Linux's ability to "emulate Windows" is already good enough for anything you want to throw at it. If you don't want to migrate, don't. But don't make up excuses.
Also, mixing Windows and Linux is more work than just choosing one or the other. And upgrading to XP is a dumb idea if you really have any intentions of moving to Linux soon.
someone that replaced them is going to have to leave
That someone who replaced them and has to leave is likely to be an illegal immigrant. The US has a history of opening the floodgates to let in illegals whenever we have decided to go to war. After WWII, Operation Wetback removed nearly a million illegal Mexican immigrants from the US.
One of the, surely foreseen, benefits of TIA and national ID cards is that the Pentagon now has the ability to replace American workers at the drop of a hat to send them to war, and just as easily send illegal immigrants back home when the war is over. They won't have to worry about doing permanant damage to the US economy by letting in too many illegals, or face too much criticism for using heavy-handed tactics to remove them.
So, not only is the US military failing in its one clear duty: to protect the borders. It's actively opening the borders whenever necessary to flood the labor market and force US citizens into the military to fight their losing wars.
that coupled with his recent comments may have been enough to cause a blip on government radars. As I say, I don't think the man really is a facist as some would have it
You're under some sort of impression that this individual citizen, exercising his right to freedom of speech and opinion, and being investigated (secretly or openly) by his government for that, is the fascist?
This was my first instinct. The sysadmin of a sysadmin should be a *programmer*.
For the vast majority of clueless sysadmins, Microsoft is their programmer. But even leet *nix admins rely on improvements in their tools to help them work more productively.
You could say the recent history of fracturing and rearrangements in the Linux community is a collective effort to answer this question: "What should meta-admins really do?"
For, say, RedHat, their answer is "Make shiny graphical utilities that make sysadmin-ning idiot-resistant." For Gentoo, the answer is "Write documentation and tools that help sysadmins understand and build software." For Debian, it's "Make a system without bells and whistles that is easily customizable and rock-solid." For SuSE, it's "Make all the hardware work out of the box." To each his own.
There are huge capital costs in wind power. Suddenly diverting 50% of the world's copper or 25% of it's aluminum to a new use would have a huge impact. Bigger even probably than a few hundred nuclear plants.
not to mention it's a tremendous waste of land better used for other purposes.
This is really the dumbest argument that anti-wind people make. And that's saying a lot. Windmills are put 100 ft in the air on existing farmland and mountains. Enough windmills to power the entire world would take up literally a tiny fraction of a percentage of available land.
It will be the country with the worst education and highest level of political and economic corruption. I'd say it's a toss up between the US and China.
It is clearly directed at nations, not at citizens in the US.
It, along with the PATRIOT Act and the entire "war on terror", are aimed at citizens in all nations, including the US. It is merely the next installment in a long-planned, carefully orchestrated, but poorly-executed scheme to exert pressure, in true imperialist fashion, on states and substates of the US to force "Western" (really Communist) values on the entire "civilized" world, including prohibitions of "hatred" (thought crimes), "extremist" religion (religions that actually read and follow their sacred texts), and "separatist" political movements (that threaten the global economy).
Your feigned shock at the idea of the terrorists "who fight back when attacked" is entirely appropriate since that isn't what is going on at all.
It absolutely is what's going on, for almost 50 years. You need a history lesson if you think otherwise.
They are fighting to establish a new Islamic super state with a literal theocracy.
Although I, and bin Laden himself, dispute your attribution of motives, many primarily Muslim countries in and around the middle east are in need of new leadership. The US thinks it should be them. Before they stopped taking land and started building borders, Israel thought it should be them. The UK would still like to have a say. Hell, Russia thinks it should be them. And, shock and awe, the actual Muslims living there think they should have a say. Everyone is surprised when the Muslims do get a say, and they elect a theocracy or a nationalist who keeps Arab oil for Arabs, instates a "gift economy" as Bush decries, and invests in profitable enterprises such as nuclear power.
