I can see how quickly this post was elevated to a +5, "kneejerk" insightful where it actually deserves a -1, redundant "canned opinion".
Science is still debating whether man has a direct influence on the environment. Science however has proven beyond doubt that ice ages, warm and even very warm periods have more or less periodically occured on this world over and over as far back as millions of years when our predecessors were still food for other animals. There are as many theories out there on the subject of man-made global warming and just as little proof behind them to back them up.
License it under an OSI license and release the source code or quit wasting my time. If I can't get it free with source without "non-commerical use only" crap then get lost.
Short answer: It is a stupid idea and it is clashing with ASN.1.
First off: ASN.1 (X.680) is not a fringe technology and it is alive and kicking. ASN.1 is dead == BSD is dead. In fact ASN.1 and the binary wire presentations (CER/DER/PER/XER) are at the core of many important services we use daily including but not limited to:
PKIX / X.509 / PKCS (Public Key Cryptography)
Kerberos authentication
SNMP / CMIP
X.500 LDAP / DAP directory services
X.400 messaging
Voice over IP: H.323 T.38
The 3GPP specifications (GSM / UMTS mobile phones)
OSI layer 7 protocols (FTAM.. etc.)
RFID
In comparison to XML, ASN.1 is a huge bandwidth saver, in fact the PER (Packed Encoding Rules) were designed for saving bandwidth. There is even a way for encoding data in XML using the XER (XML Encoding Rules) specification.
Last but not least there is finally a worthwhile opensource ASN1 to C compiler out there: Get ASN1C here.
What is going to stop Intel from integrating the on-chip DRM peripherals they've developed for the PDA chips into their general purpose microprocessors?
Right now, we're at stage 1 here. I'm using a "Thinkpad" T42 that has an onboard chip much like the ones you find on digital signature card. It has an inaccessible key store for private RSA keys and it will do on-chip RSA encryption. A RSA smart card is a neat device but I can can not trust that chip not to have a back door to it.
What's more,
for kicks, I used strings on the Thinkpad's Bios and interesting enough it contains messages like "card in slot %1 not authorized" and the like. My theory is that IBM may try to limit now or in future what kind of miniPCI cards I can plug into the Thinkpad. It makes me want to think twice about changing the wireless card it came with a 10Mbit 802.11b Intel Pro Wireless 2100 miniPCI card for a 54Mbit 802.11bg miniPCI card. Personally I think code like that is in the Bios but not in use right now.
Wait however until we get to the next stage: At this stage they will most likely disallow non-IBM peripherals such as the 80Gb Hitachi hard disk I upgraded to which only cost half at a local computer store for what IBM is selling it. I also doubt that at this stage I can upgrade any "built-in" components such as miniPCI cards.
And of course everthing else people have talked about in this article will come about too. I won't be able to connect to the internet anymore without authenticating my "authorized machine state" to the ISP and the DVD-rom will refuse to read a DVD without being presented a valid authorization datagram from an MPAA authorization server. What's more, the CPU will run code in a secure compartment in parallel to the user compartment holding my operating system and that "secure" code will be able to snoop on the non-privileged user compartment and even report on user memory contents by adding encrypted information to the authentication and authorization messages it sends.
In short, I loose control over how, when and where I use information on my computer and potentially I also loose control over the information. I can no longer trust my computer anymore but they can trust my computer to fuck me.
Breathe deeply? Isn't that the kind of advice they give in the gaschamber?? "When the gas hits, try to breathe deeply, that way you'll suffer a lot less."???
3 microseconds less a day makes the year 3e-6 * 365 = 0.001095 seconds shorter, we "lose" less than 1.1 ms. To knock of a full second of the year we would have to have roughly 900 events like this. Considering the year has 365 days we would have to have at least 2-3 of these events a day to shorten the day a full second.
Unix OS are so commonplace that nearly everybody uses or is a provided a service running on an OS like that. None of the systems are really geared towards casual use by the computer novice and those systems that as of late address that segment of users try to accomodate with graphical shells like Gnome or KDE. In order to supply a system that addresses the need of the casual technically non-involved user systems like Windows make it easy to supply common applications like wordprocessors or spreadsheets but mostly deny the user the flexibility and access to the system she has in a Unix system.
Thus it is fair to divide computer users at least into two camps, casual novices that require a locked down computing environment such as Windows and serious users that need in-depth access to their systems.
Back and forth we go so let's take a look at what you wrote here.
Frankly automobile are not my keenest interests but I think the "Corbin Sparrow" is probably next of kin to the European "Smart" or "Twingo" minicars. While offering relative safety in comparision to a normal car, these retail at least over here starting at EUR 18,000 and have a "mileage" of 5l / 100Km which is only slightly better than a recent normal car.
As for the first paragraph you provided, your heavy bias has closed your mind to the "fresh new open-minded technological and sociological ideas and concepts" that many "eco-friendly" yet also realistic people may offer up. In the original poster's statement, I didn't see any demands for personal sacrifice or that people *must* give in and toe some "eco-socialist" line. What was said was one person's opinion about what was needed.
I have replied heavily today to the posts in this thread and when you take the time to take a look you will find that I have questioned much of what we take granted. It is a shame that instead of participating in this dialog you choose to engage in a discussion of how open- or close-minded I personally am. I told you before, I have my bias and people like the original poster at the top of this thread has his bias. My point of view is however IMHO more originally and I hope better reflected than his. I invite you join me in thinking out of the box, this leads us to far more interesting things than cuddling the personal ego of the people involved in this thread, myself included:-)
Customer just called me and I got to go... however... Maybe since government is in itself highly corruptible, hard to contain and restrict, what is wrong with burning up whatever excess fat it has in resources with wasteful activies?
