Is one thing, but Ron Paul is talking about totally dismantling the federal government. He wants to get rid of:
1. The IRS. If you believe we can run a nation of 300 million people without an income tax, I have some property on the moon I'd like to sell you. 2. The FDA, which we need to keep the food supply safe. He argues that the food supply will self regulate... we notice that a bunch of people start dropping dead from eating food from a particular producer. 3. The EPA. He argues we can just *sue* to recover environmental damages... after the damage is already done. What he doesn't understand about he EPA is that it is *preventative* because once the damage is done, suing won't fix it.
Basically he wants to dismantle the most important institutions in the country, and make the federal government an entirely military affair funded by heavy tariffs. People tend to ignore these brain dead moves because he's a good public speaker, and because he does have *some* good ideas, like more responsible fiscal policy, just none of the ones listed above.
Also, his ideas about the constitution banning many important government institutions just isn't true. Some things like federal income taxation *we're* unconstitutional in the 19th century (wence most of Ron Paul's economic policies hail), but the constitution has been amended since then (see the 16th amendment of 1913). I think that what he often means is that some government agency is against the "spirit" of the original constitution. Unfortunately, many of the practices he opposes (see the above list) are vitally necessary to modern America considering the scale that we operate at now.
>having people attempting to muddy the waters by rolling all of the issues together >is also a crock of shit.
The fact that Ron Paul want to abolish the federal reserve (thus returning the ability to print money to congress) will have consequences for both monetary *and* fiscal policy because the change in the monetary policy will encourage a laxer fiscal policy. I'm not muddying the waters, I'm pointing out a *connection* between two policies.
Fairly evaluating someone's reasoning doesn't mean memorizing what someone says so that you can spout it back out. It means *finding the flaws in the arguments* that the original guy didn't see.
>The balance is composed of corporate income taxes and other taxes, and in >a cursory overview, I was able to find no evidence that Ron Paul opposes these forms of taxation
The removal of all forms of income tax follows necessarily from his plans to remove the IRS. Again, it may not be part of his reasoning, but the point of critical thinking is that you point out the *flaws* in the argument.
Only some forms of taxation work without a huge bureaucracy to collect taxes. Since income taxation is hard to enforce, it requires something like the IRS to make it work. Thus he wants to get rid of *any* kind of income tax.
Tariffs on the other hand are easy to collect and don't require a huge government agency to make it happen, which seems to be why he likes them. However, as I've mentioned tariffs won't work on the scale he's talking about since they suppress trade. Moving some of the taxation weight to tariffs isn't that bad of an idea, but we can't get rid of the IRS.
Also, it seems likely that tariffs would form at least a partially regressive tax, since consumer goods are so heavily imported. Now, some economic conservatives like regressive and flat taxes, but the vast majority of real economists say that progressive taxation is the correct model for our economy.
physics engines are still relatively simplistic due to the computational difficulty involved. I'd love to see what a good game designer could do with physics capabilities comparable to what modern graphics capabilities look like.
>We have more than two parties in the US. The last election had the >Libertarians on the ballot in all but one state.
So what? Should we start having more coverage of the communist party's presidential nominee? If I get my name on the ballot can we have a debate about the Jedi party?
People don't discuss the Libertarians because they are an annoying wacko fringe group with nonsensical economic policies. If anything they receive disproportionate coverage lately due to Ron Paul running in the Republican race.
>Another salient FACT is the FACT that the next President will be Republican. >Both Obama and Clinton have far too many people who hate them for either of them to >win the General Election.
I think you need a refresher on how elections work. People cast a vote *for* a candidate, not *against* them. Check out your next ballot and see if there's a box marked "check here to vote against this candidate".
Also, your argument is just nonsense because Obama in particular has pulled large numbers of independents and republicans to his campaign. Clinton may be hated by many on the right, but that has more to do with her connection with her husband. Obama has a fairly clean slate.
Unless you were just trying to say that a woman or a black man can't win an american election, in which case I think you need a reality check. The numbers of people coming out to vote for both of these candidates in just the *primaries* are already record breaking. Either of them *clearly* has the support they need to make a go at the oval office.
>Howzabout a forum dedicated to Libertarians or the communist party? Maybe we can get some neo nazi's in on the fun too?
Libertarian's are very noisy, but they represent batshit insane economic policies America discarded over a century ago. They have zero chance of winning an American election *ever*. Get over it.
I see a lot of Ron Paul supporters spouting a bunch of hyperbole about Ron Paul. While he's a good speaker, and makes his points fairly intelligently, most of his economic policies are downright stupid, and any real economist will tell you he doesn't know what he's talking about.
Libertarians are not who you should go to for economic advice. They paint the federal reserve as the source of all of our economic problems, and suggest going back to the gold standard. This is ridiculous. We had enormous monetary problems before the federal reserve came into play and we had a way of regulating the economy. However, if you hear Ron Paul tell it, things were all roses before the federal reserve, and the fed has done nothing but cause inflation. Inflation predates the federal reserve.
Ron Paul suggests the Federal Reserve causes inflation, but *his* plan is to have congress print money whenever they feel like it, as if *that* won't case the exact same problem even more so. At least the Fed is run by trained professionals with a long term interest in maintaining the stability of the banking industry and the economy at large. Congress is not qualified to determine how much money to dump into the economy, since they will just spend like crazy if they have the right to print money.
>1. Why is he running as a Republican? > >Because he embodies the true ideals of conservativism that the neo-cons have robbed from modern >Republicans.
