G'uhgh.... once again geeks confusing a technical capability with a real-world practicality
And once again, geeks not realizing anyone but geeks install and use operating systems other than the one that came with their hardware.
I'm more than willing to consider (and help out) anyone who tries at least a geek-in-training. Generally, they're more likely to ask someone to do it for them, or teach them how. Either's fine by me.
Microsoft is tired of FOSS and legacy software cutting into their profits.
The last I heard, FOSS users (I'm one) are a mere blip compared to the installed base of commercial offerings. They're not forgoing much by us not coming over to the dark side. I'd say MS ought to be a lot more resentful of the vast number of NT, XP and Vista users who've so far refused to upgrade.
Please, don't add to the FUD. There's enough of it out there already. I think UEFI stinks and I'm sorry Fedora thinks they need to accomodate it, but as long as I can turn it off as easily as going into the BIOS, I'll be satisfied.
On the other hand, if UEFI can do something to make up for all the horrible things MS's lousy security model have enabled over the years (malware, botnets,...), it could be a good thing.
If I can't work and it's not my fault because my bosses were stupid, then I still get paid.
Until some slick salesdroid/MBA comes a calling with, "I can fix that fault and you can eliminate all the positions it affects with $whiz_bang_brand_new_shortsighted_stupid_idea!"
The only rational reason to suppress education is to suppress progress.
The only reason to suppress education is to promote ignorance and superstition, and we shouldn't be considering that rational. I long wistfully for the day when we hear stories of females banding together into baseball bat wielding street gangs out to hunt these jerks down and teach them a lesson in civility.
These guys' behaviour makes me ashamed of my gender. I imagine they're just so knocked up on the teachings of Muhammad, they're starting to think the girls are smarter than them, and they resent it. They're correct. They should resent it, but they did this to themselves. The girls are innocent.
... I ended up getting flagged at -1 troll within about 15 minutes or so of my post...
So what? From what I've seen, lots of us read at -1. Yeah, I see a lot of crap, so what? Our/. Overlords recommend reading at -1, so I do. I also try to mod up, not down, also as they recommend.
You're not being censored into oblivion, no matter how much the down-modders may think you are.
As for the IPv4/6 thing, large blocks of IPv4 are returning back onto the market now that scarcity has increased their value to some. Personally, I'd prefer to see ubiquitous rollout of DNSSec instead and pretty much don't care when IPv4 addresses will run out.
This has resulted in endless posts like the original and your reply where those whose legal rights are being trampled on are made out to be at fault.
Yes, because burning down the house to take care of an ant problem is the wrong solution. Hollywood's chosen solution to their "piracy problem" is insane. Instead of finding ways to deliver their stuff to those who want to buy it, they buy politicians and laws and try to litigate their way out of the mess, and it's never going to work, and it's stinking up the place. This satisfies no-one, not even themselves, and irritates their potential customers no end.
Slashdot forgets that it's the pirates that are legally in the wrong.
From what I've been seeing, nobody gives a rat's ass whether it's illegal, and are pretty much convinced it's bad law bought by the entertainment industry from corrupt politicians, so it's ignored. It doesn't even matter to try to change it via the electoral system. Here in Canada, the Liberals introduced laws enforcing IP maximalism, and now the Conservatives are in power they're carrying through on it. Voting them out of office doesn't work. They get cushy jobs with their benefactors when they leave (cf. Chris Dodd). I preach boycotting them, but even I'll admit that's got a snowball's chance in hell of changing anything.
Meanwhile, lives are being destroyed and fortunes are being lost, lawyers are cleaning up, whole countries' legal systems get hijacked by deep pocketed special interests, and we get Justin Bieber in consolation, all because Hollyweird has a bad case of Jack Vallenti that they can't see their way out of.
... an espionage tool directed at our mutual targets of intelligence interest...
Just so's you know, there are people out here, living amongst you, who do not consider themselves to be on your side and don't agree with what The Gang In Charge is doing to those they're targetting. Some of us deplore the sabre rattling and bullying behaviour that the US currently engages in. Go the fuck home and tend to your own damned knitting. You've got enough truly fucked up stuff happening at home that you ought to be concentrating on instead. Or perhaps that's the intention of The Gang In Charge, to distract you from that horrible mess?
