1. Russia occupied (occupied is not even the right word since occupation is temporary, but their troops decided to stay) all these countries for almost 50 years. They prefer US for a reason.
An equivalent of your arguments as applied to US history: "Free Texas!!!"
Every time those three tiny Baltic countries change "ownership" (no matter in what manner and how peacefully) they suddenly discover that their previous "masters" occupied them for decades or centuries. In 50-100 years they will claim that they were duped into being "occupied by EU".
2. In 1940-s they had to choose between joining Germany or Russia. If you think anybody knew at that time about Hitler's workings you are dead wrong and by the way - soviets at that time slaughtered far more innocent people than Nazi Germany, but the winners are not judged in a war. So they just chose what seemed lesser of two evils at the time.
WTF are you talking about? Nazi volunteers in Estonia? They were occupied by Nazi at the very beginning of the war, thus "reversing" the long-decried Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Estonians weren't targeted by Nazi for extermination because of closeness of their ethnic groups. They could choose to sit at home instead of joining Waffen SS. Given the nature of Nazi, SS and especially a position of being a foreign (!) volunteer (!!) in it, that would be a pretty logical choice for any sane human being. Germans themselves see volunteering for Nazi as a dishonorable act now, so I guess, they were better Nazi than Germans. An achievement, indeed.
3. Torture camps in Poland may or may not be true, but do you know what torture camps are in Russia? Well, I do know. The situation there is much worse, but they are much better at propaganda.
If you know so much, why don't you tell me. Again, Poland has a rare distinction of providing torture camps to a foreign power in a feeble attempt of winning favors -- yet another step in a long chain of political whoring.
4. So where do you think Russia got this small exclave? Asking nicely or buying it?
By winning WWII. Haven't you studied any history outside US?
Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, and Poland -- where have I seen this list before?
Oh, that's right, it's the list of countries that had sucking up to US and taking political potshots at Russia as the cornerstone of their foreign policy since 1991. With such famous successes as celebrating Estonian Nazi volunteers (Estonia, obviously), providing torture camps for their new American friends (Poland), harassing Russians traveling between a small Russian exclave accessible only through their territory and the rest of Russia (Lithuania) and other similarly glorious achievements.
There is nothing inherently wrong with limiting the number of options you can choose from. It's wrong to give control over those options to the entity interested in providing inferior service for higher prices, however local population as a whole (that controls municipal services) is not such an entity.
I am sure, you also want to have the "freedom" to unknowingly consume harmful ingredients in your food that big bad government bans when it discovers their effect on public health, "freedom" to sell yourself into slavery, "freedom" to exempt yourself from police protection in exchange for tax refund, and other similar "freedoms" and "choices" that similarly dangerous for everyone around yourself.
And it always sucks, yet, this very forum was all the rage for several years over a monopoly called "municipal wifi"...
Municipal wifi is noncommercial, therefore it can't be a monopoly to begin with. It does not achieve control over the market, it destroys the market, however so does freely available breathing air. Not everything should be on the market in the first place.
I find it extremely offensive that people like you treat economy as if it has the goal of providing a way for producers to squeeze wealth out of the consumers. The only reason why it exists is because it provides benefit for consumers -- the fact that there is a profit to be made is merely a side effect that may decrease and disappear as technology and society develop. If service can be better provided by a public entity, and incumbent businesses on the market can't provide a superior alternative, there is absolutely no reason to keep them around, there is no "right to milk the public".
1. Administrator of the board was sued despite not being involved in any trolling. There was no justifiable reason -- good or bad -- to sue him.
2. Anonymous postings on the Internet have no credibility unless they mention verifiable facts -- and then the facts matter, not the postings. In this case there was absolutely no reason to expect that flamewar on the board in any way translated to a credible threat. The matter was trivial, not worth a lawsuit, not worth trouble and expenses inflicted on those people.
3. The only thing this did to the reputation of the original "victim" is to confirm that she is in fact what is commonly described as a bitch. What apparently didn't affect her career in any negative way considering that she got a well-paid job at a law firm.
As many people pointed out, not allowing him to use his name was a crappy service that would turned him away from Verizon to another provider -- except there wasn't any practical alternative due to Verizon being a monopoly. The problem is not with severity of the product defect but with having no way to fix it due to laziness of Verizon despite obviousness of the defect and triviality of the solution.
There are plenty of other issues with the same company, however they are usually less obvious and require understanding of underlying technology to be recognized. This is blatantly obvious.
Monopolies are inherently anti-capitalist because they negate the free market forces that make capitalism work.
They are also the only possible result of the economy unless the government actively prevent them from forming.
That being said, yes there are a lot of misguided liberals on Slashdot who think Government is the solution to all of societies ills. That has zero to do with this story of the general reaction to it.
