Interferring with the laws of nature is what we do.
Yes, unfit species die out naturally but we're massively screwing with things to the point that very few species can manage to cope, and that's not a good thing. We need things to remain in balance, otherwise bad things like huge amounts of pests happen.
Besides, animals are a source of a huge amount of research. Who knows if the cure for cancer is going to come from the research of some animal that's about to become extinct?
For instance, the Axolotl is endangered, which is really bad for a species that has such remarkable qualities like regeneration.
Here's a radical idea I heard about: let's domesticate everything remotely domesticable. After all, cats and dogs aren't going to go extinct any time soon. I'm pretty sure that quite a few species like red pandas could make very viable pets. In fact they're probably endangered by their protection status. Who wouldn't want to have something this cute? Allow people to keep them, and they'll get bred like rabbits. Videos like this one suggest that they'd make pretty fun pets.
For breeds that are too large, breed them down to a manageable size (if we can make a chihuahua surely we can make a dog sized tiger).
Experiments with foxes seem to show that domestication is quite possible in a reasonable amount of time, and research shows that only 40 genes seem to be responsible for the domestication.
So, here's the idea: domesticate everything, study what changed in the genetics, and if the wild population decays too much, use the genetics research to reverse the domestication, while drawing from the abundant pet population.
I think that this might be the better solution long term, as maintaining habitats and populations is a never ending struggle, while that is never a problem for any species people have an use for.
Just take a lesson from the Moscow Metro. When the doors are closing they warn:
"Be careful, the doors are closing".
And that's entirely serious, because they slam with such force you can see them bounce back a bit. If you do get caught it leaves a good bruise. Definitely removes all the temptation to try to get through at the last second. Trains run on schedule with no problem at all.
It also helps that the trains pass every 1 to 3 minutes.
Some things have tradeoffs to them. An effect can be intended or not. For instance if this is the intended effect, then it's obvious somebody has gone crazy and needs to be replaced. On the other hand, it may be an undesired side effect of an otherwise sensible policy.
A law may force offshoring because for instance the manufacture of a product requires some dangerous intermediate product that's illegal to transport for safety reasons. The end effect is that it has to be made somewhere else, but the goal behind it is protection from dangerous substances.
What mikael seems to be claiming is that the government is really intending to keep jobs out of the country, and simply using the first convenient law to that end:
Just read today that Gibson guitars from Nashville are facing their second federal shakedown to make them offshore jobs.
I dunno, ask Obama. He's the one in charge of the DOJ, and the DOJ submitted a court brief telling Gibson they need to offshore their work. Obama keeps talking about creating jobs, so why does he want to lay off workers in Memphis (who are probably all black, given that city's demographics)?
The way I read mikael's post is that the government has a specific interest in sending jobs offshore, and is using a law to pressure a company to that end. This is quite different from a law that simply makes offshore manufacturing a necessity for another reason.
The idea of that the government has a specific interest in having less jobs in the country has to be justified.
And what makes you think one of the most prominent guitar makers in the world "probably employs very few people"? Guitars require a lot of labor to make; in case you haven't noticed, the good ones aren't cheap, usually around $1000 or more. For what's essentially a couple small pieces of wood bolted together with some metal wires, that's a lot of money.
Because if too much employment in a country is somehow a problem, there is much bigger fish to fry. The government could go talk to Walmart for instance, who I'm sure would be more than happy enough to cooperate.
Most things make sense when the right information is made available. Even if the reason isn't ethical.
I think that the most reasonable explanation is tht mikael has an axe to grind, and interpreting something much more mundane as a huge conspiracy. Possible reasons for this that I can imagine:
This kind of thing does happen on a regular basis, it's just that this regulation is particularly troublesome for specific business like the guitar ones, and this case is getting more attention online than the rest.
Whoever is in charge of starting it made a mistake but doesn't want to admit it, so they're going ahead anyway.
Whoever is in charge is trying to prove themselves or has an axe to grind.
The government is simply following badly thought rules. It's not the direct fault of anybody involved, so they just keep going.
And so on. To me at least, the idea of that the federal government would have something to gain from moving random jobs offshore and increasing unemployment and decreasing the amount of collected taxes just doesn't sound right at all.
