The problem is population density. Japan is said to have half the population of the United States crammed into an area the size of California. Much of Europe is also densely populated, though not as much as Japan. High-speed rail lines are expensive, per km, to build and maintain. Pavement is less so. This is the same reason that subways serve the center of a city, streetcars the outlying areas, and buses the suburbs and some rural areas.
The Acela train is Amtrak's grasping attempt at high-speed rail. The fare is still too expensive: For instance, I can get a bus ticket from Boston to New York for $12, but, last time I checked, Acela was $80. If someone else is paying (i.e. it's a business trip) then it's more sensible to fly. Acela is stuck in a difficult middle-market.
Personally, I think that the problem with public transit in the US is that it interfaces poorly with the automotive system. Here in Boston, commuter lots at suburban train stations fill up quickly, and in many cases are quite expensive. They are also have security problems. Often, stations are in the middle of villages, where there is not the room for parking lot expansion and building a garage would adversly effect the character of the village. There needs to be more funding of vast garages built where high speed rail systems interface to the interstate highway system. The garages need to be inexpensive (no more than $5 a day), secure, 24 hour, and have sufficient bandwidth for rush hour. There should be a number of non-stop, high speed trains to/from the center of the city. These stations should also serve the interstate and local bus lines in the area, with shuttle buses to the outlying airports.
Train fare for such purposes should be at least partially tax-deductible. One should merely have to submit the yearly report from a transit authority account which would list the passes of various types purchased, or retain a collection of receipts for fares bought anonymously.
The US does, foe the US.This is called tariffs and protectionism, and I think it has its place. Many of these low-wage countries don't have nearly adequate protection of human rights or the environment. India is one of these, China another. I am not suggesting that all laws have to be uniform, but rather there is a minimum standard that those which trade with the first world (to use an ugly marxist term) should have to abide by.
Yes, I am speaking from a euro-american perspective. Yes, I realize that other cultures in the world have different ideas of what is right. I am not saying that they should be forced to change. But I believe in doing business only with civilized people.
IBM is now on my bad-guys list. They've sold out the US worker, and the European one as well. There should be strikes called by the unions. This globalization is getting out of hand. We need to stop it before it's too late.
I am annoyed with this supposition. I don't have any ads on any of my sites; I put them up purely for the reason of being useful to the community.
What I am getting annoyed with is that there is an increasing number of purportedly 'community' sites that are are now polluted with google ads. These don't belong on the site, and can't easily be blocked.
Why do some people feel as though they can simply bow to commercial pressures and suck a few pennies out of the audience with such ads? I have lost a lot of respect for these sites. Some of these are wikis I have contributed to in the past, particularly ones having to do with community wireless networks, but I will no longer be a part of someone's revenue generating model. It's so cheap to host a web site these days, there's no reason to claim you need this money to support the costs of running it. If the site sponsor can't kick in the $1.50 per month to pay for the site, I'll go to a site where the creator of it does care enough to run it without ads.
And at 200 calls per-hour, they'll just stop answering the phones. Seriously, do you think they're going to listen?
Well, if you're lucky, they may. Remember, they have staff just for this purpose.
Going down there in person is a hit-or-miss chance of actually speaking to someone with the power to change anything... or you'll end up in jail for "stalking" your senator.
Well, I have to admit I haven't done this (walking in). I am sure the chances of actually meeting your rep are pretty slim. But perhaps hand-delivering a letter, explaining to the staff what you've said, would leave them with some impression. As I've indicated in other responses, my only inside information on this part of the political process comes from a state rep's staffer, where there's probably a lot less action.
The reason they probably slid this through on a rider so fast, was likely so people could NOT write to their senators in time.
This could be true -- but you've got to TRY. Defeatism gets you...defeated.
The sad part of talking about this is that I am not a resident of the states listed, so my opinion is going to count a lot less.
Nope, not true...I know someone who used to work in a reps office opening mail (state rep, but I figure it applies) - they all have UV scanners now to wipe out anthrax, and geiger counters as well.
Hand-written letters are given the most attention. Letters that are well written and seem to come from older, respectable people (the ones most likely to vote and most likely to donate money) are paid attention to.
Email is routinely ignored by congressional staffers. Signing a paper petition is a little more useful. A phone call is better still. A written letter is far superiour. Saying what you think in person is better still. The reason for these classifications is that elected officials are getting spammed and information overloaded like everyone else. If you spend more effort getting your particular issue heard, they also feel you will be more likely to remember them on election day. It's fairly valid.
