There just aren't enough resources for everyone human on Earth to live like a Westerner.
There may not be enough resources (questionable) for everyone to live like an _American_, but Americans are the most frivolously wasteful people in history.
The resource usage of, say, the average Swiss or Dutch citizen is substantially lower, yet the living standard is not meaningfully worse (better by many measures).
We have plenty of resources. The problem is one of distribution.
Short of a major disaster (worldwide epidemic, nuclear war, asteroid strike), none of which would benefit the planet in the long run, I don't see how we're going to recover. Here in Australia they just passed a carbon tax - as if we can just tax the problem away.
Well "we" obviously can't because Australia's contribution to global warming is insignificant.
If *everyone* had a carbon tax, well, that would be a different matter.
I don't really have any objection to shares changing hands at any time. I just object to the idea that there needs to be any sort of 'market' except every three months. There's a difference between someone selling a used car and a car dealership.
I'm struggling a bit to see how shares can change hands without a "market". How are sellers and buyers supposed to find each other ?
It does if it expects any sort of reduced tax rate. If it's an 'investment that helps the economy', sure. But otherwise it's just winnings at a casino, and the gamblers should be expected to pay income tax on all their winnings.
Well now you're getting into tax laws that can vary significantly between localities, so it's hard to have a discussion.
Where I am, gambling winnings are not taxed. Capital gains are taxed as income unless the asset has been held for more than 12 months (strictly speaking there is a capital gains discount on assets held greater than 12 months).
Both of these situations seem reasonable (and I say that as someone who doesn't gamble or invest - or "invest") to me.
What I would like to see is a greater use of capital gains tax to both combat HFT and encourage investing. Say, CGT started at something like 95% and tailed off at 1% for each day for the first month, then 5% for every 6 months after that until it was half whatever your marginal income tax rate was.
I get why folks are angry... just not why they're angry at what amounts to middle men in this mess.
Because "there's no law saying I can't" is not a valid excuse for acting immorally, unethically, dishonestly and recklessly.
The actual causative factors of the GFC essentially all boil down to the naked, insatiable greed, glorified recklessness, and institutionalised deviousness and deception, of the finance sector.
Someone's going to have to explain why exactly a stock market investment should be liquidatable on a daily basis, whereas, for example, investing in CD or property or comic books or whatever isn't set up that way. If the stock market is actually an investment as it is claimed to be, and not the casino it appears to be, then, like any other investment, sometimes investors can't instantly liquidate their investment.
While that is true from the perspective of actually getting the money, it's not true from the perspective of making the decision.
I can make the decision to sell my house, or all my comics, any time I want. Certainly it might take me anywhere from days to months to actually complete that transaction, I still have the ability to react at any time.
If shares can only change hands every quarter, then I can't even *attempt* to liquidate until the next trading window rolls around. There's a big difference between "it might take you a few weeks to sell a house" and "you can only sell (and by definition, buy !) your house four times a year".
I'm not really familiar with what a "CD" is, but I'm guessing it's some sort of fixed-term bank deposit. These can obviously run the whole gamut from 3 months to multiple years.
The point here is that shares can fit into a spectrum of asset liquidity that can range from cash to shares, to property to term deposits, etc. In that context, I don't think daily trading needs any special justification.
We also need to reform the way we treat corporations. There is no need to tax them, as every penny they make will eventually wind up in someone's hands (where it will be taxed).
That person, however, may not be in the same country where the corporation and the tax code are operating.
There is absolutely no point to operating this idiotic 'stock market' day to day and letting people own parts of corporations for seconds at a time. Or even for a day or a week. It doesn't accomplish anything.
There *are* decent reasons for operating it on a day to day basis. For example, an investor needs to liquidate because they need cash for an emergency. Obviously there would also need to be a buyer for their investment as well.
I agree operating at much more than a daily - hourly at most - basis, however, seems to have little real justification.
How do the right wing christian fundamentalists in the Tea Party square letting people without medical insurance die (they cheered this idea at a recent political meeting) with christian values?
Because to fundamentalist Christians, bad things only happen to people who deserve it (either because they lack faith or because they made the wrong decisions).