That doesn't answer my question. I didn't ask under what laws they are being persecuted, I asked you to justify your claim of that the federal government favours offshoring.
What does the federal government have to gain by offshoring jobs? And in the case they do, why would they be pressuring a guitar manufacturer who probably employs very few people?
Whishful thinking. How many people do you know personally that run a Tor exit node? How many of them would you consider 100% trustworthy? Compromised exit nodes offer a lot of possibilities: browser ID'ing, code injection, traffic analysis. How about the programs you run over Tor. Are you 100% sure they don't leak private information? Have you checked their source code and internet protocols? What about the endpoints? Are they secure? Do they use SSL? Which SSL encryption do they use, super-secure RC4 like Google search? Can you be identified from your browsing behavior?
You're not supposed to trust a Tor exit node. Every Tor instruction I've seen mentions that you should use an anonymizing proxy to erase the things that allow browser IDing.
For leaking private information, there exist programs that monitor traffic and tell you when for instance DNS requests are made without going through Tor.
Yes, getting all this right is certainly tricky. But it's not a new idea, and countermeasures for untrustworthy exit nodes are already in place.
However, if a government wants to get rid of Tor officially there is a much easier way. They just prohibit it and that's it. Use of Tor is easy to identify. The same for encryption in general. Or you just make it illegal not to give away the password to authorities when they want it like in the fascist UK.
But that's where what I said about making the internet less useful comes in. Yes, the government can forbid encryption. But what about the countless VPNs used by foreign companies, internet banking and shopping, the myriad of old or embedded systems that automatically do encrypted transfers, the encryption built into operating systems?
In some backward third world country that might be possible, but anywhere else such a thing would carry a very high cost attached.
Then if it still happens, people will figure out how to transfer data in a hidden way.
The whole point of encryption is making it so that sending your stuff over somebody else's wire doesn't let them know what it is.
As for anonymity, there are ways for that as well, like what Tor does.
True, the owner of the wire has quite a lot of control, but to truly make encryption and Tor impossible would mean changing the way the net works so radically that it would become a lot less useful. And then people will come up with some way around that, like adhoc wifi networks or something of that sort.
Huh? The kernel has next to nothing to do with that.
Games in Linux are nearly an entirely userspace problem. The kernel provides what's needed for a game to work, the issue is that:
1. The userspace API isn't the same as Windows, so specific support is needed 2. The way Linux is distributed is inconvenient for packaging commercial games
The only place where the kernel is at fault is with audio, IMO. Audio is still done in Linux in a very awkward manner, though there are some fairly good reasons for it (like that usage of floating point for mixing audio in kernel space is problematic).
That depends on the kind of experience. Generally every brand will screw up at some point, and I generally don't pay that much attention to that. I've bought every brand of hard disk more than once, and had a disk of probably every brand go bad. Generally I buy two different brands at once and RAID them.
The cases where I really decide to permanently ignore a brand are: it''s such crap that all its products can be assumed to be (pretty rare), I know it doesn't make anything I'd want to buy (brands that only make racing cars, Apple), or companies I really don't want to give money to for some reason (Sony)
For buying stuff I get long lists of products, apply filters, and choose from what remains. For instance, my next wifi router is just based on searching in the supported devices list for DD-WRT.
I don't know about you, but I don't define what I am by a brand. I like cranberry juice, to put an example; the brand is unimportant unless it happens to taste like crap which hasn't happened to me yet. I like coffee and ocassionally eat fast food, but just go to the nearest establishment. In fact I'd say that somebody who genuinely loves coffee wouldn't have "brand loyalty" -- they'd be trying to get every possible kind of it, prepared in every possible way.
I'd say that I work by anti-brand loyalty: I don't give a damn whichbrand is it unless I hate it for some reason.
SO... movies should be written with characters that never drink soda, never go to a Starbucks, never eat anything other than what they harvested out of the back yard. They don't drive cars made by real corporations, ride buses that actually exist, nor wear clothes that look like anything we, real people, wear. And they don't live in actual cities or town, indeed, they don't even live in actual nations.
Exactly!
Look, I don't care for your brand of fast food. A hamburger is a hamburger, and a car is just a car, and generally which kind is entirely irrelevant to the story. It took me 15 minutes to remember which model of car my mother drives last time somebody asked (and I just realized I forgot again), so believe me, I don't give a damn about who drives what in a movie.
