Maybe I'm being dense but I'm not sure if your'e implying that there is one that does.
No, I was implying that if you knew of a party that advocated that position, I'd vote for them.
It'd be a wasted vote, though, as the 2000 elections showed us with the Green party.
Heh, why do you think I joined the Navy? Once out of boot camp they only make us PT test twice a year, and generally I had to cheat on the measly 1.5 mile run.
That's 1.5 miles more than they make you run in the Air Force.
One of the many inter-service jokes was about that. I don't recall the details, because it wasn't that funny, but it went something like:
P.T. in the various services: The Marines: Every day, wake up at 3am, run five miles, do 100 push ups and 100 sit-ups. Army: Every day, wake up at 5am, run two miles, do 50 push ups and 50 sit-ups. Navy: Once a week, wake up at 5am, run 1.5 miles Air Force: Every day, wake up sometime before noon, walk to the coffee maker, and look at the track.
I have felt for some time that affirmative action programs shouldn't be abolished but should be restructured to give people preference based on socioeconomic factors instead of purely on race.
That's a great idea. Now, which political party has that as part of their platform?
I'd classify my upbringing as lower-middle class,...
Wow. Our upbringings are eerily similar.
I was also brought up lower-middle class; my father had nothing more than an AA (required for his short career as a police officer), and raised us by himself after my parent's divorce. Chicken pot pies were the big meal of the week, with a healthy macaroni-and-cheese diet the rest of the time. For a while there, we were a decidedly low-income family.
I, too, barely made it out of high-school -- I repeated a class or two, but luckily never an entire year -- but in my case, I joined the Army. I don't think it did anything for me except make me a little more assertive.
In my case, it was sheer luck that I got anywhere. My mother loved higher education, and always lived in college towns, which was a marked improvement over the inner-city low-income neighborhoods my dad lived in. My high school was one of the early ones to have a fully stocked computer lab and an outstanding teacher for the computer classes. Mostly, I was lucky to be interested, and have some ability, in a subject that turned out to pay pretty well.
In your case, the Navy was a positive influence on you, and gave you the strength of will and the wherewithall to get where you wanted. In my case, the Army gave me enough money to pay for college, and a healthy desire to never, ever, be forced to do P.T. again. Ever.
It seems we disagree on the amount of a handicap low-income children suffer, which appears to be a critical factor in how much we think people are responsible for their own situations.
I don't think that Wal-Mart is in danger of falling victim to unionization anytime soon.
No, probably not. I don't believe the truly evil corporations will ever be brought to justice. We only punish the management of corporations who are incompetent, and who cost stockholder's money, not the ones stealing from the poor and middle-class.
Part of that is that the 90's conomy has taught people that a successful stock market means a healthy economy
Agreed, on every point.
Actually I blame the Democrats for that, America was good and ready to vote for somebody else, in fact most of the other potential Democratic candidates would have beaten Dubya easily. Instead they nominated Kerry who pretty much ran on a "Vote for me because I'm not George W Bush" platform.
Again, agreed. I believe that part of the problem is that the Dems are controlled by big business, and so are unable to significantly differentiate themselves from the Republicans and have failed to give the undecided voters a good reason to vote for them. That, and the fact that the Republicans have Joeseph Goebbels' head in a jar, writing propaganda for them. Christ, I've never seen such good spin doctors, and they're doing an unparalleled job at exploiting the average American's 30 second attention span. The democrats have simply been unable to compete.
It takes ca. 5 seconds to know this by googling for debian AND mp3 AND patent AND policy, which brings up this thread as the first link.
Well, see? That's my problem. I was just Googling for debian AND mp3. Why didn't I think to add "patent" AND "policy"? Duh. I mean, it isn't like I've been using MP3's for the past ten years without considering patent policy... oh, wait...
Anyway, there are things I have interest in dicking around with, and that isn't one of them. I got bored with having to fight with package managers a long time ago.
I'm sure Debian is fine for you, and that's great. Go wild. I just didn't like it much.
--- SER
To be sure the workers (and in these parts at least also the shoppers) at Wal-Mart are indeed the dregs of society, but at the risk of sounding like a Republican (am a Libertarian) that's really nobody's fault but their own.
At the risk of being modded -1 (Offtopic), I'd like to point out that -- while what you're saying is undeniably true, it is true in the Republican sense of "true" -- that is, there is truth in the words, but it hides and ignores a lot of greater truths that would entirely change the meaning.
Now, I haven't done a study of the social class of the average Walmart employee, but there is one thing that I'm sure of: if you're born into a lower class family in the US, you face enormous oppositions to raising yourself out of that class, and have to exert Herculean effort to do so. It may not be as impossible as it is in some other countries, but I'm not here to compare the US to other countries.
