It's like when they put in speed/redlight cameras. The majority of people who bitch are the very people the gear is meant to catch. And they're not really pissed off because of the supposed violation of privacy, it's because they know they won't get away with their previously bad behaviour. I very rarely speed, and if I do, it's on highways and usually less than 10mph over the limit. I never run red lights... that said,
I object to cameras because I'm not a proponent of the government always watching you looking for you to screw up. Almost everyone commits a minor crime here and there. Ever jay walk? Leave a parking lot stub hanging from your rear view mirror on the drive home? Have your neighbor's mail put in your mailbox by mistake so you put it in theirs for them? Make a joke to a friend about the need to kill a public figure?
I'd rather not have to live in a constant state of fear that I'm going to get busted for something beyond trivial because cameras don't have common sense and they're operated by someone who can obsess over you and just wait for you to screw up. I've been taking care of my dad for years after he had a stroke and, lo and behold, after clearing his name with the local department of social services for a false charge that it took 6 years to get a hearing for him for (which ended up being thrown out with prejudice and expunged), they're suddenly getting "anonymous phone calls" telling them that I don't feed my dad (who weighs 240 pounds) forcing them to come investigate us all the time. Naturally, they can't disclose the supposed source of the phone calls even though they're all obviously false. Any given day, I can wake up to someone knocking on my door insisting that they come in, inspect my kitchen and all of the area my dad has access to just looking for the smallest thing they can charge me with. That I know of, they've stopped over at least 40 times in the last 4 years. Who knows how many times they've tried to snoop around when I wasn't home.
Absent a progressive income tax, it would be impossible to finance the government, period. A flat tax rate would have to starve poor people to fund the government Do you realize that you can exempt the first X amount of income, right? Let's say twice the poverty level. Let's call it $30k just for discussion purposes. Everyone gets a deduction of $30k. That means anyone making less than that pays no taxes. It also means if you made $10 million, you'll only have to pay taxes on $9,970,000. Figure out the percentage of the remaining income (after exemptions) and tax a flat amount based on that. Lets just call it 15%, again just for discussion. If you earn $10 million, you pay $1,495,500 in taxes. If you earn $70k, you pay $6000 in taxes. If you earn $35k, you pay $750 in taxes. Everyone pays the same rate, everyone gets the same exemptions... You can't pay an army of accountants to find loopholes so you pay $0 anymore since there is only one exemption that everyone gets uniformly.
Besides being gathered by more local authorities, and sold as a way to tax out-of-area people, the sales tax encourages saving. My neighboring county, where most of the business in the area is, raised their sales tax 1% about a decade ago. They lost quite a bit of my business for it. I do my best to buy stuff in my own county and if I get a good that's too good to pass up in the neighboring county (such as a vehicle $1000 cheaper I can get it for in my county), I point out where I live and I pay taxes at my county's rate anyway. The problem that caused the need for the sales tax to increase (excessive spending) hasn't gotten any more under control since the increase... they've spent the last 2 years calling for another increase.
It does absolutely nothing to encourage saving... if you're below middle class, you have no choice and have to spend the money.If you have lots of disposable income, a single digit sales tax isn't going to stop you from buying something. If you're stuck in the middle, you get pissed off that your busting your ass to pay the government and things like the sales tax are keeping you from doing more for your family.
Property Tax: Since property is finite, and there are various philisophical and religious objections to permentently owning land, this is the government's way of returning land to the public domain, at least metaphysically.
By that logic, government should be free to take anything they want. I object to you owning a computer because someone else has a perceived need for one, so let me just take that off your hands. Even under eminent domain, you're supposed to be compensated for the state taking your property. The right to property is just as important as the right to liberty because you cannot be truly free without it.
Estate Tax: Rich dead people seem like the ideal people to tax. But beyond that, it's the transfer of wealth that is being taxed, not that person. That is, taxes only must be paid by Person A on what they get from Person B's Estate. Seems fair. I live in a farm town... family farms are worth a lot of money but don't necessarily generate a ton of profit. Property values have skyrocketed here from $15k an acre in 1985 to $40-80k an acre now. Just speaking in terms of land, a small 100 acre farm has gone from being worth $1.5 million to $4 million during the time the farmer's kid went from diapers to going to college. Factor in equipment, livestock, etc and farms are worth a minor fortune... but still don't generate a whole lot of profit. When the farmer dies and bequeaths the farm to his children, they have to pay a massive tax, far beyond the revenue of the farm, and that results in having to sell off the farm (and with it, possibly their very own job since a lot of farmers kids seem to work on the farm as adults). That sounds extremely fair and reasonable, doesn't it? Meanwhile, that prime farm land is developed into sprawl and the nation gets a little less home grown food and the domestic food supply leans more toward big corporate farms.
After all, how many projects still use GPL version 1?
GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE
Version 1, February 1989
GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE
Version 2, June 1991
GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE
Version 3, 29 June 2007 Mind to venture a guess how many non-FSF/GNU projects were created in the 28 months that the GPLv1 was the current license versus how many projects were created in the 16 years that the GPLv2 was the current license? Predicting the dominance of the GPLv3 based on the current usage of GPLv1 is a little disingenuous.
As for the GPLv3 being the dominate license in a few years, I've read that RMS already wants to get a GPLv4 out soon. If it's within the next 3 years, the GPLv3 will barely have time to catch on and the rapid license changes will make the GPL look unstable to non-FSF zealots.
You mean I'm not the only one who spills more gas pouring with a no-spill gas can than I've ever spilled in the previous 25 years with the old style cans? I swear I splash some out every time I use the no-spill ones because the venting system causes major glugs. I'm tempted to just poke an air hole in the top of the can.
Is this not strong evidence of a strong lack of diversity in their fields of work (they must not have many minorities working there) and a strong undercurrent of racism (they couldn't possibly have gotten these positions without help!).
Look at the NFL. Never mind that black people make up 13% of the population and make up about 70% of the players. Never mind that almost 30% of the assistant coaching positions and that 5 of the 32 (16%) teams have a black head coach. The league requires teams interview at least one black person for a coaching position. Isn't the league already over-represented in terms of race at pretty much every turn (save maybe ownership, which I'm not sure of offhand)?
My dad worked for the town highway department. It was 6 guys and an elected supervisor. Should they be forced to hire 3 women and a token black just to make it a diverse work environment or is it likely that women generally don't like doing highway maintenance work and the 1.7% black population is my town is statistically irrelevant in a population of 7 people? ALL of the K-3 grade teachers (ballpark of 20) in our school district are female. Shouldn't they have to disqualify women in the future until they reach parity so they have proper diversity?
How does the need for diversity in our culture affect our desire for fairness?
I don't think there is an inherent need for diversity (in terms of race or sex) in the vast majority of jobs. I think there's a need for diversity in thought or else we'll fall into the trap of group-think. We need people who will challenge the status quo instead of people we get a warm fuzzy for hiring. What do you think would change the **AA more, some black/female executives from the same colleges the current ones came from or someone who sees that the technology has changed and needs to be embraced if the industry is going to continue?
I think different types of people are attracted to different jobs and that's ok. We need to embrace our differences and realize that it is ok that not everyone is the same. There's no reason why a woman can't be an engineer and a male can't be a nurse but we aren't improving a field by forcing people who don't have a predilection for that field. Most of my teachers sucked because they didn't care about teaching, they cared about having a 7-3 job with all the best days off and great benefits (and yes, around here, they're paid as well as any other profession requiring a similar degree and have a better pension and guaranteed job security to boot - we've taken it too far and end up attracting so many idiots who want the benefit package that they drown out those whom would give up a career in engineering to teach math).
I'm not sure if you're implying the federal government should come up with a complicated formula by which to judge if the circumstances of a person's life merit particular help? That seems infeasible, though it might be nice.
I'm sure given sufficient analysis, we could come up with an objective formula that approximates a person's adversity merit, but I'm not sure we should implement it to that degree. Instead, I think it would be better interview/approval techniques would be better. Who works best with the rest of the team? Who really grasps the ideas and has suggestions for improvement? Who seems to have a keen insight to advance things? The same holds true for stuff like research grants. Who's idea really looks like it will have the greatest benefit and/or provide a currently unforeseen breakthrough?
So why would those type of criteria provide an advantage to people who had to work to overcome disadvantages to be on par with their peers? I went to school with a lot of people who never worked a job in their life before graduating college. They had lots of ideas on how things should work in theory and they had a lot of ideas on how they wanted things to work. What they didn't understand is how things actually work and what other people would wa
Terminal cancer - Attemped murder Actually happened. My cousin was murdered by a guy with colon cancer who had six months to live. The court let him go because he would likely die before the trial could be finished and forcing him to die in jail would be cruel. Twelve years later, my cousin's 3 kids don't have a father and the guy is still alive. Since the court dismissed his case, he never had to pay for his crime.
To summarize an argument that was only adequately argued to me a few years after college, the goal is not "color blindness", where everyone is treated the same way and everything is merit based. The goal is "equal opportunity", where a person's race, gender, and economic background is not a burden for them to bear. Even if racism and sexism was removed from the world, things would still not be "fair", because the legacy of less education, less money, and less connections means that certain groups are not as capable of receiving the education and experience needed to compete equally. A genius born in poverty has much less chance being recognized because they are much less likely to receive the same level of education and are more likely to be burdened by other social ills. In theory, this genius should have the opportunity to be as successful as their characteristics allow, but in reality their social circumstances are as important, if not more so, than their personal merits.