Of course, government is the solution. It's the only player that is supposed to be controlled by the population in general -- the rest are businesses, and their interests are inevitably at odds with the interests of population in general. If you want businesses to win this game and take control over the population, weaken the government or let businesses to take over the control of it. If you want to support the population, you need someone to constantly oppress the businesses -- and only government can do it. What is perfectly fine because businesses aren't people, and governments only have obligations toward people.
If you are one of those Social Conservatives or Libertarians who scream "but businesses provide benefit to society! don't touch them!!!", try to imagine what amount of damage you need to inflict on a company in a monopoly position before it will start negatively affecting any actual well-being of any person. Please note that ability to control others is not "well-being", and I am sure, actual usable possessions of shareholders and executives are not going to decrease in quantity and quality if the company will go from "ridiculously profitable" to merely "very profitable" -- what would happen if it actually was beneficial in the first place. This also explains why government has to be strong -- it should be capable of inflicting such a damage, or otherwise it would succumb to businesses' power.
How population is supposed to control a government is a different problem. History shows that educated people usually can do it by whatever means that system of government allows, unless someone managed to convince them that some force other than themselves -- God, democracy, market, particular school of philosophy, superiority of some ethnicity or race, etc. -- provides a guarantee that their rulers can do no wrong. So if someone is really concerned about keeping the government from oppressing people, the best thing he can do is to make sure that next generation of people is educated and resistant to propaganda. Please note that "resistant to propaganda" also means "hard to influence by advertising", so most businesses won't help with that part.
Next time someone will claim that monopolies' power over the market does not negate the very mechanism that is supposed to implement the market, refer him to this.
...that this investigation seems to be driven by "Among the whole population of the world, who is one single person, against whom it would be the easiest to find some supposedy incriminating evidence among known facts of his life?" as opposed to "Let's analyze obviously relevant evidence, determine what actually happened, and finally find out who did it".
"Part of reason people were so upset with Anthony Ciolli was that they believe he stuck to his guns and defended things on free speech grounds," Solove says. "People want to see some sort of contriteness."
In the fantasy world of this guy "people are upset" because sued person is some kind of sympathetic hero, AND NOT BECAUSE HE WAS NOT INVOLVED IN ANY RELEVANT WRONGDOING, SO ATTACKING HIM IS FUNDAMENTALLY WRONG. I am truly impressed with the amount of twisting the facts in a single sentence. He teaches future lawyers -- no wonder those lawyers then proceed to troll message boards for lawsuit material.
You need to manage such people and their contributions which is not trivial. In fact with something as sensitive (to fuckups) as a spaceship it'd essentially cost more effort than you gain. It works in areas where contributions aren't tightly controlled and mistakes aren't expensive. In this case that bit of code may cause an error by interacting with another system through purely hardware means that crashes the spaceship. That logo may be too dark, absorb too much sunlight, overheat a wire and explode the spaceship. Most people probably don't think in the proper way to prevent mistakes on their own or to simply not active induce problems (ie: they don't follow directions).
Like umm... operating system. I know of some projects where large number of people wrote pieces of kernel code that had to work together. What a failure it was...
The thing is that the US let's people go amazing things if they have what it takes and if they go after their dreams. Many people however expect their dreams to come to them or to have someone else tell them what their dreams are.
The thing is, the less people are concerned about things they are supposed to "dream of" according to US ideology (money, fame, control over other people), the more contribution they make to worthwhile projects.
There is a free market... in some things, sometimes.
There has been a free market, in the past, for most things, most of the time.
There will be a free market again.
No. There is baseless glorification of the past, nothing more.
Admittedly, government interference has reduced both the quantity and quality of free market available to us, which has demonstrably damaged our nation. But I do not believe it is damaged beyond repair.
Government predates capitalism and most forms of trade. It was always there, and it was always powerful. The only form of market that ever existed is one that relies on government power to determine what is and what isn't in the scope of the market. There is absolutely no evidence that weakened government would be replaced by "free market" and not a mix of robber barons and organized crime that would form a new government far more tyrannical than anything seen by mankind within the last millennium or two.
There is only one reason why Libertarian slogans are still being repeated despite their complete disconnect from reality -- it's because they can be used to raise popular support for things that benefit socially-conservative aristocracy. As someone said, Libertarianism is anarchy for the rich.
But that does NOT mean that free markets cannot be regained by other means. Reasonable antitrust regulation does work. It has worked in the past. Unfortunately, recent government administrations have almost seemed to have forgotten about that. For example, isn't it remarkable how the antitrust suits -- which were proceeding quite well -- against Microsoft seemed to disappear almost overnight, after Bush was elected?