This, in turn, encourages more and more driving. As things spread out, there is a definite negative impact on many facets of society - after all, who wants to live downtown when everything you would want is in the suburbs?
Do we really need downtowns or even at all the concept of cities? What about rethinking why all that space is necessary for Walmarts and the like? Why do I have to walk through aisles to shop when I could get it delivered directly to my home or preorder it on the internet and then just drive by and pick it up? Why do I need a Wendys, McD, BK, KFC one after the other when a single outlet could serve all four brands? (Why should I eat that shit if it makes me sick?) Why do I need a gas station when I could charge my cars hydrogen cells in my garage? Why are our downtowns nowadays just full of high rise buildings housing banks and insurances? Most of the space we use and deem necessary nowadays is wasted.
... everything else slowly drifts away from the center. Thus, they become slums, which correlates to a higher probability of crime, etc etc.
95% of property crime is the result of missing perspective and opportunities. Many of the murders that occur in ghetto settings are also property-related or a result of aggression due to deprivation. Then there are the murders out of passion, and frankly I have no idea what to do about those:-). To solve these problems (and they can be resolved) a simple renovation of our current system would not be sufficient. The current power group benefits too much from from making work a privilege that can be arbitrarily denied. We would have to do away with current core concepts such as that work and sustainance of an individual are related to each other. We could exchange sustainance with luxury, and make necessary work (agriculture, road maintenance) a commodity to be exchanged for the opportunity to do pleasurable work. Interesting enough, _we_ in the Opensource Community are actively exploring concepts like these, by exchanging pleasurable work for recognition or even better for later business opportunities such as consulting and training services. However much as those who benefit from the closed source closed shop paradigm hate the from their viewpoint unwelcome competition and at best pay lip service to it, the power groups running our society behind the scenes stand to loose when concepts similar to Opensource pervade into their carefully managed system.
You should read your state's driving manual. I think you would be surprised to learn that bicycles are considered vehicles, and have just as much right to be on the road as your car.You're probably right as far as road conditions in rural America is concerned. Over in Europe however, road space is limited and someone riding a bike there can be an obstruction to traffic, compromising their own and other drivers safety. Interestingly enough, the Netherlands for example are known for the extensive use of bicycle lanes. However, the perceived advantage of combining transportation with physical activity fades in the view of fatalities and bicycle lanes are not a catch-all remedy for keeping bicycle and automobile traffic safe from each other.
Yes, I am indeed biased and in discussions like these there is little merit in a "balanced" monolog that first sends us down the road of ecosocialist wailing for (pointless) personal sacrifice when we should ignore that and concentrate on fresh new open-minded technological and sociological ideas and concepts. They have ample opportunity to tell their side of the story and it is already hard enough to turn a deaf ear to their monotonous calls for a "sustainable" society. A "sustainable society" whose only knee-jerk solution to problems is various forms of abstinence and sacrifice. There are too many voices in that chorus that sing along that song of "joyous" sacrifice without reflecting on it. Too many mostly well-meaning people are blind and filled with unthinking zealotry, eager to trade away the (little) precious freedom we enjoy from nature's ugly side. Gall stones, cancer and tubercolisis are a part of nature too, though nobody except maybe the scamsters behind the "Green Movement" see value in preserving these. An extremely biased group themselves, they can fill TV-screens during prime-time with commercials, buy "scientific commentary" and in the last decade even their way into "politics". Obviously they don't need any help telling "their side" of "the story". This is Slashdot and most of us on Slashdot lean strongly towards technology and technology assisted individualism and rather than green ecosocialist collectivism.
I wonder where you get the idea from that it is wrong to be biased and call things by their names?
As far as the mini-cars are concerned, they are on sale on Europe too (EUR 10,000 - 13,000) and the local Automobile Association proved these vehicles to be death-traps. I might add, due to the design constraints for reduced weight they are mostly made of cheap plastic wherever the engineers could get away with replacing a steel/metal part with a cheaper one and they do not whatsoever offer the comfort of a "real" car. As much as it may come to a surprise, but these low-cost, low-mileage vehicles also conform to the prevailing perception that eco-friendliness must come at the expense of comfort. Instead now is the time to focus on preserving/increasing levels of automotive comfort _AND_ switching to alternative carriers (not necessarily sources) of energy such as hydrogen.
As far as throwing garbage on the ground is concerned, it is done in Detroit and probably all over the world with the expectation that it will not be removed in the near future. You are right in that this most likely done with an attitude that the cleanliness of the location in question is not important. But again, as in my previous post, would it not make sense to specifically allow for throwing garbage on the ground in the sound knowledge that within a very short time this piece of garbage will have been collected and maybe even recycled? The city of Detroit could do it, though it would mean they would have to provide a meaningful service to its population.
We're not, tree-hugger. First of all the one thing I agree with is that we need to cut down on environmental toxity, not only on atmospheric emissions but also on other sources of disease such as for example the less than nutritional food that is forced upon us.
However, tree-hugger, just as healthy foods such as hormone-free meat, eggs without antibiotica, salad and fruit without pesticide are far more tastier than the crap they sell at the supermarket, there is no reason whatsoever to cut down on the amenities of modern life. Forcing everybody on a train with set schedules and set destinations is communist. Our road system gives us the freedom to go where we want exactly when we want and on top we also get the who we want because we don't have to share our car with total strangers. Hydrogen powered cars will sooner or later replace cars running on petrochemicals and electric trains will sooner or later exclusively carry cargo but not people.