I am highly critical of these online petitions, because people believe that they have done something, and therefore will not follow up their web form tick-off with something more substantive like the communications mentioned above.
I know it's a bit too late to dash of a handwritten letter to your rep in this occasion. But a phone call may be appropriate.
As far as RMS and De Raadt, I have met both of them, and would tend to agree, they are both difficult characters.
Debian - yes, I am a debian user, but I am getting really disenchanted with Debian, from the techincal end, from the philosophical end, and from the practical end. Not ready for the Gentoo koolaid though. SuSE seems to work pretty well.
ps Thanks for the universe, God, it's mostly working pretty well thought I have a few suggestions.
Just as you should depend on your spell checker to catch all of your typographical errors, you should not depend on Einstein to do all of your heavy-lifting in the brain department. The man was wrong about several things. He was humble enough to admit he was wrong with some of these errors. Others, he never discovered (ot at least, never acknowledged).
There's evidence of time travel all around you, you're just not paying attention to it. Much of the inexplicable in the world is due to time travel. A type of time travel is responsible for the creation and re-creation of the universe itself.
You don't get what I am saying: Yes, spam filtering is good. Even blacklists can work. But these systems that spread blacklists are not. They're open to abuse and error, and the results are disasterous.
Here's something else: blacklist can be abused as a form of censorship: don't like what people are saying on a mailing list? Just add them to SPEWS! Good thing it wouldn't be very effective, because most sysadmins don't use spews.
Theo is really good at making people angry. Sometimes, that's angry enough to get out and fix a problem (such as security issues) but just as often they'll tell him to fuck off.
But he's a good attack dog for the open source movement: He can yell and scream at vendors and make the Linux people look calm and collected by comparison.
Just for the record, I use both OpenBSD and Linux (and other OS as well). There's some really good stuff in OpenBSD. There's also some things that Linux does better. Or, I should say, operating system using the Linux kernel.
Theo says that the BSD lawsuit made people flock to Linux. Nope, that wasn't it for all of us: when I was getting involved back in '92, it was the fact that Linux would run on lesser hardware. Specifically, it was that I needed a math coprocessor to run BSD but Linux would run fine on my 80386SX at 16 mhz. I remember seeing somewhere that Alan Cox chose to work on Linux for the same reason. More broadly speaking, Linux was more egalitarian in its hardware support.
I think that Linux success has been largely due to the social impact of the GPL license.
Yeah, well I hope none of them pay you for email, because if I did and you were causing my email to be dropped, I'd cancel service. And if your rash and careless action had caused me to lose money because of dropped business mail, I'd sue you.
But hey, if it's just email for you and your friends, then go for it. Because I am probably not going to be sending you email anyhow.
I was victimized too. Because someone hijacked some IP space that I used to provide ptr dns records for, somehow they feel as though my IP space is hijacked as well, SPEWS feels as though my IP space must be hijacked and I must be a spammer as well.
And other spam-blocking lists use SPEWS info, so I am banned through them as well.
The worst of this is, this is all heresay and libel and there's nothing I can do about it. I found that one non-profit ISP starting using SPEWS and my mail to that server bounced, but luckily I knew the guy and just called him up and told him and he got rid of SPEWS.
The whole blacklisting idea is just bad. All you need is a few vengeful cranks to make the whole thing fall apart.
Wow. The first party of your article almost made some sense. Then you got a bit personally offensive, and went back to a zero. Then you went below zero with your bullshit criticism of ogg vorbis (which is a great codec...and this is not just my opinion, but the opinion of people who write audio codecs for a living that I worked for last summer!). Your final assumption that I had never used an Ipod, and calling ME an ignorant fanboy, really just takes the cake.
I can only hope that this complete lack of tact and good sense that you have in dealing with people online will become dominant, and in your face-to-face conversations you will adopt some of the characteristics you display here, so that someone can give you the punch in the face that you so richly deserve.
This is a swamp cooler. Nothing new. Popular in places where they have dry heat (southwest US). But not very efficient, and almost useless in humid weather. Really, this isn't much of an invention and shouldn't be a slashdot article.
Well, there is already a project at MIT to produce such a thing. But it's for the 'developing' world. In other words, you (us) Americans and Europeans can continue to pay high prices. But the backwater countries will get some of these laptops for rougly the equivalent of month's salary: $100. Which isn't too bad, when you consider that I spent all of my savings ($2200) on a laptop when I was young.
