Hint: you need to balance your books, whether you're a mom-and-pop store or a nation.
This is just false. Macro-economics is not just micro-economics on a larger scale. Governments are fundamentally different: your mom-and-pop store cannot print money, cannot raise taxes, does not have a AAA rating on the international financial markets, does not have a central bank as a lender of last resort, and does not have to take multiplier effects into account when trying to reduce a deficit. And governments don't have to (and shouldn't in many case) balance their budgets - it's okay if the national debt grows perpetually, as long as it grows slower than the economy.
Well, the court says that: 1) Article 21 of the Dutch constitution requires the government to protect the environment; and 2) the government has signed treaties (which are legally binding) committing the Netherlands to reducing CO2 emissions. So arguably the court is just telling the government to obey the law. Which is not on the face of it unreasonable.
Now, it may not be a great idea if courts start setting specific emission targets, but the 25% is actually the bottom end of what the IPCC considers necessary. (The plaintiffs demanded 40%.)
According to Wikipedia, that makes you slightly shorter than the average Dutch male, but significantly taller than the average Dutch female, so it's not surprising that you would be taller than most people.
>all of the best 3D and 2D tools, other than video, are entrenched in the Linux environment and perform best there
Um, no. What a ridiculous statement. Maya is for Windows and OSX only.
Maya has been available for Linux for years. See http://www.autodesk.com/produc...: "Available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X operating systems." It's just the free trial that isn't available for Linux.
A long time ago, I saw Bertrand Meyer (the Eiffel guy) give a keynote at ICSE, where he pointed out that the "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" claim is unscientific, because it can't be falsified: if a bug is not found, people can always say that there were not enough eyeballs, so "Linus' Law" still holds.
[A liquidity trap] puts us in a world of topsy-turvy, in which many of the usual rules of economics cease to hold. Thrift leads to lower investment; wage cuts reduce employment; even higher productivity can be a bad thing. And the broken windows fallacy ceases to be a fallacy: something that forces firms to replace capital, even if that something seemingly makes them poorer, can stimulate spending and raise employment. Indeed, in the absence of effective policy, that’s how recovery eventually happens: as Keynes put it, a slump goes on until “the shortage of capital through use, decay and obsolescence” gets firms spending again to replace their plant and equipment.
Mind you, Keynesians don't actually propose that the government should go around smashing windows, given that there is plenty of useful infrastructure spending to be done.
Having said that, military spending apparently has a negative multiplier, so it may be a bad idea even if you're down with Keynes.
How is systemd's use of D-Bus a problem for anybody? Do you have any evidence that its use of D-Bus is causing a performance problem anywhere? D-Bus is not an appropriate IPC in every situation (e.g. if you need to send huge amounts of data), but for systemd's usage scenario (sending occasional messages between processes), it seems perfectly fine.
The claim that systemd is somehow causing "tivoization" makes no sense whatsoever. If the systemd developers feel that it's fine for proprietary code to make API calls to systemd via D-Bus, then so what? They're not forcing anybody else to use D-Bus. (Systemd is licensed under the LGPL, by the way.)
This is just more anti-systemd FUD very light on actual facts.
First you assert that it's somehow a bad thing that systemd uses a standard, established IPC mechanism (D-Bus). Would it have been better if it had invented its own?
Then you claim that a crash of one systemd daemon "might" cause deadlocks/hangs/crashes, but you don't give any example. What daemons are intertwined in such a way that a failure of one would bring down the system? As far as I know, you can kill any systemd daemon (other than PID 1, obviously), and systemd will notice and restart it. Daemons like systemd-journald even use systemd's watchdog mechanism to ensure that they get restarted in case of a hang. In other words, systemd provides a much stronger basis for a reliable system than SysV init.
Fun fact: I just did a "kill -9 -1" to kill every process in a NixOS VM except PID 1. Systemd restarted every system service perfectly. Try that on SysV init.