If you're born into a middle or upper class family, your odds of going to a decent school are better: The odds that your parents are educated, and therefore value education and are better able to help you in your education, are better. Your parents will, on average, have fewer children, and will therefore have more resources to spend on each child. The odds that you'll have to quit school to support your family are smaller. Your peers will be less of a drag on your success potential. On top of all that, I strongly believe that you'll have much more optimism in your own potential to succeed.
Children from low income families aren't somehow genetically inferior to those from middle-class families; they're just smacked on the head, every day of their lives, with failure. They're surrounded by it, they're taught to expect it by what they see in their neighborhoods and in the media. They're raised with an entirely different set of social values.
I'm not talking entirely about inner city kids. The US is peppered with low-income, quasi-rural, trailer parks and small towns, where the average income is technically poverty level.
What I'm saying is that, most of the time, it isn't their fault, except that they've failed to exhibit unusual precociousness and stupendous strength-of-will.
If Wal-Mart didn't pay them outragious amounts of money to screw over their workers, squeeze their suppliers and crush their competition
I'd say their main goal is to line their own pockets, and then cash out as soon as they've riled up the employees so much that they form a union, and Walmart suffers the market death you predict (if that happens). But, whatever. You're right; we don't reward companies, or executives, for being good social citizens. We reward them for profit, which is why things are so screwed up and we get the Enrons, the Haliburtons, and the Walmarts. Google, as an (arguable) exception, is proof.
Unions don't always look out for them members benefit,
Unions, by and large, do what their employees vote. To strike, the employees have to authorize the strike. If 51% vote to strike (or whatever is required by the union rules), well, that's democracy.
I agree that the mobs don't always know what is in their best interests; witness the re-election of G.W. Bush, but that doesn't mean that the union leaders exercise the same control over the union members that executives do.
As far as my own union stories go, I only have one: my father-in-law is a pilot (now retired), and a couple of decades ago, the pilots went on strike at the company he worked for (Easter). He crossed the line, and was blackballed by the union, and was unable to get a job in the US thereafter. He eventually went to work for Eva Air, but until then, the union members really gave him a hard time, putting offensive signs on his lawn, sending hate mail, that sort of thing. It was pretty rough for him, and the union was, IMO, entirely unethical, if not illegal, in it's practices. Considering what pilots make, I think this is absurd. However, considering the plight of Walmart employees, I think they'd be perfectly justified in unionizing.
By "ship," I mean "ship." As in, comes with. As in: KDE on my wife's Debian laptop would neither play, nor burn, MP3s. That's "shipped." There is no MP3 support in Debian, as it ships. As in, getting MP3 and mplayer support requires modifying obscure (to people who don't know app) files to include obscure (to people who don't know app) URLs, and upgrading major parts of the system. At least, that was the case when I last touched Debian, which was over a year ago.
Now, I don't know why Debian doesn't support mplayer out of the box, but I'm pretty sure I ran across some discussion about how the Debian committee doesn't like the mplayer license, or something, and that it had nothing to do with the legality of the software. But I could be wrong about that.
In any case, what I said, and what I meant, is that Debian doesn't ship with support for some -- what I consider -- pretty basic software, and I haven't heard anybody respond with anything other than (1) why they can't ship it, (2) how simple it is to circumvent the law by downloading it from out-country, and (3) how stupid I am for not knowing how to use apt. None of which invalidates my claim about Debian not. Shipping. With. MP3. Support.
What are you talking about? You just have to add one well-advertised repository to apt, and can install whatever multimedia stuff you want, be it mp3 en/decoders, decss, win32 libraries, etc. (You should live in a country where this is legal to do this.)
Well, I don't live in a country where this is legal, and it wasn't obvious to me where this well-advertised repository is, and I still don't see how you can add MP3 support to KDE when the support has to be compiled into the KDE apps that use it... unless you are suggesting that I also re-install KDE using the version on this alternative repository.
In the end, it was just easier to wipe Debian and install Gentoo.
--- SER
Please don't confuse Ubuntu for Debian - Debian does ship with mp3 support.
My wife's laptop came with Debian, and it didn't come with MP3 support. There was no support for MP3 in KDE, either, and IIRC, when I tracked down why, it was due to licensing issues. It was a royal PITA, I can tell you, especially because Debian is a binary distribution, so you can't just add MP3 support.
for every VP & above at Wal-Mart there are 800 or more high school dropouts, meth users and unwed mothers in vests in the stores
That sounds an awful lot like "the executives" and "the worthless, amoral, drug-using employees." They're mostly criminals and dead-beats anyway, so why is anybody complaining about how they get treated?