If you have working antitrust legislation, it means that government is in control of monopolies, and is more powerful than they are. This is the opposite of free market, at best you can claim that it's government manipulating the market to make it indistinguishable from being "free", what makes very little sense.
The fact is, just like a cone standing on its tip will inevitably fall, a "free" market inevitably gets taken over by a monopoly. The fact that it's impossible to predict who will be this monopolist means about as much as the fact that cone can fall in a random direction -- it's of little relevance to the end result that cone is not going to stand even if it can be imagined doing so. Upside-down cones fall. Any trade in a system when property rights and contracts are somehow enforced eventually results in a "winner" taking control over everything. Governments at worst acknowledge those "winners" (and then Libertarians decry government "creating monopolies"), at best fight them thus restoring the balance (and then Libertarians decry government for "punishing success").
Government being subservient to powerful businesses is far closer to "free market" than government controlling the commerce to keep monopolies from gaining power. Saying that it isn't so because of some law does not change the reality -- all government's decisions are "laws", and in a truly free market government and all its laws can be bought very easily.
Population has to realize that corporations are not anyone's friends, and there is absolutely no reason in trying to make their life more "fair" or comfortable unless you are a majority shareholder or top executive of some of them. The only kind of organizations that have some chance to represent population as a whole are governments, however stupid, brainwashed people would rather cling to myths of businesses being "important" and government being inherently "evil", and would do nothing to control the government so government would actually represent them. Then, of course, they get government that does not represent them (and therefore actually evil), and corporations are free to loot and enslave -- sometimes under the banner of "free market", sometimes claiming that their riches and "greatness" make them worthy of bei
There is no free market. There never was a free market. There never will be a free market.
It's an abstract concept, a model that is occasionally useful for making basic economic theories but does not reflect much of the reality.
You can wait for Earth to lose a war with unicorns and be conquered by Magical Kingdom of Free Market -- or you can admit that monopolies exist, and the only way of dealing with them is finding reasonable ways of oppressing them, so they won't have total control of their market, suppliers, consumers and employees. They are companies, not people, it's perfectly OK to oppress them or destroy them when it benefits people whom they are supposed to serve.
Care to explain how that's a "strawman"? Moving food production as close as possible to the end consumers is *exactly* what the slow food movement advocates.
How is that "movement" in any way related to this discussion?
Instead of large, centralized farms, they want small, decentralized farms - which logically means a far higher percent of people in the agriculture sector.
Farms don't belong in the middle of the cities. They may be close to the cities though (as in, few miles from them).
As for your statement on "reduced/reversed sprawl," you don't seem to bother to explain what you mean. Build vertically? Limit the size of the lots that can be developed? Delineate one or two borders on a city so the growth can at least be directed?
Build high-quality residential high-rise apartment buildings out of steel an concrete, like what every developed country with a single exception of US is doing now, not crappy ersatz-peasant houses made of dry wall and wooden sticks. Stop making convoluted patterns of narrow streets to make houses less accessible to anything but individual cars. Allow mixed development, so people can actually walk on the streets near their homes instead of zooming in cars through lifeless mazes. All those things will allow increasing quality of life while the population density grows or stays the same.
Then city area will grow the same or slower than population, and city radius will grow as a square root of population, what means the density of infrastructure built with the same resources relative to population will increase over time. US model, with area growing much faster than population, can be only sustained by decreasing density of infrastructure. This is why cities all over the world grow more and more sophisticated, and cities in US grow more and more primitive.
Agriculture doesn't belong in the cities -- not until it will be able to work in greenhouses using artificial soil and industrial-like environment, because otherwise it won't have enough area and water to be efficient. At no point in history cities had anything to do with agricultural production, and now is not the right time to start.
On the other hand, reduced (or, better, reversed) sprawl can provide stable environment for development of farming around cities, in the areas that now are waiting to be sold for new suburban development.
I use SIP exclusively for VoIP-to-PSTN and PSTN-to-VoIP calls (some of them are VoIP-to-PSTN-to-VoIP). With average prices about a cent a minute it makes more sense than Skype unless I want a really, really long conversation, or call somewhere far away.
With such a weapon the supposed target would never be able to distinguish between lethal and non-lethal attacks, and any mistake can turn out deadly -- you will either have a cop unknowingly shooting lethal bullets, or fleeing person returning fire with a regular gun, believing that cops are trying to kill him. Or both at the same time. The right thing to do is to go into the opposite direction -- making lethal and non-lethal weapons so different that it will be impossible to take one for another even from a distance. Like the difference that exists now between a gun and a club, or between uniforms and equipment of soldiers (who always shoot to kill) and riot police (that is expected to never use anything deadly).