Your post captures what most anti-systemd posts have in common: it spouts reasonably-sounding slogans ("Unix philosophy!", "dependency hell bad!") - which have nothing to do with how systemd actually works.
Take the supposed dependency hell. In reality, systemd has a fairly small number of dependencies, almost all of which are already ubiquitous on a modern Linux system (e.g. libacl), and many of which are optional (e.g. PAM). Gnome depending on systemd is hardly systemd's fault - if systemd provides useful functionality that Gnome wants to use, then why does that count against systemd? In any case, it's irrelevant for your "stripped down and hardened server", because surely you're not running Gnome there.
Or take the Unix philosophy. I'd say systemd (as in the PID 1 program) exemplifies the Unix philosophy: it does one thing, namely managing system services, and it does it really well. Now, systemd the *package* contains lots of other stuff, but most of it is optional. For instance, it does contain an NTP client now, but you don't have to use it. In fact, there even is a configure flag to disable it at build time. Also, the existence of systemd-timesyncd in no way prevents you from running whatever NTP client you want under systemd.
The idea that systemd is only relevent on the desktop could not be further from the truth. I would say it's even more relevant on servers, where I expect services to be managed reliably. SysV init cannot do that. (E.g., there is no guarantee that after "/etc/init.d/httpd stop" all httpd processes are really gone. It cannot even tell me if a service is currently running.) Systemd can. It cannot imagine going back to a situation where I can't do "systemctl" or "systemd-cgls" to get an overview of what is running on a system, or do "systemctl status " to see the status of a service, including its most recent log messages.
It's so simple that it's broken. See for example http://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/s... for a nice overview of all the limitations of SysV init, the most important being that it doesn't actually keep track of what services are running and what processes belong to what services.
How is that a problem? Pass the size in a separate variable.
You've just answered your own question. It's a problem because it requires programmers to concern themselves with low-level tedious details that the compiler could handle for them - details that they are in fact likely to get wrong. (E.g., you have to pass the correct size value, you have to remember to check it everywhere, and so on.)
Decades of buffer overflows should be sufficient evidence that this is not a good approach. Unfortunately, many programmers stubbornly refuse to see the obvious.
However, there is no smoke without fire and some of the EU's enforced regulations are truly head-scratching (eg: bottled water packaging cannot claim to combat dehydration.
Now you're propagating sensationalized British tabloid stories yourself, as explained here.
Regarding immigration: yes, you have to let those foreigners in because that's what your government agreed to after a democratic process. In fact, the UK has traditionally been one of the biggest supporters of freedom of movement...
I have in fact driven in the netherlands. You may think it's not that laid back - you have plainly not driven in the U.S. or anywhere with aggressive traffic for that matter.
I have driven in several states in the US and haven't noticed traffic being more "aggressive" than in the Netherlands. But that's of course anecdotal.
Not that I saw, apart from some speed cameras. It's that more people follow the rules as they are.
You're wrong. There were 9.6 million traffic citations in the Netherlands last year, on 10 million people with a driver's license. That appears to be a lot more (per capita) than in the US. The book "Traffic" by Tom Vanderbilt suggests that the much higher enforcement level may be the reason that the number of traffic fatalities is much less in the Netherlands than in Belgium (3.9 vs 8.1 per 100,000 according to the map).
That God doesn't give a shit about my right to file a joint tax return has no bearing on the fact that the United States government doesn't grant rights to the citizenry. That's an inherently un-American way of looking at rights
"Natural rights" may be the American way of looking at rights, but it's also a completely meaningless notion. Rights do not grow on trees. They're not laws of physics or mathematics. (If they were, they couldn't be violated.) Instead rights are a legal notion, and every society and individual has different views on what rights should be recognized.
For instance, you can certainly feel that gays should have the right to marry (as I do), but to say that the right to gay marriage has existed since the dawn of time but just wasn't recognized by the government is meaningless and pointless. You can certainly feel that certain rights should be universal, but there is no sense in pretending that they are.