I am not a party to your monolithic game plan and I deplore the idea that apparently governments are engaging "cyber-warfare."
You massively underestimate the capabilities of determined individuals. One guy on his own reinvented Unix. Napoleon *almost* subjugated all of Asia. Larry Wall invented the world of perl.
Given the chance, I could fix this for Iran by myself, but it'll take a while to train subordinates. Debian wheezy or squeeze?
Unless I've just been unaware of the all-nude Swedish lesbian IT shops
Link? Please?
I know a few women IT people. They don't want to run a business. They're more interested in having a life.
WOSB sounds like the dumbest idea I've seen come out of gov't in a while. "We're promoting women, but it only works if enough women apply." Who thought that up? They must have been drunk. It must be Monday.
And then, when they show up, become the majority population and elect their own leadership, the whole damned place gets run entirely into the ground. It's not the white overlords who aren't paying the electrical bills or are creating the highest crime rates in the US.
They didn't ask to be dragged off from Africa to pick cotton in America. The Whites started this. You take the bad with the good.
I'm no fan of Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton, but if that's who they want to follow, it's no skin off my nose. They're the decendants of slaves. What do you expect of them? Give 'em time. I expect it'll all sort itself out eventually.
The whole damned thing's been "an expensive education" for all of you. At least you're all still learning. I think they ought to elect Will Smith, with Oprah as VP.:-) Put Dennis Rodman in as head of the DHS. Ha!
You have not explained why the 'golden rule' is any better for us bags of meat here on this planet than any other moral system.
Well, I wasn't asked that. However, people all over the world from all different cultures *just fucking know* that some things are good and other things are bad. Everyone agrees that putting your hand on a hot stove burner is bad. Everyone knows that when someone smiles at you approvingly, it's a good thing, because those are the things that civilized humans all over the world and throughout time do by their very nature. It's what we are and it defines who we are. It says we're human.
Culture, shmulture. We're human. At bottom, we're all driven by the same things, good or bad, pleasant or painful, *if we're normal civilized human beings*. The Jeffrey Dahmers and Albert Desotos and Zodiac and Green River killers stand out as abnormals; not the way any civilized human would expect another civilized human to act.
Who doesn't believe the Golden Rule is the correct and moral way for humans to treat each other? Wall St? Kim Jong Il? Ahmadinejad? Henry the 8th? See any pattern there? JD and his like fit there too.
Why not follow a moral system based on, "help my friends, hurt my enemies?"
Hurting takes effort which would be better used in helping friends or ourselves. How about "help my friends, ostracize our enemies"? Basic game theory: be nice to me, and I'll be nice to you. You screw me, I'll screw you back until you learn it doesn't pay to screw me.
People who think they've found an objective moral system always mystify me.
Yeah, I get that a lot. I don't understand why it's so difficult for others to get, but lots of people do have trouble with it. It's objective because it's based on what civilized humans are.
We're civilized humans, which means we have an inherent nature which consists of having come from the animal kingdom but we have also come to invent complex concepts like morality and ethics and right and wrong and good and bad, because of what we are. We have no control over our being born with all that gray matter in our heads. Those things set us apart from all other living things and along with a few other things define us.
Or, perhaps thinking like a Pollyanna is unnatural and I'm the psychopath.:-) Funny story: There once was a very happy kingdom where everyone got along and everyone loved the benevolent despot king. One night, an evil witch flew in on her broomstick and poisoned the well that everyone drank from. The next morning, everyone went crazy from the poisoned water they drank but noticed the king was still sane, so they rose up against him and threatened to overthrow him. That night, the king drank from the well, and the next morning everyone loved him again, and everyone lived happily ever after.
The modern world is built on spending - that's how the economy works. It must always grow, or else it falls apart. If enough people lived as you suggested, and stopped throwing money away on unneeded luxuries, what happens to all those who work in the factories that produce those luxuries, and those who mine the resources to feed those factories, and the workers in retail who sell them?