Yes, the Republican party used to be the conservative party, and before that it used to be the *liberal* party. The name of the party means nothing, his views are not represented or sponsored by its members. The Libertarian party represents is more representative of his views at this point.
Ron Paul calling himself a Republican is like an ante-bellum southern Democrat calling himself a modern Democrat. Before the war Democrats were the social conservative pro slavery party, now they are not.
In any case, the neo conservative and libertarian economic policies are both equally stupid, so it's not like a return to 19th century economic policies would improve our situation.
>2. Why is he STILL running? > >Because he still has a good shot, the only thing holding him back is when news outlets don't >mention him at all. News outlets such as Slashdot.
This is a bunch of bullshit. Ron Paul isn't taken seriously because his views *can't* be taken seriously and because he does not appeal the the vast majority of voters.
The vast majority of voters do *not* want to end social security, do *not* want to end the FDA which is responsible for maintaining the safety of the food supply. Many people want a smaller more efficient federal government, including myself, but most people depend on the federal government for various services and do not want to see it dismantled.
Also, his policy that we get rid of the income tax and just have massive tariffs is stupid. I'm not saying that we should never have tariffs. However, the IRS takes in 2.5 trillion annually. This is not possible with tariffs. Even if we raised tariffs to the level where we could take in 2.5 trillion in one year, the next year we would have to raise tariffs again because trade would *decrease*. Small tariffs to spur internal industry makes some sense, but the kind of tariffs Ron Paul is talking about would *end* international trade and destroy this country. No country can survive with an isolationist policy in the modern world.
I liked how he talked when I've heard him, and I appreciated his opposition to the war and his willingness to buck the party line, but this guy is advocating economic policies that just don't make sense.
In the case of Yahoo, I think it is somewhat unlikely (although not impossible) that Microsoft would dismantle Yahoo and try to replace it with its own set of internet services. Yahoo has been significantly more successful than Microsoft, and it would make more sense to simply make yahoo the web branch of the company, and move the top Microsoft web guys into Yahoo.
The fear is that Microsoft has too big of a case of Not Invented Here, and will make the Yahoo guys rebuild a lot of their stuff using Microsoft technology. That would be an enormous waste of time and would probably kill any gains from buying Yahoo, but it is something that many large companies do when they acquire smaller ones.
That said, if they are somewhat smart about it, they will just continue most of Yahoos programs and continue using Yahoo technology, at least for existing Yahoo products. What Microsoft has to offer in a Yahoo-Microsoft relationship is primarily money.
The article seems to suggest that Microsoft would necessarily kill all Yahoo use and development of open source technologies. That could happen, but I suspect that the Linux community, with its long held animosity towards Microsoft, or any company that produces a rival operating system (I know many Linux users who hate Apple vehemently, supposedly because it is "proprietary") is being unnecessarily pessimistic.
Microsoft has taken a progressively softer stance towards open source over the years, and now has a number of its own open source packages. Many zealots like to paint Microsoft as simply the enemy of open source, but that is an overly simplistic take on a rather complex issue. Large software companies don't see software licensing as a religious issue. For them it is a question of, how do we maximize return on investment?
I suspect they will look at a number of the open source program that yahoo is sponsoring and will keep them on a case by case basis. Some email client for linux is fairly likely to be killed, but some of Yahoo's more interesting projects, like Hadoop, might actually be useful to help Microsoft compete with Google in the same way they were useful to Yahoo.
a major issue that makes younger companies more attractive to industry talent than older companies.
Starting your own company is inordinately risky, but if you go to work for a pre-IPO company that is already profitable like facebook, or like google was it's IPO, you are basically guaranteed to be make a few million in a relatively short amount of time.
If you join a post IPO company that is still new and doing well, you can still make your own salary over again in stock options. Also, newer companies are usually hungrier and more aggressive about geting good talent than established companies, so they will generally offer better compansation, although not always in salary, for instance google offers significant bonuses and strong benefits like free meals that significantly increase total income even though their salaries aren't spectacular.
However, older companies tend to be a bit more complacent, and tend to follow the curve on employment benefits instead of pushing it. Microsoft has reasonable salaries, but I doubt their total compensation is competitive with Google, Yahoo (I know yahoo offers a *lot* of money for some of their most talented developers), and Facebook. I don't know their detailed pay structure though, so maybe someone currently working at Microsoft can post with details on what kind of compensation various developers can expect.
In addition to compensation issues, it is also true that the smartest people want to be working on something new and cool, and the fear when working at a company like microsoft is always that you will be made into a cog on the machine working on a fairly small and unimportant widget on a larger application like office.
Also, one of microsofts major disadvantages is that developers report having less freedom there i.e. they can't design and implement their own product even if they have the drive to do so, they have to get someone several layers up to sign off on such an idea before they can start working on it. This just isn't true at a lot of the newer companies. The new model is that engineers are encouraged to work on those areas that they care about, and get management support after the fact for projects they want to productize (eventually, management does have to nip some side projects in the bud if they aren't going anywhere).
In general, Microsoft has to overhaul how it compensates developers (and advertise this! if no one knows that microsoft guys are treated well, it doesn't help them) and overhaul management structure so that individual developers have more freedom to innovate on their own. Oh! and they need free food. The cafeteria food was way overpriced the last time I checked. That becomes a major cost for employees over the span of a year.