And if "natural rights" really exist, what are they? Is my "right" not to pay taxes a natural right? Clearly there are people who feel that way. How do you decide in an objective way?
But the GP was referring to "big government", and in that sense the EU is absolutely tiny compared to any modern nation state: its budget is about 1% of the EU's GDP, and the European Commission has fewer civil servants than a largish European city.
100% CPU usage is not a bug but a symptom of a bug. There are numerous bugs and warts in numerous programs that cause 100% CPU usage. (And of course, it's not a bug if the program is doing useful computation...)
Amazing how you manage to spin two giant downsides of NAT as advantages. #1 is especially bad: no end-to-end connectivity means whole classes of applications (like peer-to-peer systems) are only possible with awful hacks (if you are lucky). #2 is really a non-issue. Things like SLAAC and DNS were invented for a reason.
It should have AAA, rating is based on the likelyhood of default. US can print money to repay debt, that means there's no chance of default.
If that were true, then every country with its own currency would have a AAA rating. They don't.
The notion that countries with their own currency can't default seems to be a strange meme that has emerged from the Eurozone crisis. In fact, countries with their own currency have defaulted all the time in history (including Greece before the Euro). This is because printing money to repay your debt is likely to lead to inflation, which will in turn cause lenders to demand a higher interest rate, requiring you to print even more money, and so on. This will ruin your economy so defaulting may be the better solution. Also, if investors distrust your currency because of inflation, you may be forced to start borrowing in a foreign currency, which you can't just print.
I agree it's rather scandalous they once more try to force such unwanted legislation but have good hopes the various national governments will instruct their commissioner to either take out the sting or stop the whole process, otherwise the EU parliament will bury it as happened with ACTA.
National governments are not supposed to "instruct" their commissioner since the commissioners (in theory) do not represent member states but the interests of the EU as a whole. They even take an oath of office to that effect ("neither to seek nor to take instructions from any Government or from any other institution, body, office or entity").
Actually those representatives can't do much : they don't have legislative iniative ( they can't create laws ) , they can only reject, amend or propose legislation
Which means they can do a lot - if the EP doesn't like it, it doesn't become law. Having the right to initiative would be great, but lack of it doesn't make the EP powerless (especially since they can (try to) amend proposals in the co-decision procedure).
Only the European Commission can do that, and the members of this commission are not elected by the people, but proposed by the European Commision , and elected by the European Parliament.
Simply put : if you don't like the laws the EU is making , you can't punish the lawmakers for it, because you can't elect them.
If national governments or the EP don't like what the Commision is doing, they can refrain from giving them a second term. Also, the EP can dismiss the Commission (and has done so in the past).
Also, while the European Parliament can block laws being passed by the European Commission , how like are they going to do that, knowing that they lose all chance of ever being proposed to join the European Commission.
What a strange thing to say. Do you have any example of this? It's not even plausible - Commissioners are nominated by national governments, so if an MEP makes himself popular at home by blocking some legislation, why wouldn't they nominate him?
Why is it undemocratic? The Council of the European Union has a democratic mandate because they're representatives of democratically elected governments (and can be sent home by voters if they don't approve), and more importantly, directives have to be approved by the European Parliament, who are elected directly. (Obligatory link)
You mean the one in which the European Commission just turfed out the democratically elected Prime Minister and replaced him with a Goldman Sachs stooge? That Italian government? Following quick on the heals of rolling the leader of the Greek government (for the high crime of proposing to put the people's future to a vote by, you know, the people) and replacing him with another European central banker?
You're seriously misinformed or just trolling. The European Commission did no such thing - in fact, they have been relatively absent in the entire debt crisis. You could argue that Merkozy got rid of Papandreou and Berlusconi, but that's rather dubious as well: Papandreou did himself in by calling for a referendum (a stupid unilateral move that was rightly met with condemnation from the other EU states; should you organise a referendum when your house is on fire?) and then reversing course a few days later, while Berlusconi (finally!) lost his majority in parliament. Governments fall all the time - I don't see what's undemocratic here.