SIP is a bad protocol, however Skype is a proprietary protocol, implemented by one (1) application that does not interoperate with anything.
On the other hand, IAX2 is both good (tolerant to latency, passes firewalls without problems) and open. I have WRT54G running both regular NAT router and Asterisk as a proxy between SIP (that my VoIP provider supports) and IAX2 (that my internal Asterisk-based PBX uses), so I don't have to pass SIP through NAT.
actually, this problem comes up now and then, and as can be seen on the bugreport, there was another person reporting very similar symptoms. which can be observed by reading it.
Accelerated framebuffer on console is not an essential feature -- it may be nice to have, but you can't expect every piece of hardware to have it. On general-purpose computers now used for two purposes -- last-resort fallback X driver (that is only necessary if there is no usable native driver) and for boot splashes.
rrright, because in this context we are talking only about "worksforme" things. this is a quite perfect example of the attitude this very same article/discussuion is about. if somebody reports a problem, a lot of energy is wasted to dismiss it, starting with blaming the person as just having googled the bits, then attempting to invent explanations why, you know, there is no problem actually !
Your bug report does not contain anything related to BIOS, kernel messages that would shed some light on possible ACPI or driver misbehavior, etc. I am surprised that it was accepted as a bug report at all, because it does not follow the format of a kernel bug report ( http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/docs/lkml/reporting-bugs.html ).
i don't see such attitude that often, so i was a bit surprised about the amount of complaints - but i guess there are a lot of people who will never admit there is a problem. it all depends on what kind of a person user initially stumbles upon... being ridiculed for reporting problems will surely increase testers for the project.
Again, if no one can reproduce it, no one can fix it. On the other hand, it's well known that many laptops shipped with faulty ACPI BIOSes that only kinda work with Windows ACPI implementation (it was encouraged by Microsoft), and manufacturers provided fixed BIOS versions later. You didn't mention the BIOS vendor and release, and did not try to find the updates that could be released by the laptop manufacturer.
After a minute of googling I have ended up at Fujitsu FAQ page for that laptop -- complete with typical broken-ACPI-related problems and with urging the users to update their BIOS to the latest version.
In my experience (using Linux since 2003), the opposite is true. Distro-supported software I get through emerge or apt works great!
I think, I made it very clear that I AM TALKING ABOUT COMPATIBILITY ACROSS DISTRIBUTIONS. You usually can't take a binary from, say, Gentoo and expect it to automagically run under Debian.
Third-party binary blobs work when the phase of the moon is right and I shout "CTHULHU FHTAGN!".
Only if you managed to miss installing their components. What is pretty hard to do on Linux, where you can drag libraries along with every piece of software, and commercial installers do it all the time (ex: massive amount of libraries you get when installing Second Life client).
Because, again, Linux does not offer a standard ABI across distributions.
Linux ABI is the same everywhere.
It can't possibly do so, really, because "Linux" isn't even monolithic. If some third-party binary blob needs libXYZ-1.2.3 and the libXYZ developers made the stupid decision to break binary compability in libXYZ-1.2.4 instead of calling it libXYZ-2.0.0
Examples, please.
and allowing users to install the old and new ABIs in parallel and two different major distros made different decisions on when to upgrade their supplied libXYZ package, the binary blob's developers have to go back and patch their code for no good reason at all, and simply might not be able to support all distributions with a single package at all. On Windows and Mac they don't have this problem because applications don't have to share the entire damned file-system with one another and can simply install with their own preferred library versions. The fact that Windoze programs suffered from DLL Hell last time I checked comes from Windoze developers sucking and deciding to use C:\Windows\ as a system-wide library directory rather than for mere storage of the bloody operating system.
See above. You can always use exactly the same version of library that it was compiled for. You have to be completely ignorant if you think, Windows has a better mechanism (or that OSX doesn't use exactly the same system of libraries as Linux). All commercial packages that come with libraries use a wrapper script that defines library directory with custom versions as having higher priority than system default (distro maintainers may revert this for efficiency if they are sure that libraries are the same).
As noted above, I haven't actually used a M$ system since Windows ME. I've done a few packages worth of Linux development in C and Python, and I've used Red Hat Linux, Mandrake, Ubuntu, Gentoo, and Linux From Scratch over the years.
Oh, really? What did you write, and how exactly those supposed problems affected those projects?
Slashdot Mirror
1. Russia occupied (occupied is not even the right word since occupation is temporary, but their troops decided to stay) all these countries for almost 50 years. They prefer US for a reason.
An equivalent of your arguments as applied to US history: "Free Texas!!!"