Essentially, you make each team responsible for putting important documents on their wiki page, and make each team member responsible for documenting his particular project (design documents, howtos etc). The key thing is to make this easy to use, so test out various wikis and pick something with an easy to use syntax and interface and make sure there's not a lot of permissions nonsense blocking your users (they shouldn't need to get in contact with you to make new pages, etc). Also, having prefab pages that can be copy pasted to get the layout right helps (like a canonical design document).
For a less technical audience, wikis might be problematic. You should ask yourself what the average technical skill of your users are, and if most people aren't confortable with writing basic html, then they probably aren't going to be comfortable with a wiki.
Aside from that, a big directory for word documents isn't that bad of an idea. If you give every team their own share they can write to and make everything globally visible in a way people can pass around paths (z:\teama\mydoc.doc) then you will be using tools that people are already pretty familiar with. Make sure that the share is automatically mounted on the same drive letter for every machine, as users with low technical skill won't understand how to mount their own shares.
I know it's pretty unslashdotlike to suggest using word and CFS/SMB shares, but for users of low skill that's the simplest solution they can handle. Otherwise, go with wikis, but only if users indicate that they understand them and would use them in their daily job, otherwise you are wasting time.
(depending on who you ask) which is actually up quite a bit over historical standards. Total non-ie usage globally seems to be almost a quarter.
My question is this, why is European adoption so much higher than global adoption? The article doesn't really explain this. Is windows available unbundled in Europe? Does firefox get more press there?
In the US, colleges tend to use firefox, and a lot of more technically oriented people; however IE is still the default for most institutions and home users.
If you can't get a laptop that lasts on battery for more than 4 hours, it should tell you something about the current state of battery technology.
>As soon as Bush came to power, the government dismantled all electric car development >efforts and immediately began talking about hydrogen
Replaced electric cars with hydrogen? Hygrogen cars *are* electric cars. Fuel cells produce *electricity*. Hydrogen is just another battery technology, an attempt to fix what is wrong with existing battery technologies.
Furthermore, Bush isn't the president of GM, he can't stop work on electric cars. All the government did was make some noise about moving to a hydrogen based economy. I'm not sure if they even ever did anything about it. Bush has proposed many grand sounding initiatives that he's failed to follow through on. Remember that time he promised to take us to the moon?
If you are going to come up with some conspiracy theory, you might be bothered to get your facts right.
>Linux (as kernel and piece of technology) is far ahead of most OSs in power management >and especially in power saving.
I doubt this is true. Do you know for a fact, for instance, that none of the other two major operating systems don't already have dynamic ticks? How many people on slashdot are familiar with the windows kernel? You don't have to work at microsoft to get these architectural details (windows architecture is detailed in a number of books, and university students often have access to windows source), but it is somewhat esoteric knowledge. Linux is the only operating system where kernel changes are highly public.
I've observed that people tend to assume that when something comes out for whatever platform that they have, it must have just been invented for their platform. In reality, people tend to reinvent the wheel a lot, and not that much real innovation occurs in operating systems. Innovation looks like it occurs, because any given operating system is missing features present in some other operating system and they only slowly converge.
Apple in particular tends to borrow architectural features from other operating systems, and their primary innovation tends to be how their plug everything together and package it up just right. Often they simply port existing software and keep interfaces intact. OSX has API's ported straight from macintosh, unix, and even windows (they have some minimal COM support).
Both the Linux community and Microsoft on the other hand have an enormous case of Not Invented Here, and tend to take the basic idea of some existing feature, and reimplement it in an incompatible way.
Microsoft is a fan of writing big frameworks that tightly integrate with other Microsoft technologies. This is real nice if you only ever want your software to run on windows, but those same frameworks tend to be so large that it complicates porting both software that runs on the framework and the framework itself.
The Linux community on the other hand likes to develop a number of incompatible frameworks that do the same thing simultaneously (e.g. sound frameworks that fight for control of the sound card). People tend to ignore standards both from other operating systems and from within linux, as everyone has their own idea what the ideal Linux should behave like. I'm not the first person to observe that Linux would benefit massively from a single good system architect to coordinate and discipline the effort at a high level. Someone like Linus, but responsible for the whole stack instead of just the kernel.
"The KDE development community's adoption of CMake is another major factor that has contributed to the increased portability of the desktop environment. KDE's build system was previously based on Autotools, an intractably arcane and grotesquely anachronistic cesspool of ineffable complexity that makes even seasoned programmers nauseous."
Can I get an amen?
I wrote a little poem about autotools. It goes like this "Autotools die die die die die Autotools die die die Autotools fuck you!"
It's not very lyrical, but I think it conveys my emotions.
Now if only we could converge on a single good cross platform build system for c and c++...
Since this new tag lets them safely break compatibility with the old IE, are they going to fix longstanding javascript issues like moving to the standard event model?
It would be nice to be able to write javascript without a bunch of compatibility hacks; however, the IE team hasn't shown much interest in javascript compatibility in the past and instead has focussed on CSS compatibility. CSS is also an important area, but it alone won't allow for hack free coding.
As it stands there's a lot of incentive to move to a different platform, such as flash or silverlight.
I'm sorry, but this is the stupidest thing I have ever seen. Wanting more people to use the command line is not a suitable justification for bringing a new human being into the world. It certainly is not the basis for a healthy relationship.
It's true that all sorts of people who aren't qualified to reproduce do so anyway. Just be aware that you are in that group.
Also, no, just knowing what KSH is doesn't guarantee you have prime genetic material.
>If this is true, then Lenovo looks to have some heavy competition for the Macbook Air
Lenovo already has a computer in the ultralight space, the X61. The X61 has almost identical specs to the macboook air, at a much lower price and significantly higher clockspeed.