As to throwing garbage on the ground, maybe we should look into improving and streamlining the process of getting it removed FROM THE GROUND before putting up a waste-basket every 200 feet or so or even making people take their garbage home. Undoubtedly in the mid-term future, "garbage" such as paper, plastic or even organics will be a much in demand commodity. Just consider the fact that once we run out of oil we also run out of cheap plastic.
Driving through town is indeed a horrible experience, I'll give you that. Most of it however is due to the fact that the demand we put on the road system in general has risen exponentially while existing infrastructure is geared towards the demand of the fifties. Japan is one of the worlds most space constrained countries and cities in the west will adopt japanese traffic solutions such as stacking multiple stories of roads on top of another or moving stores, amusements and even offices below the ground. Small to medium cities and towns will increasingly divert dense traffic from downtown areas to city limits, offering commerce growth at the perimeter. (You, upset walking/cycling dude will have to walk a hell of a lot more, of course),
Tell you what, you are indeed a member of an odd minority that insists on inefficiency, something an employer is least likely to appreciate. I would suggest that you take your car to work and then in the evening ride your bicycle in a Bicycle-Park or other designated area where it can not interfere with traffic nor be endanged by it.
Whatever you do, however, don't bitch at us because we do not literally go the extra mile. Bitch at the people that deliberately hold back both technology and society.
Having permanent residency and a full unlimited work permit in Germany I had to follow up on this one and call the "Bundesagentur fuer Arbeit", the "Federal Work Agency" directly in Nuremberg (Click on IMPRESSUM for information on how to contact them).
According to them, an American who has acquired permanent residency status (through marriage, birth etc.) in Germany and who has been issued a permanent work permit unrestricted by employer or type of work, can be additionally issued a similar work permit in other EU member states, except for the newly admitted EU members such as Poland or the Baltic states.
Basically this means that an American permanent resident has the same rights as a EU citizen as far as mobility between member states concerned, though he has to go through tons of red tape to exercise them.
Good that I held off on submitting this. I just talked to a lady at the Dutch General Consulate in Dusseldorf and she told me that they do not automatically issue Dutch residency or work permits on the basis of German residency or work permits. She says, it seems to work kind of like the US-H1B deal, I would have to find a dutch employer and they would apply for the permits.
I don't know which of the two is right, the German Bundesagentur or the impatient and slightly annoyed lady at the Dutch General Consulate, but I think the truth is somewhere in between.
So you'd like almost everybody to be a sucker just waiting for you to fleece them?
Consider the downside then, you're the wolf and and when there are more sheep they put up more fences and put more dogs on patrol.
The easier your neighbors are coralled and managed the easier it is to corall and manage you because the infrastructure is there.
Other than the conversation function, the robot has 15 programs to keep the elderly thinking and healthy, including singing songs, reading out quiz games and old news, and inquiring about health functions.
I wonder if I ever got that old, could I have a gun or some cyanide instead? On second thought, could I have a SDK with it?
Any which way you twist or turn it, it is definitely _not_ a safe vehicle. Just because the vehicle survive a crash, does not mean you do. The makers of miniature cars all claim that they have found a way to make their car-alikes safe enough for a collision with a real car or even a concrete wall. However, that is just not possible. Real cars are designed to be "crash compatible to each other, meaning that the zones and structures within the cars that take up the kinetic energy of the impact are positioned in a way for optimum result. Miniatures do not come close to the geometry a real car has and which is required to be crash compatible. Instead of trying to minimize the amount of kinetic energy that has to be buffered by the car structures, they make these materials extra hard and rigid so that they will pass the impact shock through the passenger compartment. During a crash test this strategy achieves extremely good results as far as the passenger cage itself undergoes only minimal deformation.
However, and this is where the low survivability comes in, much like in aircraft crashes where not even one bone of the recovered corpses was broken, a passenger in a Smart/Zap/Mini-whatever will most likely not die because of being crushed during impact but because of internal bleeding as blood vessels and organs are burst because of the shock of impact. This is also called the "pretty corpse" phenomenon.
Who needs this shit? This is the same crap like the European "smart" car, another vehicle with near zero survivability in a crash and as uncomfortable a driving experience as can be.
This is a dilemma. Keep working and risk getting not paid for example because the company folds or walk out and at least get paid for the month you put in. Depends on your customer. Personally I would take a 6 month delay from the likes of Deutsche Telekom or DaimlerChrysler, but I wouldn't take it from medium or small businesses.
I'm a contractor myself, although in the EU, but I think it's pretty much the same in the states.
1. Incorporate yourself as a company -- get professional tax advice on this. Over here a LLC limits your liability to EUR 12,500 but in addition to fees it is taxed extra hard.
2. Insurance is preposterously high over here hence the LLC.
3. Training... If you're between contracts this is what you do but I have not had anyone really harp on certifications. Most clients are more interested in what projects you did before you came to them and couldn't any care less about certifications. What fellow freelancers is your take on this??
4. You will work your ass off, expect to work overtime and salaried employees turning over their work which was due yesterday to you on friday evening just as you were about to leave. Do it with a smile. Even though the work, the people and everything else sucks, they're paying you by the hour. Oh and btw... most companies over here work hard to make you feel unwelcome. Be prepared for some of the worst cubicles (if you get one), having to share a desk with another freelancer and not even being able to buy coffee because you need an employee tag to use the coffee machine. Btw... Do us all a favor and try to treat your fellow contractors not so much as "competitors" but as colleagues. The permanent employees do their best to make life miserable so most of us opt for "cooperative mode". Keep in mind, you might be working with them at a different project at a different customer just couple of months from now... On top of that, sometimes another freelancer who has been working at the customer site for some time now will most likely help you get setup and maybe even get you a special contractor tag so you can get coffee and buy lunch. On the other hand, don't get to cozy with them either. The guy sitting next to me for the past 12 months was a real asshole, picking his nose and rolling his boogers into little balls of snot, surfing the net all day and doing his best to make me look incompetent in the eyes of the customer.