Every time those three tiny Baltic countries change "ownership" (no matter in what manner and how peacefully) they suddenly discover that their previous "masters" occupied them for decades or centuries. In 50-100 years they will claim that they were duped into being "occupied by EU".
2. In 1940-s they had to choose between joining Germany or Russia. If you think anybody knew at that time about Hitler's workings you are dead wrong and by the way - soviets at that time slaughtered far more innocent people than Nazi Germany, but the winners are not judged in a war. So they just chose what seemed lesser of two evils at the time.
WTF are you talking about? Nazi volunteers in Estonia? They were occupied by Nazi at the very beginning of the war, thus "reversing" the long-decried Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Estonians weren't targeted by Nazi for extermination because of closeness of their ethnic groups. They could choose to sit at home instead of joining Waffen SS. Given the nature of Nazi, SS and especially a position of being a foreign (!) volunteer (!!) in it, that would be a pretty logical choice for any sane human being. Germans themselves see volunteering for Nazi as a dishonorable act now, so I guess, they were better Nazi than Germans. An achievement, indeed.
3. Torture camps in Poland may or may not be true, but do you know what torture camps are in Russia? Well, I do know. The situation there is much worse, but they are much better at propaganda.
If you know so much, why don't you tell me. Again, Poland has a rare distinction of providing torture camps to a foreign power in a feeble attempt of winning favors -- yet another step in a long chain of political whoring.
4. So where do you think Russia got this small exclave? Asking nicely or buying it?
By winning WWII. Haven't you studied any history outside US?
Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, and Poland -- where have I seen this list before?
Oh, that's right, it's the list of countries that had sucking up to US and taking political potshots at Russia as the cornerstone of their foreign policy since 1991. With such famous successes as celebrating Estonian Nazi volunteers (Estonia, obviously), providing torture camps for their new American friends (Poland), harassing Russians traveling between a small Russian exclave accessible only through their territory and the rest of Russia (Lithuania) and other similarly glorious achievements.
There is nothing inherently wrong with limiting the number of options you can choose from. It's wrong to give control over those options to the entity interested in providing inferior service for higher prices, however local population as a whole (that controls municipal services) is not such an entity.
I am sure, you also want to have the "freedom" to unknowingly consume harmful ingredients in your food that big bad government bans when it discovers their effect on public health, "freedom" to sell yourself into slavery, "freedom" to exempt yourself from police protection in exchange for tax refund, and other similar "freedoms" and "choices" that similarly dangerous for everyone around yourself.
And it always sucks, yet, this very forum was all the rage for several years over a monopoly called "municipal wifi"...
Municipal wifi is noncommercial, therefore it can't be a monopoly to begin with. It does not achieve control over the market, it destroys the market, however so does freely available breathing air. Not everything should be on the market in the first place.
I find it extremely offensive that people like you treat economy as if it has the goal of providing a way for producers to squeeze wealth out of the consumers. The only reason why it exists is because it provides benefit for consumers -- the fact that there is a profit to be made is merely a side effect that may decrease and disappear as technology and society develop. If service can be better provided by a public entity, and incumbent businesses on the market can't provide a superior alternative, there is absolutely no reason to keep them around, there is no "right to milk the public".
1. Administrator of the board was sued despite not being involved in any trolling. There was no justifiable reason -- good or bad -- to sue him.
2. Anonymous postings on the Internet have no credibility unless they mention verifiable facts -- and then the facts matter, not the postings. In this case there was absolutely no reason to expect that flamewar on the board in any way translated to a credible threat. The matter was trivial, not worth a lawsuit, not worth trouble and expenses inflicted on those people.
3. The only thing this did to the reputation of the original "victim" is to confirm that she is in fact what is commonly described as a bitch. What apparently didn't affect her career in any negative way considering that she got a well-paid job at a law firm.
As many people pointed out, not allowing him to use his name was a crappy service that would turned him away from Verizon to another provider -- except there wasn't any practical alternative due to Verizon being a monopoly. The problem is not with severity of the product defect but with having no way to fix it due to laziness of Verizon despite obviousness of the defect and triviality of the solution.
There are plenty of other issues with the same company, however they are usually less obvious and require understanding of underlying technology to be recognized. This is blatantly obvious.
Monopolies are inherently anti-capitalist because they negate the free market forces that make capitalism work.
They are also the only possible result of the economy unless the government actively prevent them from forming.
That being said, yes there are a lot of misguided liberals on Slashdot who think Government is the solution to all of societies ills. That has zero to do with this story of the general reaction to it.
Of course, government is the solution. It's the only player that is supposed to be controlled by the population in general -- the rest are businesses, and their interests are inevitably at odds with the interests of population in general. If you want businesses to win this game and take control over the population, weaken the government or let businesses to take over the control of it. If you want to support the population, you need someone to constantly oppress the businesses -- and only government can do it. What is perfectly fine because businesses aren't people, and governments only have obligations toward people.