It's not "lazy developers", it's right there in the IPv6 standard. It's pretty much the standard way of forming IPv6 interface identifiers (basically, the lower 64 bits of most IPv6 addresses). Generating interface identifiers randomly to protect privacy is a later invention.
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Hint: you need to balance your books, whether you're a mom-and-pop store or a nation.
This is just false. Macro-economics is not just micro-economics on a larger scale. Governments are fundamentally different: your mom-and-pop store cannot print money, cannot raise taxes, does not have a AAA rating on the international financial markets, does not have a central bank as a lender of last resort, and does not have to take multiplier effects into account when trying to reduce a deficit. And governments don't have to (and shouldn't in many case) balance their budgets - it's okay if the national debt grows perpetually, as long as it grows slower than the economy.
Well, the court says that: 1) Article 21 of the Dutch constitution requires the government to protect the environment; and 2) the government has signed treaties (which are legally binding) committing the Netherlands to reducing CO2 emissions. So arguably the court is just telling the government to obey the law. Which is not on the face of it unreasonable.
Now, it may not be a great idea if courts start setting specific emission targets, but the 25% is actually the bottom end of what the IPCC considers necessary. (The plaintiffs demanded 40%.)
According to Wikipedia, that makes you slightly shorter than the average Dutch male, but significantly taller than the average Dutch female, so it's not surprising that you would be taller than most people.
>all of the best 3D and 2D tools, other than video, are entrenched in the Linux environment and perform best there
Um, no. What a ridiculous statement. Maya is for Windows and OSX only.
Maya has been available for Linux for years. See http://www.autodesk.com/produc...: "Available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X operating systems." It's just the free trial that isn't available for Linux.
A long time ago, I saw Bertrand Meyer (the Eiffel guy) give a keynote at ICSE, where he pointed out that the "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" claim is unscientific, because it can't be falsified: if a bug is not found, people can always say that there were not enough eyeballs, so "Linus' Law" still holds.
Of course, Krugman, a Nobel prize winning economist, does actually know about the broken window fallacy:
[A liquidity trap] puts us in a world of topsy-turvy, in which many of the usual rules of economics cease to hold. Thrift leads to lower investment; wage cuts reduce employment; even higher productivity can be a bad thing. And the broken windows fallacy ceases to be a fallacy: something that forces firms to replace capital, even if that something seemingly makes them poorer, can stimulate spending and raise employment. Indeed, in the absence of effective policy, that’s how recovery eventually happens: as Keynes put it, a slump goes on until “the shortage of capital through use, decay and obsolescence” gets firms spending again to replace their plant and equipment.
Mind you, Keynesians don't actually propose that the government should go around smashing windows, given that there is plenty of useful infrastructure spending to be done.
Having said that, military spending apparently has a negative multiplier, so it may be a bad idea even if you're down with Keynes.
How is systemd's use of D-Bus a problem for anybody? Do you have any evidence that its use of D-Bus is causing a performance problem anywhere? D-Bus is not an appropriate IPC in every situation (e.g. if you need to send huge amounts of data), but for systemd's usage scenario (sending occasional messages between processes), it seems perfectly fine.
The claim that systemd is somehow causing "tivoization" makes no sense whatsoever. If the systemd developers feel that it's fine for proprietary code to make API calls to systemd via D-Bus, then so what? They're not forcing anybody else to use D-Bus. (Systemd is licensed under the LGPL, by the way.)
This is just more anti-systemd FUD very light on actual facts.
First you assert that it's somehow a bad thing that systemd uses a standard, established IPC mechanism (D-Bus). Would it have been better if it had invented its own?