5. No job security whatsoever. Usually you get a contract which runs for three months and gets renewed. Sometimes they renew it on the last day, sometimes they'll throw you out for a couple of weeks and then give you another contract. On the other hand if you get a "permanent" job there is no job security whatsoever either. They will fire you when the project is over. It happened to me and I am no longer interested in a permanent position. If you ask me nowadays the real difference between contracting and a permanent position is that as a permanent employee you are not expected to work as hard as but are also paid a lot less. I have turned down offers for permanent employment because it was obvious that they were trying to get the same work done at lower rates. (A salaried employee costs them EUR 50 an hour maximum, don't let them tell you crap).
6. Cash flow. Some customers will delay payments for 6 months and longer, some will even try every trick in the book to delay payment.
7. If you get recruited for a contract, expect to get 10-20% of what you're making. If they want more then they're obviously trying to exploit your newbie status. Don't expect to acquire a direct contract with a large company. They will not do business directly with you.
8. Hourly rates. Over here working for a fortune 500 class company is EUR 100-120 an hour which means you make 80 - 100 EUR an hour. Medium sized businesses will most likely accept EUR 80-100 an hour. Your customer will most likely try to argue that since the project is long-term you, they are not prepared to pay so much. EUR 70 an hour is good money too but let them negotiate your hourly rate down, don't do it for them.
In 2000 I was out of a job and nobody was hiring. Contracting was the _only_ way for me to go back then, but tell you what I don't regret it. If I were you I would definitely go for it.
I think the biggest misconception out there on slashdot is that every machine is just another PC more or less, meaning a mainboard with just one PCI bus, a bunch of slots and an onboard ethernet and ide-controlled and one or two CPUs. A sun4m/sun4u desktop machine which propably most of the people here use to run Solaris at home is more or less like a standard PC (okay, so the sun4m has SBUS) and these machines are equally well supported both by Solaris and Linux.
However there is a vast difference between a Solaris/Linux box that sits on your desktop, and a Sun mid-range 6800 or even an Sun enterprise level E25K iron. These big highend machines are chock-full of redundancy and reliability features, interconnecting system components such as CPU boards (one board 1-8 CPUs & gigs of memory) and redundant i/o and network controllers over an also redundant backplane. The cool thing is that with these machines you can yank a (malfunctioning) CPU / IO / Network / whatever board and replace/upgrade it with a new one while the system is running. Not a second of downtime. However such features require kernel support. Solaris has that kind of support on Sun mid-range and enterprise machines. I doubt that most of you, me included, have a Sun Fire 6800 or even a Sun Fire E25K to play around with. If you're interested, this is what a big iron is like: Sun Fire E25K Hardware Manual
If people want to know their place in the food chain, they should compare their teeth and nails to those of a lion.
No buddy, look at the brain of a lion and then compare that to what's in the cranium of even the stupidest among us and then tell me where in the foodchain lions belong. We've got guns and trucks and they've got shit in comparison. As far as I'm concerned, they're a species shit out of luck. Today for an animal species to survive it either has to be real tasty or nice and cuddly or a lot smarter and meaner than us. Sorry buddy, but if you wanted to place someone above us in the foodchain you would have to look off-planet and find yourself an Alien Predator.
Some of you vegetarian spiritualists pussies suggest that people be made to personally kill the animals they eat. Watch me.
" It's an interesting read that has some valid critiques of the format as far as journalistic integrity is concerned (not that CBS hasn't been without its problems)."
Taco, CBS isn't just "not without problems", CBS/FOX/ABC/NBC and all the other broadcasters of corporate/lobby interest crap are part of the problem, but the REAL PROBLEM is that YOU pay lip service to the illusion that American Media is about journalism.
"It is in large part crackpot physics," says physicist Lawrence Krauss of Case Western Reserve University, author of The Physics of Star Trek, a book detailing the physical limits that prevent teleportation. He describes the Air Force report as "some things adapted from reasonable theoretical studies, and other things from nonsensical ones."
"It is in large part crackpot heresy", says Geronimo Boccia, advisor to the Pope, author of "The Joys of Belief", a book detailing the divine limits set for mankind. He describes the heretic heliocentric teachings of Galileo Galilei that as "some things adapted from scripture and other things are clearly inspired by the devil".
Nothing personal about Mr. Krauss here but we need more people to work on developing all the cool star treky stuff such as teleportation, the warp drive, the phasers, the universal translator, subspace communications, force fields, synterol, a society without money, holographic doctors. What we need less of is unimaginative people that will flip open a dusty five-year old textbook and tell us it can't be done becasuse of physics theories back in the days of the book was written.
As a matter of fact "Mother Nature (Mother Gaia, Mother Goose???)" still operates the largest nuclear reactor on the planet and I doubt any man-made reactor is ever going to surpass it in Terawatts or size: You are standing on it, it is below your feet! It is the core of the planet. If it weren't for the decay of radioactive isotopes under our feet the oceans would have frozen up billions of years ago. Ground-thermal heat is not a holdover from the planet creations, that energy has long since been dissipated into space.
Slashdot Mirror
I can see how quickly this post was elevated to a +5, "kneejerk" insightful where it actually deserves a -1, redundant "canned opinion".