Looking at this new machine, I really like that they've lowered the weight more and slightly increased the screen size; however, I have to wonder what the point of a 1440X900 resolution is at 13' inches.
I also have to ask what the point of including a touch pad is, when you have one of those "keyboard nipple" trackpoints. The trackpoints are so ridiculously and unambiguously superior to a touch pad, that it just seems like a waste of space.
The third issue with the new spec, is that it is still VGA output instead of DVI output. Pretty much all modern monitors have DVI inputs, so I don't see the point of going with the old standard.
Finally, I'm not convinced of the benefits of a flash harddrive. If they are saving weight, that's nice (although I'm not sure they are lighter). However, it's a pretty small drive, and it is a myth that flash drives are faster. Flash drives have better random access, but slower sequential access, and most accesses are sequential. Things are going to seem *slower* moving to flash, not faster.
>they do not expect it to delay the goal of returning astronauts to the moon by 2020.
of course not, what's going to delay going to the moon again by 2020 is the fact that congress has no intention whatsoever of paying for that, and no one, not even Bush takes the program seriously.
Why are they wasting money on programs that are going to be thrown right out the window, never to be heard of again, as soon as the next president takes office?
by how sympathetic the slashdot crowd is to places like pirate bay.
I'll say, I've used to website in the past. It's a great website. But, let's not kid ourselves, it is breaking real legitimate laws.
There's a certain crowd that believes that piracy is somehow noble. This is nonsense. It's not the worse thing in the world, but it is definitely a crime. Copyright violation is a violation of someone's property rights. It might not be as bad as stealing someone's car, but it is stealing, and people that make piracy their business are still criminals.
Additionally, as a software developer those are *my* property rights that are being violated some of the time. If I want my software to go out as freeware or open source, I'll do so, but no one has the right to just take something of mine for free that I only offered them for sale. That's just theft.
Now, people will make arguments that I benefit from piracy because it "spreads the word" about my awesome software. Indeed, this may be true. However, whether I distribute my software for free is my own choice and it is still a violation of my rights if you make that choice for me.
It isn't enough justification to say you were "acting in the artists best interests" when you downloaded their music. The issue isn't who's benefiting, it's who's property rights are being violated. We don't live in a society where you can just do anything to anyone else without their permission if you judge it to be "in their best interest." Consent is required.
that some people in the community seem very excited about, and I can't figure out why. Oh no. Microsoft is getting ISO standardization for a format. For... evil? Gasp!
I also think it is hilarious that so many people can talk about how bad OOXML is, in extremely vague terms. Maybe it is bad. Maybe it isn't. However, virtually none of the people who hold strong opinions about the issue are qualified to do so. Instead, they just seem to be engaging in groupthink.
This is an issue that comes up often, where people with no knowledge will hold a strong opinion. Kind of like how every evangelical christian has a very strong opinion on evolution, and no relevant education.
I guess what I'm trying to say is it seems like this petty technical dispute over OOXML has become a religious issue. A religious issue in perhaps the most boring and pointless religion in the world, the church of the slashdot nerd.
I appreciate what they are trying to do... but others have already made ultraportable laptop's that are in some ways better.
I currently use an laptop well under 3 pounds, the IBM/lenovo X61. It has very similar specs, with a core 2 duo and GMA X3100 (which is the best *embedded* card on the market).
The differences that I note are this: 1. The air is a lot thinner and less sturdy than the X61 for the same weight. This may be a stylistic plus, but it also makes the hardware a lot less breakable, and I think they made the wrong choice here. 2. The Air is only 1.6 Ghz for a core 2 duo. My X61 came in at 2.2 Ghz. 3. The Air costs a lot more. My X61 came in at about $1400, whereas the air starts out at $1800! That's $400 for a brand identity on slightly inferior hardware. 4. The Air has a tiny by current standards harddrive (80 gigs) probably to make the solid state version not look so bad. 5. The Air's one strong point is that it has DVI out, whereas the X61 only has VGA out. Since there are DVI to s-video adapters, this means the Air can play movies on the tv, whereas the X61 cannot. 6. The air has an optional (it's in the $3000 dollar model) solid state drive. I'm not sure what real benefits you get by paying for this.
I am glad that more companies are putting out more portable laptops. I see a lot of people with these huge tanking laptops rigged for gaming and audio video that make no sense to me. My brother's laptop even has 2 harddrive's!
If your laptop weighs in at around 10 pounds, then there's no point in having a laptop. Just get a desktop and save some money. Desktop's are about as portable as a 10 pound laptop...
Although this is quite a ways off, I am still curious whether this or some other event is going to make the earth uninhabitable. My understanding was that our planet had at least a couple of billion years left in it. Reducing that to 40 million is significant, even if it doesn't effect this years elections.
How is it that positrons are formed? Where do they come from? Obviously, they weren't just sitting around from the beginning of the universe, otherwise they would have annihilated with electrons a long time ago.
you joke, but... these days professionalism in schools is so low that teachers dating students is pretty common. It happened at my school, and at the school's of most people I've talked to.
What's more, these people rarely get fired since union rules for firing make it next to impossible to fire a teacher for any reason whatsoever.
Slashdot Mirror
Is one thing, but Ron Paul is talking about totally dismantling the federal government. He wants to get rid of:
1. The IRS. If you believe we can run a nation of 300 million people without an income tax, I have some property on the moon I'd like to sell you.