I keep hearing you people say that you see them "everywhere" but that's just not the case. I travel very frequently to major cities all around the world, and I deal with universities, research labs and corporations. Yet I almost NEVER see people using tablets, and I keep my eye out for them!
I recently went to vForum in Australia. I'd say every second person had an iPad.
I remember at VMworld 2010, when I bought an iPad to get me through the week after my laptop crapped itself on the Monday (worst case scenario: a gift for my wife), and there were so many iPads around I actually chuckled at the perceived pointlessness of using them as prizes.
In my new job, 3/4 of the people on my floor have iPads. The ones who don't, want one. Probably 1/10th of them are actually company-provided. There's a few Motorola tablets around, but they're a rounding error compared to the iPads.
Personally I'm surprised, as I considered my iPad a gimmicky toy when I bought it. But I'm using it more and more, and it's nearly replaced my laptop for actual on-the-road work.
What is your setup and why in Spagetti Monster's name are you running VM over NFS ethernet? Either go RAID or fiber to a SAN. That does not sound like a good Enterprise setup. Are we talking 10GB over a dedicated line (doable) or 1GB over switch (WTF)? If it's the latter, I bet you have a hell of a write to disk latency problem if you run more than 1 production VM.
NetApp (and EMC, I'm pretty sure) have done extensive testing that demonstrates the performance difference between NFS, iSCSI and FC is negligible. So is the difference between 1GbE, 4/8GbFC and 10GbE, assuming your load isn't bandwidth-limited.
I'm just taking a wild guess you aren't running a rack, or have network intensive users/applications. In my situation, I have to deal with about 80 workstations, a remote office, and 4 internet data connections on top of the servers themselves, including a 13TB file server and 20TB of backup storage. I can eat bandwidth with the best of them. When you can no longer count your routers and switches on your fingers, then I'd more willing to listen.
In my previous job we ran hundreds of VMs in each datacentre off NFS (over 10GbE) datastores. The easier manageability and greater functionality over FC and iSCSI makes it a simple choice.
Child abuse is a serious concern. But AFAIK there's no place left on Earth (where's there any rule of law) that it's legal to make or buy child pornography. Given there's no legal market anywhere, it would seem to me that it's the abuse, not the evidence thereof, that should be the first priority for concern.
Of course, the "child" part can vary substantially from country to country, also including ridiculous situations where there's a discrepancy between the ages where it's legal to have sex and be filmed having sex.
Well first, if there's undocumented APIs, that's absolutely an OS failure. There shouldn't be any undocumented APIs, period. There's no good technical reason for such a thing.
Of course there is. Functionality and features only meant to be used within the OS by other OS components and not by third party applications.
Anyway, APIs shouldn't be deprecated.
Why not ? Why should new capabilities always be tacked onto existing ones, building up an ever more fragile and complex environment ? Why should redundant or unnecessary functionality not be removed ?
You're essentially arguing API have to be done once, perfectly and never changed thence. Hardly reasonable.
Programs written for the standard C library on a Unix system back in the 80s will probably still compile and run fine on a modern Linux system now.
I doubt that's true for any code doing anything particularly complicated.
As for hardcoded paths, what applications have that problem? I've honestly never heard of that. That's definitely an application problem.
Hardcoded paths are rife in consumer software. Heck, Microsoft had to go out and build a whole emulation/redirection layer for Vista so they could make the shift to a least-privileged user by default without breaking applications trying to write to either system directories, or hardcoded user paths (eg: C:\Documents and Settings\$USER vs C:\Users\$USER).
I've said for some time that anti-virus is not security. It is damage control, at best. The way it is currently marketed and commonly used, it really is a terrible substitute for the inability of an OS to maintain security.
They are two completely different aspects of security.
OS security is the fences, the gates and the locks. It's there to stop the bad guys getting in at all.
AV security is the motion detectors, the dogs and the security guards. It's there to try and minimise the damage once the bad guys are in.
Right, but again this is an OS failure. It shouldn't (in theory) matter what version of an OS you have, as long as it's not too old; there should be no such thing as a "legacy app" that only runs on a legacy OS, it should be possible to run the old app on a new OS version without any issues whatsoever. The fact that this isn't the case shows that there's a giant failure in OSes.