It's not just that it shows ads, it breaks lots of internet services.
People seem to forget that the web isn't just HTTP, and there are quite a few other things that do DNS lookups. And weird stuff happens when a name that doesn't exist resolves, and the connection is directed to an ad server.
Or even easier, just not buy the device at all. What could be easier than not going to the shop?
And, why would I want to pay money to somebody who is very clearly working against my interest? I'd much rather give it to somebody with less controlling tendencies.
Even ignoring the issues with the required tech and the price, a problem remains: There's no way a sheet of paper will remain pristine enough to pass through a printer 260 times without jamming under any kind of realistic conditions.
I highly suspect that even under completely unrealistic usage conditions, it'll jam the printer after the 5th-10th time or so. Printers bend the paper and don't have perfect alignment, and that's got to add up eventually.
Besides, it's a thermal printer. Nobody uses those except for printing tickets, and for that reuse makes no sense.
Even ignoring all that, nobody is going to bother with figuring out what paper can be reused and carefully putting it back into the printer. If this invention has a practical use, it has to be a very niche one.
That being, stopping wasting their money on buying patents, and using their considerable amount of cash to push the elimination of software patents. Just imagine the amount of money and bullshit that would get saved long term.
Nothing, the problem is that the current crop of desktop environments seem to care little about such things, and obsesses with chasing Apple and adding features nobody wants, instead of actually making a solid system.
Take KDE: KDE3 was good and solid. KDE4 started with lacking most of KDE3's funcionality, and being horribly unstable. Then they threw out the perfectly functional Konqueror for Dolphin (which IMO is a lot less convenient to use), gutted Amarok, replaced DCOP with something harder to use from the commandline, added stupidity like running a local MySQL database which didn't seem to properly work on the early releases, and has a console app that crashes if you use the split screen functionality too much.
Most work unfortunately seems to have gone into desktop widgets and similar pretty but mostly pointless things, instead of concentrating on something that works first and adding junk later.
Gnome seems to have got infected with an "usability" obsession, which means dumbing everything down and removing as many things as possible. To get anything useful done seems to require using their version of the registry editor.
Yes, in the real world, data isn't laid out on the disk in the exact order it's going to be read. Especially when filesystem structures are involved.
Seeks are very expensive. I measured a desktop drive barely doing 300 KB/s when doing random reads. That's of course not very realistic either, but the real world performance is going to be somewhere in between that and the ideal contiguous read speed. Having a disk capable of 100MB/s managing only 5MB/s is quite possible.
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Interferring with the laws of nature is what we do.
Yes, unfit species die out naturally but we're massively screwing with things to the point that very few species can manage to cope, and that's not a good thing. We need things to remain in balance, otherwise bad things like huge amounts of pests happen.
Besides, animals are a source of a huge amount of research. Who knows if the cure for cancer is going to come from the research of some animal that's about to become extinct?
For instance, the Axolotl is endangered, which is really bad for a species that has such remarkable qualities like regeneration.
Here's a radical idea I heard about: let's domesticate everything remotely domesticable. After all, cats and dogs aren't going to go extinct any time soon. I'm pretty sure that quite a few species like red pandas could make very viable pets. In fact they're probably endangered by their protection status. Who wouldn't want to have something this cute? Allow people to keep them, and they'll get bred like rabbits. Videos like this one suggest that they'd make pretty fun pets.
For breeds that are too large, breed them down to a manageable size (if we can make a chihuahua surely we can make a dog sized tiger).
Experiments with foxes seem to show that domestication is quite possible in a reasonable amount of time, and research shows that only 40 genes seem to be responsible for the domestication.
So, here's the idea: domesticate everything, study what changed in the genetics, and if the wild population decays too much, use the genetics research to reverse the domestication, while drawing from the abundant pet population.
I think that this might be the better solution long term, as maintaining habitats and populations is a never ending struggle, while that is never a problem for any species people have an use for.
Just take a lesson from the Moscow Metro. When the doors are closing they warn:
"Be careful, the doors are closing".