I could possibly agree with you except for one thing, it's not up to the empployees,
This is true, and is why I don't like unions. However, I maintain that even a bad union is better than Walmart, and that a union is a democracy, where a company without a union is an autocracy.
Or, put another way: without a union, you're a serf. With a union, even if the vote doesn't always go your way, at least you have one. At least a union is marginally looking out for the employee's best interests; Walmart has proven that upper management is actively hostile to its employees.
Perhaps you missed the part where I said I don't shop at Wal-Mart (15 years & counting) because I don't like them as a company
Sorry, my bad. I didn't mean "you" as in you, personally.
Lets compare Wal-Mart & Target shall we, Target employees are paid better and likely have better benefits but everyone knows that Target is more expensive for the consumer, and there are less Targets and thus less Target empployees. Personally I dirive past Wal-Mart to get to Target where I know I'll pay more but there are too many American's who wouldn't dream of doing something like that.
Ok, so I hear you saying that if Walmart were better to their employees in any significant way, then they'd have to raise their prices. You're saying that reducing management salaries and benefits, and reducing the profit margin would not be sufficient to cover the cost. You're also saying that, once Walmart raises their prices, they'll cease to have their "unique" competitive edge, and people will start shopping at Target, and that Walmart will stop being able to breed stores at a fungus-like rate like they currently do. And that a current source of really cheap consumer goods will be less cheap, and fewer Walmarts will mean fewer employment opportunities for the dregs of American society. Is that about right?
If so, then I think that's an entirely reasonable way to look at the situation, although I don't entirely agree with your analysis. I do agree that unionizing Walmart is an extreme measure, but I also believe it may be the only measure available to Walmart employees, given the utter failure of Walmart to take any steps to improve the treatment of their employees. And again, I assert that if Walmart employees unionize, it'll be only Walmart management's fault. People only unionize when they feel utterly repressed. People are greedy and unionizing can improve their salaries and benefits, but unionizing is also a lot of work, and I have faith in the belief that the common man's laziness is far stronger than his greed -- to such an extent that people unionize only in the most dire of circumstances.
Anyway, I have no idea whether there's any real push to unionize among Walmart employees. But I wouldn't mind seeing it happen. I'd even more like to see Walmart's upper management brought up on some sort of ethical business practices charges, but there's that Bush-joins-MENSA probability again.
But what people need to understand, and generally they don't, is that to unionize Wal-Mart is to destroy (effectively) Wal-Mart. I really think there are a lot of people who believe that if Wal-Mart were union friendly that the workers would be better paid and be treated better but that the low prices would remain and that nothing else would change.
Sure, because it isn't like Walmart management is going to reduce their multi-million dollar salaries, their enormous benefits package, and their huge profit margins just to give their employees a fair deal.
In any case, it isn't their choice to unionize or not; that's up to the employees. No industry voluntarily chooses unionization; unionization has been forced by the workers, and sometimes by the community. If Walmart's employees unionize, it is Walmart's own fault for being an abusive employer, and they deserve it. It would survive if the management learned to be less greedy, and if it didn't... well, you'd just have to learn to live without your $3.00 one-gallon jar of pickles.
it's not like there are fat margins that can be eroded
Say what? Walmart is extremely profitable, and there are a lot of people getting rich off it. Just not the people who actually do any work there. If Walmart didn't fuck their employees, they could still afford lower prices by cutting their profit margin, or their executive salaries, or their executive's benefits.
Seriously; this is Walmart we're talking about. IBM executives make a butt-load of money, but their employees do pretty well, too. The disparity between the Walmart benefits for the executives and the employees is so huge, it isn't anything but absurd.
--- SER
I'd be happy if Dell supported one distro (or hell, even netBSD). It would mean that other distro's could look at the drivers used & have an easy time supporting Dell.
Agreed, and good point. Dell only has to make sure that everything on their (supported) laptop works under some version of Linux, and make things like the kernel config available on a support site. The people who care about which distribution they use will be able to tweak their own distribution for the laptop, and the people who don't care won't complain about Dell's choice of distribution.
Besides; it'll be a cold day in hell when the Linux community converges on a single distribution. Distributions like Gentoo will always be popular with people like me who are sick of the dependency hell of Redhat, the crippled nature of Debian (which doesn't ship with mplayer or mp3 support, fer christsake), or whatever. And there are a ton of people who think compiling everything from scratch is obsessive and takes too long.
