshore abyssal envirornments, provided they are not too much younger. If that then the enironments for these younger Miocene units as all become more shallow water ones, a trend which continues into younger units as the land emerged into Pliocene time.
I only had to read maybe 3 posts on this thread to realize that it has gotten off on the wrong heading.
This is not about automobile fuel tradeoffs. Far more energy is needed to run the electric grid than to run cars, and what drivers of passenger cars do is far less impactful than what commercial machines of all sorts do to the environment. The Conservatives who are trying to deceive you about energy, many of whom also backed the GOP in the last election, are hard-bitten energy executives who want to protect the investment they have in producing ever more expensive carbon-based fuels for a system that is not built out to take advantage of any alternatives, even if they were super abundant, and they are using their considerable clout and greed to try to pull the wool over our eyes.
We are already well into the predicted effects of global warming due to excess C02 and Methane in the atmosphere caused by human activity. The weather shifts were predicted by NOAA as far back as 2003, so the only mystery here is when the Permian Mass Extinction like-event will play out on us in full. A bunch of greedy bastards don't care if 75% of the life on the planet gets exterminated as long as they and their elites can find a place to stay and lock out all the other poor people who don't share their libertarian views. After all, this is about elites ripping the rest of us off and then running from the results.
I have really disliked Microsoft for a long time. The reason is really how lazy and uncreative they are. There products are boring and their OS is a huge security hole. I was using software back in 1982 that I was sure Bill Gates stole from. I always thought that he was just a greedy bastard from Harvard, which is what I think of Mark Zuckerberg. They are all bastards, sociopaths, really.
Still, success in business does not justify any of it, whether Google is reading my e-mails or whether Microsoft gets to install its crap OS on every PC and charge you for it whether you use it or not. If we had a decent Congress, that would have been made illegal years ago. But we don't. what we have is a nation and a government that uncritically worships business and most people, even many who post here, believe that if it was done in the course of pursuing profit,that it must be OK. Let me tell you, it isn't.
I hope that the ad is an act of desperation, that Microsoft is finally aware that it is going to lose big time and that it is on the attack because it has really lost a critical battle, but what I really hope is that the power ambitions of all these companies is thwarted at the point where abuse of power starts to show. I am not rooting for Google, either. I have seen how greed is shaping search and how mining my data to target ads at me is going to turn me off. It is time for another giant slayer to appear, to make search unbiased again, to undermine the business model and to keep greedy investors from poisoning the well.
Conservatives can want revolution, but it matters who the revolution is for. For Conservatives and especially Libertarians is is change to favor an elite, An elite that thinks it deserves the benefits of civilization more than many other groups in society, an elite that imagines itself as more productive and more worthy than groups its labels as unproductive or as not contributing enough.
What distinguishes Conservatives from other persuasions is that they see inclusiveness and universality, you know, the idea that most people are more or less alike and have the same st of needs and urges, as a threat, and that they want to dictate the rules for who can be included.
This is a point of view predicated on scarcity, of money, of the benefits of life, or specie. So groups who worship gold or business, view themselves as special and entitled. Elites can come from many sources. they can come from religion, wealth, race, education, profession, and ideology. There are Communist elites, for example, but regardless of the political classification, it is the them vs. us mentality that is diagnostic.
Yes, you hit the nail on the head.
Even if you don't like Ubuntu with Unity, at least the cost of it isn't bundled with the price of the whole system.
Unity is about as brain dead as the start screen on Windows 8, and for the same reason. At least Windows 8 runs on a tablet for which that is reasonable.
The OEM deal Microsoft has with PC vendors is a reason I have no faith in the laws of the U.S. that were designed to protect consumers from monopoly. That deal should have been declared illegal long ago.
That said, Windows is largely crap, and the biggest reason is that it is basically a huge security hole that can't be plugged. If Norton can nag you about installing their anti-virus software on a new Windows install, evey hacker can get the keys to your kingdom as well. I wouldn't go so far as to assert that Linux is not hackable, just like users can be persuaded to reveal the root password. but it seems to be harder to rootkit than to get access on a Windows system.
A little courage can save you lots of money. You might even be money ahead to buy a recent refurbished laptop with a clean disk or no disk and put a new disk in and install some version of Linux and try the Windows-like apps which should meet most of your needs. Don't let some bozo install Windows or charge you for a Windows install when there are plenty of fine Linux distributions that you can test from live DVD before you decide to install one. They run entirely in memory and do not touch the hard drive, and you get get the flavor and test them before you install. I have run some recent versions on an ancient box with no disk at all and with less than a gig of ram. You can easily try these and see if you like what they do at no risk.