If you are one of those Social Conservatives or Libertarians who scream "but businesses provide benefit to society! don't touch them!!!", try to imagine what amount of damage you need to inflict on a company in a monopoly position before it will start negatively affecting any actual well-being of any person. Please note that ability to control others is not "well-being", and I am sure, actual usable possessions of shareholders and executives are not going to decrease in quantity and quality if the company will go from "ridiculously profitable" to merely "very profitable" -- what would happen if it actually was beneficial in the first place. This also explains why government has to be strong -- it should be capable of inflicting such a damage, or otherwise it would succumb to businesses' power.
How population is supposed to control a government is a different problem. History shows that educated people usually can do it by whatever means that system of government allows, unless someone managed to convince them that some force other than themselves -- God, democracy, market, particular school of philosophy, superiority of some ethnicity or race, etc. -- provides a guarantee that their rulers can do no wrong. So if someone is really concerned about keeping the government from oppressing people, the best thing he can do is to make sure that next generation of people is educated and resistant to propaganda. Please note that "resistant to propaganda" also means "hard to influence by advertising", so most businesses won't help with that part.
Next time someone will claim that monopolies' power over the market does not negate the very mechanism that is supposed to implement the market, refer him to this.
Then punch him in the face.
gb2/b/ -- you, parent and especially the journalist who wrote that newspaper article.
...that this investigation seems to be driven by "Among the whole population of the world, who is one single person, against whom it would be the easiest to find some supposedy incriminating evidence among known facts of his life?" as opposed to "Let's analyze obviously relevant evidence, determine what actually happened, and finally find out who did it".
If the court sent a clear message, this could reduce the number of cases to a manageable amount.
And the message is "You can be sued for ANYTHING". I guess, it may discourage some people from living.
Solove is not nearly as sympathetic.
"Part of reason people were so upset with Anthony Ciolli was that they believe he stuck to his guns and defended things on free speech grounds," Solove says. "People want to see some sort of contriteness."
In the fantasy world of this guy "people are upset" because sued person is some kind of sympathetic hero, AND NOT BECAUSE HE WAS NOT INVOLVED IN ANY RELEVANT WRONGDOING, SO ATTACKING HIM IS FUNDAMENTALLY WRONG. I am truly impressed with the amount of twisting the facts in a single sentence. He teaches future lawyers -- no wonder those lawyers then proceed to troll message boards for lawsuit material.
You need to manage such people and their contributions which is not trivial. In fact with something as sensitive (to fuckups) as a spaceship it'd essentially cost more effort than you gain. It works in areas where contributions aren't tightly controlled and mistakes aren't expensive. In this case that bit of code may cause an error by interacting with another system through purely hardware means that crashes the spaceship. That logo may be too dark, absorb too much sunlight, overheat a wire and explode the spaceship. Most people probably don't think in the proper way to prevent mistakes on their own or to simply not active induce problems (ie: they don't follow directions).
Like umm... operating system. I know of some projects where large number of people wrote pieces of kernel code that had to work together. What a failure it was...
The thing is that the US let's people go amazing things if they have what it takes and if they go after their dreams. Many people however expect their dreams to come to them or to have someone else tell them what their dreams are.
The thing is, the less people are concerned about things they are supposed to "dream of" according to US ideology (money, fame, control over other people), the more contribution they make to worthwhile projects.
Except, of course, it makes no sense -- your premise is wrong, your conclusion is wrong, and there is absolutely no logic.
Enjoy your "prosperity" (aka debt), I guess.
There is a free market... in some things, sometimes.
There has been a free market, in the past, for most things, most of the time.
There will be a free market again.
No. There is baseless glorification of the past, nothing more.
Admittedly, government interference has reduced both the quantity and quality of free market available to us, which has demonstrably damaged our nation. But I do not believe it is damaged beyond repair.
Government predates capitalism and most forms of trade. It was always there, and it was always powerful. The only form of market that ever existed is one that relies on government power to determine what is and what isn't in the scope of the market. There is absolutely no evidence that weakened government would be replaced by "free market" and not a mix of robber barons and organized crime that would form a new government far more tyrannical than anything seen by mankind within the last millennium or two.
There is only one reason why Libertarian slogans are still being repeated despite their complete disconnect from reality -- it's because they can be used to raise popular support for things that benefit socially-conservative aristocracy. As someone said, Libertarianism is anarchy for the rich.