Science is still debating whether man has a direct influence on the environment. Science however has proven beyond doubt that ice ages, warm and even very warm periods have more or less periodically occured on this world over and over as far back as millions of years when our predecessors were still food for other animals. There are as many theories out there on the subject of man-made global warming and just as little proof behind them to back them up.
License it under an OSI license and release the source code or quit wasting my time. If I can't get it free with source without "non-commerical use only" crap then get lost.
Slashdot editors: You failed your job miserably.
First off: ASN.1 (X.680) is not a fringe technology and it is alive and kicking. ASN.1 is dead == BSD is dead. In fact ASN.1 and the binary wire presentations (CER/DER/PER/XER) are at the core of many important services we use daily including but not limited to:
PKIX / X.509 / PKCS (Public Key Cryptography)
Kerberos authentication
SNMP / CMIP
X.500 LDAP / DAP directory services
X.400 messaging
Voice over IP: H.323 T.38
The 3GPP specifications (GSM / UMTS mobile phones)
OSI layer 7 protocols (FTAM.. etc.)
RFID
In comparison to XML, ASN.1 is a huge bandwidth saver, in fact the PER (Packed Encoding Rules) were designed for saving bandwidth. There is even a way for encoding data in XML using the XER (XML Encoding Rules) specification.
Last but not least there is finally a worthwhile opensource ASN1 to C compiler out there: Get ASN1C here.
New to ASN.1?? Visit this site and be sure to pick up the excellent free book on ASN.1!
What is going to stop Intel from integrating the on-chip DRM peripherals they've developed for the PDA chips into their general purpose microprocessors?
Right now, we're at stage 1 here. I'm using a "Thinkpad" T42 that has an onboard chip much like the ones you find on digital signature card. It has an inaccessible key store for private RSA keys and it will do on-chip RSA encryption. A RSA smart card is a neat device but I can can not trust that chip not to have a back door to it.
What's more, for kicks, I used strings on the Thinkpad's Bios and interesting enough it contains messages like "card in slot %1 not authorized" and the like. My theory is that IBM may try to limit now or in future what kind of miniPCI cards I can plug into the Thinkpad. It makes me want to think twice about changing the wireless card it came with a 10Mbit 802.11b Intel Pro Wireless 2100 miniPCI card for a 54Mbit 802.11bg miniPCI card. Personally I think code like that is in the Bios but not in use right now.
Wait however until we get to the next stage: At this stage they will most likely disallow non-IBM peripherals such as the 80Gb Hitachi hard disk I upgraded to which only cost half at a local computer store for what IBM is selling it. I also doubt that at this stage I can upgrade any "built-in" components such as miniPCI cards.
And of course everthing else people have talked about in this article will come about too. I won't be able to connect to the internet anymore without authenticating my "authorized machine state" to the ISP and the DVD-rom will refuse to read a DVD without being presented a valid authorization datagram from an MPAA authorization server. What's more, the CPU will run code in a secure compartment in parallel to the user compartment holding my operating system and that "secure" code will be able to snoop on the non-privileged user compartment and even report on user memory contents by adding encrypted information to the authentication and authorization messages it sends.
In short, I loose control over how, when and where I use information on my computer and potentially I also loose control over the information. I can no longer trust my computer anymore but they can trust my computer to fuck me.
Breathe deeply? Isn't that the kind of advice they give in the gaschamber?? "When the gas hits, try to breathe deeply, that way you'll suffer a lot less."???
1s = 1_000 ms = 1_000_000 microsec
3 microseconds less a day makes the year 3e-6 * 365 = 0.001095 seconds shorter, we "lose" less than 1.1 ms. To knock of a full second of the year we would have to have roughly 900 events like this. Considering the year has 365 days we would have to have at least 2-3 of these events a day to shorten the day a full second.
Unix OS are so commonplace that nearly everybody uses or is a provided a service running on an OS like that. None of the systems are really geared towards casual use by the computer novice and those systems that as of late address that segment of users try to accomodate with graphical shells like Gnome or KDE. In order to supply a system that addresses the need of the casual technically non-involved user systems like Windows make it easy to supply common applications like wordprocessors or spreadsheets but mostly deny the user the flexibility and access to the system she has in a Unix system.
Thus it is fair to divide computer users at least into two camps, casual novices that require a locked down computing environment such as Windows and serious users that need in-depth access to their systems.
Unix OS are so commonplace that nearly everbody uses or is provided a service running
If you work at Microsoft, shouldn't you be working on some sinister DRM project or something equally evil?
Don't use any random string generator for generating account names. I used one and look at what I got!
Back and forth we go so let's take a look at what you wrote here.
:-)
Frankly automobile are not my keenest interests but I think the "Corbin Sparrow" is probably next of kin to the European "Smart" or "Twingo" minicars. While offering relative safety in comparision to a normal car, these retail at least over here starting at EUR 18,000 and have a "mileage" of 5l / 100Km which is only slightly better than a recent normal car.
As for the first paragraph you provided, your heavy bias has closed your mind to the "fresh new open-minded technological and sociological ideas and concepts" that many "eco-friendly" yet also realistic people may offer up. In the original poster's statement, I didn't see any demands for personal sacrifice or that people *must* give in and toe some "eco-socialist" line. What was said was one person's opinion about what was needed.
I have replied heavily today to the posts in this thread and when you take the time to take a look you will find that I have questioned much of what we take granted. It is a shame that instead of participating in this dialog you choose to engage in a discussion of how open- or close-minded I personally am. I told you before, I have my bias and people like the original poster at the top of this thread has his bias. My point of view is however IMHO more originally and I hope better reflected than his. I invite you join me in thinking out of the box, this leads us to far more interesting things than cuddling the personal ego of the people involved in this thread, myself included
Customer just called me and I got to go... however... Maybe since government is in itself highly corruptible, hard to contain and restrict, what is wrong with burning up whatever excess fat it has in resources with wasteful activies?