In GoboLinux, binary and source packages are both first-class citizens, which is nice, but talk about diverging from the norm -- geez. *I* like Gobo, but there's about as much chance of it becoming The Linux Distribution as... well, as G.W. Bush has of being accepted by MENSA.
I'm not surprised that Dell doesn't grok the Linux community; if he did, he'd understand the parent poster's point, but you have to understand the fact that the Linux community is largely comprised of DIYers.
Sure the Wal-Mart jobs would be shitty McJobs but personally I'd rather have a shitty McJob than be on welfare.
Yes. I don't disagree with you; I'd, personally, rather submit to mild torture than be killed. I'd rather be forced to eat dog shit than have my fingernails pulled out. And I'd rather work at Walmart than watch my family starve.
This doesn't justify the fact that Walmart abuses its employees; it doesn't justify the fact that, when they go into a market, they regularly ignore local environmental laws while they're putting in their installation because it is cheaper to pay the fines than it is to obey the regulations. There is, simply, no excuse for their behavior; they aren't struggling to stay out of bankruptcy, and their executives don't have to forgo basic medical coverage.
I'm not a big fan of unions, but if there is any good reason for the continued existence of unions, it is corporations like Walmart. Walmart is a perfect example of how businesses are capable of abusing employees in the absence of an organized workforce or decent employment regulation. Really, the rest of corporate America should be pissed off at Walmart, too. Walmart is a major reason why lots of people laugh when they hear American industries say that they need to be given an opportunity to self-regulate. Walmart is my one-word answer to libertarian political philosophy.
but multinational corporations are just not something I can rouse the neccessary emotional response to sympathise with.
I hate Walmart, or, rather, I hate Walmart management. They're terrible community citizens -- in fact, if Walmart was a person, it'd have been in and out of jail for most of its life due to a habitual tendancy for vandalizm and assault.
Also, I agree with you -- corporations are *not* living entities. I sympathize with my television more than I sympathize with any corporation.
That said, I think that most people who feel sympathy with the company are really feeling sympathy with:
Their own pocket book ("Walmart has great prices! One stop shopping!")
They are feeling sympathetic to all of the people that Walmart employs, who might not have jobs otherwise
The main problem with the humanist sympathizers is that they're entirely ignorant about, or they choose to ignore, how shitty Walmart treats the people who work for it. It is similar to justifying sweat-shops by saying that the people are better off being raped than they are starving. The fact that often gets ignored is that these aren't non-profit organizations. There are plenty of fat (figuratively) fucks at the top who are getting rich while they figure out new ways of screwing their employees out of benefits.
Despite the rant, I do think that there are people who are simply ignorant, and do believe that Walmart is a good thing for the jobs it brings into communities.
Nearly one in eight did not even bother to check out a route they were unfamiliar with and simply relied on the technology to get them to their destination.
Well, duh. If it works, why would they check it? Seriously, if you discover after using it that the navigation system reliably gets you there, why would you check the route?
From what I've seen, the system in the Prius is a better navigator than most humans I've encountered.
Google should expunge all references to Perfect 10 from their database, and should simply filter out any results for them.
I'm siding with Google on this one. Copyright law allows reproduction in part; only returning 2% of an image (by thumbnailing it), IMO, constitutes a partial reproduction.
.. if "Unix" is Linux, OS X and the various surviving Unixes. This is (way) less impressive if it's only the latter.
The "Unix" category doesn't include Linux[1], which the article states took third place with about 5.3 billion. It also doesn't include mainframes, which took another 5 billion. So, even if you discount mainframes, POSIX OSes still took 23 billion, while Windows took only 18 billion.
The important metric, which the article omits, is by how much the Windows market grew; they only say that they took in 17.7 billion in 2005, and not how much they took in 2004. The do say (indirectly) that Linux grew by 23%, and I'd be surprised if Windows grew by that much.
[1] Maybe somebody should should bring that up in the SCO case.
but it was 65 F in the middle iof January in Baltimore, MD, USA and I was wearing shorts and a tee and I loved it. Use more hairspray Jersey!
The problem being, of course, that if this keeps on, the state of New Jersey and the city of Baltimore are both going to be under water, and the Poconos (a small mountain range in PA) are going to be beach-front property.
Don't kid yourself. This has nothing to do with being evil or not and everything to do with making money. Great big piles of money.
Agreed. I think that Google, by and large, has done a commendable job of staying Good, but I think they screwed the moral pooch on this one.
I heard a quote from a Google exec, who said something like "In the end, we decided some information is better than none." I disagree with that opinion, in the case that the missing information is being deliberately censored. Selectively omitting information is exactly the same as lying.