Color me uninterested if I don't give a shit who it ends up being, as long as the US doesn't waste trillions of dollars or get further accused of being in league with those Zionist dipshits and create more brown people trying to blow themselves up in the US.
They are fundamentally (or is it fundamentalist?) imperialists.
They are not imperialist. They are nationalist. Empires are composed of priviledged classes colonising and ruling over occupied territories. Nations are composed of groups of people with a common race and/or language and/or religion.
Japan was imperialist. The UK was imperialist. The USSR was imperialist. Rome was imperialist. The US was, and still is, imperialist. China is primarily nationalist. Israel is nationalist, although it began as a colony in an occupied middle east, and still has its own occupied territories and underpriviledged classes. Nazi Germany was nationalist. The vast majority of Islamic republics in the middle east are nationalist.
Is this new to you?
No, it is not "news to me". I wrote a paper on the subject in October of 2001.
I hope you don't find that "poofy hair" make the "Dear Leader" cuddly. You seem to be presenting this as if to soften his image.
I do not and I was not. I think it makes him comical, in a supervillain sort of way. I added the phrase upon review because I felt some of my descriptions may not be clear enough. Obviously I should have added more to my description of bin Laden instead.
The US government is composed of adults who can discern between people trying to kill Americans
Hardly. If you're not with them, you're with the terrorists.
And those terrorists consist of 1) an isolated, sanctioned, former western-puppet dictator throwing a few petrodollars at Palestinians and threatening to move to the Euro, 2) a Islamist republic standing in the way of Israeli domination of the Middle East, developing nuclear power in violation of a treaty signed by a previous western-puppet dictator, moving it's petrodollars to the Euro, and helping other OPEC countries do the same, 3) an isolated, sanctioned, communist-puppet dictator with poofy hair that already has nuclear weapons, and is threatening to use them unless it gets more US food and oil for its million-man army and failing socialist economy, 4) a small band of religious fundamentalists "oppressing" women in the poorest country on earth, preventing the opium harvest, and standing in the way of a Unocal pipeline from the Caspian, and, lest we forget, 5) a former CIA operative who flew planes into the two of the tallest buildings in the US, killing thousands of Americans.
This is the clear-headed leadership you envision? Assuming so, which "terrorist" do you suppose a "discerning adult" would attack first?
Nice article, btw. It clearly shows not that they want to, but that they feel justified in killing or injuring millions of us because we have killed or injured millions of them. Again, evil "terrorists" who fight back when attacked. *shock*
Don't forget, he handed them right to Neocons in the US who waved them around and used them as justification for going to war in Iraq. Or, at least that's what they tell us over here.
I don't know which one, Bush or Blair, is the head idiot, but they are two of the biggest national socialist dipshits to have hit the West since, well, you know who:)
Yeah. He gave money to the orphans and widows of Palistinians who decided that killing themselves was a better alternative than living in an Israeli-occupied ghetto.
We're not quite stupid enough to believe your expansive definition of "terrorism" and your even more expansive definition of "fund".
It's not like we really had them to begin with. It's like, there are 5 barrels there that we could have with a more efficient process, but we only get 1.
Okay. Nice post. Here's what I see as the basic problems with cities:
1) people working less
Specialization works well up until a point. Then you realize that you've invested $100 grand in an education to create something that nobody really wants or needs anyways. And not only are you in debt up to your eyeballs, you're completely worthless. You wasted all that money and time getting a worthless PhD? You must be a real idiot. Go work at McDonalds. No, wait, McDonalds doesn't need employees anymore since they've automated everything. Try the trash collectors.