You're suggesting planned obsolesence is a feature? That Windows stuffs itself up with malware eventually to explode is a good thing? That wheels on cars should be designed to eventually, unexpectedly, fall off?
I don't want to live in that Walmart world of yours. That's the very definition of "doin' it wrong." "All of those people" working in those factories should not be doing that, and I'd be happy to see them find another line of work. Hook rugs or do Batik or carve wooden statues. Don't produce shit just to fill landfills. I don't care how hungry your kids are, sorry kids. Your dad shouldn't have had you.
I've seen quite a few comments from the Austrian School Fan Club here over the years. They're certainly way outnumbered by Demopublicans/Republicrats, Socialists/Communists and Tea Partiers, but it's a significantly healthy minority. I don't think I've ever seen more than one nitwit post from a von Mises hater here.
But everything being equal I'm going to support my neighbor before I support the guy in the other hemisphere.
Why? What've you got against him?
Jeffrey Dahmer was a local boy too (and all things would have been equal prior to JD's crimes being discovered). I'd rather support some dirt poor peasant in Woolaboolaland than JD any day.
You can justify everything as moral, including slavery, rape, and murder. This is because morals are inherently subjective.
That's not true. All human beings, because they're humans, should consider all of those as inherently immoral, even evil. No-one wants to be a slave or be raped or murdered, so we should all agree not to enslave or rape or murder; it's only civilized. Be careful with that last one too. killing someone, if you have to, to defend yourself or others is not murder. Self defense too is inherently moral.
Capital punishment is immoral because if they're in a jail cell, no-one's in any danger from them. However, I prefer Heinlein's Coventry idea. Build one honking big wall and toss the bad ones in to live out their days with others of their own kind.
I wouldn't consider killing a cow to be murder either. Farm animals were bred to be the way they are because they make better food that way. If it weren't us doing it to them, the wolves would be happy to take over. At least when we do it to them, they have reasonably long, healthy, and peaceful lives and (hopefully) a very quick and unexpected demise.
The exact same argument was used to justify continuing slavery - "slaves are better off with the food and housing their masters provide them - setting them free would be cruel".
Judging by Detroit, I have to think that whoever made that comment may have been on to something.
Then perhaps you shouldn't judge by Detroit. I could be wrong, but didn't the majority of blacks in the North get there because they said "Fuck this!" and bolted from the segregated South as soon as they could? I know there was a huge wave of this going on as late as the 60s.
If the choice is between an assembly line job at Ford, or hanging from some cracker's tree for "lookin' funny" at his daughter, I'd take the former.
Well, you could say why are we still dragging java around when we have C#, or Scala etc.
C# doesn't appear to exist for me (Debian Linux), so I assume that's proprietary Microsoft tech. Scala does exist, yet I'd never heard of it before a couple of days ago.
There is nothing wrong with keeping something around when it still works...
In the case of COBOL, clearly there is something wrong if you're having to pay princely specialist rates for programmers who understand it.
"Yet Ada is more difficult to learn and does not provide as many convenient built in features for data formatting and input/output"
That does not strike me as a very compelling argument assuming competent programmers. Every language is lacking in some way in comparison to others. If "convenient built in features for data formatting and input/output" is the make or break test, then they should be using perl[*], not COBOL.
[*] "Practical Extraction and Report Language" or "Positively Eclectic Rubbish Lister"; take your pick.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
G'uhgh.... once again geeks confusing a technical capability with a real-world practicality
And once again, geeks not realizing anyone but geeks install and use operating systems other than the one that came with their hardware.
I'm more than willing to consider (and help out) anyone who tries at least a geek-in-training. Generally, they're more likely to ask someone to do it for them, or teach them how. Either's fine by me.
The problem here is that the average knowledge level of the computer users are dropping meteor style: fast and speculatively.
... can you point me to any meteors that have fallen speculatively?
Maybe the ones that graze the atmosphere and bounce off?
Perhaps he meant "spectacularly." Damned autocomplete.