This, in turn, encourages more and more driving. As things spread out, there is a definite negative impact on many facets of society - after all, who wants to live downtown when everything you would want is in the suburbs?
... everything else slowly drifts away from the center. Thus, they become slums, which correlates to a higher probability of crime, etc etc.
:-). To solve these problems (and they can be resolved) a simple renovation of our current system would not be sufficient. The current power group benefits too much from from making work a privilege that can be arbitrarily denied. We would have to do away with current core concepts such as that work and sustainance of an individual are related to each other. We could exchange sustainance with luxury, and make necessary work (agriculture, road maintenance) a commodity to be exchanged for the opportunity to do pleasurable work. Interesting enough, _we_ in the Opensource Community are actively exploring concepts like these, by exchanging pleasurable work for recognition or even better for later business opportunities such as consulting and training services. However much as those who benefit from the closed source closed shop paradigm hate the from their viewpoint unwelcome competition and at best pay lip service to it, the power groups running our society behind the scenes stand to loose when concepts similar to Opensource pervade into their carefully managed system.
Do we really need downtowns or even at all the concept of cities? What about rethinking why all that space is necessary for Walmarts and the like? Why do I have to walk through aisles to shop when I could get it delivered directly to my home or preorder it on the internet and then just drive by and pick it up? Why do I need a Wendys, McD, BK, KFC one after the other when a single outlet could serve all four brands? (Why should I eat that shit if it makes me sick?) Why do I need a gas station when I could charge my cars hydrogen cells in my garage? Why are our downtowns nowadays just full of high rise buildings housing banks and insurances? Most of the space we use and deem necessary nowadays is wasted.
95% of property crime is the result of missing perspective and opportunities. Many of the murders that occur in ghetto settings are also property-related or a result of aggression due to deprivation. Then there are the murders out of passion, and frankly I have no idea what to do about those
You should read your state's driving manual. I think you would be surprised to learn that bicycles are considered vehicles, and have just as much right to be on the road as your car.You're probably right as far as road conditions in rural America is concerned. Over in Europe however, road space is limited and someone riding a bike there can be an obstruction to traffic, compromising their own and other drivers safety. Interestingly enough, the Netherlands for example are known for the extensive use of bicycle lanes. However, the perceived advantage of combining transportation with physical activity fades in the view of fatalities and bicycle lanes are not a catch-all remedy for keeping bicycle and automobile traffic safe from each other.
Yes, I am indeed biased and in discussions like these there is little merit in a "balanced" monolog that first sends us down the road of ecosocialist wailing for (pointless) personal sacrifice when we should ignore that and concentrate on fresh new open-minded technological and sociological ideas and concepts. They have ample opportunity to tell their side of the story and it is already hard enough to turn a deaf ear to their monotonous calls for a "sustainable" society. A "sustainable society" whose only knee-jerk solution to problems is various forms of abstinence and sacrifice. There are too many voices in that chorus that sing along that song of "joyous" sacrifice without reflecting on it. Too many mostly well-meaning people are blind and filled with unthinking zealotry, eager to trade away the (little) precious freedom we enjoy from nature's ugly side. Gall stones, cancer and tubercolisis are a part of nature too, though nobody except maybe the scamsters behind the "Green Movement" see value in preserving these. An extremely biased group themselves, they can fill TV-screens during prime-time with commercials, buy "scientific commentary" and in the last decade even their way into "politics". Obviously they don't need any help telling "their side" of "the story". This is Slashdot and most of us on Slashdot lean strongly towards technology and technology assisted individualism and rather than green ecosocialist collectivism.
I wonder where you get the idea from that it is wrong to be biased and call things by their names?
As far as the mini-cars are concerned, they are on sale on Europe too (EUR 10,000 - 13,000) and the local Automobile Association proved these vehicles to be death-traps. I might add, due to the design constraints for reduced weight they are mostly made of cheap plastic wherever the engineers could get away with replacing a steel/metal part with a cheaper one and they do not whatsoever offer the comfort of a "real" car. As much as it may come to a surprise, but these low-cost, low-mileage vehicles also conform to the prevailing perception that eco-friendliness must come at the expense of comfort. Instead now is the time to focus on preserving/increasing levels of automotive comfort _AND_ switching to alternative carriers (not necessarily sources) of energy such as hydrogen.
As far as throwing garbage on the ground is concerned, it is done in Detroit and probably all over the world with the expectation that it will not be removed in the near future. You are right in that this most likely done with an attitude that the cleanliness of the location in question is not important. But again, as in my previous post, would it not make sense to specifically allow for throwing garbage on the ground in the sound knowledge that within a very short time this piece of garbage will have been collected and maybe even recycled? The city of Detroit could do it, though it would mean they would have to provide a meaningful service to its population.
We're not, tree-hugger. First of all the one thing I agree with is that we need to cut down on environmental toxity, not only on atmospheric emissions but also on other sources of disease such as for example the less than nutritional food that is forced upon us.
However, tree-hugger, just as healthy foods such as hormone-free meat, eggs without antibiotica, salad and fruit without pesticide are far more tastier than the crap they sell at the supermarket, there is no reason whatsoever to cut down on the amenities of modern life. Forcing everybody on a train with set schedules and set destinations is communist. Our road system gives us the freedom to go where we want exactly when we want and on top we also get the who we want because we don't have to share our car with total strangers. Hydrogen powered cars will sooner or later replace cars running on petrochemicals and electric trains will sooner or later exclusively carry cargo but not people.