But that does NOT mean that free markets cannot be regained by other means. Reasonable antitrust regulation does work. It has worked in the past. Unfortunately, recent government administrations have almost seemed to have forgotten about that. For example, isn't it remarkable how the antitrust suits -- which were proceeding quite well -- against Microsoft seemed to disappear almost overnight, after Bush was elected?
If you have working antitrust legislation, it means that government is in control of monopolies, and is more powerful than they are. This is the opposite of free market, at best you can claim that it's government manipulating the market to make it indistinguishable from being "free", what makes very little sense.
The fact is, just like a cone standing on its tip will inevitably fall, a "free" market inevitably gets taken over by a monopoly. The fact that it's impossible to predict who will be this monopolist means about as much as the fact that cone can fall in a random direction -- it's of little relevance to the end result that cone is not going to stand even if it can be imagined doing so. Upside-down cones fall. Any trade in a system when property rights and contracts are somehow enforced eventually results in a "winner" taking control over everything. Governments at worst acknowledge those "winners" (and then Libertarians decry government "creating monopolies"), at best fight them thus restoring the balance (and then Libertarians decry government for "punishing success").
Government being subservient to powerful businesses is far closer to "free market" than government controlling the commerce to keep monopolies from gaining power. Saying that it isn't so because of some law does not change the reality -- all government's decisions are "laws", and in a truly free market government and all its laws can be bought very easily.
Population has to realize that corporations are not anyone's friends, and there is absolutely no reason in trying to make their life more "fair" or comfortable unless you are a majority shareholder or top executive of some of them. The only kind of organizations that have some chance to represent population as a whole are governments, however stupid, brainwashed people would rather cling to myths of businesses being "important" and government being inherently "evil", and would do nothing to control the government so government would actually represent them. Then, of course, they get government that does not represent them (and therefore actually evil), and corporations are free to loot and enslave -- sometimes under the banner of "free market", sometimes claiming that their riches and "greatness" make them worthy of bei
There is no free market.
There never was a free market.
There never will be a free market.
It's an abstract concept, a model that is occasionally useful for making basic economic theories but does not reflect much of the reality.
You can wait for Earth to lose a war with unicorns and be conquered by Magical Kingdom of Free Market -- or you can admit that monopolies exist, and the only way of dealing with them is finding reasonable ways of oppressing them, so they won't have total control of their market, suppliers, consumers and employees. They are companies, not people, it's perfectly OK to oppress them or destroy them when it benefits people whom they are supposed to serve.
Care to explain how that's a "strawman"? Moving food production as close as possible to the end consumers is *exactly* what the slow food movement advocates.
How is that "movement" in any way related to this discussion?
Instead of large, centralized farms, they want small, decentralized farms - which logically means a far higher percent of people in the agriculture sector.
Farms don't belong in the middle of the cities. They may be close to the cities though (as in, few miles from them).
As for your statement on "reduced/reversed sprawl," you don't seem to bother to explain what you mean. Build vertically? Limit the size of the lots that can be developed? Delineate one or two borders on a city so the growth can at least be directed?
Build high-quality residential high-rise apartment buildings out of steel an concrete, like what every developed country with a single exception of US is doing now, not crappy ersatz-peasant houses made of dry wall and wooden sticks. Stop making convoluted patterns of narrow streets to make houses less accessible to anything but individual cars. Allow mixed development, so people can actually walk on the streets near their homes instead of zooming in cars through lifeless mazes. All those things will allow increasing quality of life while the population density grows or stays the same.
Then city area will grow the same or slower than population, and city radius will grow as a square root of population, what means the density of infrastructure built with the same resources relative to population will increase over time. US model, with area growing much faster than population, can be only sustained by decreasing density of infrastructure. This is why cities all over the world grow more and more sophisticated, and cities in US grow more and more primitive.
That's a strawman.
Agriculture doesn't belong in the cities -- not until it will be able to work in greenhouses using artificial soil and industrial-like environment, because otherwise it won't have enough area and water to be efficient. At no point in history cities had anything to do with agricultural production, and now is not the right time to start.
On the other hand, reduced (or, better, reversed) sprawl can provide stable environment for development of farming around cities, in the areas that now are waiting to be sold for new suburban development.
The only proper response to /b/ on Slashdot can be GNAA in Habbo.
Cease and Desist orders or DMCA takedown notices?
Fire your lawyer.
I use SIP exclusively for VoIP-to-PSTN and PSTN-to-VoIP calls (some of them are VoIP-to-PSTN-to-VoIP). With average prices about a cent a minute it makes more sense than Skype unless I want a really, really long conversation, or call somewhere far away.