One can look at efforts to give advantages to minorities as unfair and reverse-racism/sexism. I certainly did for a long time. The truth is, though, that even when ignoring the existence of prejudice in people, white males are born into an advantageous position, and that advantageous position will likely grow without intervention, just as those with the most money are in a better position to make more money. That's not "fair" either, and will only lead to more prejudice. Just as progressive taxes are meant to redistribute wealth to the lower and middle classes in hopes that they'll be able to rise, we attempt to make it a little easier for minorities to get into fields dominated by white males in hopes that someday the advantage gap will disappear between groups. So, a white male born to a single welfare mother in the ghetto of a dying city has a more advantageous position than, say, Oprah Winfrey's children (if she were to have some)? If you want to truly promote equal opportunity, neither race nor sex is are primary factors. Parent's education level and economic background, the quality of public schools in the area, undue family hardships (father died from an injury at work or maybe mom died from cancer while the child was young), the person's intellect, work ethic, ability to overcome adversity, etc are all what you should look at.
When you say "This grant is only for people who were born without a penis (or perhaps people who chopped theirs off) or are not from a pure Caucasian descent," you are saying that those people are inherently inferior to all white males and they cannot make it on their own regardless of their personal circumstances. I have friends who are minorities and women who earned coveted positions through hard work but everyone assumes that they got them just because of their skin color or gender. That, in fact, breeds resentment and hatred between white males and others as well as instills an inferiority complex in everyone that we're supposedly helping with those policies. Hillary might as well hang a sign outside her restaurant that says "No White Males" and we can go back to the days of segregation. Two wrongs don't make a right.
Had a girlfriend/boyfriend in high school whom you lost? Find him/her online. Precisely why I don't use social networking sites. I prefer to be out of sight/out of mind for my stalker ex. She already suckered me in and wasted an extra year of my life once. I'd rather not let her have any way to get interested in my life again. Even if all she can see is my last login date, I prefer to let her wonder whether or not I'm still alive.
This here is why the cool stuff like say dtrace and zfs get done on other systems not linux. Versus Linux getting stuff like ReiserFS, ALSA, etc. Solaris got dtrace and zfs because the corporation that owns Solaris paid developers to create them. FreeBSD gets to use them because the CDDL and BSD license doesn't have the incompatibility problems that CDDL and GPL have. Can you say strawman?
I did NOT say it was trivial, I said it was not terrible far from the current state and especially not compared to bsd. Again you are purposely misinterpreting what I said seemingly because you are some sort of jackass. And yes I would do this if my coding time was not already spent on things I consider more important than the linux kernel. And Ingo considers his scheduler more important than implementing the code you've discussed. It's ok for you to work on something else but not for him or another kernel dev to work on what they consider important? Oh, and calling me a jackass clearly proves how little work there is in converting Linux to use the model you suggest. Thanks for the tip.
I linked to the paper to show that other people have demonstrated that it is a good idea. Kernel developers shouldn't care what I think, they should care about facts and about improving their system. Instead they dithering over registers and cache lines when the whole approach is grossly inefficient to begin with in many cases. Were they submitted? Are they clean enough to be maintainable and don't cause any regressions or is it just proof of concept code?
Mind giving me and installing an electric engine to put in [my truck] Here you go. It's your truck, you put it in. Way to completely miss the point. You're telling me that I need to spend MY time and money to make my truck conform to YOUR ideals. Not only that, but you need me to completely drop all of my current knowledge to work on something I know nothing about because you say it is going to be better. The onus is on you to prove that your concept is valid, not to expect me to stop working on something I enjoy/find useful to work on something that might not interest me at all.
You act as if the entire kernel would have to be rewritten and maybe even userspace, but that is not so. They would need to make some changes like being able to do anything from an in-kernel thread that an application can, which is not too terribly far from the current Linux (as opposed to say FreeBSD which would require a *lot* of work to do this). Hell even just start with something simple like inotify (the design of which is absurd) and make it so programs can process events inside the kernel, making it actually be useful (see BPF). Again, if you're so confident that it is trivial, why don't you code up some patches and send them to Linus (well, Andrew) with benchmarks? There's no short supply of people mailing LKML to tell them that they should implement some idea (quite a few of which are totally hare-brained)
Roman is a long time kernel dev and is the maintainer of AFFS, HFS, M68K and kconfig. He's hardly new to the scene. New to the scheduler code, perhaps.
All of this started with Roman doing a code review of CFS a month or two ago. Roman asked some questions to clarify what certain parts of the code were doing, Ingo asked Roman to provide more info so he could see where CFS was falling short on Roman's test cases. Both sides kept trying to talk passed each other. Eventually, Roman got frustrated and provided a new scheduler/patch with some mathematical proofs behind it to make the scheduling better. Roman and Ingo continued to talk passed each other. Ingo picked up some of Roman's patches. Roman feels slighted like he's being ignored but was just as guilty in ignoring Ingo (and other CFS devs) along the way. Factor in the taste in people's mouth from earlier this year with Con and the lines were already drawn before Roman got involved.
It's a clash of egos all around and nothing atypical for a large open source project.
The advantage of that is that launching with preset negative nice numbers could be done by anyone rather than only by the superuser. That would show some benefits for interactive/latency sensative software without creating any problems for software that doesn't report a need - they would still default to 0. Potentially dangerous to allow "anyone" to do it... it would be much better to have some type of ACL that allows specific users/group and/or perhaps specific programs to be reniced outside of root's control. Back when I was in college, it was typical to PPP in and then telnet to some machine in the CS lab there to get work done. Someone would be sitting at the physical terminal and we might have 3 or 4 other users logged in on the machine doing some coding or whatever. If those other 3 users could renice some buggy, or perhaps deliberately malicious, code and deny everyone else the ability to do anything significant with the machine, it would be a problem. Factor in, as well, at one point, we were learning about distributed computing and were running things like distributed fractals across the entire lab. I can only imagine the fun as 2-3 people (or maybe 30) attempt to run their distributed fractal at -20 across the entire lab .
Basically they are replacing the spark plugs when they could be switching to an electric engine. A huge amount of overhead comes from system calls, context switches, and data copying -- three things that effectively cannot be eliminated if the system runs unsafe code. You can *sometimes* eliminate data copying in specific cases using shared memory or complex operations (sendfile), but not normally. I just changed the spark plugs, oil/oil filter and air filter in my truck. Mind giving me and installing an electric engine to put in it? After all, I know how to work on gasoline engines but I've never done work with electric engines so you're forcing me to deprecate my current abilities and knowledge to spend a considerable amount of time and money changing to a new paradigm for something that has more long term potential but will, at least in the short term, be less maintainable and will cause me significant pain (by not having a vehicle to drive) until I get it all installed just right.
Someone who is good writing a compiler may not be good at creating a new kernel design. Someone who is great at writing a window manager may not be great at creating a new cryptography algorithm.
Last time I saw, Linus was pretty open to taking patches... the bar you have to meet is that the patches need to be understandable by him (and thus maintainable) and that he thinks it will improve the kernel more than hurt it. If you have patches, submit them (or convince the person who did write them to submit them) and persuade Linus. If you don't have patches, pay someone to write them for you or at least convince (but don't berate) a kernel developer of the merits of your idea so they will write them for you. Don't, however, expect a kernel dev to go off on a tangent that is going to require large amounts of the kernel, some of which he may not have any interest in, to be replaced just because you think it might be a good idea. That's like expecting a government to completely dissolve its defense system because someone got the idea that everyone would be more relaxed if they got a free massage every week.
Do you even know what Stallman has developed? He didn't just start telling people to use his license. He created the GPL, GCC, glibc, gdb and gmake. Without Stallman, Linux would have been stillborn.
Did it ever occur to you that if Linux hadn't existed then the GNU people might have paid a little more attention to the HURD? I started college in 1995. At the time, I had been using OS/2 as my OS and Borland compilers at home (though I had played with the 30 some disks of Slackware a little). At college, we had a bunch of Sun and SGI boxes that used their respective compilers in the computer labs. In order to make things easier, I wanted to go with something UNIXy at home but I obviously wasn't going to afford to buy one of those expensive boxes. So, what did I do? I installed Linux again (this time off a Red Hat CDROM I bought through cheapbytes).
That started my dual booting era, OS/2 for games and Linux for getting work done. Of course, with Linux came gcc, glibc, etc. During that time, gcc was pretty stagnant and would soon bring about EGCS (which, in 1999, officially took over the gcc project). glibc, if I'm not mistaken, was actually written mostly by Roland McGrath, rather than Stallman, and for a while, the Linux guys actually had their own version. That fork forced the GNU project to make a better, more POSIX compliant, C library.
The ultimate question is... without early adopters of Linux like me (and 1995 was still pretty early if you remember the Linux 1.2 days), would as much attention have been brought to the GNU tools and would there have been the pressure to improve them? Yes, the tools undoubtedly predated Linux but the influx of new users forced them to evolve into something far better than they were before that.