2) corruption/market inefficiency
Add it up sometime. Start out making some average crappy wage, like $10/hr. Then subtract a mortgage/rent and insurance and transportation and student loans and parking tickets and food (fast food if you're really talking about specializing) and, if you're adventurous, throw in a kid or two. If you have anything left, see what you can do with it to save it for the long term. The overhead for buying property is usually pretty high and there are really no guarantees. You can get a 50 year mortgage and pay it off just in time for you to die and the government to take it from your children. If you rent, you can't invest in your surroundings. If you do own a house, investing in it will get you little in return besides your own happiness. Invest in stocks and you'll probably lose more than you make. Invest in gold/silver and you'll get shiny objects and probably labeled a crackpot. Invest in bonds that barely keep up with inflation. You can't put up a windmill. If you have one, you can't put anything in your yard without the neighborhood association complaining or condemning your house. Oh and the gov't can condemn your house anytime anyways to build a strip mall or whatever. Then assume that a tornado hits, or a hurricane, or a flood, and the government gives you a trailer. Or, better yet, bird flu or ebola and you don't get a shot and you starve in your apartment because it was too small to stock up any food.
3) crime
If you're lucky enough to live in a house, try putting up a fence. If you live in an apartment, you're a victim already. Try carrying a firearm, no wait, can't do that in big cities. See how fun it is after you've been burglarized or had a car stolen a couple of times. And witness how efficient the "specialist" pawn shops and cops are at retrieving your stolen goods. *rolls eyes*
In the end, you're working for nothing -- maybe a few posessions and nice clothes and being able to go out every weekend, but really just nothing. And don't think, if you do have a nice job, your job can't be outsourced or automated. At the cost of energy and the price of foreign labor, you can always be replaced. You can expect it to come right before you have your mortgage paid off.
So, in the end, I'll accept your argument that cities justify themselves. And I'll just say "we'll see". When the oil runs out and we realize coal is slowly killing us, we'll see how many cities make it on their own, how many whine to the government for aid, and how many get planes flown into their tallest buildings and collect the insurance.
Your whole attitude seems very paternalistic and demeaning
I'm sorry you feel that way, but it is paternalistic to have to help people in other countries with basics like clean water. And it should be demeaning to have to accept such aid.
It demeans me that you're complaining about it, like somehow affordable appliances aren't good enough. When Africans can afford $2000 windmills, they'll be there. Until then, save the high-priced handouts for Americans who need help. There are a million of them who lost their homes in Katrina, remember?
We are using it for disposable soda cans
You might be. If you feel guilty about it, perhaps you should expend your guilty energies building windmills in this country so that we might have an energy source from which to continue refining aluminum and providing clean water for other continents.
don't just create a new dependency which you can take advantage of later.
Where did you get this idea? You're under the impression that giving people the equivalent of stoves and boilers is "creating a dependency", but giving them electronics isn't?
Remember, better teach a man to fish than to give him one.
Teach them to refine their own damn aluminum, then. I'd sooner buy a windmill made in Africa than buy one in the US to be sent there. But before that can happen, they have to, you know, stop dying. And that seems to be what Mr. Kamen is addressing here.
And burning cow dung, wood, whatever won't help people in the long run, or even the medium term, because they likely need those resources for fertilizer, shelter, etc.
In the short term, they'll do better with power than without. In the medium term, they'll learn to allocate resources efficiently and not to overreproduce. In the long term, we'll see how much aluminum is left after giving Americans windmills... mmkay?
removes huge amounts of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide from the atmosphere
Not by itself it doesn't. I wondered where that 10,000 gallons/acre figure came from. Obviously it comes out of a smoke stack.
You might say this system prevents carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere, but even that isn't honest. More like, it delays carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere. That would be honesty.
My window air conditioning unit uses 650 Watts. The heat of vaporization of water is 2428 kJ/Liter. That's 674 Watt*hours/Liter. Running an AC 12 hours a day condenses, at most, 12 Liters of water. Your figures might have been believable 10 years ago, but not today.
Admittedly, your idea is interesting. But it's nowhere near what the GP suggested. So I'm going to stick with my assessment of what was presented.
But I will happily eat the following phrase:
Secondly, you realize you're advocating air conditioning as a means of water purification for undeveloped nations? That's just goofy.
That's ridiculous. Your generator doesn't run on cow dung or wood, only expensive and limited petrochemicals.
You could even get a 1000 watt wind turbine for $2,115 and you wouldn't need fuel.