The problem they're going to have, of course, is what to do with it: Many of these people are barely literate, if at all literate, and in many places, power and communications are not available or if they are, they are not reliable. And then there's the question of security: If such a portable, expensive, and easily-resalable item becomes common, I can forsee armed gangs raiding villages in search of this booty (sort of like iPods in the hood). The mere existance of these laptops could add to the misery of these people.
I don't think this is the Intel vesion.I say this because nowhere in the title or page is intel or x86 mentioned, and also it was released on the 12th of April -- whereas the article mentions this 'just' became available.
I got bit by this stupidity -- took my main server offline for a day. Debian has really gone to hell lately. I am either going to switch to something else (Gentoo?) or maybe join if anyone wants to fork Debian into something that concentrates on quality.
I am just blowing off steam? I hope not. I hope that I can find something to replace Debian. Unfortunately I think that competancy is becoming rare. Who knows what disasters lurk in other distros.
I have about 80gb of MP3s. Way too much to fit on an HD based ipod. But I want to be able to take a long trip without killing the batteries in my laptop, I want something that I can used to tune out the panhandlers on the subway, something cheap and light and robust. The Muvo accomplishes that, I doubt the ipod ever could. I guess you can just keep a backup of your music collection for when your ipod's HD fails (which it almost certainly will). I have heard that if you don't use the ipod a lot, you won't likely get the battery problem. The thing is, I DO use my mp3 player a lot so it wouldn't work for me.
And yeah, I can store my docs on the Muvo as well. USB2.0 connector, no cable required, use it as a USB flash device. The muvo will also function as a voice record (but will not code into mp3, unfortunately). The thing I wish it had was the ability to play ogg files.
I may have gone off on a little bit of a tirade, please excuse me. But when the media hype of the ipod seems to be high enough for some rebate on a dead ipod to become a story on slashdot, I have to speak up.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is population density. Japan is said to have half the population of the United States crammed into an area the size of California. Much of Europe is also densely populated, though not as much as Japan. High-speed rail lines are expensive, per km, to build and maintain. Pavement is less so. This is the same reason that subways serve the center of a city, streetcars the outlying areas, and buses the suburbs and some rural areas.
The Acela train is Amtrak's grasping attempt at high-speed rail. The fare is still too expensive: For instance, I can get a bus ticket from Boston to New York for $12, but, last time I checked, Acela was $80. If someone else is paying (i.e. it's a business trip) then it's more sensible to fly. Acela is stuck in a difficult middle-market.
Personally, I think that the problem with public transit in the US is that it interfaces poorly with the automotive system. Here in Boston, commuter lots at suburban train stations fill up quickly, and in many cases are quite expensive. They are also have security problems. Often, stations are in the middle of villages, where there is not the room for parking lot expansion and building a garage would adversly effect the character of the village. There needs to be more funding of vast garages built where high speed rail systems interface to the interstate highway system. The garages need to be inexpensive (no more than $5 a day), secure, 24 hour, and have sufficient bandwidth for rush hour. There should be a number of non-stop, high speed trains to/from the center of the city. These stations should also serve the interstate and local bus lines in the area, with shuttle buses to the outlying airports.
Train fare for such purposes should be at least partially tax-deductible. One should merely have to submit the yearly report from a transit authority account which would list the passes of various types purchased, or retain a collection of receipts for fares bought anonymously.
When I was in Leipzig last month, I saw DSL advertised prices of 4,95 and 9,95 but I don't know what speed it was. So cheap! I'd get a dozen!
The US does, foe the US.This is called tariffs and protectionism, and I think it has its place. Many of these low-wage countries don't have nearly adequate protection of human rights or the environment. India is one of these, China another. I am not suggesting that all laws have to be uniform, but rather there is a minimum standard that those which trade with the first world (to use an ugly marxist term) should have to abide by.
Yes, I am speaking from a euro-american perspective. Yes, I realize that other cultures in the world have different ideas of what is right. I am not saying that they should be forced to change. But I believe in doing business only with civilized people.
IBM is now on my bad-guys list. They've sold out the US worker, and the European one as well. There should be strikes called by the unions. This globalization is getting out of hand. We need to stop it before it's too late.
I am annoyed with this supposition. I don't have any ads on any of my sites; I put them up purely for the reason of being useful to the community.