2. The FDA, which we need to keep the food supply safe. He argues that the food supply will self regulate... we notice that a bunch of people start dropping dead from eating food from a particular producer.
3. The EPA. He argues we can just *sue* to recover environmental damages... after the damage is already done. What he doesn't understand about he EPA is that it is *preventative* because once the damage is done, suing won't fix it.
Basically he wants to dismantle the most important institutions in the country, and make the federal government an entirely military affair funded by heavy tariffs. People tend to ignore these brain dead moves because he's a good public speaker, and because he does have *some* good ideas, like more responsible fiscal policy, just none of the ones listed above.
Also, his ideas about the constitution banning many important government institutions just isn't true. Some things like federal income taxation *we're* unconstitutional in the 19th century (wence most of Ron Paul's economic policies hail), but the constitution has been amended since then (see the 16th amendment of 1913). I think that what he often means is that some government agency is against the "spirit" of the original constitution. Unfortunately, many of the practices he opposes (see the above list) are vitally necessary to modern America considering the scale that we operate at now.
>having people attempting to muddy the waters by rolling all of the issues together
>is also a crock of shit.
The fact that Ron Paul want to abolish the federal reserve (thus returning the ability to print money to congress) will have consequences for both monetary *and* fiscal policy because the change in the monetary policy will encourage a laxer fiscal policy. I'm not muddying the waters, I'm pointing out a *connection* between two policies.
Fairly evaluating someone's reasoning doesn't mean memorizing what someone says so that you can spout it back out. It means *finding the flaws in the arguments* that the original guy didn't see.
>The balance is composed of corporate income taxes and other taxes, and in
>a cursory overview, I was able to find no evidence that Ron Paul opposes these forms of taxation
The removal of all forms of income tax follows necessarily from his plans to remove the IRS. Again, it may not be part of his reasoning, but the point of critical thinking is that you point out the *flaws* in the argument.
Only some forms of taxation work without a huge bureaucracy to collect taxes. Since income taxation is hard to enforce, it requires something like the IRS to make it work. Thus he wants to get rid of *any* kind of income tax.
Tariffs on the other hand are easy to collect and don't require a huge government agency to make it happen, which seems to be why he likes them. However, as I've mentioned tariffs won't work on the scale he's talking about since they suppress trade. Moving some of the taxation weight to tariffs isn't that bad of an idea, but we can't get rid of the IRS.
Also, it seems likely that tariffs would form at least a partially regressive tax, since consumer goods are so heavily imported. Now, some economic conservatives like regressive and flat taxes, but the vast majority of real economists say that progressive taxation is the correct model for our economy.
physics engines are still relatively simplistic due to the computational difficulty involved. I'd love to see what a good game designer could do with physics capabilities comparable to what modern graphics capabilities look like.
>We have more than two parties in the US. The last election had the
>Libertarians on the ballot in all but one state.
So what? Should we start having more coverage of the communist party's presidential nominee? If I get my name on the ballot can we have a debate about the Jedi party?
People don't discuss the Libertarians because they are an annoying wacko fringe group with nonsensical economic policies. If anything they receive disproportionate coverage lately due to Ron Paul running in the Republican race.
>Another salient FACT is the FACT that the next President will be Republican.
>Both Obama and Clinton have far too many people who hate them for either of them to
>win the General Election.
I think you need a refresher on how elections work. People cast a vote *for* a candidate, not *against* them. Check out your next ballot and see if there's a box marked "check here to vote against this candidate".
Also, your argument is just nonsense because Obama in particular has pulled large numbers of independents and republicans to his campaign. Clinton may be hated by many on the right, but that has more to do with her connection with her husband. Obama has a fairly clean slate.
Unless you were just trying to say that a woman or a black man can't win an american election, in which case I think you need a reality check. The numbers of people coming out to vote for both of these candidates in just the *primaries* are already record breaking. Either of them *clearly* has the support they need to make a go at the oval office.
>Howzabout a forum dedicated to Libertarians
or the communist party? Maybe we can get some neo nazi's in on the fun too?
Libertarian's are very noisy, but they represent batshit insane economic policies America discarded over a century ago. They have zero chance of winning an American election *ever*. Get over it.
I see a lot of Ron Paul supporters spouting a bunch of hyperbole about Ron Paul. While he's a good speaker, and makes his points fairly intelligently, most of his economic policies are downright stupid, and any real economist will tell you he doesn't know what he's talking about.
Libertarians are not who you should go to for economic advice. They paint the federal reserve as the source of all of our economic problems, and suggest going back to the gold standard. This is ridiculous. We had enormous monetary problems before the federal reserve came into play and we had a way of regulating the economy. However, if you hear Ron Paul tell it, things were all roses before the federal reserve, and the fed has done nothing but cause inflation. Inflation predates the federal reserve.
Ron Paul suggests the Federal Reserve causes inflation, but *his* plan is to have congress print money whenever they feel like it, as if *that* won't case the exact same problem even more so. At least the Fed is run by trained professionals with a long term interest in maintaining the stability of the banking industry and the economy at large. Congress is not qualified to determine how much money to dump into the economy, since they will just spend like crazy if they have the right to print money.
>1. Why is he running as a Republican?
>
>Because he embodies the true ideals of conservativism that the neo-cons have robbed from modern >Republicans.
Yes, the Republican party used to be the conservative party, and before that it used to be the *liberal* party. The name of the party means nothing, his views are not represented or sponsored by its members. The Libertarian party represents is more representative of his views at this point.