Only... now some of my taxes, that currently go into the public education system, would be funnelled into whatever dogma-oriented, debate-sterile environment they choose to send their kids to. The last thing I need is more tax money going to religious-right organizations, and -- be honest -- that's where most of this money is going to end up going.
By and large, there are only three reasons that people promote voucher systems:
They want to be able to send their kids to schools that aren't subject to the standards set by the rest of society. IE, they want to be able to teach their kids fables as if they were facts.
They want to break teachers unions. As if we overpay our teachers in this country.
They don't want their kids to be have to mingle with the Undesireables. The poor, usually.
They're rich enough to support an elite private school for their kids, and want their tax dollars back to help pay the bill.
The first three are great reasons to oppose vouchers. The only hope the children of those people has is to get as much exposure to diversity as possible. The third is debatable. I can sympathize with that point of view -- however, until I can opt-out of paying for George Bush's private vendettas in the Middle East, I don't think it's fair for the right winger to be able to opt out of stuff they ideologically disagree with, either.
The only problem is that it uses Western Digital hard drives, which are in my experience proned to sudden death syndrome
Heed these words.
I'm consulting at a place that has several hardware RAID arrays in our group; two 4TB, one 8TB, and one 1TB array. The 1TB array had 8 250GB Western Digital drives in RAID5 configuration, with two spares. The drives in this array were all four years old, and were purchased at the same time. A couple of months ago, we started having trouble with the 1TB array -- to make a long story short, the array died, taking everything with it (thank goodness for the backups).
After we replaced all of the drives in the array, we did a post-mortem on the disks. Six of the eight drives were shot. Four of them were riddled with bad blocks, and two of them wouldn't even spin up. The remaining two drives tested out OK.
It may be that these drives were part of a bad batch -- I vaguely remember some sort of fiasco a few years back about Western Digital sending out bad drives. I don't know if modern WD drives are this bad.
Also, I'm not a hardware guy, so this may be bunk: but I've heard that there are drives that are rated for server operation -- drives engineered to be always on and spinning during their lives, as opposed to being spun up and down repeatedly, as on a (Windows) desktop. These drives that died were nothing special. Regardless, look at the MTBF for server drives.
Say what? The US has used just two nuclear weapons against another country and that was back in WWII. Are you going on about that, or has there been some new developments?
Well... technically, we're the only country, in recorded history, to use a nuclear weapon against another country in war. Saying that he's "going on about it" is a lot like saying somebody is "going on about" the (WWII) holocaust. It was a pretty significant event, and one that occurred during the lifetimes of people who are still alive today.
And just to be really combative, I'd point out that the Romans had conquered nearly 100% of their known world, far more than the British.
Parent: Dyson spheres and FTL travel are also very cool too and also have nothing to do with this
Of course. That's why the OP mentioned the space elevator. You can't get to Mars with only a space elevator, and you can't get into space with only an ion drive. They're complementary, not competing, technologies.
Don't get me wrong; I'm all for nuclear power, but I'm not convinced that we've got a decent mechanism for storing the waste yet. Maybe we could team up with these guys.
Incidentally, is there a nuclear physicist in the house? How does the waste from pebble reactors compare to traditional rod reactors when it comes to waste disposal?
--- SER
Slashdot Mirror
It'd be a wasted vote, though, as the 2000 elections showed us with the Green party.
That's 1.5 miles more than they make you run in the Air Force.One of the many inter-service jokes was about that. I don't recall the details, because it wasn't that funny, but it went something like:
P.T. in the various services:
The Marines: Every day, wake up at 3am, run five miles, do 100 push ups and 100 sit-ups.
Army: Every day, wake up at 5am, run two miles, do 50 push ups and 50 sit-ups.
Navy: Once a week, wake up at 5am, run 1.5 miles
Air Force: Every day, wake up sometime before noon, walk to the coffee maker, and look at the track.
Like I said, it wasn't that funny.
Heh--- SER
I was also brought up lower-middle class; my father had nothing more than an AA (required for his short career as a police officer), and raised us by himself after my parent's divorce. Chicken pot pies were the big meal of the week, with a healthy macaroni-and-cheese diet the rest of the time. For a while there, we were a decidedly low-income family.
I, too, barely made it out of high-school -- I repeated a class or two, but luckily never an entire year -- but in my case, I joined the Army. I don't think it did anything for me except make me a little more assertive.
In my case, it was sheer luck that I got anywhere. My mother loved higher education, and always lived in college towns, which was a marked improvement over the inner-city low-income neighborhoods my dad lived in. My high school was one of the early ones to have a fully stocked computer lab and an outstanding teacher for the computer classes. Mostly, I was lucky to be interested, and have some ability, in a subject that turned out to pay pretty well.