Then you claim that a crash of one systemd daemon "might" cause deadlocks/hangs/crashes, but you don't give any example. What daemons are intertwined in such a way that a failure of one would bring down the system? As far as I know, you can kill any systemd daemon (other than PID 1, obviously), and systemd will notice and restart it. Daemons like systemd-journald even use systemd's watchdog mechanism to ensure that they get restarted in case of a hang. In other words, systemd provides a much stronger basis for a reliable system than SysV init.
Fun fact: I just did a "kill -9 -1" to kill every process in a NixOS VM except PID 1. Systemd restarted every system service perfectly. Try that on SysV init.
Your post captures what most anti-systemd posts have in common: it spouts reasonably-sounding slogans ("Unix philosophy!", "dependency hell bad!") - which have nothing to do with how systemd actually works.
Take the supposed dependency hell. In reality, systemd has a fairly small number of dependencies, almost all of which are already ubiquitous on a modern Linux system (e.g. libacl), and many of which are optional (e.g. PAM). Gnome depending on systemd is hardly systemd's fault - if systemd provides useful functionality that Gnome wants to use, then why does that count against systemd? In any case, it's irrelevant for your "stripped down and hardened server", because surely you're not running Gnome there.
Or take the Unix philosophy. I'd say systemd (as in the PID 1 program) exemplifies the Unix philosophy: it does one thing, namely managing system services, and it does it really well. Now, systemd the *package* contains lots of other stuff, but most of it is optional. For instance, it does contain an NTP client now, but you don't have to use it. In fact, there even is a configure flag to disable it at build time. Also, the existence of systemd-timesyncd in no way prevents you from running whatever NTP client you want under systemd.
The idea that systemd is only relevent on the desktop could not be further from the truth. I would say it's even more relevant on servers, where I expect services to be managed reliably. SysV init cannot do that. (E.g., there is no guarantee that after "/etc/init.d/httpd stop" all httpd processes are really gone. It cannot even tell me if a service is currently running.) Systemd can. It cannot imagine going back to a situation where I can't do "systemctl" or "systemd-cgls" to get an overview of what is running on a system, or do "systemctl status " to see the status of a service, including its most recent log messages.
It's so simple that it's broken. See for example http://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/s... for a nice overview of all the limitations of SysV init, the most important being that it doesn't actually keep track of what services are running and what processes belong to what services.
How is that a problem? Pass the size in a separate variable.
You've just answered your own question. It's a problem because it requires programmers to concern themselves with low-level tedious details that the compiler could handle for them - details that they are in fact likely to get wrong. (E.g., you have to pass the correct size value, you have to remember to check it everywhere, and so on.)
Decades of buffer overflows should be sufficient evidence that this is not a good approach. Unfortunately, many programmers stubbornly refuse to see the obvious.
However, there is no smoke without fire and some of the EU's enforced regulations are truly head-scratching (eg: bottled water packaging cannot claim to combat dehydration.
Now you're propagating sensationalized British tabloid stories yourself, as explained here.
Which of the thousand examples do you want?
The UK did not want to give the vote to prisoners. They voted against it through to the EU courts.
The prisoner voting thing was a decision by the European Court of Human Rights, which is not an EU institution. If you want to criticize the EU, please inform yourself a bit better first.
Regarding immigration: yes, you have to let those foreigners in because that's what your government agreed to after a democratic process. In fact, the UK has traditionally been one of the biggest supporters of freedom of movement...
Or maybe he wasn't "criticizing" them but was just reminiscing about the old days when interviewed for this book?
I have in fact driven in the netherlands. You may think it's not that laid back - you have plainly not driven in the U.S. or anywhere with aggressive traffic for that matter.
I have driven in several states in the US and haven't noticed traffic being more "aggressive" than in the Netherlands. But that's of course anecdotal.
Not that I saw, apart from some speed cameras. It's that more people follow the rules as they are.