These days, Stallman doesn't do that much coding anymore. I've been told he still contributes the occasional patch here and there, but he's largely become disconnected with the coder side of things and rather has become more of a proselytizer of the FSF/GNU philosophy than anything else. The fact that he declared that gcc would be GPLv3 by August 1st (and any subsequent patches, even on the existing branch, would as well) even though as of last week, the gcc developers still weren't sure what to do about the files with exceptions for the pending 4.2.2 release. It's a case of "force the software to use my new license now before we even get a chance to think through the implications fully!"
You mean to tell me it spends more on this than on defense? Not even close! Defense used to be 20% of the whole budget in non war years. You know what it is now when we have an unnecessary war entered under false pretenses, which we are coincidentally losing? Does anyone even know what IRAQ cost? What it's going to cost over the next 10 years?
Don't forget a lot of money is wasted on pork projects and things like NASA. 2007 estimated federal budget(in billions):
National Defense: 447
Education: 88
Health: 285
Medicare: 377
Income Security: 357
Social Security: 556
Let's throw in a wild and crazy overly inflated $200 billion more for Iraq. That puts us at $647 billion for defense and $1663 billion for welfare spending out of a budget of $2592 billion. Even if you're one of those people who insist that SSDI/SSI "shouldn't" count (though it obviously does), that still leaves the social programs at $750 billion which is still more than defense. Also, states don't spend a whole lot on defense but do spend a ton on welfare in addition to what the feds spend. Then on top of that, we also have local taxes (sales tax, property taxes, etc) of which, a good portion goes to social programs and none of which goes to military spending.
And as long as you want to talk about percentages of federal budget, that puts military spending (including inflated Iraq numbers) at 25% with welfare spending at 64%. Now, I can point to the federal government having the power to provide for a national defense in the Constitution. Can you tell me where, specifically, the federal government was granted the power to create a Ponzi retirement scheme, mess with local education issues, create public medical insurance programs, etc? It is duplicitous if you support the federal assumption of ungranted power for such programs but don't support something like the Patriot Act. Either you support federal power grabs or you don't.
As for ongoing costs of policies.. Lets look back to 1960 in comparison:
National Defense: 48
Education: 1
Health: 0.8
Medicare: none
Income Security: 7
Social Security: 12
$48 billion in defense compared to just under $21 billion for welfare on a $92 billion budget
1970? mid-Vietnam
National Defense: 82
Education: 9
Health: 6
Medicare: 6
Income Security: 16
Social Security: 30
Total budget: 196
1980
National Defense: 134
Education: 32
Health: 23
Medicare: 32
Income Security: 87
Social Security: 119
Total budget: 591
1990
National Defense: 299
Education: 37
Health: 58
Medicare: 98
Income Security: 149
Social Security: 249
Total budget: 1253
2000
National Defense: 294
Education: 54
Health: 155
Medicare: 197
Income Security: 254
Social Security: 409
Total budget: 1789
Calculating for inflation, that 1960 $48 billion for defense is $320 billion in 2006 dollars. That $294 billion in 2000 is $344 billion in 2006. Non-Iraq military spending is pacing a little ahead of inflation. Can you guess which programs are far outpacing inflation and have gone from 23% of the budget in 1960 to 64% of the budget today? Hint, they're the programs that you say "cost less" than defense spending. And again, that is only at the federal level. States and local governments add hundreds of billions more in social spending.
As for wasting money on NASA, $25 billion is a drop in the bucket compared to that $1663 billion in welfare spending. Not only that, but I can make an argument for NASA providing national defense benefits (which is a power granted to the feds).
Eh, You make a point -- but I'm not entirely sure what it is. My point was you're not going to be able to get ala carte channels just for the price of each channel through current distribution channels. There's going to have to be some type of charge to support infrastructure in there somewhere. That could be the $15 in connection fees/equipment I pointed out or it could be channels that don't cost 75 cents or a dollar, but two or three dollars instead.
Even with content over the internet, your provider may encourage you to get the power user package at a higher cost to achieve the bandwidth (both burst and total monthly consumption) needed. I know my ISP (RR) offers a $30 light version (I think it is 1Mbit down, 128k up), $45 standard (10 Mbit down, 384k up) and $60 power user version (15 Mbit down, 1 Mbit up). You get a $5 discount for also subscribing to any cable package. I know there is some kind of bandwidth consumption cap that they'll kick people over but 15 gigs a month isn't atypical for me and I've never gotten any type of warning (standard package).
I wouldn't be surprised if the cable subscribers are still subsidizing the DOCSIS infrastructure as well. Cable modems only require a couple channels of space versus everything else coming down the line... and all of that equipment at the head end costs money. I'm not a cable/networking guy so I'm not sure just how much equipment is needed to eliminate the cable channels while going entirely internet infrastructure.
Still, when I get high speed fiber later this month -- I'll watch what I want online. Cable and satellite will merge with the internet seamlessly in the near future -- it's just that the U.S. is terribly behind in it's high speed infrastructure compared to other countries. That's mostly because the current setup is "good enough" for most people. Look at how many people still willingly use dialup even though broadband is available to them (who wants to spend $40 a month to read 3 emails a week when you can get dialup for $9.95 or whatever?) The infrastructure won't be upgraded until either people demand it (and even then, it may require an act of government (not necessarily at the federal level) to goad companies into upgrading) or until the infrastructure becomes so deteriorated that they have to upgrade to keep providing the current level of service (we're seeing this with companies switching to fiber internally but we still have that whole last mile situation).
And what of infrastructure costs? A digital cable box might cost $200 and then you need to factor in depreciation. The cable company has to run wire down your street, from the pole to your house, etc. They have to maintain those wires. They need to maintain their broadcasting equipment. They need to handle billing and technical support. It probably costs $10-15 a month per subscriber just to maintain the network (and I've seen estimates for Dish Network's per customer fixed costs being around $28/month)... So, more than likely, you'd see something like my electric bill:
Basic Connection Fee: $10
Equipment Rental: $5
Content Delivery:
ALA Carte Channel 52: $0.75
ALA Carte Channel 67: $1.50
ALA Carte Channel 115: $0.75
ALA Carte Channel 242: $1.00
ALA Carte Channel 300: $0.75
ALA Carte Channel 633: $1.25
Franchise Fee: $4
Subtotal: $25
Taxes: $5
Amount Due: $30
That said... this spring, I got a really interesting offer that compelled me to leave Dish Network and return back to my local cable company. Their full package of digital cable (about 250 channels) plus every (43) movie channel with 2 digital receivers for $60/month and the rate is guaranteed for 2 years. I've even found myself watching channels I didn't think I would like just because they're now available to me for less than I was paying Dish for their 150 channel package + 3 sets of premium channels (I dropped $35/month off my monthly tv bill). When my 2 years is about to expire, I'll tell the cable company they can renew my package or I'll shop around for the cheapest price again. I made sure I kept my Dish equipment rather than take the $100 trade in credit so the cost to start with them will be negligible. As an added bonus, it knocked $5/month off my cable modem bill too.
Where are your stats that more than (literally) 99.9% of dropouts do so to deal drugs or get pregnant? Did I say 99.9% of kids drop out to deal drugs or get pregnant? No... but thanks for trying to put words in my mouth. What I said was that giving kids $1000 to graduate isn't going to encourage them to stay when they can partake in other activities that make the $1000 look like chump change.
I'd say that most kids drop out not for any specific reason, but because they aren't inspired, and have too many family problems to internalize the graduation goal. I'd say you just randomly make up undefined statistics. Care to show me studies that say 50.1% of kids drop out because "they lack inspiration and can't internalize the graduation goal."
They're distracted by people who the realistic dream of $1000 can easily overpower. Just giving them that specific dream, on top of all the other known benefits of staying in school, should push at least 0.1% of them over the line. And that's worth the money. I have a dream that, I too, can invest 13 years to get a $1000 return on my investment. I mean, that's like a whole month worth of minimum wage pay. Way to grab my attention and stoke the fire of my dreams.
Parents aren't solving the problem. Maybe if we gave parents $1000, too, when their kids graduate on time, we'd get more than 0.2% to do it. And then we'd break even. Hey, I know... why don't we give everyone a billion dollars! It'll solve all of our problems and everyone will be rich. Even if just 0.2% of people invest it wisely, we'll make great strides.
What's important is to get over the impulse to moralize. These HS grads are going to get an opportunity to make a bonus for meeting quotas in a job soon after graduating. They'll make a bonus for meeting quotas after they go to college, achieve full member status in their union or whatever... High school graduates flipping burgers don't get bonuses (which is the type of job they're going to get "soon after graduating" high school)
For the most successful, that bonus will become their greatest motivation, as the largest part of their income. Wow, in DocRubyland, high school graduates get bonuses big enough to be "the largest part of their income?" So, every high school grad immediately gets a job working as a stock broker with a million dollar bonus because the company had a good year? Damn... if only I had lived there instead of Earth when I graduated.
Dreaming that parents will just become better, especially when we don't even increase parents' graduation rate, is a recipe for the unacceptable status quo. And throwing hundreds of billions in extra money at the education system over the last 20 years has solved the problem already. Throwing $225 billion more (75 million kids * $1000 each + 150 million parents * 1000 each) will certainly solve the problem. Ehh.. who cares that we're going to have to raise the taxes of the working poor and middle class even more to pay for it.