In your case, the Navy was a positive influence on you, and gave you the strength of will and the wherewithall to get where you wanted. In my case, the Army gave me enough money to pay for college, and a healthy desire to never, ever, be forced to do P.T. again. Ever.
It seems we disagree on the amount of a handicap low-income children suffer, which appears to be a critical factor in how much we think people are responsible for their own situations.
No, probably not. I don't believe the truly evil corporations will ever be brought to justice. We only punish the management of corporations who are incompetent, and who cost stockholder's money, not the ones stealing from the poor and middle-class. Agreed, on every point. Again, agreed. I believe that part of the problem is that the Dems are controlled by big business, and so are unable to significantly differentiate themselves from the Republicans and have failed to give the undecided voters a good reason to vote for them. That, and the fact that the Republicans have Joeseph Goebbels' head in a jar, writing propaganda for them. Christ, I've never seen such good spin doctors, and they're doing an unparalleled job at exploiting the average American's 30 second attention span. The democrats have simply been unable to compete.--- SER
Anyway, there are things I have interest in dicking around with, and that isn't one of them. I got bored with having to fight with package managers a long time ago.
I'm sure Debian is fine for you, and that's great. Go wild. I just didn't like it much. --- SER
Now, I haven't done a study of the social class of the average Walmart employee, but there is one thing that I'm sure of: if you're born into a lower class family in the US, you face enormous oppositions to raising yourself out of that class, and have to exert Herculean effort to do so. It may not be as impossible as it is in some other countries, but I'm not here to compare the US to other countries.
If you're born into a middle or upper class family, your odds of going to a decent school are better: The odds that your parents are educated, and therefore value education and are better able to help you in your education, are better. Your parents will, on average, have fewer children, and will therefore have more resources to spend on each child. The odds that you'll have to quit school to support your family are smaller. Your peers will be less of a drag on your success potential. On top of all that, I strongly believe that you'll have much more optimism in your own potential to succeed.
Children from low income families aren't somehow genetically inferior to those from middle-class families; they're just smacked on the head, every day of their lives, with failure. They're surrounded by it, they're taught to expect it by what they see in their neighborhoods and in the media. They're raised with an entirely different set of social values.
I'm not talking entirely about inner city kids. The US is peppered with low-income, quasi-rural, trailer parks and small towns, where the average income is technically poverty level.
What I'm saying is that, most of the time, it isn't their fault, except that they've failed to exhibit unusual precociousness and stupendous strength-of-will.
I'd say their main goal is to line their own pockets, and then cash out as soon as they've riled up the employees so much that they form a union, and Walmart suffers the market death you predict (if that happens). But, whatever. You're right; we don't reward companies, or executives, for being good social citizens. We reward them for profit, which is why things are so screwed up and we get the Enrons, the Haliburtons, and the Walmarts. Google, as an (arguable) exception, is proof. Unions, by and large, do what their employees vote. To strike, the employees have to authorize the strike. If 51% vote to strike (or whatever is required by the union rules), well, that's democracy.I agree that the mobs don't always know what is in their best interests; witness the re-election of G.W. Bush, but that doesn't mean that the union leaders exercise the same control over the union members that executives do.
As far as my own union stories go, I only have one: my father-in-law is a pilot (now retired), and a couple of decades ago, the pilots went on strike at the company he worked for (Easter). He crossed the line, and was blackballed by the union, and was unable to get a job in the US thereafter. He eventually went to work for Eva Air, but until then, the union members really gave him a hard time, putting offensive signs on his lawn, sending hate mail, that sort of thing. It was pretty rough for him, and the union was, IMO, entirely unethical, if not illegal, in it's practices. Considering what pilots make, I think this is absurd. However, considering the plight of Walmart employees, I think they'd be perfectly justified in unionizing.
--- SER
Now, I don't know why Debian doesn't support mplayer out of the box, but I'm pretty sure I ran across some discussion about how the Debian committee doesn't like the mplayer license, or something, and that it had nothing to do with the legality of the software. But I could be wrong about that.
In any case, what I said, and what I meant, is that Debian doesn't ship with support for some -- what I consider -- pretty basic software, and I haven't heard anybody respond with anything other than (1) why they can't ship it, (2) how simple it is to circumvent the law by downloading it from out-country, and (3) how stupid I am for not knowing how to use apt. None of which invalidates my claim about Debian not. Shipping. With. MP3. Support.