And that's entirely serious, because they slam with such force you can see them bounce back a bit. If you do get caught it leaves a good bruise. Definitely removes all the temptation to try to get through at the last second. Trains run on schedule with no problem at all.
It also helps that the trains pass every 1 to 3 minutes.
Smart people?
Some things have tradeoffs to them. An effect can be intended or not. For instance if this is the intended effect, then it's obvious somebody has gone crazy and needs to be replaced. On the other hand, it may be an undesired side effect of an otherwise sensible policy.
Right, it heads off horrible things like democracy in places where it'd be inconvenient.
Oh, you mean there's no other possible explanation for it? Just because it has that effect it must automatically be the intended one?
But that's another thing entirely.
A law may force offshoring because for instance the manufacture of a product requires some dangerous intermediate product that's illegal to transport for safety reasons. The end effect is that it has to be made somewhere else, but the goal behind it is protection from dangerous substances.
What mikael seems to be claiming is that the government is really intending to keep jobs out of the country, and simply using the first convenient law to that end:
The way I read mikael's post is that the government has a specific interest in sending jobs offshore, and is using a law to pressure a company to that end. This is quite different from a law that simply makes offshore manufacturing a necessity for another reason.
The idea of that the government has a specific interest in having less jobs in the country has to be justified.
Because if too much employment in a country is somehow a problem, there is much bigger fish to fry. The government could go talk to Walmart for instance, who I'm sure would be more than happy enough to cooperate.
Most things make sense when the right information is made available. Even if the reason isn't ethical.
I think that the most reasonable explanation is tht mikael has an axe to grind, and interpreting something much more mundane as a huge conspiracy. Possible reasons for this that I can imagine:
This kind of thing does happen on a regular basis, it's just that this regulation is particularly troublesome for specific business like the guitar ones, and this case is getting more attention online than the rest.
Whoever is in charge of starting it made a mistake but doesn't want to admit it, so they're going ahead anyway.
Whoever is in charge is trying to prove themselves or has an axe to grind.
The government is simply following badly thought rules. It's not the direct fault of anybody involved, so they just keep going.
And so on. To me at least, the idea of that the federal government would have something to gain from moving random jobs offshore and increasing unemployment and decreasing the amount of collected taxes just doesn't sound right at all.
That doesn't answer my question. I didn't ask under what laws they are being persecuted, I asked you to justify your claim of that the federal government favours offshoring.
Please explain, because I don't get it at all:
What does the federal government have to gain by offshoring jobs? And in the case they do, why would they be pressuring a guitar manufacturer who probably employs very few people?
You're not supposed to trust a Tor exit node. Every Tor instruction I've seen mentions that you should use an anonymizing proxy to erase the things that allow browser IDing.
For leaking private information, there exist programs that monitor traffic and tell you when for instance DNS requests are made without going through Tor.
Yes, getting all this right is certainly tricky. But it's not a new idea, and countermeasures for untrustworthy exit nodes are already in place.
But that's where what I said about making the internet less useful comes in. Yes, the government can forbid encryption. But what about the countless VPNs used by foreign companies, internet banking and shopping, the myriad of old or embedded systems that automatically do encrypted transfers, the encryption built into operating systems?
In some backward third world country that might be possible, but anywhere else such a thing would carry a very high cost attached.
Then if it still happens, people will figure out how to transfer data in a hidden way.
The whole point of encryption is making it so that sending your stuff over somebody else's wire doesn't let them know what it is.
As for anonymity, there are ways for that as well, like what Tor does.
True, the owner of the wire has quite a lot of control, but to truly make encryption and Tor impossible would mean changing the way the net works so radically that it would become a lot less useful. And then people will come up with some way around that, like adhoc wifi networks or something of that sort.
FTP would be a bad protocol for file transfer to Mars with so much talk back and forth.
I figure they'd use HTTP POST or something similar.
Huh? The kernel has next to nothing to do with that.
Games in Linux are nearly an entirely userspace problem. The kernel provides what's needed for a game to work, the issue is that:
1. The userspace API isn't the same as Windows, so specific support is needed
2. The way Linux is distributed is inconvenient for packaging commercial games
The only place where the kernel is at fault is with audio, IMO. Audio is still done in Linux in a very awkward manner, though there are some fairly good reasons for it (like that usage of floating point for mixing audio in kernel space is problematic).