This is more interesting. Wind generators made primarily of aluminum wire would be interesting. But, for now, I think we'll reserve wind power for the first and second worlds and limit hand-outs to technologies that are more fool-proof and less capital-intensive, if more labor-intensive.
Okay. But it's neither cheap nor easy to get gasoline in the middle of the brush in a country that doesn't use the largest military in the world to subsidize the price of gasoline.
And, in case you missed it, it's quite possible that worldwide petroleum production has already peaked. So that solution isn't getting any cheaper.
Slashdot Mirror
Linux's ability to "emulate Windows" is already good enough for anything you want to throw at it. If you don't want to migrate, don't. But don't make up excuses.
Also, mixing Windows and Linux is more work than just choosing one or the other. And upgrading to XP is a dumb idea if you really have any intentions of moving to Linux soon.
someone that replaced them is going to have to leave
That someone who replaced them and has to leave is likely to be an illegal immigrant. The US has a history of opening the floodgates to let in illegals whenever we have decided to go to war. After WWII, Operation Wetback removed nearly a million illegal Mexican immigrants from the US.
One of the, surely foreseen, benefits of TIA and national ID cards is that the Pentagon now has the ability to replace American workers at the drop of a hat to send them to war, and just as easily send illegal immigrants back home when the war is over. They won't have to worry about doing permanant damage to the US economy by letting in too many illegals, or face too much criticism for using heavy-handed tactics to remove them.
So, not only is the US military failing in its one clear duty: to protect the borders. It's actively opening the borders whenever necessary to flood the labor market and force US citizens into the military to fight their losing wars.
that coupled with his recent comments may have been enough to cause a blip on government radars. As I say, I don't think the man really is a facist as some would have it
You're under some sort of impression that this individual citizen, exercising his right to freedom of speech and opinion, and being investigated (secretly or openly) by his government for that, is the fascist?
They've all been toned down or discontinued in the last decade, but other companies also had the pyramid/eyeball logo: AOL, Logitech, and Fidelity.
And of course the all-seeing eye pyramid is being taken off of US currency.
This was my first instinct. The sysadmin of a sysadmin should be a *programmer*.
For the vast majority of clueless sysadmins, Microsoft is their programmer. But even leet *nix admins rely on improvements in their tools to help them work more productively.
You could say the recent history of fracturing and rearrangements in the Linux community is a collective effort to answer this question: "What should meta-admins really do?"
For, say, RedHat, their answer is "Make shiny graphical utilities that make sysadmin-ning idiot-resistant." For Gentoo, the answer is "Write documentation and tools that help sysadmins understand and build software." For Debian, it's "Make a system without bells and whistles that is easily customizable and rock-solid." For SuSE, it's "Make all the hardware work out of the box." To each his own.
There are huge capital costs in wind power. Suddenly diverting 50% of the world's copper or 25% of it's aluminum to a new use would have a huge impact. Bigger even probably than a few hundred nuclear plants.
not to mention it's a tremendous waste of land better used for other purposes.
This is really the dumbest argument that anti-wind people make. And that's saying a lot. Windmills are put 100 ft in the air on existing farmland and mountains. Enough windmills to power the entire world would take up literally a tiny fraction of a percentage of available land.
It isn't the depth of the lake that provides the cooling capacity, but the surface area and evaporation of water.
It will be the country with the worst education and highest level of political and economic corruption. I'd say it's a toss up between the US and China.
It's kind of like the difference between living on a train, and getting hit by a train. Only somewhat less so.
It is clearly directed at nations, not at citizens in the US.
It, along with the PATRIOT Act and the entire "war on terror", are aimed at citizens in all nations, including the US. It is merely the next installment in a long-planned, carefully orchestrated, but poorly-executed scheme to exert pressure, in true imperialist fashion, on states and substates of the US to force "Western" (really Communist) values on the entire "civilized" world, including prohibitions of "hatred" (thought crimes), "extremist" religion (religions that actually read and follow their sacred texts), and "separatist" political movements (that threaten the global economy).