The introduction of the welfare system in the US has solved what problems? Incarceration rates are higher now than they were before it. The family structure of urban youth has been decimated and there is more likely to be no father figure than one and with that comes a lack of discipline. We've spent hundreds of billions of dollars (and raised the taxes of the working poor to pay for it) while encouraging the next generation to put their hand out like their parent did.
I've got more than 30 first cousins on my dad's side of the family. My dad and 2 siblings moved out of the ghetto they grew up in. Each one of those families had 2 kids and 5 of the 6 graduated (the 6th deciding to drop out with 2 months left to go in her senior year because she was failing english... after her father had a brain aneurysm/stroke). Average family size for the siblings remaining in the city is 6. All of them grew up without a father (and in fact, there were 2-4 fathers for each of the women having kids) and all of them grew up on welfare. None of those 25 graduated. 2 were murdered. Every one of the girls now has kids and are on welfare (as early as age 14). All of the guys (except two) are currently in prison or engaging in activity that will put them there. One of the exceptions actually moved out of the city as an adult and has built a relatively decent life for himself (not that he didn't do jail time as a kid). The other one is 7 and his mother had him because her youngest was about to turn 18 so she was going to get kicked off welfare. They've all utterly destroyed the homes that they were provided and have chosen to live in conditions of absolute filth (2" of dog crap covering the basement floor, your feet stick to their kitchen floors when you walk through, roaches everywhere, etc).
But hey, we (all US taxpayers) can feel better because we supported their kids and that put them in a situation where they were going to live better lives than their parents. Welfare also ensured we weren't going to be incarcerating them all.
Modify welfare so that it encourages them to have families (as in a mother and father in the home) if they want to receive it. Tie their welfare benefits to the children's school performance and their criminal history. Limit the amount of welfare they can receive (in terms of years of payments) to prevent them from having more kids to milk the system longer. Put the families to work (such as picking up parks, removing graffiti, etc) to teach them the value of earning something and to promote the idea of taking care of something). I really like models like Habitat for Humanity that encourages people to help others and value what they receive versus the current welfare system of basically handing someone a check and telling them they'll get another same day next month.
but $1000 is still quite a lot to most kids in highschool. The kids you're trying to get to stay in school are the ones who are most likely to be dealing drugs for $1000 a day, finding out that having a kid at 15 will give them a decent life (in their eyes, most likely not ours) for the next 18 years, etc. You don't need to encourage the good kids to go to school, you need to encourage the millions of kids who drop out every year to stay in school. $1000 doesn't do much to entice them. That's chump change to what they can earn by leaving school at 16 and working for the next 2 years at even a minimum wage job (30 hours * $5.85/hr * 52 weeks = $9,126 * 2 years = $18,252 to drop out now rather than stay). Yep, it's pretty short sighted, but so are the very people you're trying to affect.
The problem all starts at home... if the parents don't instill the value of education in their kids, their kids almost certainly won't get it. By cushioning the effects of not valuing education, we promote the idea that education isn't really important. In fact, many urban areas are fervently anti-education because you must be a sucker if you want to stay legit rather than give in to the easy life (even if it means you're going to die before you can legally drink).
I'm still not convinced. You're saying that some medical technology was developed in a wartime environment. I'm not disputing that. BUT, war is an incredibly inefficient way to develop medical technology. You're far better off skipping the war, and directly investing in health care and medical research. So when you say we owe a debt to war for the medical technology we have, I still argue that we'd have BETTER medical technology if the money we spent on war were put to better use.
And yet, you'll sit there and argue out of ignorance because you choose to so you don't have to question your internal biases. Entire fields of medicine were developed and refined because of war medical needs; Emergency medicine being one of the most important. But hey, triage, stabilization and evacuation techniques would have developed all on their own decades earlier if it wasn't for a military needing with hundreds of soldiers being wounded.
Wars of old were over some pretty stupid things, yes. But these are subsiding, and being replaced by imperialist wars. Forget ancient mythology. Check out the past century.
My farm dries up while my neighbor has more water than he can use but refuses to share. It is capitalism for me to go steal his water to keep my family from dying?
Good example. Under capitalism, your neighbor is quite within their rights to refuse to share 'their' water with you. You starve, or you fight. That's all that capitalism offers. Under socialism, there is no such thing as 'your' water or 'their' water, as water is a shared natural resource. If you need water, you get it from the state, and the state may then go and get it from your neighbor.
And where does the state get the water from? Oh yeah, forced coercion of your neighbor. Give us your water to give to everyone else and we won't throw you in jail, charge you with crimes against humanity and the state, and maybe we'll let you keep some for yourself. Oh, and he better dig another well while he's at it so they can get some more water off the fruit of his labor while his neighbor sits on his ass complaining he's thirsty. Humans are inherently self-centered. They will protect their family first before they aid the town on the other side of the county, the city in another state and the country on another continent. We aren't ants and the flaw of communism and similar models is they expect us to not be human. Again, you are letting your own anti-capitalism bias cloud your judgment.
Some people will kill each other still just because of the color of their skin.
Not without being stirred up by some ultra-conservative arse-wipe first though. It's important to keep that in mind.
It's gotta be a conservative, right? Why, damn that David Duke for going out to LA back in 1992 and stirring up the blacks so they would go attack the Koreans. Screw that neo-con Abbie Hoffman and the others who incited the 1968 Chicago riots. The Black Panthers? Rush Limbaugh's personal attack squad.
Very few people actually like and support full scale war... but, it is the one thing guaranteed to provide a solution to a problem.
On the contrary, it's the only thing guaranteed to NOT provide a solution. You see, there's no peace without justice. And justice is not distributed by the strongest army - it's achieved by human negotiation and compassion. I deeply pity you if you see war as the only solution to the world's problems. I also hope you never get in a position of any power ( karma ensures that people who abuse power in one life very rarely get access to power again ).
I didn't say war was the only, nor the best, solution to every problem... I said that war is the one thing that is guaranteed to be a solution to every problem. Fact is, violence solves problems. That bully that harassed you in school? If you would have punched him in the nose, he would have left you alone... Whining to your parents just made him laugh at you and encouraged him more. Some
Doctors, when faced with medical problems, strive to find solutions. Our initial knowledge of anatomy came from doctors disecting deceased people, to see how they tick. Some... a VERY small percentage... of this knowledge came from the battlefield. An overwhelming majority did NOT come from the battlefield, but from universities.
It's hard to find solutions when you don't have a fresh stream of people in the right place at the right time to try them out on. Certainly, you wouldn't argue that a 10 year old with a facial scar from a car accident when she was 3 is the person to do initial experiments with plastic surgery on. Guys who are missing half of their face from a shrapnel wound? Good choice.
Prior to the Civil War, armies didn't really try to set up field hospitals where they could perform on-site diagnosis, triage and surgery facing a wide array of potentially fatal, somewhat random wounds. They treated everything from burns to gangrene to shattered bones in those hospitals. Morbidity post-amputation was pretty high and that's where sterilization procedures started coming into play. Where do you think the system of roving medics who triage wounds and stabilize patients en-route to doctors (like EMTs/ambulances/helicopters rushing you to the hospital) comes from?
a mini PBS documentary of some of the history of medicine and the military. I've seen lots of stuff on the History Channel as well. There are a LOT of books and other information out there describing the advances made in medicine because of warfare. If you think we'd be where we are without those sacrifices, you'd be very mistaken. Pick up a book, pretty much any book on the subject, and educate yourself before you go off spouting that scientists/doctors will make advances at the rate they have without patients to work on.
Not at all. Capitalism, and in particular Imperialism is driving all the wars on the planet, in one form or another. Even the stupid tribal wars in Africa can be traced back to a bunch of capitalists who want to profit from selling arms and generally sticking their nose ( and capital ) where's it's not wanted. The Middle East is of course the most obvious example of imperialist meddling leading to wars. Individuals - even large groups of them - have no interest in war. People want to solve their problems in constructive ways, that benefit everyone. It's the capitalists who use massive armies and WOMD to enforce their will.
Check your history... Everyone has an ancestor who has been involved in war. It doesn't matter if they were from Athens, Egypt, Russia, Peru or Japan. Everyone fights at some time and you're ignorant if you think it's always pure capitalism at heart. My farm dries up while my neighbor has more water than he can use but refuses to share. It is capitalism for me to go steal his water to keep my family from dying? Only if that is the prism that you look at the entire world through. Wars were fought over the eye of a woman (see Helen of Troy... yes, mythology but mythology is often based in historical fact to convey a lesson). Siblings fight over the attention of their parents. Some people will kill each other still just because of the color of their skin.
Very few people actually like and support full scale war... but, it is the one thing guaranteed to provide a solution to a problem. Diplomacy can never work without a military to enforce it and if someone refuses diplomacy and keeps attacking you, you have no choice but to force them into surrender.