If someone writes their application to use deprecated (or, worse, undocumented) APIs and features, then its failure to run in more recent versions where said APIs and features no longer exist, or no longer have the same quirks, is not a failure of the OS.
The use of hardcoded paths is another major screwup applications developers seem to love making.
If its an older PC I think i'd rather not waste CPU cycles on compression.
Probably worth pointing out that compression will often actually improve disk IO, because the CPU is so much faster than the disk, the fact that less actual data needs to be written (and particularly read, as decompressing is faster) will make a machine with a compressed drive faster overall.
This has been true since at least the Pentium II days, and probably all the way back to the 486DX.
Yeah, because we never saw a company try to pull something like that...
Your examples are all devices designed and sold as specific-purpose appliances, not general-purpose computers.
Do you have any more a bit more relevant ? Can you offer a reason why this would suddenly happen now, and not twenty years ago when the PC world was vastly more homogenous ?
Right now the belief is that the Swedish justice system is being used as a mule to drag Mr. Assange into a country for which the United States has Extradition arrangements (unlike the UK, his current place of residence).
Since when do the UK and USA not have extradition treaties ?
Wasn't there a big hoo-ha on Slashdot a year or two ago about some "hacker" being extradited from the UK to the US because he broke into Government computers looking for evidence of UFOs ?
Slashdot Mirror
There may not be enough resources (questionable) for everyone to live like an _American_, but Americans are the most frivolously wasteful people in history.
The resource usage of, say, the average Swiss or Dutch citizen is substantially lower, yet the living standard is not meaningfully worse (better by many measures).
We have plenty of resources. The problem is one of distribution.
Well "we" obviously can't because Australia's contribution to global warming is insignificant.
If *everyone* had a carbon tax, well, that would be a different matter.
Indeed, just like the Romans !
I'm struggling a bit to see how shares can change hands without a "market". How are sellers and buyers supposed to find each other ?
Well now you're getting into tax laws that can vary significantly between localities, so it's hard to have a discussion.
Where I am, gambling winnings are not taxed. Capital gains are taxed as income unless the asset has been held for more than 12 months (strictly speaking there is a capital gains discount on assets held greater than 12 months).
Both of these situations seem reasonable (and I say that as someone who doesn't gamble or invest - or "invest") to me.
What I would like to see is a greater use of capital gains tax to both combat HFT and encourage investing. Say, CGT started at something like 95% and tailed off at 1% for each day for the first month, then 5% for every 6 months after that until it was half whatever your marginal income tax rate was.
Because "there's no law saying I can't" is not a valid excuse for acting immorally, unethically, dishonestly and recklessly.
The actual causative factors of the GFC essentially all boil down to the naked, insatiable greed, glorified recklessness, and institutionalised deviousness and deception, of the finance sector.
While that is true from the perspective of actually getting the money, it's not true from the perspective of making the decision.
I can make the decision to sell my house, or all my comics, any time I want. Certainly it might take me anywhere from days to months to actually complete that transaction, I still have the ability to react at any time.
If shares can only change hands every quarter, then I can't even *attempt* to liquidate until the next trading window rolls around. There's a big difference between "it might take you a few weeks to sell a house" and "you can only sell (and by definition, buy !) your house four times a year".
I'm not really familiar with what a "CD" is, but I'm guessing it's some sort of fixed-term bank deposit. These can obviously run the whole gamut from 3 months to multiple years.
The point here is that shares can fit into a spectrum of asset liquidity that can range from cash to shares, to property to term deposits, etc. In that context, I don't think daily trading needs any special justification.
Yep, they sure did. I mean, who would use Windows 3.x and Windows 7 for a day each and prefer the interface of the former except a programmer ?
That person, however, may not be in the same country where the corporation and the tax code are operating.
What benefit is derived from trading happening at a frequency greater than a minute (or even an hour) ?
There *are* decent reasons for operating it on a day to day basis. For example, an investor needs to liquidate because they need cash for an emergency. Obviously there would also need to be a buyer for their investment as well.
I agree operating at much more than a daily - hourly at most - basis, however, seems to have little real justification.
Because to fundamentalist Christians, bad things only happen to people who deserve it (either because they lack faith or because they made the wrong decisions).