Ron Paul calling himself a Republican is like an ante-bellum southern Democrat calling himself a modern Democrat. Before the war Democrats were the social conservative pro slavery party, now they are not.
In any case, the neo conservative and libertarian economic policies are both equally stupid, so it's not like a return to 19th century economic policies would improve our situation.
>2. Why is he STILL running?
>
>Because he still has a good shot, the only thing holding him back is when news outlets don't >mention him at all. News outlets such as Slashdot.
This is a bunch of bullshit. Ron Paul isn't taken seriously because his views *can't* be taken seriously and because he does not appeal the the vast majority of voters.
The vast majority of voters do *not* want to end social security, do *not* want to end the FDA which is responsible for maintaining the safety of the food supply. Many people want a smaller more efficient federal government, including myself, but most people depend on the federal government for various services and do not want to see it dismantled.
Also, his policy that we get rid of the income tax and just have massive tariffs is stupid. I'm not saying that we should never have tariffs. However, the IRS takes in 2.5 trillion annually. This is not possible with tariffs. Even if we raised tariffs to the level where we could take in 2.5 trillion in one year, the next year we would have to raise tariffs again because trade would *decrease*. Small tariffs to spur internal industry makes some sense, but the kind of tariffs Ron Paul is talking about would *end* international trade and destroy this country. No country can survive with an isolationist policy in the modern world.
I liked how he talked when I've heard him, and I appreciated his opposition to the war and his willingness to buck the party line, but this guy is advocating economic policies that just don't make sense.
In the case of Yahoo, I think it is somewhat unlikely (although not impossible) that Microsoft would dismantle Yahoo and try to replace it with its own set of internet services. Yahoo has been significantly more successful than Microsoft, and it would make more sense to simply make yahoo the web branch of the company, and move the top Microsoft web guys into Yahoo.
The fear is that Microsoft has too big of a case of Not Invented Here, and will make the Yahoo guys rebuild a lot of their stuff using Microsoft technology. That would be an enormous waste of time and would probably kill any gains from buying Yahoo, but it is something that many large companies do when they acquire smaller ones.
That said, if they are somewhat smart about it, they will just continue most of Yahoos programs and continue using Yahoo technology, at least for existing Yahoo products. What Microsoft has to offer in a Yahoo-Microsoft relationship is primarily money.
The article seems to suggest that Microsoft would necessarily kill all Yahoo use and development of open source technologies. That could happen, but I suspect that the Linux community, with its long held animosity towards Microsoft, or any company that produces a rival operating system (I know many Linux users who hate Apple vehemently, supposedly because it is "proprietary") is being unnecessarily pessimistic.
Microsoft has taken a progressively softer stance towards open source over the years, and now has a number of its own open source packages. Many zealots like to paint Microsoft as simply the enemy of open source, but that is an overly simplistic take on a rather complex issue. Large software companies don't see software licensing as a religious issue. For them it is a question of, how do we maximize return on investment?
I suspect they will look at a number of the open source program that yahoo is sponsoring and will keep them on a case by case basis. Some email client for linux is fairly likely to be killed, but some of Yahoo's more interesting projects, like Hadoop, might actually be useful to help Microsoft compete with Google in the same way they were useful to Yahoo.
a major issue that makes younger companies more attractive to industry talent than older companies.
Starting your own company is inordinately risky, but if you go to work for a pre-IPO company that is already profitable like facebook, or like google was it's IPO, you are basically guaranteed to be make a few million in a relatively short amount of time.
If you join a post IPO company that is still new and doing well, you can still make your own salary over again in stock options. Also, newer companies are usually hungrier and more aggressive about geting good talent than established companies, so they will generally offer better compansation, although not always in salary, for instance google offers significant bonuses and strong benefits like free meals that significantly increase total income even though their salaries aren't spectacular.
However, older companies tend to be a bit more complacent, and tend to follow the curve on employment benefits instead of pushing it. Microsoft has reasonable salaries, but I doubt their total compensation is competitive with Google, Yahoo (I know yahoo offers a *lot* of money for some of their most talented developers), and Facebook. I don't know their detailed pay structure though, so maybe someone currently working at Microsoft can post with details on what kind of compensation various developers can expect.
In addition to compensation issues, it is also true that the smartest people want to be working on something new and cool, and the fear when working at a company like microsoft is always that you will be made into a cog on the machine working on a fairly small and unimportant widget on a larger application like office.
Also, one of microsofts major disadvantages is that developers report having less freedom there i.e. they can't design and implement their own product even if they have the drive to do so, they have to get someone several layers up to sign off on such an idea before they can start working on it. This just isn't true at a lot of the newer companies. The new model is that engineers are encouraged to work on those areas that they care about, and get management support after the fact for projects they want to productize (eventually, management does have to nip some side projects in the bud if they aren't going anywhere).
In general, Microsoft has to overhaul how it compensates developers (and advertise this! if no one knows that microsoft guys are treated well, it doesn't help them) and overhaul management structure so that individual developers have more freedom to innovate on their own. Oh! and they need free food. The cafeteria food was way overpriced the last time I checked. That becomes a major cost for employees over the span of a year.
put to good use at tech companies.
Essentially, you make each team responsible for putting important documents on their wiki page, and make each team member responsible for documenting his particular project (design documents, howtos etc). The key thing is to make this easy to use, so test out various wikis and pick something with an easy to use syntax and interface and make sure there's not a lot of permissions nonsense blocking your users (they shouldn't need to get in contact with you to make new pages, etc). Also, having prefab pages that can be copy pasted to get the layout right helps (like a canonical design document).