With such a weapon the supposed target would never be able to distinguish between lethal and non-lethal attacks, and any mistake can turn out deadly -- you will either have a cop unknowingly shooting lethal bullets, or fleeing person returning fire with a regular gun, believing that cops are trying to kill him. Or both at the same time. The right thing to do is to go into the opposite direction -- making lethal and non-lethal weapons so different that it will be impossible to take one for another even from a distance. Like the difference that exists now between a gun and a club, or between uniforms and equipment of soldiers (who always shoot to kill) and riot police (that is expected to never use anything deadly).
SIP is a bad protocol, however Skype is a proprietary protocol, implemented by one (1) application that does not interoperate with anything.
On the other hand, IAX2 is both good (tolerant to latency, passes firewalls without problems) and open. I have WRT54G running both regular NAT router and Asterisk as a proxy between SIP (that my VoIP provider supports) and IAX2 (that my internal Asterisk-based PBX uses), so I don't have to pass SIP through NAT.
actually, this problem comes up now and then, and as can be seen on the bugreport, there was another person reporting very similar symptoms. which can be observed by reading it.
Accelerated framebuffer on console is not an essential feature -- it may be nice to have, but you can't expect every piece of hardware to have it. On general-purpose computers now used for two purposes -- last-resort fallback X driver (that is only necessary if there is no usable native driver) and for boot splashes.
rrright, because in this context we are talking only about "worksforme" things. this is a quite perfect example of the attitude this very same article/discussuion is about. if somebody reports a problem, a lot of energy is wasted to dismiss it, starting with blaming the person as just having googled the bits, then attempting to invent explanations why, you know, there is no problem actually !
Your bug report does not contain anything related to BIOS, kernel messages that would shed some light on possible ACPI or driver misbehavior, etc. I am surprised that it was accepted as a bug report at all, because it does not follow the format of a kernel bug report ( http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/docs/lkml/reporting-bugs.html ).
i don't see such attitude that often, so i was a bit surprised about the amount of complaints - but i guess there are a lot of people who will never admit there is a problem. it all depends on what kind of a person user initially stumbles upon... being ridiculed for reporting problems will surely increase testers for the project.
Again, if no one can reproduce it, no one can fix it. On the other hand, it's well known that many laptops shipped with faulty ACPI BIOSes that only kinda work with Windows ACPI implementation (it was encouraged by Microsoft), and manufacturers provided fixed BIOS versions later. You didn't mention the BIOS vendor and release, and did not try to find the updates that could be released by the laptop manufacturer.
After a minute of googling I have ended up at Fujitsu FAQ page for that laptop -- complete with typical broken-ACPI-related problems and with urging the users to update their BIOS to the latest version.
In my experience (using Linux since 2003), the opposite is true. Distro-supported software I get through emerge or apt works great!
I think, I made it very clear that I AM TALKING ABOUT COMPATIBILITY ACROSS DISTRIBUTIONS. You usually can't take a binary from, say, Gentoo and expect it to automagically run under Debian.
Third-party binary blobs work when the phase of the moon is right and I shout "CTHULHU FHTAGN!".
Only if you managed to miss installing their components. What is pretty hard to do on Linux, where you can drag libraries along with every piece of software, and commercial installers do it all the time (ex: massive amount of libraries you get when installing Second Life client).
Because, again, Linux does not offer a standard ABI across distributions.
Linux ABI is the same everywhere.
It can't possibly do so, really, because "Linux" isn't even monolithic. If some third-party binary blob needs libXYZ-1.2.3 and the libXYZ developers made the stupid decision to break binary compability in libXYZ-1.2.4 instead of calling it libXYZ-2.0.0
Examples, please.
and allowing users to install the old and new ABIs in parallel and two different major distros made different decisions on when to upgrade their supplied libXYZ package, the binary blob's developers have to go back and patch their code for no good reason at all, and simply might not be able to support all distributions with a single package at all. On Windows and Mac they don't have this problem because applications don't have to share the entire damned file-system with one another and can simply install with their own preferred library versions. The fact that Windoze programs suffered from DLL Hell last time I checked comes from Windoze developers sucking and deciding to use C:\Windows\ as a system-wide library directory rather than for mere storage of the bloody operating system.
See above. You can always use exactly the same version of library that it was compiled for. You have to be completely ignorant if you think, Windows has a better mechanism (or that OSX doesn't use exactly the same system of libraries as Linux). All commercial packages that come with libraries use a wrapper script that defines library directory with custom versions as having higher priority than system default (distro maintainers may revert this for efficiency if they are sure that libraries are the same).
As noted above, I haven't actually used a M$ system since Windows ME. I've done a few packages worth of Linux development in C and Python, and I've used Red Hat Linux, Mandrake, Ubuntu, Gentoo, and Linux From Scratch over the years.
Oh, really? What did you write, and how exactly those supposed problems affected those projects?