But apparently ignore the bit where Jesus told them to "render unto Caesar what is Caesar's"...
Uh, it does, because part of the spec - particularly with laptops - is the build materials and quality.
An Inspiron is a plastic, fragile, piece of consumer crap. An MBP and a Latitude are strong, metal-framed professional laptops.
The reason you don't compare an Inspiron to a MBP has nothing to do "shiny". It's because of materials, build quality and worksmanship.
I don't know what "quadro only" is suppose to mean, and a similarly configured E6520 is a hundred-odd bucks cheaper than a MBP.
A MacBook Pro should be compared to a Latitude, not an Inspiron.
Dell Latitude E6520.
That took me about a minute to find, and I haven't been interested in buying a big laptop for 5+ years now.
I recently went to vForum in Australia. I'd say every second person had an iPad.
I remember at VMworld 2010, when I bought an iPad to get me through the week after my laptop crapped itself on the Monday (worst case scenario: a gift for my wife), and there were so many iPads around I actually chuckled at the perceived pointlessness of using them as prizes.
In my new job, 3/4 of the people on my floor have iPads. The ones who don't, want one. Probably 1/10th of them are actually company-provided. There's a few Motorola tablets around, but they're a rounding error compared to the iPads.
Personally I'm surprised, as I considered my iPad a gimmicky toy when I bought it. But I'm using it more and more, and it's nearly replaced my laptop for actual on-the-road work.
NetApp (and EMC, I'm pretty sure) have done extensive testing that demonstrates the performance difference between NFS, iSCSI and FC is negligible. So is the difference between 1GbE, 4/8GbFC and 10GbE, assuming your load isn't bandwidth-limited.
In my previous job we ran hundreds of VMs in each datacentre off NFS (over 10GbE) datastores. The easier manageability and greater functionality over FC and iSCSI makes it a simple choice.
Child abuse is a serious concern. But AFAIK there's no place left on Earth (where's there any rule of law) that it's legal to make or buy child pornography. Given there's no legal market anywhere, it would seem to me that it's the abuse, not the evidence thereof, that should be the first priority for concern.
Of course, the "child" part can vary substantially from country to country, also including ridiculous situations where there's a discrepancy between the ages where it's legal to have sex and be filmed having sex.
Of course there is. Functionality and features only meant to be used within the OS by other OS components and not by third party applications.
Why not ? Why should new capabilities always be tacked onto existing ones, building up an ever more fragile and complex environment ? Why should redundant or unnecessary functionality not be removed ?
You're essentially arguing API have to be done once, perfectly and never changed thence. Hardly reasonable.
I doubt that's true for any code doing anything particularly complicated.
Hardcoded paths are rife in consumer software. Heck, Microsoft had to go out and build a whole emulation/redirection layer for Vista so they could make the shift to a least-privileged user by default without breaking applications trying to write to either system directories, or hardcoded user paths (eg: C:\Documents and Settings\$USER vs C:\Users\$USER).
They are two completely different aspects of security.
OS security is the fences, the gates and the locks. It's there to stop the bad guys getting in at all.
AV security is the motion detectors, the dogs and the security guards. It's there to try and minimise the damage once the bad guys are in.
If someone writes their application to use deprecated (or, worse, undocumented) APIs and features, then its failure to run in more recent versions where said APIs and features no longer exist, or no longer have the same quirks, is not a failure of the OS.
The use of hardcoded paths is another major screwup applications developers seem to love making.
Probably worth pointing out that compression will often actually improve disk IO, because the CPU is so much faster than the disk, the fact that less actual data needs to be written (and particularly read, as decompressing is faster) will make a machine with a compressed drive faster overall.
This has been true since at least the Pentium II days, and probably all the way back to the 486DX.
Your examples are all devices designed and sold as specific-purpose appliances, not general-purpose computers.
Do you have any more a bit more relevant ? Can you offer a reason why this would suddenly happen now, and not twenty years ago when the PC world was vastly more homogenous ?
Since when do the UK and USA not have extradition treaties ?
Wasn't there a big hoo-ha on Slashdot a year or two ago about some "hacker" being extradited from the UK to the US because he broke into Government computers looking for evidence of UFOs ?