--- SER
In the end, it was just easier to wipe Debian and install Gentoo. --- SER
--- SER
This is true, and is why I don't like unions. However, I maintain that even a bad union is better than Walmart, and that a union is a democracy, where a company without a union is an autocracy.
Or, put another way: without a union, you're a serf. With a union, even if the vote doesn't always go your way, at least you have one. At least a union is marginally looking out for the employee's best interests; Walmart has proven that upper management is actively hostile to its employees.
Sorry, my bad. I didn't mean "you" as in you, personally.
Ok, so I hear you saying that if Walmart were better to their employees in any significant way, then they'd have to raise their prices. You're saying that reducing management salaries and benefits, and reducing the profit margin would not be sufficient to cover the cost. You're also saying that, once Walmart raises their prices, they'll cease to have their "unique" competitive edge, and people will start shopping at Target, and that Walmart will stop being able to breed stores at a fungus-like rate like they currently do. And that a current source of really cheap consumer goods will be less cheap, and fewer Walmarts will mean fewer employment opportunities for the dregs of American society. Is that about right?
If so, then I think that's an entirely reasonable way to look at the situation, although I don't entirely agree with your analysis. I do agree that unionizing Walmart is an extreme measure, but I also believe it may be the only measure available to Walmart employees, given the utter failure of Walmart to take any steps to improve the treatment of their employees. And again, I assert that if Walmart employees unionize, it'll be only Walmart management's fault. People only unionize when they feel utterly repressed. People are greedy and unionizing can improve their salaries and benefits, but unionizing is also a lot of work, and I have faith in the belief that the common man's laziness is far stronger than his greed -- to such an extent that people unionize only in the most dire of circumstances.
Anyway, I have no idea whether there's any real push to unionize among Walmart employees. But I wouldn't mind seeing it happen. I'd even more like to see Walmart's upper management brought up on some sort of ethical business practices charges, but there's that Bush-joins-MENSA probability again.
--- SER
In any case, it isn't their choice to unionize or not; that's up to the employees. No industry voluntarily chooses unionization; unionization has been forced by the workers, and sometimes by the community. If Walmart's employees unionize, it is Walmart's own fault for being an abusive employer, and they deserve it. It would survive if the management learned to be less greedy, and if it didn't... well, you'd just have to learn to live without your $3.00 one-gallon jar of pickles.
Say what? Walmart is extremely profitable, and there are a lot of people getting rich off it. Just not the people who actually do any work there. If Walmart didn't fuck their employees, they could still afford lower prices by cutting their profit margin, or their executive salaries, or their executive's benefits.Seriously; this is Walmart we're talking about. IBM executives make a butt-load of money, but their employees do pretty well, too. The disparity between the Walmart benefits for the executives and the employees is so huge, it isn't anything but absurd. --- SER
Besides; it'll be a cold day in hell when the Linux community converges on a single distribution. Distributions like Gentoo will always be popular with people like me who are sick of the dependency hell of Redhat, the crippled nature of Debian (which doesn't ship with mplayer or mp3 support, fer christsake), or whatever. And there are a ton of people who think compiling everything from scratch is obsessive and takes too long.
In GoboLinux, binary and source packages are both first-class citizens, which is nice, but talk about diverging from the norm -- geez. *I* like Gobo, but there's about as much chance of it becoming The Linux Distribution as... well, as G.W. Bush has of being accepted by MENSA.
I'm not surprised that Dell doesn't grok the Linux community; if he did, he'd understand the parent poster's point, but you have to understand the fact that the Linux community is largely comprised of DIYers.
--- SER
Yes. I don't disagree with you; I'd, personally, rather submit to mild torture than be killed. I'd rather be forced to eat dog shit than have my fingernails pulled out. And I'd rather work at Walmart than watch my family starve.
This doesn't justify the fact that Walmart abuses its employees; it doesn't justify the fact that, when they go into a market, they regularly ignore local environmental laws while they're putting in their installation because it is cheaper to pay the fines than it is to obey the regulations. There is, simply, no excuse for their behavior; they aren't struggling to stay out of bankruptcy, and their executives don't have to forgo basic medical coverage.
I'm not a big fan of unions, but if there is any good reason for the continued existence of unions, it is corporations like Walmart. Walmart is a perfect example of how businesses are capable of abusing employees in the absence of an organized workforce or decent employment regulation. Really, the rest of corporate America should be pissed off at Walmart, too. Walmart is a major reason why lots of people laugh when they hear American industries say that they need to be given an opportunity to self-regulate. Walmart is my one-word answer to libertarian political philosophy.