As to throwing garbage on the ground, maybe we should look into improving and streamlining the process of getting it removed FROM THE GROUND before putting up a waste-basket every 200 feet or so or even making people take their garbage home. Undoubtedly in the mid-term future, "garbage" such as paper, plastic or even organics will be a much in demand commodity. Just consider the fact that once we run out of oil we also run out of cheap plastic.
Driving through town is indeed a horrible experience, I'll give you that. Most of it however is due to the fact that the demand we put on the road system in general has risen exponentially while existing infrastructure is geared towards the demand of the fifties. Japan is one of the worlds most space constrained countries and cities in the west will adopt japanese traffic solutions such as stacking multiple stories of roads on top of another or moving stores, amusements and even offices below the ground. Small to medium cities and towns will increasingly divert dense traffic from downtown areas to city limits, offering commerce growth at the perimeter. (You, upset walking/cycling dude will have to walk a hell of a lot more, of course),
Tell you what, you are indeed a member of an odd minority that insists on inefficiency, something an employer is least likely to appreciate. I would suggest that you take your car to work and then in the evening ride your bicycle in a Bicycle-Park or other designated area where it can not interfere with traffic nor be endanged by it.
Whatever you do, however, don't bitch at us because we do not literally go the extra mile. Bitch at the people that deliberately hold back both technology and society.
Having permanent residency and a full unlimited work permit in Germany I had to follow up on this one and call the "Bundesagentur fuer Arbeit", the "Federal Work Agency" directly in Nuremberg (Click on IMPRESSUM for information on how to contact them).
According to them, an American who has acquired permanent residency status (through marriage, birth etc.) in Germany and who has been issued a permanent work permit unrestricted by employer or type of work, can be additionally issued a similar work permit in other EU member states, except for the newly admitted EU members such as Poland or the Baltic states.
Basically this means that an American permanent resident has the same rights as a EU citizen as far as mobility between member states concerned, though he has to go through tons of red tape to exercise them.
Good that I held off on submitting this. I just talked to a lady at the Dutch General Consulate in Dusseldorf and she told me that they do not automatically issue Dutch residency or work permits on the basis of German residency or work permits. She says, it seems to work kind of like the US-H1B deal, I would have to find a dutch employer and they would apply for the permits.
I don't know which of the two is right, the German Bundesagentur or the impatient and slightly annoyed lady at the Dutch General Consulate, but I think the truth is somewhere in between.
So you'd like almost everybody to be a sucker just waiting for you to fleece them? Consider the downside then, you're the wolf and and when there are more sheep they put up more fences and put more dogs on patrol. The easier your neighbors are coralled and managed the easier it is to corall and manage you because the infrastructure is there.
Other than the conversation function, the robot has 15 programs to keep the elderly thinking and healthy, including singing songs, reading out quiz games and old news, and inquiring about health functions.
I wonder if I ever got that old, could I have a gun or some cyanide instead? On second thought, could I have a SDK with it?
Any which way you twist or turn it, it is definitely _not_ a safe vehicle. Just because the vehicle survive a crash, does not mean you do. The makers of miniature cars all claim that they have found a way to make their car-alikes safe enough for a collision with a real car or even a concrete wall. However, that is just not possible. Real cars are designed to be "crash compatible to each other, meaning that the zones and structures within the cars that take up the kinetic energy of the impact are positioned in a way for optimum result. Miniatures do not come close to the geometry a real car has and which is required to be crash compatible. Instead of trying to minimize the amount of kinetic energy that has to be buffered by the car structures, they make these materials extra hard and rigid so that they will pass the impact shock through the passenger compartment. During a crash test this strategy achieves extremely good results as far as the passenger cage itself undergoes only minimal deformation.
However, and this is where the low survivability comes in, much like in aircraft crashes where not even one bone of the recovered corpses was broken, a passenger in a Smart/Zap/Mini-whatever will most likely not die because of being crushed during impact but because of internal bleeding as blood vessels and organs are burst because of the shock of impact. This is also called the "pretty corpse" phenomenon.
Who needs this shit? This is the same crap like the European "smart" car, another vehicle with near zero survivability in a crash and as uncomfortable a driving experience as can be.
This is a dilemma. Keep working and risk getting not paid for example because the company folds or walk out and at least get paid for the month you put in. Depends on your customer. Personally I would take a 6 month delay from the likes of Deutsche Telekom or DaimlerChrysler, but I wouldn't take it from medium or small businesses.
I'm a contractor myself, although in the EU, but I think it's pretty much the same in the states.
1. Incorporate yourself as a company -- get professional tax advice on this. Over here a LLC limits your liability to EUR 12,500 but in addition to fees it is taxed extra hard.
2. Insurance is preposterously high over here hence the LLC.
3. Training... If you're between contracts this is what you do but I have not had anyone really harp on certifications. Most clients are more interested in what projects you did before you came to them and couldn't any care less about certifications. What fellow freelancers is your take on this??