What I am getting annoyed with is that there is an increasing number of purportedly 'community' sites that are are now polluted with google ads. These don't belong on the site, and can't easily be blocked.
Why do some people feel as though they can simply bow to commercial pressures and suck a few pennies out of the audience with such ads? I have lost a lot of respect for these sites. Some of these are wikis I have contributed to in the past, particularly ones having to do with community wireless networks, but I will no longer be a part of someone's revenue generating model. It's so cheap to host a web site these days, there's no reason to claim you need this money to support the costs of running it. If the site sponsor can't kick in the $1.50 per month to pay for the site, I'll go to a site where the creator of it does care enough to run it without ads.
Well, if you're lucky, they may. Remember, they have staff just for this purpose.
Going down there in person is a hit-or-miss chance of actually speaking to someone with the power to change anything... or you'll end up in jail for "stalking" your senator.
Well, I have to admit I haven't done this (walking in). I am sure the chances of actually meeting your rep are pretty slim. But perhaps hand-delivering a letter, explaining to the staff what you've said, would leave them with some impression. As I've indicated in other responses, my only inside information on this part of the political process comes from a state rep's staffer, where there's probably a lot less action.
The reason they probably slid this through on a rider so fast, was likely so people could NOT write to their senators in time.
This could be true -- but you've got to TRY. Defeatism gets you...defeated.
The sad part of talking about this is that I am not a resident of the states listed, so my opinion is going to count a lot less.
Nope, not true...I know someone who used to work in a reps office opening mail (state rep, but I figure it applies) - they all have UV scanners now to wipe out anthrax, and geiger counters as well.
Hand-written letters are given the most attention. Letters that are well written and seem to come from older, respectable people (the ones most likely to vote and most likely to donate money) are paid attention to.
A law against pork? Well, not all of us are jews or muslim or vegetarian.
Email is routinely ignored by congressional staffers. Signing a paper petition is a little more useful. A phone call is better still. A written letter is far superiour. Saying what you think in person is better still. The reason for these classifications is that elected officials are getting spammed and information overloaded like everyone else. If you spend more effort getting your particular issue heard, they also feel you will be more likely to remember them on election day. It's fairly valid.
I am highly critical of these online petitions, because people believe that they have done something, and therefore will not follow up their web form tick-off with something more substantive like the communications mentioned above.
I know it's a bit too late to dash of a handwritten letter to your rep in this occasion. But a phone call may be appropriate.
As far as RMS and De Raadt, I have met both of them, and would tend to agree, they are both difficult characters.
Debian - yes, I am a debian user, but I am getting really disenchanted with Debian, from the techincal end, from the philosophical end, and from the practical end. Not ready for the Gentoo koolaid though. SuSE seems to work pretty well.
Just as you should depend on your spell checker to catch all of your typographical errors, you should not depend on Einstein to do all of your heavy-lifting in the brain department. The man was wrong about several things. He was humble enough to admit he was wrong with some of these errors. Others, he never discovered (ot at least, never acknowledged).
There's evidence of time travel all around you, you're just not paying attention to it. Much of the inexplicable in the world is due to time travel. A type of time travel is responsible for the creation and re-creation of the universe itself.
I made an attempt to explain this at the MIT time traveler convention. But I couldn't get in the door. I guess I'll have to try again.
Time travel take more energy than most of you seem to realize.
You don't get what I am saying: Yes, spam filtering is good. Even blacklists can work. But these systems that spread blacklists are not. They're open to abuse and error, and the results are disasterous.
Here's something else: blacklist can be abused as a form of censorship: don't like what people are saying on a mailing list? Just add them to SPEWS! Good thing it wouldn't be very effective, because most sysadmins don't use spews.
Theo is really good at making people angry. Sometimes, that's angry enough to get out and fix a problem (such as security issues) but just as often they'll tell him to fuck off.
But he's a good attack dog for the open source movement: He can yell and scream at vendors and make the Linux people look calm and collected by comparison.
Just for the record, I use both OpenBSD and Linux (and other OS as well). There's some really good stuff in OpenBSD. There's also some things that Linux does better. Or, I should say, operating system using the Linux kernel.
Theo says that the BSD lawsuit made people flock to Linux. Nope, that wasn't it for all of us: when I was getting involved back in '92, it was the fact that Linux would run on lesser hardware. Specifically, it was that I needed a math coprocessor to run BSD but Linux would run fine on my 80386SX at 16 mhz. I remember seeing somewhere that Alan Cox chose to work on Linux for the same reason. More broadly speaking, Linux was more egalitarian in its hardware support.