Now... since you seem to be in the camp that the US shouldn't stick its nose into other people's business, do you also agree we have no business going into Darfur, had no business in Kosovo, Somalia, etc? Or do you mean we have no business meddling in other people's affairs unless it is something you, in particular, approve of? I know quite a few people who have an inte
Seems to me the 30 million would be better spent researching ways to stops getting into so many wars. You do realize that emergency medicine (ie, that trauma center at your local hospital), plastic/reconstructive surgery, prosthetics, etc all have their roots in military need, don't you? If your kid is born with a facial deformity, be glad that somewhere along the line, soldiers had their face rebuilt after taking severe wounds. If you get stabbed in the park, be glad that the military devised a method of mobilizing, classifying, and treating wounds. If you get in an accident and completely shatter your foot beyond repair, be glad the military invested the R&D in amputation techniques and how to build a better lower leg.
Replacements will eventually get better. In fact, there was a story on slashdot a couple weeks ago about a new hand, As to the person saying the military will only get such things for high ranking soldiers, the story I saw on tv was about one Sgt. Juan Arredondo. Not only not major brass, he's hispanic as well.
Everyone has a pet project on how they'd want to spend X million dollars... and we'll never agree 100% on any expenditure. However, I feel it is our duty to return as much life back to those who volunteered to protect our lives and freedom. Also, lets be realistic, as long as people are human, they will disagree and disagreements will eventually spill over into war of some kind (be it one military against another, one gang against another or two siblings fighting that goes too far).
Yes, because "downstate democrats" control the state assembly and "upstate republicans" control the state senate, there has not been an on time state budget for as long as I can remember. It was passed on time in 2005 for the first time since 1984. Obviously, the big problem is the state is run by three people behind closed doors, Joe Bruno, Sheldon Silver and the governor. However, in the particular case I was referring to, was Silver in 1997 demanding the state renew rent control for New York City or he would make sure the Assembly didn't pass the budget. If NYC wants rent control, that's their problem to solve, it isn't the problem of a poor farmer in Canisteo... but the entire state had to suffer for NYC's selfish desires.
People (and politicians) in NYC have no idea what the rest of the state needs and they don't care so long as they get what they want. I've been from Jamestown to Binghamton, Buffalo to Messina and live in a rural county somewhere in between all of that. The rest of the state has nothing in common with New York City and desperately needs to remove the albatross from its neck because we've been sinking for at least 20 years with no signs of care (well, maybe some election time lip service) from Albany. Draw a line along Rensselaer, Albany, Greene, Ulster and Sullivan counties. Those counties and everyone to the south can be New York State and the rest of the state can form another state.
And yeah, we do have an awful lot of right wing Conservatives (Conservative Party of New York State) that don't necessarily align themselves the Republican party. Without their support, no Republican candidate has won a state-wide election in recent history. There are only 149,157 registered Conservatives in NY. There are a lot of liberal Republicans who will gladly vote for a liberal Republican candidate. There are a lot of conservative Republicans who won't vote for a liberal Republican candidate. In fact, I think that's the main reason Pataki chose to not run again... over time, he'd gone more and more against conservative principles and a lot of those conservative Republicans weren't going to vote for him again, just to send him a message. As I mentioned in the post you replied to, that automatically gives the Democrat a win so Pataki saw the writing on the wall and got out by retiring rather than losing.
The Republican campaign against Hillary in 2006 was the most pathetic political campaign I've seen since Mondale in 1984. The Republicans spent months just trying to drum up a candidate and when it looked like they finally had one (Janine Pirro), she bailed and switched to run for Attorney General instead because she was too liberal to get the conservative vote. Ultimately, the Republicans had to hold a primary less than two months before the election. The result is that I actually just had to look up the name of the guy I voted for (John Spencer) because he had no time to campaign against the well-oiled incumbent Clinton machine. So again, the post I originally responded to is completely mischaracterizing her re-election as an approval of the job she's done when it is really anything but.
PS, as I was looking up the date for the rent control thing, I came across a NY Times Article written today saying that Silver is out to stir up the rent control thing again.
Also, the picture of Hillary on Wikipedia scares the hell out of me, everything seems out of proportion.
Slashdot Mirror
I object to cameras because I'm not a proponent of the government always watching you looking for you to screw up. Almost everyone commits a minor crime here and there. Ever jay walk? Leave a parking lot stub hanging from your rear view mirror on the drive home? Have your neighbor's mail put in your mailbox by mistake so you put it in theirs for them? Make a joke to a friend about the need to kill a public figure?
I'd rather not have to live in a constant state of fear that I'm going to get busted for something beyond trivial because cameras don't have common sense and they're operated by someone who can obsess over you and just wait for you to screw up. I've been taking care of my dad for years after he had a stroke and, lo and behold, after clearing his name with the local department of social services for a false charge that it took 6 years to get a hearing for him for (which ended up being thrown out with prejudice and expunged), they're suddenly getting "anonymous phone calls" telling them that I don't feed my dad (who weighs 240 pounds) forcing them to come investigate us all the time. Naturally, they can't disclose the supposed source of the phone calls even though they're all obviously false. Any given day, I can wake up to someone knocking on my door insisting that they come in, inspect my kitchen and all of the area my dad has access to just looking for the smallest thing they can charge me with. That I know of, they've stopped over at least 40 times in the last 4 years. Who knows how many times they've tried to snoop around when I wasn't home.
Besides being gathered by more local authorities, and sold as a way to tax out-of-area people, the sales tax encourages saving. My neighboring county, where most of the business in the area is, raised their sales tax 1% about a decade ago. They lost quite a bit of my business for it. I do my best to buy stuff in my own county and if I get a good that's too good to pass up in the neighboring county (such as a vehicle $1000 cheaper I can get it for in my county), I point out where I live and I pay taxes at my county's rate anyway. The problem that caused the need for the sales tax to increase (excessive spending) hasn't gotten any more under control since the increase... they've spent the last 2 years calling for another increase.
It does absolutely nothing to encourage saving... if you're below middle class, you have no choice and have to spend the money.If you have lots of disposable income, a single digit sales tax isn't going to stop you from buying something. If you're stuck in the middle, you get pissed off that your busting your ass to pay the government and things like the sales tax are keeping you from doing more for your family.
Property Tax: Since property is finite, and there are various philisophical and religious objections to permentently owning land, this is the government's way of returning land to the public domain, at least metaphysically. By that logic, government should be free to take anything they want. I object to you owning a computer because someone else has a perceived need for one, so let me just take that off your hands. Even under eminent domain, you're supposed to be compensated for the state taking your property. The right to property is just as important as the right to liberty because you cannot be truly free without it.
Estate Tax: Rich dead people seem like the ideal people to tax. But beyond that, it's the transfer of wealth that is being taxed, not that person. That is, taxes only must be paid by Person A on what they get from Person B's Estate. Seems fair. I live in a farm town... family farms are worth a lot of money but don't necessarily generate a ton of profit. Property values have skyrocketed here from $15k an acre in 1985 to $40-80k an acre now. Just speaking in terms of land, a small 100 acre farm has gone from being worth $1.5 million to $4 million during the time the farmer's kid went from diapers to going to college. Factor in equipment, livestock, etc and farms are worth a minor fortune... but still don't generate a whole lot of profit. When the farmer dies and bequeaths the farm to his children, they have to pay a massive tax, far beyond the revenue of the farm, and that results in having to sell off the farm (and with it, possibly their very own job since a lot of farmers kids seem to work on the farm as adults). That sounds extremely fair and reasonable, doesn't it? Meanwhile, that prime farm land is developed into sprawl and the nation gets a little less home grown food and the domestic food supply leans more toward big corporate farms.
Version 1, February 1989 GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE
Version 2, June 1991 GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE
Version 3, 29 June 2007 Mind to venture a guess how many non-FSF/GNU projects were created in the 28 months that the GPLv1 was the current license versus how many projects were created in the 16 years that the GPLv2 was the current license? Predicting the dominance of the GPLv3 based on the current usage of GPLv1 is a little disingenuous.
As for the GPLv3 being the dominate license in a few years, I've read that RMS already wants to get a GPLv4 out soon. If it's within the next 3 years, the GPLv3 will barely have time to catch on and the rapid license changes will make the GPL look unstable to non-FSF zealots.
You mean I'm not the only one who spills more gas pouring with a no-spill gas can than I've ever spilled in the previous 25 years with the old style cans? I swear I splash some out every time I use the no-spill ones because the venting system causes major glugs. I'm tempted to just poke an air hole in the top of the can.
Is this not strong evidence of a strong lack of diversity in their fields of work (they must not have many minorities working there) and a strong undercurrent of racism (they couldn't possibly have gotten these positions without help!).
Look at the NFL. Never mind that black people make up 13% of the population and make up about 70% of the players. Never mind that almost 30% of the assistant coaching positions and that 5 of the 32 (16%) teams have a black head coach. The league requires teams interview at least one black person for a coaching position. Isn't the league already over-represented in terms of race at pretty much every turn (save maybe ownership, which I'm not sure of offhand)?
My dad worked for the town highway department. It was 6 guys and an elected supervisor. Should they be forced to hire 3 women and a token black just to make it a diverse work environment or is it likely that women generally don't like doing highway maintenance work and the 1.7% black population is my town is statistically irrelevant in a population of 7 people? ALL of the K-3 grade teachers (ballpark of 20) in our school district are female. Shouldn't they have to disqualify women in the future until they reach parity so they have proper diversity?
How does the need for diversity in our culture affect our desire for fairness?