Microsoft is tired of FOSS and legacy software cutting into their profits.
The last I heard, FOSS users (I'm one) are a mere blip compared to the installed base of commercial offerings. They're not forgoing much by us not coming over to the dark side. I'd say MS ought to be a lot more resentful of the vast number of NT, XP and Vista users who've so far refused to upgrade.
Please, don't add to the FUD. There's enough of it out there already. I think UEFI stinks and I'm sorry Fedora thinks they need to accomodate it, but as long as I can turn it off as easily as going into the BIOS, I'll be satisfied.
On the other hand, if UEFI can do something to make up for all the horrible things MS's lousy security model have enabled over the years (malware, botnets, ...), it could be a good thing.
If I can't work and it's not my fault because my bosses were stupid, then I still get paid.
Until some slick salesdroid/MBA comes a calling with, "I can fix that fault and you can eliminate all the positions it affects with $whiz_bang_brand_new_shortsighted_stupid_idea!"
Enjoy your stay on the unemployment line.
The only rational reason to suppress education is to suppress progress.
The only reason to suppress education is to promote ignorance and superstition, and we shouldn't be considering that rational. I long wistfully for the day when we hear stories of females banding together into baseball bat wielding street gangs out to hunt these jerks down and teach them a lesson in civility.
These guys' behaviour makes me ashamed of my gender. I imagine they're just so knocked up on the teachings of Muhammad, they're starting to think the girls are smarter than them, and they resent it. They're correct. They should resent it, but they did this to themselves. The girls are innocent.
... I ended up getting flagged at -1 troll within about 15 minutes or so of my post ...
So what? From what I've seen, lots of us read at -1. Yeah, I see a lot of crap, so what? Our /. Overlords recommend reading at -1, so I do. I also try to mod up, not down, also as they recommend.
You're not being censored into oblivion, no matter how much the down-modders may think you are.
As for the IPv4/6 thing, large blocks of IPv4 are returning back onto the market now that scarcity has increased their value to some. Personally, I'd prefer to see ubiquitous rollout of DNSSec instead and pretty much don't care when IPv4 addresses will run out.
Meh.
Neither of those work here.
This has resulted in endless posts like the original and your reply where those whose legal rights are being trampled on are made out to be at fault.
Yes, because burning down the house to take care of an ant problem is the wrong solution. Hollywood's chosen solution to their "piracy problem" is insane. Instead of finding ways to deliver their stuff to those who want to buy it, they buy politicians and laws and try to litigate their way out of the mess, and it's never going to work, and it's stinking up the place. This satisfies no-one, not even themselves, and irritates their potential customers no end.
Slashdot forgets that it's the pirates that are legally in the wrong.
From what I've been seeing, nobody gives a rat's ass whether it's illegal, and are pretty much convinced it's bad law bought by the entertainment industry from corrupt politicians, so it's ignored. It doesn't even matter to try to change it via the electoral system. Here in Canada, the Liberals introduced laws enforcing IP maximalism, and now the Conservatives are in power they're carrying through on it. Voting them out of office doesn't work. They get cushy jobs with their benefactors when they leave (cf. Chris Dodd). I preach boycotting them, but even I'll admit that's got a snowball's chance in hell of changing anything.
Meanwhile, lives are being destroyed and fortunes are being lost, lawyers are cleaning up, whole countries' legal systems get hijacked by deep pocketed special interests, and we get Justin Bieber in consolation, all because Hollyweird has a bad case of Jack Vallenti that they can't see their way out of.
... an espionage tool directed at our mutual targets of intelligence interest ...
Just so's you know, there are people out here, living amongst you, who do not consider themselves to be on your side and don't agree with what The Gang In Charge is doing to those they're targetting. Some of us deplore the sabre rattling and bullying behaviour that the US currently engages in. Go the fuck home and tend to your own damned knitting. You've got enough truly fucked up stuff happening at home that you ought to be concentrating on instead. Or perhaps that's the intention of The Gang In Charge, to distract you from that horrible mess?