Your feigned shock at the idea of the terrorists "who fight back when attacked" is entirely appropriate since that isn't what is going on at all.
It absolutely is what's going on, for almost 50 years. You need a history lesson if you think otherwise.
They are fighting to establish a new Islamic super state with a literal theocracy.
Although I, and bin Laden himself, dispute your attribution of motives, many primarily Muslim countries in and around the middle east are in need of new leadership. The US thinks it should be them. Before they stopped taking land and started building borders, Israel thought it should be them. The UK would still like to have a say. Hell, Russia thinks it should be them. And, shock and awe, the actual Muslims living there think they should have a say. Everyone is surprised when the Muslims do get a say, and they elect a theocracy or a nationalist who keeps Arab oil for Arabs, instates a "gift economy" as Bush decries, and invests in profitable enterprises such as nuclear power.
Color me uninterested if I don't give a shit who it ends up being, as long as the US doesn't waste trillions of dollars or get further accused of being in league with those Zionist dipshits and create more brown people trying to blow themselves up in the US.
They are fundamentally (or is it fundamentalist?) imperialists.
They are not imperialist. They are nationalist. Empires are composed of priviledged classes colonising and ruling over occupied territories. Nations are composed of groups of people with a common race and/or language and/or religion.
Japan was imperialist. The UK was imperialist. The USSR was imperialist. Rome was imperialist. The US was, and still is, imperialist. China is primarily nationalist. Israel is nationalist, although it began as a colony in an occupied middle east, and still has its own occupied territories and underpriviledged classes. Nazi Germany was nationalist. The vast majority of Islamic republics in the middle east are nationalist.
Is this new to you?
No, it is not "news to me". I wrote a paper on the subject in October of 2001.
I hope you don't find that "poofy hair" make the "Dear Leader" cuddly. You seem to be presenting this as if to soften his image.
I do not and I was not. I think it makes him comical, in a supervillain sort of way. I added the phrase upon review because I felt some of my descriptions may not be clear enough. Obviously I should have added more to my description of bin Laden instead.
The US government is composed of adults who can discern between people trying to kill Americans
Hardly. If you're not with them, you're with the terrorists.
And those terrorists consist of 1) an isolated, sanctioned, former western-puppet dictator throwing a few petrodollars at Palestinians and threatening to move to the Euro, 2) a Islamist republic standing in the way of Israeli domination of the Middle East, developing nuclear power in violation of a treaty signed by a previous western-puppet dictator, moving it's petrodollars to the Euro, and helping other OPEC countries do the same, 3) an isolated, sanctioned, communist-puppet dictator with poofy hair that already has nuclear weapons, and is threatening to use them unless it gets more US food and oil for its million-man army and failing socialist economy, 4) a small band of religious fundamentalists "oppressing" women in the poorest country on earth, preventing the opium harvest, and standing in the way of a Unocal pipeline from the Caspian, and, lest we forget, 5) a former CIA operative who flew planes into the two of the tallest buildings in the US, killing thousands of Americans.
This is the clear-headed leadership you envision? Assuming so, which "terrorist" do you suppose a "discerning adult" would attack first?
Nice article, btw. It clearly shows not that they want to, but that they feel justified in killing or injuring millions of us because we have killed or injured millions of them. Again, evil "terrorists" who fight back when attacked. *shock*
He's doctored his own intelligence reports
:)
Don't forget, he handed them right to Neocons in the US who waved them around and used them as justification for going to war in Iraq. Or, at least that's what they tell us over here.
I don't know which one, Bush or Blair, is the head idiot, but they are two of the biggest national socialist dipshits to have hit the West since, well, you know who
Because Hamas doesn't kill Americans, only Jews.
If we went to war anytime somebody killed a Jew, we'd, no wait...
That's funny, somebody with a uid of 893,028 saying Slashdot is now ruined.
Saddam DID fund terrorism. Point blank.
Yeah. He gave money to the orphans and widows of Palistinians who decided that killing themselves was a better alternative than living in an Israeli-occupied ghetto.