I don't think there is an inherent need for diversity (in terms of race or sex) in the vast majority of jobs. I think there's a need for diversity in thought or else we'll fall into the trap of group-think. We need people who will challenge the status quo instead of people we get a warm fuzzy for hiring. What do you think would change the **AA more, some black/female executives from the same colleges the current ones came from or someone who sees that the technology has changed and needs to be embraced if the industry is going to continue?
I think different types of people are attracted to different jobs and that's ok. We need to embrace our differences and realize that it is ok that not everyone is the same. There's no reason why a woman can't be an engineer and a male can't be a nurse but we aren't improving a field by forcing people who don't have a predilection for that field. Most of my teachers sucked because they didn't care about teaching, they cared about having a 7-3 job with all the best days off and great benefits (and yes, around here, they're paid as well as any other profession requiring a similar degree and have a better pension and guaranteed job security to boot - we've taken it too far and end up attracting so many idiots who want the benefit package that they drown out those whom would give up a career in engineering to teach math).
I'm not sure if you're implying the federal government should come up with a complicated formula by which to judge if the circumstances of a person's life merit particular help? That seems infeasible, though it might be nice.
I'm sure given sufficient analysis, we could come up with an objective formula that approximates a person's adversity merit, but I'm not sure we should implement it to that degree. Instead, I think it would be better interview/approval techniques would be better. Who works best with the rest of the team? Who really grasps the ideas and has suggestions for improvement? Who seems to have a keen insight to advance things? The same holds true for stuff like research grants. Who's idea really looks like it will have the greatest benefit and/or provide a currently unforeseen breakthrough?
So why would those type of criteria provide an advantage to people who had to work to overcome disadvantages to be on par with their peers? I went to school with a lot of people who never worked a job in their life before graduating college. They had lots of ideas on how things should work in theory and they had a lot of ideas on how they wanted things to work. What they didn't understand is how things actually work and what other people would wa
One can look at efforts to give advantages to minorities as unfair and reverse-racism/sexism. I certainly did for a long time. The truth is, though, that even when ignoring the existence of prejudice in people, white males are born into an advantageous position, and that advantageous position will likely grow without intervention, just as those with the most money are in a better position to make more money. That's not "fair" either, and will only lead to more prejudice. Just as progressive taxes are meant to redistribute wealth to the lower and middle classes in hopes that they'll be able to rise, we attempt to make it a little easier for minorities to get into fields dominated by white males in hopes that someday the advantage gap will disappear between groups. So, a white male born to a single welfare mother in the ghetto of a dying city has a more advantageous position than, say, Oprah Winfrey's children (if she were to have some)? If you want to truly promote equal opportunity, neither race nor sex is are primary factors. Parent's education level and economic background, the quality of public schools in the area, undue family hardships (father died from an injury at work or maybe mom died from cancer while the child was young), the person's intellect, work ethic, ability to overcome adversity, etc are all what you should look at.
When you say "This grant is only for people who were born without a penis (or perhaps people who chopped theirs off) or are not from a pure Caucasian descent," you are saying that those people are inherently inferior to all white males and they cannot make it on their own regardless of their personal circumstances. I have friends who are minorities and women who earned coveted positions through hard work but everyone assumes that they got them just because of their skin color or gender. That, in fact, breeds resentment and hatred between white males and others as well as instills an inferiority complex in everyone that we're supposedly helping with those policies. Hillary might as well hang a sign outside her restaurant that says "No White Males" and we can go back to the days of segregation. Two wrongs don't make a right.
I did NOT say it was trivial, I said it was not terrible far from the current state and especially not compared to bsd. Again you are purposely misinterpreting what I said seemingly because you are some sort of jackass. And yes I would do this if my coding time was not already spent on things I consider more important than the linux kernel. And Ingo considers his scheduler more important than implementing the code you've discussed. It's ok for you to work on something else but not for him or another kernel dev to work on what they consider important? Oh, and calling me a jackass clearly proves how little work there is in converting Linux to use the model you suggest. Thanks for the tip.
Mind giving me and installing an electric engine to put in [my truck] Here you go. It's your truck, you put it in. Way to completely miss the point. You're telling me that I need to spend MY time and money to make my truck conform to YOUR ideals. Not only that, but you need me to completely drop all of my current knowledge to work on something I know nothing about because you say it is going to be better. The onus is on you to prove that your concept is valid, not to expect me to stop working on something I enjoy/find useful to work on something that might not interest me at all.
You act as if the entire kernel would have to be rewritten and maybe even userspace, but that is not so. They would need to make some changes like being able to do anything from an in-kernel thread that an application can, which is not too terribly far from the current Linux (as opposed to say FreeBSD which would require a *lot* of work to do this). Hell even just start with something simple like inotify (the design of which is absurd) and make it so programs can process events inside the kernel, making it actually be useful (see BPF). Again, if you're so confident that it is trivial, why don't you code up some patches and send them to Linus (well, Andrew) with benchmarks? There's no short supply of people mailing LKML to tell them that they should implement some idea (quite a few of which are totally hare-brained)
These two recent examples come to mind
Thinking outside the box on file systems
The vi editor causes brain damage
or the dozens of threads requesting the kernel should use C++, glibc internally, etc.
Roman is a long time kernel dev and is the maintainer of AFFS, HFS, M68K and kconfig. He's hardly new to the scene. New to the scheduler code, perhaps.
All of this started with Roman doing a code review of CFS a month or two ago. Roman asked some questions to clarify what certain parts of the code were doing, Ingo asked Roman to provide more info so he could see where CFS was falling short on Roman's test cases. Both sides kept trying to talk passed each other. Eventually, Roman got frustrated and provided a new scheduler/patch with some mathematical proofs behind it to make the scheduling better. Roman and Ingo continued to talk passed each other. Ingo picked up some of Roman's patches. Roman feels slighted like he's being ignored but was just as guilty in ignoring Ingo (and other CFS devs) along the way. Factor in the taste in people's mouth from earlier this year with Con and the lines were already drawn before Roman got involved.
It's a clash of egos all around and nothing atypical for a large open source project.
Someone who is good writing a compiler may not be good at creating a new kernel design. Someone who is great at writing a window manager may not be great at creating a new cryptography algorithm.
Last time I saw, Linus was pretty open to taking patches... the bar you have to meet is that the patches need to be understandable by him (and thus maintainable) and that he thinks it will improve the kernel more than hurt it. If you have patches, submit them (or convince the person who did write them to submit them) and persuade Linus. If you don't have patches, pay someone to write them for you or at least convince (but don't berate) a kernel developer of the merits of your idea so they will write them for you. Don't, however, expect a kernel dev to go off on a tangent that is going to require large amounts of the kernel, some of which he may not have any interest in, to be replaced just because you think it might be a good idea. That's like expecting a government to completely dissolve its defense system because someone got the idea that everyone would be more relaxed if they got a free massage every week.
So don't use Linux if you think Linus is so evil. I promise he won't have any tears in his corn flakes tomorrow morning over it.
Did it ever occur to you that if Linux hadn't existed then the GNU people might have paid a little more attention to the HURD? I started college in 1995. At the time, I had been using OS/2 as my OS and Borland compilers at home (though I had played with the 30 some disks of Slackware a little). At college, we had a bunch of Sun and SGI boxes that used their respective compilers in the computer labs. In order to make things easier, I wanted to go with something UNIXy at home but I obviously wasn't going to afford to buy one of those expensive boxes. So, what did I do? I installed Linux again (this time off a Red Hat CDROM I bought through cheapbytes).
That started my dual booting era, OS/2 for games and Linux for getting work done. Of course, with Linux came gcc, glibc, etc. During that time, gcc was pretty stagnant and would soon bring about EGCS (which, in 1999, officially took over the gcc project). glibc, if I'm not mistaken, was actually written mostly by Roland McGrath, rather than Stallman, and for a while, the Linux guys actually had their own version. That fork forced the GNU project to make a better, more POSIX compliant, C library.
The ultimate question is... without early adopters of Linux like me (and 1995 was still pretty early if you remember the Linux 1.2 days), would as much attention have been brought to the GNU tools and would there have been the pressure to improve them? Yes, the tools undoubtedly predated Linux but the influx of new users forced them to evolve into something far better than they were before that.
These days, Stallman doesn't do that much coding anymore. I've been told he still contributes the occasional patch here and there, but he's largely become disconnected with the coder side of things and rather has become more of a proselytizer of the FSF/GNU philosophy than anything else. The fact that he declared that gcc would be GPLv3 by August 1st (and any subsequent patches, even on the existing branch, would as well) even though as of last week, the gcc developers still weren't sure what to do about the files with exceptions for the pending 4.2.2 release. It's a case of "force the software to use my new license now before we even get a chance to think through the implications fully!"
National Defense: 447
Education: 88
Health: 285
Medicare: 377
Income Security: 357
Social Security: 556
Let's throw in a wild and crazy overly inflated $200 billion more for Iraq. That puts us at $647 billion for defense and $1663 billion for welfare spending out of a budget of $2592 billion. Even if you're one of those people who insist that SSDI/SSI "shouldn't" count (though it obviously does), that still leaves the social programs at $750 billion which is still more than defense. Also, states don't spend a whole lot on defense but do spend a ton on welfare in addition to what the feds spend. Then on top of that, we also have local taxes (sales tax, property taxes, etc) of which, a good portion goes to social programs and none of which goes to military spending.