That depends on the kind of experience. Generally every brand will screw up at some point, and I generally don't pay that much attention to that. I've bought every brand of hard disk more than once, and had a disk of probably every brand go bad. Generally I buy two different brands at once and RAID them.
The cases where I really decide to permanently ignore a brand are: it''s such crap that all its products can be assumed to be (pretty rare), I know it doesn't make anything I'd want to buy (brands that only make racing cars, Apple), or companies I really don't want to give money to for some reason (Sony)
For buying stuff I get long lists of products, apply filters, and choose from what remains. For instance, my next wifi router is just based on searching in the supported devices list for DD-WRT.
Then most of the time, it's an advertisement.
I don't know about you, but I don't define what I am by a brand. I like cranberry juice, to put an example; the brand is unimportant unless it happens to taste like crap which hasn't happened to me yet. I like coffee and ocassionally eat fast food, but just go to the nearest establishment. In fact I'd say that somebody who genuinely loves coffee wouldn't have "brand loyalty" -- they'd be trying to get every possible kind of it, prepared in every possible way.
I'd say that I work by anti-brand loyalty: I don't give a damn whichbrand is it unless I hate it for some reason.
Exactly!
Look, I don't care for your brand of fast food. A hamburger is a hamburger, and a car is just a car, and generally which kind is entirely irrelevant to the story. It took me 15 minutes to remember which model of car my mother drives last time somebody asked (and I just realized I forgot again), so believe me, I don't give a damn about who drives what in a movie.
Now, a good story, that's important.
It's not just that it shows ads, it breaks lots of internet services.
People seem to forget that the web isn't just HTTP, and there are quite a few other things that do DNS lookups. And weird stuff happens when a name that doesn't exist resolves, and the connection is directed to an ad server.
Or even easier, just not buy the device at all. What could be easier than not going to the shop?
And, why would I want to pay money to somebody who is very clearly working against my interest? I'd much rather give it to somebody with less controlling tendencies.
Even ignoring the issues with the required tech and the price, a problem remains: There's no way a sheet of paper will remain pristine enough to pass through a printer 260 times without jamming under any kind of realistic conditions.
I highly suspect that even under completely unrealistic usage conditions, it'll jam the printer after the 5th-10th time or so. Printers bend the paper and don't have perfect alignment, and that's got to add up eventually.
Besides, it's a thermal printer. Nobody uses those except for printing tickets, and for that reuse makes no sense.
Even ignoring all that, nobody is going to bother with figuring out what paper can be reused and carefully putting it back into the printer. If this invention has a practical use, it has to be a very niche one.
I wonder how often does that happen.
I figure that some day, some archaeologist will dig up some ancient copies of the Silmarillion and take it for the bible of a minoritary religion.
That being, stopping wasting their money on buying patents, and using their considerable amount of cash to push the elimination of software patents. Just imagine the amount of money and bullshit that would get saved long term.
Nothing, the problem is that the current crop of desktop environments seem to care little about such things, and obsesses with chasing Apple and adding features nobody wants, instead of actually making a solid system.
Take KDE: KDE3 was good and solid. KDE4 started with lacking most of KDE3's funcionality, and being horribly unstable. Then they threw out the perfectly functional Konqueror for Dolphin (which IMO is a lot less convenient to use), gutted Amarok, replaced DCOP with something harder to use from the commandline, added stupidity like running a local MySQL database which didn't seem to properly work on the early releases, and has a console app that crashes if you use the split screen functionality too much.
Most work unfortunately seems to have gone into desktop widgets and similar pretty but mostly pointless things, instead of concentrating on something that works first and adding junk later.
Gnome seems to have got infected with an "usability" obsession, which means dumbing everything down and removing as many things as possible. To get anything useful done seems to require using their version of the registry editor.
Yes, in the real world, data isn't laid out on the disk in the exact order it's going to be read. Especially when filesystem structures are involved.
Seeks are very expensive. I measured a desktop drive barely doing 300 KB/s when doing random reads. That's of course not very realistic either, but the real world performance is going to be somewhere in between that and the ideal contiguous read speed. Having a disk capable of 100MB/s managing only 5MB/s is quite possible.