4. You will work your ass off, expect to work overtime and salaried employees turning over their work which was due yesterday to you on friday evening just as you were about to leave. Do it with a smile. Even though the work, the people and everything else sucks, they're paying you by the hour. Oh and btw... most companies over here work hard to make you feel unwelcome. Be prepared for some of the worst cubicles (if you get one), having to share a desk with another freelancer and not even being able to buy coffee because you need an employee tag to use the coffee machine. Btw... Do us all a favor and try to treat your fellow contractors not so much as "competitors" but as colleagues. The permanent employees do their best to make life miserable so most of us opt for "cooperative mode". Keep in mind, you might be working with them at a different project at a different customer just couple of months from now... On top of that, sometimes another freelancer who has been working at the customer site for some time now will most likely help you get setup and maybe even get you a special contractor tag so you can get coffee and buy lunch. On the other hand, don't get to cozy with them either. The guy sitting next to me for the past 12 months was a real asshole, picking his nose and rolling his boogers into little balls of snot, surfing the net all day and doing his best to make me look incompetent in the eyes of the customer.
5. No job security whatsoever. Usually you get a contract which runs for three months and gets renewed. Sometimes they renew it on the last day, sometimes they'll throw you out for a couple of weeks and then give you another contract. On the other hand if you get a "permanent" job there is no job security whatsoever either. They will fire you when the project is over. It happened to me and I am no longer interested in a permanent position. If you ask me nowadays the real difference between contracting and a permanent position is that as a permanent employee you are not expected to work as hard as but are also paid a lot less. I have turned down offers for permanent employment because it was obvious that they were trying to get the same work done at lower rates. (A salaried employee costs them EUR 50 an hour maximum, don't let them tell you crap).
6. Cash flow. Some customers will delay payments for 6 months and longer, some will even try every trick in the book to delay payment.
7. If you get recruited for a contract, expect to get 10-20% of what you're making. If they want more then they're obviously trying to exploit your newbie status. Don't expect to acquire a direct contract with a large company. They will not do business directly with you.
8. Hourly rates. Over here working for a fortune 500 class company is EUR 100-120 an hour which means you make 80 - 100 EUR an hour. Medium sized businesses will most likely accept EUR 80-100 an hour. Your customer will most likely try to argue that since the project is long-term you, they are not prepared to pay so much. EUR 70 an hour is good money too but let them negotiate your hourly rate down, don't do it for them.
In 2000 I was out of a job and nobody was hiring. Contracting was the _only_ way for me to go back then, but tell you what I don't regret it. If I were you I would definitely go for it.
I think the biggest misconception out there on slashdot is that every machine is just another PC more or less, meaning a mainboard with just one PCI bus, a bunch of slots and an onboard ethernet and ide-controlled and one or two CPUs. A sun4m/sun4u desktop machine which propably most of the people here use to run Solaris at home is more or less like a standard PC (okay, so the sun4m has SBUS) and these machines are equally well supported both by Solaris and Linux.
However there is a vast difference between a Solaris/Linux box that sits on your desktop, and a Sun mid-range 6800 or even an Sun enterprise level E25K iron. These big highend machines are chock-full of redundancy and reliability features, interconnecting system components such as CPU boards (one board 1-8 CPUs & gigs of memory) and redundant i/o and network controllers over an also redundant backplane. The cool thing is that with these machines you can yank a (malfunctioning) CPU / IO / Network / whatever board and replace/upgrade it with a new one while the system is running. Not a second of downtime. However such features require kernel support. Solaris has that kind of support on Sun mid-range and enterprise machines. I doubt that most of you, me included, have a Sun Fire 6800 or even a Sun Fire E25K to play around with. If you're interested, this is what a big iron is like: Sun Fire E25K Hardware Manual
If people want to know their place in the food chain, they should compare their teeth and nails to those of a lion.
No buddy, look at the brain of a lion and then compare that to what's in the cranium of even the stupidest among us and then tell me where in the foodchain lions belong. We've got guns and trucks and they've got shit in comparison. As far as I'm concerned, they're a species shit out of luck. Today for an animal species to survive it either has to be real tasty or nice and cuddly or a lot smarter and meaner than us. Sorry buddy, but if you wanted to place someone above us in the foodchain you would have to look off-planet and find yourself an Alien Predator.
Some of you vegetarian spiritualists pussies suggest that people be made to personally kill the animals they eat. Watch me.
" It's an interesting read that has some valid critiques of the format as far as journalistic integrity is concerned (not that CBS hasn't been without its problems)."
Taco, CBS isn't just "not without problems", CBS/FOX/ABC/NBC and all the other broadcasters of corporate/lobby interest crap are part of the problem, but the REAL PROBLEM is that YOU pay lip service to the illusion that American Media is about journalism.
"It is in large part crackpot physics," says physicist Lawrence Krauss of Case Western Reserve University, author of The Physics of Star Trek, a book detailing the physical limits that prevent teleportation. He describes the Air Force report as "some things adapted from reasonable theoretical studies, and other things from nonsensical ones."
"It is in large part crackpot heresy", says Geronimo Boccia, advisor to the Pope, author of "The Joys of Belief", a book detailing the divine limits set for mankind. He describes the heretic heliocentric teachings of Galileo Galilei that as "some things adapted from scripture and other things are clearly inspired by the devil".
Nothing personal about Mr. Krauss here but we need more people to work on developing all the cool star treky stuff such as teleportation, the warp drive, the phasers, the universal translator, subspace communications, force fields, synterol, a society without money, holographic doctors. What we need less of is unimaginative people that will flip open a dusty five-year old textbook and tell us it can't be done becasuse of physics theories back in the days of the book was written.
As a matter of fact "Mother Nature (Mother Gaia, Mother Goose???)" still operates the largest nuclear reactor on the planet and I doubt any man-made reactor is ever going to surpass it in Terawatts or size: You are standing on it, it is below your feet! It is the core of the planet. If it weren't for the decay of radioactive isotopes under our feet the oceans would have frozen up billions of years ago. Ground-thermal heat is not a holdover from the planet creations, that energy has long since been dissipated into space.