And as long as you want to talk about percentages of federal budget, that puts military spending (including inflated Iraq numbers) at 25% with welfare spending at 64%. Now, I can point to the federal government having the power to provide for a national defense in the Constitution. Can you tell me where, specifically, the federal government was granted the power to create a Ponzi retirement scheme, mess with local education issues, create public medical insurance programs, etc? It is duplicitous if you support the federal assumption of ungranted power for such programs but don't support something like the Patriot Act. Either you support federal power grabs or you don't.
As for ongoing costs of policies.. Lets look back to 1960 in comparison:
National Defense: 48
Education: 1
Health: 0.8
Medicare: none
Income Security: 7
Social Security: 12
$48 billion in defense compared to just under $21 billion for welfare on a $92 billion budget
1970? mid-Vietnam
National Defense: 82
Education: 9
Health: 6
Medicare: 6
Income Security: 16
Social Security: 30
Total budget: 196
1980
National Defense: 134
Education: 32
Health: 23
Medicare: 32
Income Security: 87
Social Security: 119
Total budget: 591
1990
National Defense: 299
Education: 37
Health: 58
Medicare: 98
Income Security: 149
Social Security: 249
Total budget: 1253
2000
National Defense: 294
Education: 54
Health: 155
Medicare: 197
Income Security: 254
Social Security: 409
Total budget: 1789
Calculating for inflation, that 1960 $48 billion for defense is $320 billion in 2006 dollars. That $294 billion in 2000 is $344 billion in 2006. Non-Iraq military spending is pacing a little ahead of inflation. Can you guess which programs are far outpacing inflation and have gone from 23% of the budget in 1960 to 64% of the budget today? Hint, they're the programs that you say "cost less" than defense spending. And again, that is only at the federal level. States and local governments add hundreds of billions more in social spending.
As for wasting money on NASA, $25 billion is a drop in the bucket compared to that $1663 billion in welfare spending. Not only that, but I can make an argument for NASA providing national defense benefits (which is a power granted to the feds).
*My budget numbers were taken from hist03z1.xls from http://www.gpoaccess.gov/usbudget/
Even with content over the internet, your provider may encourage you to get the power user package at a higher cost to achieve the bandwidth (both burst and total monthly consumption) needed. I know my ISP (RR) offers a $30 light version (I think it is 1Mbit down, 128k up), $45 standard (10 Mbit down, 384k up) and $60 power user version (15 Mbit down, 1 Mbit up). You get a $5 discount for also subscribing to any cable package. I know there is some kind of bandwidth consumption cap that they'll kick people over but 15 gigs a month isn't atypical for me and I've never gotten any type of warning (standard package).
I wouldn't be surprised if the cable subscribers are still subsidizing the DOCSIS infrastructure as well. Cable modems only require a couple channels of space versus everything else coming down the line... and all of that equipment at the head end costs money. I'm not a cable/networking guy so I'm not sure just how much equipment is needed to eliminate the cable channels while going entirely internet infrastructure.
Still, when I get high speed fiber later this month -- I'll watch what I want online. Cable and satellite will merge with the internet seamlessly in the near future -- it's just that the U.S. is terribly behind in it's high speed infrastructure compared to other countries. That's mostly because the current setup is "good enough" for most people. Look at how many people still willingly use dialup even though broadband is available to them (who wants to spend $40 a month to read 3 emails a week when you can get dialup for $9.95 or whatever?) The infrastructure won't be upgraded until either people demand it (and even then, it may require an act of government (not necessarily at the federal level) to goad companies into upgrading) or until the infrastructure becomes so deteriorated that they have to upgrade to keep providing the current level of service (we're seeing this with companies switching to fiber internally but we still have that whole last mile situation).
And what of infrastructure costs? A digital cable box might cost $200 and then you need to factor in depreciation. The cable company has to run wire down your street, from the pole to your house, etc. They have to maintain those wires. They need to maintain their broadcasting equipment. They need to handle billing and technical support. It probably costs $10-15 a month per subscriber just to maintain the network (and I've seen estimates for Dish Network's per customer fixed costs being around $28/month)... So, more than likely, you'd see something like my electric bill:
Basic Connection Fee: $10
Equipment Rental: $5
Content Delivery:
ALA Carte Channel 52: $0.75
ALA Carte Channel 67: $1.50
ALA Carte Channel 115: $0.75
ALA Carte Channel 242: $1.00
ALA Carte Channel 300: $0.75
ALA Carte Channel 633: $1.25
Franchise Fee: $4
Subtotal: $25
Taxes: $5
Amount Due: $30
That said... this spring, I got a really interesting offer that compelled me to leave Dish Network and return back to my local cable company. Their full package of digital cable (about 250 channels) plus every (43) movie channel with 2 digital receivers for $60/month and the rate is guaranteed for 2 years. I've even found myself watching channels I didn't think I would like just because they're now available to me for less than I was paying Dish for their 150 channel package + 3 sets of premium channels (I dropped $35/month off my monthly tv bill). When my 2 years is about to expire, I'll tell the cable company they can renew my package or I'll shop around for the cheapest price again. I made sure I kept my Dish equipment rather than take the $100 trade in credit so the cost to start with them will be negligible. As an added bonus, it knocked $5/month off my cable modem bill too.
I'd say that most kids drop out not for any specific reason, but because they aren't inspired, and have too many family problems to internalize the graduation goal. I'd say you just randomly make up undefined statistics. Care to show me studies that say 50.1% of kids drop out because "they lack inspiration and can't internalize the graduation goal."
They're distracted by people who the realistic dream of $1000 can easily overpower. Just giving them that specific dream, on top of all the other known benefits of staying in school, should push at least 0.1% of them over the line. And that's worth the money. I have a dream that, I too, can invest 13 years to get a $1000 return on my investment. I mean, that's like a whole month worth of minimum wage pay. Way to grab my attention and stoke the fire of my dreams.
Parents aren't solving the problem. Maybe if we gave parents $1000, too, when their kids graduate on time, we'd get more than 0.2% to do it. And then we'd break even. Hey, I know... why don't we give everyone a billion dollars! It'll solve all of our problems and everyone will be rich. Even if just 0.2% of people invest it wisely, we'll make great strides.
What's important is to get over the impulse to moralize. These HS grads are going to get an opportunity to make a bonus for meeting quotas in a job soon after graduating. They'll make a bonus for meeting quotas after they go to college, achieve full member status in their union or whatever... High school graduates flipping burgers don't get bonuses (which is the type of job they're going to get "soon after graduating" high school)
For the most successful, that bonus will become their greatest motivation, as the largest part of their income. Wow, in DocRubyland, high school graduates get bonuses big enough to be "the largest part of their income?" So, every high school grad immediately gets a job working as a stock broker with a million dollar bonus because the company had a good year? Damn... if only I had lived there instead of Earth when I graduated.
Dreaming that parents will just become better, especially when we don't even increase parents' graduation rate, is a recipe for the unacceptable status quo. And throwing hundreds of billions in extra money at the education system over the last 20 years has solved the problem already. Throwing $225 billion more (75 million kids * $1000 each + 150 million parents * 1000 each) will certainly solve the problem. Ehh.. who cares that we're going to have to raise the taxes of the working poor and middle class even more to pay for it.
The introduction of the welfare system in the US has solved what problems? Incarceration rates are higher now than they were before it. The family structure of urban youth has been decimated and there is more likely to be no father figure than one and with that comes a lack of discipline. We've spent hundreds of billions of dollars (and raised the taxes of the working poor to pay for it) while encouraging the next generation to put their hand out like their parent did.
I've got more than 30 first cousins on my dad's side of the family. My dad and 2 siblings moved out of the ghetto they grew up in. Each one of those families had 2 kids and 5 of the 6 graduated (the 6th deciding to drop out with 2 months left to go in her senior year because she was failing english... after her father had a brain aneurysm/stroke). Average family size for the siblings remaining in the city is 6. All of them grew up without a father (and in fact, there were 2-4 fathers for each of the women having kids) and all of them grew up on welfare. None of those 25 graduated. 2 were murdered. Every one of the girls now has kids and are on welfare (as early as age 14). All of the guys (except two) are currently in prison or engaging in activity that will put them there. One of the exceptions actually moved out of the city as an adult and has built a relatively decent life for himself (not that he didn't do jail time as a kid). The other one is 7 and his mother had him because her youngest was about to turn 18 so she was going to get kicked off welfare. They've all utterly destroyed the homes that they were provided and have chosen to live in conditions of absolute filth (2" of dog crap covering the basement floor, your feet stick to their kitchen floors when you walk through, roaches everywhere, etc).
But hey, we (all US taxpayers) can feel better because we supported their kids and that put them in a situation where they were going to live better lives than their parents. Welfare also ensured we weren't going to be incarcerating them all.
Modify welfare so that it encourages them to have families (as in a mother and father in the home) if they want to receive it. Tie their welfare benefits to the children's school performance and their criminal history. Limit the amount of welfare they can receive (in terms of years of payments) to prevent them from having more kids to milk the system longer. Put the families to work (such as picking up parks, removing graffiti, etc) to teach them the value of earning something and to promote the idea of taking care of something). I really like models like Habitat for Humanity that encourages people to help others and value what they receive versus the current welfare system of basically handing someone a check and telling them they'll get another same day next month.