For a less technical audience, wikis might be problematic. You should ask yourself what the average technical skill of your users are, and if most people aren't confortable with writing basic html, then they probably aren't going to be comfortable with a wiki.
Aside from that, a big directory for word documents isn't that bad of an idea. If you give every team their own share they can write to and make everything globally visible in a way people can pass around paths (z:\teama\mydoc.doc) then you will be using tools that people are already pretty familiar with. Make sure that the share is automatically mounted on the same drive letter for every machine, as users with low technical skill won't understand how to mount their own shares.
I know it's pretty unslashdotlike to suggest using word and CFS/SMB shares, but for users of low skill that's the simplest solution they can handle. Otherwise, go with wikis, but only if users indicate that they understand them and would use them in their daily job, otherwise you are wasting time.
(depending on who you ask) which is actually up quite a bit over historical standards. Total non-ie usage globally seems to be almost a quarter.
My question is this, why is European adoption so much higher than global adoption? The article doesn't really explain this. Is windows available unbundled in Europe? Does firefox get more press there?
In the US, colleges tend to use firefox, and a lot of more technically oriented people; however IE is still the default for most institutions and home users.
>Then why did GM refuse to market, sell, or continue the EV-1?
The EV-1 failed because battery technology isn't good enough for an electric car... just look at the wikipedia article on it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_EV1
If you can't get a laptop that lasts on battery for more than 4 hours, it should tell you something about the current state of battery technology.
>As soon as Bush came to power, the government dismantled all electric car development
>efforts and immediately began talking about hydrogen
Replaced electric cars with hydrogen? Hygrogen cars *are* electric cars. Fuel cells produce *electricity*. Hydrogen is just another battery technology, an attempt to fix what is wrong with existing battery technologies.
Furthermore, Bush isn't the president of GM, he can't stop work on electric cars. All the government did was make some noise about moving to a hydrogen based economy. I'm not sure if they even ever did anything about it. Bush has proposed many grand sounding initiatives that he's failed to follow through on. Remember that time he promised to take us to the moon?
If you are going to come up with some conspiracy theory, you might be bothered to get your facts right.
>Linux (as kernel and piece of technology) is far ahead of most OSs in power management
>and especially in power saving.
I doubt this is true. Do you know for a fact, for instance, that none of the other two major operating systems don't already have dynamic ticks? How many people on slashdot are familiar with the windows kernel? You don't have to work at microsoft to get these architectural details (windows architecture is detailed in a number of books, and university students often have access to windows source), but it is somewhat esoteric knowledge. Linux is the only operating system where kernel changes are highly public.
I've observed that people tend to assume that when something comes out for whatever platform that they have, it must have just been invented for their platform. In reality, people tend to reinvent the wheel a lot, and not that much real innovation occurs in operating systems. Innovation looks like it occurs, because any given operating system is missing features present in some other operating system and they only slowly converge.
Apple in particular tends to borrow architectural features from other operating systems, and their primary innovation tends to be how their plug everything together and package it up just right. Often they simply port existing software and keep interfaces intact. OSX has API's ported straight from macintosh, unix, and even windows (they have some minimal COM support).
Both the Linux community and Microsoft on the other hand have an enormous case of Not Invented Here, and tend to take the basic idea of some existing feature, and reimplement it in an incompatible way.
Microsoft is a fan of writing big frameworks that tightly integrate with other Microsoft technologies. This is real nice if you only ever want your software to run on windows, but those same frameworks tend to be so large that it complicates porting both software that runs on the framework and the framework itself.
The Linux community on the other hand likes to develop a number of incompatible frameworks that do the same thing simultaneously (e.g. sound frameworks that fight for control of the sound card). People tend to ignore standards both from other operating systems and from within linux, as everyone has their own idea what the ideal Linux should behave like. I'm not the first person to observe that Linux would benefit massively from a single good system architect to coordinate and discipline the effort at a high level. Someone like Linus, but responsible for the whole stack instead of just the kernel.
"The KDE development community's adoption of CMake is another major factor that has contributed to the increased portability of the desktop environment. KDE's build system was previously based on Autotools, an intractably arcane and grotesquely anachronistic cesspool of ineffable complexity that makes even seasoned programmers nauseous."
Can I get an amen?
I wrote a little poem about autotools. It goes like this
"Autotools
die
die
die
die
die
Autotools
die
die
die
Autotools
fuck you!"
It's not very lyrical, but I think it conveys my emotions.
Now if only we could converge on a single good cross platform build system for c and c++...
Since this new tag lets them safely break compatibility with the old IE, are they going to fix longstanding javascript issues like moving to the standard event model?
It would be nice to be able to write javascript without a bunch of compatibility hacks; however, the IE team hasn't shown much interest in javascript compatibility in the past and instead has focussed on CSS compatibility. CSS is also an important area, but it alone won't allow for hack free coding.
As it stands there's a lot of incentive to move to a different platform, such as flash or silverlight.
major retail stores refuse to give products away for free, even if you ask nicely. Group of shoppers start petition to see if that will help.
>PS - yes, this is for real.
I'm sorry, but this is the stupidest thing I have ever seen. Wanting more people to use the command line is not a suitable justification for bringing a new human being into the world. It certainly is not the basis for a healthy relationship.
It's true that all sorts of people who aren't qualified to reproduce do so anyway. Just be aware that you are in that group.
Also, no, just knowing what KSH is doesn't guarantee you have prime genetic material.