We're not quite stupid enough to believe your expansive definition of "terrorism" and your even more expansive definition of "fund".
throwing away 4 others...
It's not like we really had them to begin with. It's like, there are 5 barrels there that we could have with a more efficient process, but we only get 1.
1) people working less
2) corruption/market inefficiency
3) crime
In the end, you're working for nothing -- maybe a few posessions and nice clothes and being able to go out every weekend, but really just nothing. And don't think, if you do have a nice job, your job can't be outsourced or automated. At the cost of energy and the price of foreign labor, you can always be replaced. You can expect it to come right before you have your mortgage paid off.
So, in the end, I'll accept your argument that cities justify themselves. And I'll just say "we'll see". When the oil runs out and we realize coal is slowly killing us, we'll see how many cities make it on their own, how many whine to the government for aid, and how many get planes flown into their tallest buildings and collect the insurance.
Your whole attitude seems very paternalistic and demeaning
I'm sorry you feel that way, but it is paternalistic to have to help people in other countries with basics like clean water. And it should be demeaning to have to accept such aid.
It demeans me that you're complaining about it, like somehow affordable appliances aren't good enough. When Africans can afford $2000 windmills, they'll be there. Until then, save the high-priced handouts for Americans who need help. There are a million of them who lost their homes in Katrina, remember?
We are using it for disposable soda cans
You might be. If you feel guilty about it, perhaps you should expend your guilty energies building windmills in this country so that we might have an energy source from which to continue refining aluminum and providing clean water for other continents.
don't just create a new dependency which you can take advantage of later.
Where did you get this idea? You're under the impression that giving people the equivalent of stoves and boilers is "creating a dependency", but giving them electronics isn't?
Remember, better teach a man to fish than to give him one.
Teach them to refine their own damn aluminum, then. I'd sooner buy a windmill made in Africa than buy one in the US to be sent there. But before that can happen, they have to, you know, stop dying. And that seems to be what Mr. Kamen is addressing here.
And burning cow dung, wood, whatever won't help people in the long run, or even the medium term, because they likely need those resources for fertilizer, shelter, etc.
In the short term, they'll do better with power than without. In the medium term, they'll learn to allocate resources efficiently and not to overreproduce. In the long term, we'll see how much aluminum is left after giving Americans windmills... mmkay?
removes huge amounts of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide from the atmosphere
Not by itself it doesn't. I wondered where that 10,000 gallons/acre figure came from. Obviously it comes out of a smoke stack.
You might say this system prevents carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere, but even that isn't honest. More like, it delays carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere. That would be honesty.
TFA says "volunteers" but I'll bet they're paid volunteers. I wonder if they're told that they're being injected with ebola?
My window air conditioning unit uses 650 Watts. The heat of vaporization of water is 2428 kJ/Liter. That's 674 Watt*hours/Liter. Running an AC 12 hours a day condenses, at most, 12 Liters of water. Your figures might have been believable 10 years ago, but not today.
Admittedly, your idea is interesting. But it's nowhere near what the GP suggested. So I'm going to stick with my assessment of what was presented.
But I will happily eat the following phrase:
Secondly, you realize you're advocating air conditioning as a means of water purification for undeveloped nations? That's just goofy.
you can get those for $150
That's ridiculous. Your generator doesn't run on cow dung or wood, only expensive and limited petrochemicals.
You could even get a 1000 watt wind turbine for $2,115 and you wouldn't need fuel.
This is more interesting. Wind generators made primarily of aluminum wire would be interesting. But, for now, I think we'll reserve wind power for the first and second worlds and limit hand-outs to technologies that are more fool-proof and less capital-intensive, if more labor-intensive.
Okay. But it's neither cheap nor easy to get gasoline in the middle of the brush in a country that doesn't use the largest military in the world to subsidize the price of gasoline.
And, in case you missed it, it's quite possible that worldwide petroleum production has already peaked. So that solution isn't getting any cheaper.