I think that Linux success has been largely due to the social impact of the GPL license.
Amazing that they can still operate in the Gulag.
Though SPEWS may be out of reach, those that contribute to it may not be. Those that use it may not be.
SPEWS is either vindictice slander/libel, or is poorly run, or both.
Yeah, well I hope none of them pay you for email, because if I did and you were causing my email to be dropped, I'd cancel service. And if your rash and careless action had caused me to lose money because of dropped business mail, I'd sue you.
But hey, if it's just email for you and your friends, then go for it. Because I am probably not going to be sending you email anyhow.
I was victimized too. Because someone hijacked some IP space that I used to provide ptr dns records for, somehow they feel as though my IP space is hijacked as well, SPEWS feels as though my IP space must be hijacked and I must be a spammer as well.
And other spam-blocking lists use SPEWS info, so I am banned through them as well.
The worst of this is, this is all heresay and libel and there's nothing I can do about it. I found that one non-profit ISP starting using SPEWS and my mail to that server bounced, but luckily I knew the guy and just called him up and told him and he got rid of SPEWS.
The whole blacklisting idea is just bad. All you need is a few vengeful cranks to make the whole thing fall apart.
Oh, the IP space in question is 205.159.169.0/24.
So, there you go.
Wow. The first party of your article almost made some sense. Then you got a bit personally offensive, and went back to a zero. Then you went below zero with your bullshit criticism of ogg vorbis (which is a great codec...and this is not just my opinion, but the opinion of people who write audio codecs for a living that I worked for last summer!). Your final assumption that I had never used an Ipod, and calling ME an ignorant fanboy, really just takes the cake.
I can only hope that this complete lack of tact and good sense that you have in dealing with people online will become dominant, and in your face-to-face conversations you will adopt some of the characteristics you display here, so that someone can give you the punch in the face that you so richly deserve.
This is a swamp cooler. Nothing new. Popular in places where they have dry heat (southwest US). But not very efficient, and almost useless in humid weather. Really, this isn't much of an invention and shouldn't be a slashdot article.
Well, there is already a project at MIT to produce such a thing. But it's for the 'developing' world. In other words, you (us) Americans and Europeans can continue to pay high prices. But the backwater countries will get some of these laptops for rougly the equivalent of month's salary: $100. Which isn't too bad, when you consider that I spent all of my savings ($2200) on a laptop when I was young.
The problem they're going to have, of course, is what to do with it: Many of these people are barely literate, if at all literate, and in many places, power and communications are not available or if they are, they are not reliable. And then there's the question of security: If such a portable, expensive, and easily-resalable item becomes common, I can forsee armed gangs raiding villages in search of this booty (sort of like iPods in the hood). The mere existance of these laptops could add to the misery of these people.
I don't think this is the Intel vesion.I say this because nowhere in the title or page is intel or x86 mentioned, and also it was released on the 12th of April -- whereas the article mentions this 'just' became available.
So, yeah, a torrent like this -- but for x86.
I got bit by this stupidity -- took my main server offline for a day. Debian has really gone to hell lately. I am either going to switch to something else (Gentoo?) or maybe join if anyone wants to fork Debian into something that concentrates on quality.
I am just blowing off steam? I hope not. I hope that I can find something to replace Debian. Unfortunately I think that competancy is becoming rare. Who knows what disasters lurk in other distros.
Any such competition would likely come with "strings attached". ;)
I have about 80gb of MP3s. Way too much to fit on an HD based ipod. But I want to be able to take a long trip without killing the batteries in my laptop, I want something that I can used to tune out the panhandlers on the subway, something cheap and light and robust. The Muvo accomplishes that, I doubt the ipod ever could. I guess you can just keep a backup of your music collection for when your ipod's HD fails (which it almost certainly will). I have heard that if you don't use the ipod a lot, you won't likely get the battery problem. The thing is, I DO use my mp3 player a lot so it wouldn't work for me.
And yeah, I can store my docs on the Muvo as well. USB2.0 connector, no cable required, use it as a USB flash device. The muvo will also function as a voice record (but will not code into mp3, unfortunately). The thing I wish it had was the ability to play ogg files.
I may have gone off on a little bit of a tirade, please excuse me. But when the media hype of the ipod seems to be high enough for some rebate on a dead ipod to become a story on slashdot, I have to speak up.