>If this is true, then Lenovo looks to have some heavy competition for the Macbook Air
Lenovo already has a computer in the ultralight space, the X61. The X61 has almost identical specs to the macboook air, at a much lower price and significantly higher clockspeed.
http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=3765
Looking at this new machine, I really like that they've lowered the weight more and slightly increased the screen size; however, I have to wonder what the point of a 1440X900 resolution is at 13' inches.
I also have to ask what the point of including a touch pad is, when you have one of those "keyboard nipple" trackpoints. The trackpoints are so ridiculously and unambiguously superior to a touch pad, that it just seems like a waste of space.
The third issue with the new spec, is that it is still VGA output instead of DVI output. Pretty much all modern monitors have DVI inputs, so I don't see the point of going with the old standard.
Finally, I'm not convinced of the benefits of a flash harddrive. If they are saving weight, that's nice (although I'm not sure they are lighter). However, it's a pretty small drive, and it is a myth that flash drives are faster. Flash drives have better random access, but slower sequential access, and most accesses are sequential. Things are going to seem *slower* moving to flash, not faster.
>they do not expect it to delay the goal of returning astronauts to the moon by 2020.
of course not, what's going to delay going to the moon again by 2020 is the fact that congress has no intention whatsoever of paying for that, and no one, not even Bush takes the program seriously.
Why are they wasting money on programs that are going to be thrown right out the window, never to be heard of again, as soon as the next president takes office?
by how sympathetic the slashdot crowd is to places like pirate bay.
I'll say, I've used to website in the past. It's a great website. But, let's not kid ourselves, it is breaking real legitimate laws.
There's a certain crowd that believes that piracy is somehow noble. This is nonsense. It's not the worse thing in the world, but it is definitely a crime. Copyright violation is a violation of someone's property rights. It might not be as bad as stealing someone's car, but it is stealing, and people that make piracy their business are still criminals.
Additionally, as a software developer those are *my* property rights that are being violated some of the time. If I want my software to go out as freeware or open source, I'll do so, but no one has the right to just take something of mine for free that I only offered them for sale. That's just theft.
Now, people will make arguments that I benefit from piracy because it "spreads the word" about my awesome software. Indeed, this may be true. However, whether I distribute my software for free is my own choice and it is still a violation of my rights if you make that choice for me.
It isn't enough justification to say you were "acting in the artists best interests" when you downloaded their music. The issue isn't who's benefiting, it's who's property rights are being violated. We don't live in a society where you can just do anything to anyone else without their permission if you judge it to be "in their best interest." Consent is required.
that some people in the community seem very excited about, and I can't figure out why. Oh no. Microsoft is getting ISO standardization for a format. For... evil? Gasp!
I also think it is hilarious that so many people can talk about how bad OOXML is, in extremely vague terms. Maybe it is bad. Maybe it isn't. However, virtually none of the people who hold strong opinions about the issue are qualified to do so. Instead, they just seem to be engaging in groupthink.
This is an issue that comes up often, where people with no knowledge will hold a strong opinion. Kind of like how every evangelical christian has a very strong opinion on evolution, and no relevant education.
I guess what I'm trying to say is it seems like this petty technical dispute over OOXML has become a religious issue. A religious issue in perhaps the most boring and pointless religion in the world, the church of the slashdot nerd.
I appreciate what they are trying to do... but others have already made ultraportable laptop's that are in some ways better.
I currently use an laptop well under 3 pounds, the IBM/lenovo X61. It has very similar specs, with a core 2 duo and GMA X3100 (which is the best *embedded* card on the market).
The differences that I note are this:
1. The air is a lot thinner and less sturdy than the X61 for the same weight. This may be a stylistic plus, but it also makes the hardware a lot less breakable, and I think they made the wrong choice here.
2. The Air is only 1.6 Ghz for a core 2 duo. My X61 came in at 2.2 Ghz.
3. The Air costs a lot more. My X61 came in at about $1400, whereas the air starts out at $1800! That's $400 for a brand identity on slightly inferior hardware.
4. The Air has a tiny by current standards harddrive (80 gigs) probably to make the solid state version not look so bad.
5. The Air's one strong point is that it has DVI out, whereas the X61 only has VGA out. Since there are DVI to s-video adapters, this means the Air can play movies on the tv, whereas the X61 cannot.
6. The air has an optional (it's in the $3000 dollar model) solid state drive. I'm not sure what real benefits you get by paying for this.
I am glad that more companies are putting out more portable laptops. I see a lot of people with these huge tanking laptops rigged for gaming and audio video that make no sense to me. My brother's laptop even has 2 harddrive's!
If your laptop weighs in at around 10 pounds, then there's no point in having a laptop. Just get a desktop and save some money. Desktop's are about as portable as a 10 pound laptop...
Although this is quite a ways off, I am still curious whether this or some other event is going to make the earth uninhabitable. My understanding was that our planet had at least a couple of billion years left in it. Reducing that to 40 million is significant, even if it doesn't effect this years elections.
How is it that positrons are formed? Where do they come from? Obviously, they weren't just sitting around from the beginning of the universe, otherwise they would have annihilated with electrons a long time ago.
you joke, but... these days professionalism in schools is so low that teachers dating students is pretty common. It happened at my school, and at the school's of most people I've talked to.
What's more, these people rarely get fired since union rules for firing make it next to impossible to fire a teacher for any reason whatsoever.
>This comparison yields the actual code that causes the overflow:
>A mistake in the calculation of the required size in a dynamic allocation
I hope no one else makes this mistake.