The problem all starts at home... if the parents don't instill the value of education in their kids, their kids almost certainly won't get it. By cushioning the effects of not valuing education, we promote the idea that education isn't really important. In fact, many urban areas are fervently anti-education because you must be a sucker if you want to stay legit rather than give in to the easy life (even if it means you're going to die before you can legally drink).
I'm still not convinced. You're saying that some medical technology was developed in a wartime environment. I'm not disputing that. BUT, war is an incredibly inefficient way to develop medical technology. You're far better off skipping the war, and directly investing in health care and medical research. So when you say we owe a debt to war for the medical technology we have, I still argue that we'd have BETTER medical technology if the money we spent on war were put to better use.
And yet, you'll sit there and argue out of ignorance because you choose to so you don't have to question your internal biases. Entire fields of medicine were developed and refined because of war medical needs; Emergency medicine being one of the most important. But hey, triage, stabilization and evacuation techniques would have developed all on their own decades earlier if it wasn't for a military needing with hundreds of soldiers being wounded.
Wars of old were over some pretty stupid things, yes. But these are subsiding, and being replaced by imperialist wars. Forget ancient mythology. Check out the past century. My farm dries up while my neighbor has more water than he can use but refuses to share. It is capitalism for me to go steal his water to keep my family from dying? Good example. Under capitalism, your neighbor is quite within their rights to refuse to share 'their' water with you. You starve, or you fight. That's all that capitalism offers. Under socialism, there is no such thing as 'your' water or 'their' water, as water is a shared natural resource. If you need water, you get it from the state, and the state may then go and get it from your neighbor.
And where does the state get the water from? Oh yeah, forced coercion of your neighbor. Give us your water to give to everyone else and we won't throw you in jail, charge you with crimes against humanity and the state, and maybe we'll let you keep some for yourself. Oh, and he better dig another well while he's at it so they can get some more water off the fruit of his labor while his neighbor sits on his ass complaining he's thirsty. Humans are inherently self-centered. They will protect their family first before they aid the town on the other side of the county, the city in another state and the country on another continent. We aren't ants and the flaw of communism and similar models is they expect us to not be human. Again, you are letting your own anti-capitalism bias cloud your judgment.
Some people will kill each other still just because of the color of their skin. Not without being stirred up by some ultra-conservative arse-wipe first though. It's important to keep that in mind.
It's gotta be a conservative, right? Why, damn that David Duke for going out to LA back in 1992 and stirring up the blacks so they would go attack the Koreans. Screw that neo-con Abbie Hoffman and the others who incited the 1968 Chicago riots. The Black Panthers? Rush Limbaugh's personal attack squad.
Very few people actually like and support full scale war... but, it is the one thing guaranteed to provide a solution to a problem. On the contrary, it's the only thing guaranteed to NOT provide a solution. You see, there's no peace without justice. And justice is not distributed by the strongest army - it's achieved by human negotiation and compassion. I deeply pity you if you see war as the only solution to the world's problems. I also hope you never get in a position of any power ( karma ensures that people who abuse power in one life very rarely get access to power again ).
I didn't say war was the only, nor the best, solution to every problem... I said that war is the one thing that is guaranteed to be a solution to every problem. Fact is, violence solves problems. That bully that harassed you in school? If you would have punched him in the nose, he would have left you alone... Whining to your parents just made him laugh at you and encouraged him more. Some
Doctors, when faced with medical problems, strive to find solutions. Our initial knowledge of anatomy came from doctors disecting deceased people, to see how they tick. Some ... a VERY small percentage ... of this knowledge came from the battlefield. An overwhelming majority did NOT come from the battlefield, but from universities.
It's hard to find solutions when you don't have a fresh stream of people in the right place at the right time to try them out on. Certainly, you wouldn't argue that a 10 year old with a facial scar from a car accident when she was 3 is the person to do initial experiments with plastic surgery on. Guys who are missing half of their face from a shrapnel wound? Good choice.
Prior to the Civil War, armies didn't really try to set up field hospitals where they could perform on-site diagnosis, triage and surgery facing a wide array of potentially fatal, somewhat random wounds. They treated everything from burns to gangrene to shattered bones in those hospitals. Morbidity post-amputation was pretty high and that's where sterilization procedures started coming into play. Where do you think the system of roving medics who triage wounds and stabilize patients en-route to doctors (like EMTs/ambulances/helicopters rushing you to the hospital) comes from?
a mini PBS documentary of some of the history of medicine and the military. I've seen lots of stuff on the History Channel as well. There are a LOT of books and other information out there describing the advances made in medicine because of warfare. If you think we'd be where we are without those sacrifices, you'd be very mistaken. Pick up a book, pretty much any book on the subject, and educate yourself before you go off spouting that scientists/doctors will make advances at the rate they have without patients to work on.
Not at all. Capitalism, and in particular Imperialism is driving all the wars on the planet, in one form or another. Even the stupid tribal wars in Africa can be traced back to a bunch of capitalists who want to profit from selling arms and generally sticking their nose ( and capital ) where's it's not wanted. The Middle East is of course the most obvious example of imperialist meddling leading to wars. Individuals - even large groups of them - have no interest in war. People want to solve their problems in constructive ways, that benefit everyone. It's the capitalists who use massive armies and WOMD to enforce their will.
Check your history... Everyone has an ancestor who has been involved in war. It doesn't matter if they were from Athens, Egypt, Russia, Peru or Japan. Everyone fights at some time and you're ignorant if you think it's always pure capitalism at heart. My farm dries up while my neighbor has more water than he can use but refuses to share. It is capitalism for me to go steal his water to keep my family from dying? Only if that is the prism that you look at the entire world through. Wars were fought over the eye of a woman (see Helen of Troy... yes, mythology but mythology is often based in historical fact to convey a lesson). Siblings fight over the attention of their parents. Some people will kill each other still just because of the color of their skin.
Very few people actually like and support full scale war... but, it is the one thing guaranteed to provide a solution to a problem. Diplomacy can never work without a military to enforce it and if someone refuses diplomacy and keeps attacking you, you have no choice but to force them into surrender.
Now... since you seem to be in the camp that the US shouldn't stick its nose into other people's business, do you also agree we have no business going into Darfur, had no business in Kosovo, Somalia, etc? Or do you mean we have no business meddling in other people's affairs unless it is something you, in particular, approve of? I know quite a few people who have an inte
Replacements will eventually get better. In fact, there was a story on slashdot a couple weeks ago about a new hand, As to the person saying the military will only get such things for high ranking soldiers, the story I saw on tv was about one Sgt. Juan Arredondo. Not only not major brass, he's hispanic as well.
Everyone has a pet project on how they'd want to spend X million dollars... and we'll never agree 100% on any expenditure. However, I feel it is our duty to return as much life back to those who volunteered to protect our lives and freedom. Also, lets be realistic, as long as people are human, they will disagree and disagreements will eventually spill over into war of some kind (be it one military against another, one gang against another or two siblings fighting that goes too far).
People (and politicians) in NYC have no idea what the rest of the state needs and they don't care so long as they get what they want. I've been from Jamestown to Binghamton, Buffalo to Messina and live in a rural county somewhere in between all of that. The rest of the state has nothing in common with New York City and desperately needs to remove the albatross from its neck because we've been sinking for at least 20 years with no signs of care (well, maybe some election time lip service) from Albany. Draw a line along Rensselaer, Albany, Greene, Ulster and Sullivan counties. Those counties and everyone to the south can be New York State and the rest of the state can form another state.
And yeah, we do have an awful lot of right wing Conservatives (Conservative Party of New York State) that don't necessarily align themselves the Republican party. Without their support, no Republican candidate has won a state-wide election in recent history. There are only 149,157 registered Conservatives in NY. There are a lot of liberal Republicans who will gladly vote for a liberal Republican candidate. There are a lot of conservative Republicans who won't vote for a liberal Republican candidate. In fact, I think that's the main reason Pataki chose to not run again... over time, he'd gone more and more against conservative principles and a lot of those conservative Republicans weren't going to vote for him again, just to send him a message. As I mentioned in the post you replied to, that automatically gives the Democrat a win so Pataki saw the writing on the wall and got out by retiring rather than losing.
The Republican campaign against Hillary in 2006 was the most pathetic political campaign I've seen since Mondale in 1984. The Republicans spent months just trying to drum up a candidate and when it looked like they finally had one (Janine Pirro), she bailed and switched to run for Attorney General instead because she was too liberal to get the conservative vote. Ultimately, the Republicans had to hold a primary less than two months before the election. The result is that I actually just had to look up the name of the guy I voted for (John Spencer) because he had no time to campaign against the well-oiled incumbent Clinton machine. So again, the post I originally responded to is completely mischaracterizing her re-election as an approval of the job she's done when it is really anything but.
PS, as I was looking up the date for the rent control thing, I came across a NY Times Article written today saying that Silver is out to stir up the rent control thing again.
Also, the picture of Hillary on Wikipedia scares the hell out of me, everything seems out of proportion.