--- SER
I hate Walmart, or, rather, I hate Walmart management. They're terrible community citizens -- in fact, if Walmart was a person, it'd have been in and out of jail for most of its life due to a habitual tendancy for vandalizm and assault.
Also, I agree with you -- corporations are *not* living entities. I sympathize with my television more than I sympathize with any corporation.
That said, I think that most people who feel sympathy with the company are really feeling sympathy with:
The main problem with the humanist sympathizers is that they're entirely ignorant about, or they choose to ignore, how shitty Walmart treats the people who work for it. It is similar to justifying sweat-shops by saying that the people are better off being raped than they are starving. The fact that often gets ignored is that these aren't non-profit organizations. There are plenty of fat (figuratively) fucks at the top who are getting rich while they figure out new ways of screwing their employees out of benefits.
Despite the rant, I do think that there are people who are simply ignorant, and do believe that Walmart is a good thing for the jobs it brings into communities.
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Well, duh. If it works, why would they check it? Seriously, if you discover after using it that the navigation system reliably gets you there, why would you check the route?
From what I've seen, the system in the Prius is a better navigator than most humans I've encountered.
--- SER
Google should expunge all references to Perfect 10 from their database, and should simply filter out any results for them.
I'm siding with Google on this one. Copyright law allows reproduction in part; only returning 2% of an image (by thumbnailing it), IMO, constitutes a partial reproduction.
--- SER
The important metric, which the article omits, is by how much the Windows market grew; they only say that they took in 17.7 billion in 2005, and not how much they took in 2004. The do say (indirectly) that Linux grew by 23%, and I'd be surprised if Windows grew by that much.
[1] Maybe somebody should should bring that up in the SCO case.
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I really hate the fact that I have to quote this so often, but it seems that Americans are becoming increasingly senile:
I exaggerate. But only a little.
--- SER
I heard a quote from a Google exec, who said something like "In the end, we decided some information is better than none." I disagree with that opinion, in the case that the missing information is being deliberately censored. Selectively omitting information is exactly the same as lying.
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Only... now some of my taxes, that currently go into the public education system, would be funnelled into whatever dogma-oriented, debate-sterile environment they choose to send their kids to. The last thing I need is more tax money going to religious-right organizations, and -- be honest -- that's where most of this money is going to end up going.
By and large, there are only three reasons that people promote voucher systems:
The first three are great reasons to oppose vouchers. The only hope the children of those people has is to get as much exposure to diversity as possible. The third is debatable. I can sympathize with that point of view -- however, until I can opt-out of paying for George Bush's private vendettas in the Middle East, I don't think it's fair for the right winger to be able to opt out of stuff they ideologically disagree with, either.
--- SER
I'm consulting at a place that has several hardware RAID arrays in our group; two 4TB, one 8TB, and one 1TB array. The 1TB array had 8 250GB Western Digital drives in RAID5 configuration, with two spares. The drives in this array were all four years old, and were purchased at the same time. A couple of months ago, we started having trouble with the 1TB array -- to make a long story short, the array died, taking everything with it (thank goodness for the backups).
After we replaced all of the drives in the array, we did a post-mortem on the disks. Six of the eight drives were shot. Four of them were riddled with bad blocks, and two of them wouldn't even spin up. The remaining two drives tested out OK.
It may be that these drives were part of a bad batch -- I vaguely remember some sort of fiasco a few years back about Western Digital sending out bad drives. I don't know if modern WD drives are this bad.
Also, I'm not a hardware guy, so this may be bunk: but I've heard that there are drives that are rated for server operation -- drives engineered to be always on and spinning during their lives, as opposed to being spun up and down repeatedly, as on a (Windows) desktop. These drives that died were nothing special. Regardless, look at the MTBF for server drives.
--- SER
And just to be really combative, I'd point out that the Romans had conquered nearly 100% of their known world, far more than the British.
--- SER
OP: Ion engines are high impulse, low torque, so they are appropriate only once your already IN space.
You. Can't. Get. Into. Orbit. With. This. Ion. Drive.
Parent: Dyson spheres and FTL travel are also very cool too and also have nothing to do with this
Of course. That's why the OP mentioned the space elevator. You can't get to Mars with only a space elevator, and you can't get into space with only an ion drive. They're complementary, not competing, technologies.
--- SER
Yeah, until the waste containers start leaking and leach material into water tables.
Don't get me wrong; I'm all for nuclear power, but I'm not convinced that we've got a decent mechanism for storing the waste yet. Maybe we could team up with these guys.
Incidentally, is there a nuclear physicist in the house? How does the waste from pebble reactors compare to traditional rod reactors when it comes to waste disposal? --- SER