I am not a party to your monolithic game plan and I deplore the idea that apparently governments are engaging "cyber-warfare."
Napoleon? Asia? I think you might mean Europe, it's a little to the left.
Europe's the Western end of the continent of Asia. He was on his way East when the plan fell apart.
I forgot he also took Egypt.
"In every revolution, it starts with one man." -- Paraphrasing James Tiberius Kirk.
Not only that, a lone man can only do so much
You massively underestimate the capabilities of determined individuals. One guy on his own reinvented Unix. Napoleon *almost* subjugated all of Asia. Larry Wall invented the world of perl.
Given the chance, I could fix this for Iran by myself, but it'll take a while to train subordinates. Debian wheezy or squeeze?
I'm tired of having to flirt with all the gay guys in IT.
That's what you get for signing on with an Apple shop.
Badabing! :-)
Unless I've just been unaware of the all-nude Swedish lesbian IT shops
Link? Please?
I know a few women IT people. They don't want to run a business. They're more interested in having a life.
WOSB sounds like the dumbest idea I've seen come out of gov't in a while. "We're promoting women, but it only works if enough women apply." Who thought that up? They must have been drunk. It must be Monday.
Holy crap, that's a stupid way to do it.
And then, when they show up, become the majority population and elect their own leadership, the whole damned place gets run entirely into the ground. It's not the white overlords who aren't paying the electrical bills or are creating the highest crime rates in the US.
They didn't ask to be dragged off from Africa to pick cotton in America. The Whites started this. You take the bad with the good.
I'm no fan of Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton, but if that's who they want to follow, it's no skin off my nose. They're the decendants of slaves. What do you expect of them? Give 'em time. I expect it'll all sort itself out eventually.
The whole damned thing's been "an expensive education" for all of you. At least you're all still learning. I think they ought to elect Will Smith, with Oprah as VP. :-) Put Dennis Rodman in as head of the DHS. Ha!
You have not explained why the 'golden rule' is any better for us bags of meat here on this planet than any other moral system.
Well, I wasn't asked that. However, people all over the world from all different cultures *just fucking know* that some things are good and other things are bad. Everyone agrees that putting your hand on a hot stove burner is bad. Everyone knows that when someone smiles at you approvingly, it's a good thing, because those are the things that civilized humans all over the world and throughout time do by their very nature. It's what we are and it defines who we are. It says we're human.
Culture, shmulture. We're human. At bottom, we're all driven by the same things, good or bad, pleasant or painful, *if we're normal civilized human beings*. The Jeffrey Dahmers and Albert Desotos and Zodiac and Green River killers stand out as abnormals; not the way any civilized human would expect another civilized human to act.
Who doesn't believe the Golden Rule is the correct and moral way for humans to treat each other? Wall St? Kim Jong Il? Ahmadinejad? Henry the 8th? See any pattern there? JD and his like fit there too.
Why not follow a moral system based on, "help my friends, hurt my enemies?"
Hurting takes effort which would be better used in helping friends or ourselves. How about "help my friends, ostracize our enemies"? Basic game theory: be nice to me, and I'll be nice to you. You screw me, I'll screw you back until you learn it doesn't pay to screw me.
People who think they've found an objective moral system always mystify me.
Yeah, I get that a lot. I don't understand why it's so difficult for others to get, but lots of people do have trouble with it. It's objective because it's based on what civilized humans are.
We're civilized humans, which means we have an inherent nature which consists of having come from the animal kingdom but we have also come to invent complex concepts like morality and ethics and right and wrong and good and bad, because of what we are. We have no control over our being born with all that gray matter in our heads. Those things set us apart from all other living things and along with a few other things define us.
Or, perhaps thinking like a Pollyanna is unnatural and I'm the psychopath. :-) Funny story: There once was a very happy kingdom where everyone got along and everyone loved the benevolent despot king. One night, an evil witch flew in on her broomstick and poisoned the well that everyone drank from. The next morning, everyone went crazy from the poisoned water they drank but noticed the king was still sane, so they rose up against him and threatened to overthrow him. That night, the king drank from the well, and the next morning everyone loved him again, and everyone lived happily ever after.