If you insist on running some Windows app, that is doable on most Linux systems with have emulation for Windows, which is most of them.
[...] But the reality is that some people are born maladapted to modern technological culture, and the question is, "What do you do about it, if anything?" Moralistic, "Oh my god, the nazis!" hand wringing helps nothing. Morality is subjective, changeable with time and culture. Is genetic engineering for greater intelligence moral or immoral, and says who? You?
Sounds like Lebensborn to me
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As a practical matter, as resources shrink, particularly energy resources shirink over time, decisions like this will be made, if not in the USA, then certainly in other countries. You can deal with them as rationally as possible, or you can continue whingeing, disclaiming all responsibility and doing nothing while overpopulation continues and EVERYBODY starves.
Nazi Germany was driven by the engineering mentality. There was a technological solution for everything. But note that I didn't use the word "scientific". Because of the closed mindset Hitler and the government lost sight of the science that was intended to defeat him and then reduce Germany to even more of a cinder that it was. It was labeled as "jewish" and dismissed.
At worse we have started the ball rolling on a mass extinction event that no-one will escape. It is not simply that fortunes or national treasuries will be lost, or that some Uber class of people, so-called "smart" people, will be able to survive, for it was those leaders in technology and business who are causing the disaster, and it might wipe out the human race altogether.
As you sound paranoid, be careful that in setting yourself up as wise and above the frey that the great unwashed don't come gunning for you as the cause of their suffering.The same happened to Hitler.
Yes, "Stealing is Theft", but the wisdom of giving things away might be that it is cheaper than trying to control them. It is a trade-off. It might be better to allow some people to "steal" then to enforce that everybody pay, and it might create better good will. An example of that you pay for "free" stuff and it might be better to give it way: There is a site that gives away "free" fonts, but I have stopped going to the site because they want information from me in exchange for downloading the font file. Now not all of the fonts on the site are free and it is obvious that they will probably begin sending me e-mails about products I'd have to pay for. Now it isn't the case that I am interested in a new font very often. I'm not a designer who needs to try out lots of fonts and has a budget to spend on getting fonts. In addition I have to trust that the site owners will otherwise respect my privacy, which is by no means a given. So I had decided not to visit that site again. They should consider that if they are going to offer free fonts that there be no strings ( pardon the pun) attached. I think that pay walls from journals could be open more both to stimulate use of research and because the return as articles age does not merit the cost of keeping them behind it.
And you do know about copyright exceptions for educators? Maybe colleges and universities have to pay someone for the right to allow faculty and students to copy materials under copyright in their library collections. This is allowed because restricting use of these materials is worse than preventing out-right theft. Contrast that with the effort by the recording industry to force public libraries to charge a fee for lending CDs against the possibility that the CDs would be illegally copied. That didn't fly because it was not practical to reinburse the recording companies.
Because the cost of distribution got very cheap and the artist and the record companies lost control of media and can't get it back. They've tried; remember the Sony DRM debacle? Fact is, not much has really changed. Musicians still get paid nothing as they have for the past 300 years. What has changed is that a very profitable middleman has been eliminated, one who screwed artists, and as for the resulting flood of crap, only time is the solution for that.
Most music that has ever been written has been forgotten and will remain forgotten. I know serious music (Classical) and I remember a craze for obscure composers of the 18th century and before that happened at about that same time as the fad for authentic performance practice. What that taught us is that there is a reason most of what Antonio Vivaldi wrote and all of Karl Ditters con Dittersdorf was not worth playing, excuse my exaggeration, and that what gets performed is still controlled by performers and the ensambles they form. The serious music corpus is not nearly as large as the popular one, and that the works that get played over and over are revisited for the reason that they have value for musicians, The same will apply to the body of pop. Just give it time.
Oh, and journal publishers are making SO much money on thousands of arcane research articles that maybe five people read in a year? Copyright ought to have a lower bond on usage, it expires if the annual use is lower than the cost of printing or casting into some tangible product. It should pass into the public domain. The only reason a publisher can enforce copyright is that articles are in a printed form, otherwise they are fair game, and if that removes incentives to publish them then researchers can get peer-reviewed and then put the article in the public domain. Who needs publishers, anyway?