The modern world is built on spending - that's how the economy works. It must always grow, or else it falls apart. If enough people lived as you suggested, and stopped throwing money away on unneeded luxuries, what happens to all those who work in the factories that produce those luxuries, and those who mine the resources to feed those factories, and the workers in retail who sell them?
You're suggesting planned obsolesence is a feature? That Windows stuffs itself up with malware eventually to explode is a good thing? That wheels on cars should be designed to eventually, unexpectedly, fall off?
I don't want to live in that Walmart world of yours. That's the very definition of "doin' it wrong." "All of those people" working in those factories should not be doing that, and I'd be happy to see them find another line of work. Hook rugs or do Batik or carve wooden statues. Don't produce shit just to fill landfills. I don't care how hungry your kids are, sorry kids. Your dad shouldn't have had you.
I've seen quite a few comments from the Austrian School Fan Club here over the years. They're certainly way outnumbered by Demopublicans/Republicrats, Socialists/Communists and Tea Partiers, but it's a significantly healthy minority. I don't think I've ever seen more than one nitwit post from a von Mises hater here.
All human beings, because they're humans, should consider all of those as inherently immoral, even evil.
I thank you for explaining your subjective views of morality to me.
I take it you just don't get objectivity. Good to know. Perhaps you have a different definition of what a "civilized human" is than I do.
But everything being equal I'm going to support my neighbor before I support the guy in the other hemisphere.
Why? What've you got against him?
Jeffrey Dahmer was a local boy too (and all things would have been equal prior to JD's crimes being discovered). I'd rather support some dirt poor peasant in Woolaboolaland than JD any day.
... von mises is a ron paul level kook ...
Please, don't be an idiot. Gahd, that's depressing.
You can justify everything as moral, including slavery, rape, and murder. This is because morals are inherently subjective.
That's not true. All human beings, because they're humans, should consider all of those as inherently immoral, even evil. No-one wants to be a slave or be raped or murdered, so we should all agree not to enslave or rape or murder; it's only civilized. Be careful with that last one too. killing someone, if you have to, to defend yourself or others is not murder. Self defense too is inherently moral.
Capital punishment is immoral because if they're in a jail cell, no-one's in any danger from them. However, I prefer Heinlein's Coventry idea. Build one honking big wall and toss the bad ones in to live out their days with others of their own kind.
I wouldn't consider killing a cow to be murder either. Farm animals were bred to be the way they are because they make better food that way. If it weren't us doing it to them, the wolves would be happy to take over. At least when we do it to them, they have reasonably long, healthy, and peaceful lives and (hopefully) a very quick and unexpected demise.
The exact same argument was used to justify continuing slavery - "slaves are better off with the food and housing their masters provide them - setting them free would be cruel".
Judging by Detroit, I have to think that whoever made that comment may have been on to something.
Then perhaps you shouldn't judge by Detroit. I could be wrong, but didn't the majority of blacks in the North get there because they said "Fuck this!" and bolted from the segregated South as soon as they could? I know there was a huge wave of this going on as late as the 60s.
If the choice is between an assembly line job at Ford, or hanging from some cracker's tree for "lookin' funny" at his daughter, I'd take the former.
Well, you could say why are we still dragging java around when we have C#, or Scala etc.
C# doesn't appear to exist for me (Debian Linux), so I assume that's proprietary Microsoft tech. Scala does exist, yet I'd never heard of it before a couple of days ago.
There is nothing wrong with keeping something around when it still works ...
In the case of COBOL, clearly there is something wrong if you're having to pay princely specialist rates for programmers who understand it.
"Yet Ada is more difficult to learn and does not provide as many convenient built in features for data formatting and input/output"
That does not strike me as a very compelling argument assuming competent programmers. Every language is lacking in some way in comparison to others. If "convenient built in features for data formatting and input/output" is the make or break test, then they should be using perl[*], not COBOL.
[*] "Practical Extraction and Report Language" or "Positively Eclectic Rubbish Lister"; take your pick. :-)