You're wrong. There were 9.6 million traffic citations in the Netherlands last year, on 10 million people with a driver's license. That appears to be a lot more (per capita) than in the US. The book "Traffic" by Tom Vanderbilt suggests that the much higher enforcement level may be the reason that the number of traffic fatalities is much less in the Netherlands than in Belgium (3.9 vs 8.1 per 100,000 according to the map).
That God doesn't give a shit about my right to file a joint tax return has no bearing on the fact that the United States government doesn't grant rights to the citizenry. That's an inherently un-American way of looking at rights
"Natural rights" may be the American way of looking at rights, but it's also a completely meaningless notion. Rights do not grow on trees. They're not laws of physics or mathematics. (If they were, they couldn't be violated.) Instead rights are a legal notion, and every society and individual has different views on what rights should be recognized.
For instance, you can certainly feel that gays should have the right to marry (as I do), but to say that the right to gay marriage has existed since the dawn of time but just wasn't recognized by the government is meaningless and pointless. You can certainly feel that certain rights should be universal, but there is no sense in pretending that they are.
And if "natural rights" really exist, what are they? Is my "right" not to pay taxes a natural right? Clearly there are people who feel that way. How do you decide in an objective way?
But the GP was referring to "big government", and in that sense the EU is absolutely tiny compared to any modern nation state: its budget is about 1% of the EU's GDP, and the European Commission has fewer civil servants than a largish European city.
100% CPU usage is not a bug but a symptom of a bug. There are numerous bugs and warts in numerous programs that cause 100% CPU usage. (And of course, it's not a bug if the program is doing useful computation...)
Amazing how you manage to spin two giant downsides of NAT as advantages. #1 is especially bad: no end-to-end connectivity means whole classes of applications (like peer-to-peer systems) are only possible with awful hacks (if you are lucky). #2 is really a non-issue. Things like SLAAC and DNS were invented for a reason.
It should have AAA, rating is based on the likelyhood of default. US can print money to repay debt, that means there's no chance of default.
If that were true, then every country with its own currency would have a AAA rating. They don't.
The notion that countries with their own currency can't default seems to be a strange meme that has emerged from the Eurozone crisis. In fact, countries with their own currency have defaulted all the time in history (including Greece before the Euro). This is because printing money to repay your debt is likely to lead to inflation, which will in turn cause lenders to demand a higher interest rate, requiring you to print even more money, and so on. This will ruin your economy so defaulting may be the better solution. Also, if investors distrust your currency because of inflation, you may be forced to start borrowing in a foreign currency, which you can't just print.
I agree it's rather scandalous they once more try to force such unwanted legislation but have good hopes the various national governments will instruct their commissioner to either take out the sting or stop the whole process, otherwise the EU parliament will bury it as happened with ACTA.
National governments are not supposed to "instruct" their commissioner since the commissioners (in theory) do not represent member states but the interests of the EU as a whole. They even take an oath of office to that effect ("neither to seek nor to take instructions from any Government or from any other institution, body, office or entity").
Actually those representatives can't do much : they don't have legislative iniative ( they can't create laws ) , they can only reject, amend or propose legislation
Which means they can do a lot - if the EP doesn't like it, it doesn't become law. Having the right to initiative would be great, but lack of it doesn't make the EP powerless (especially since they can (try to) amend proposals in the co-decision procedure).
Only the European Commission can do that, and the members of this commission are not elected by the people, but proposed by the European Commision , and elected by the European Parliament.
Simply put : if you don't like the laws the EU is making , you can't punish the lawmakers for it, because you can't elect them.
If national governments or the EP don't like what the Commision is doing, they can refrain from giving them a second term. Also, the EP can dismiss the Commission (and has done so in the past).
Also, while the European Parliament can block laws being passed by the European Commission , how like are they going to do that, knowing that they lose all chance of ever being proposed to join the European Commission.
What a strange thing to say. Do you have any example of this? It's not even plausible - Commissioners are nominated by national governments, so if an MEP makes himself popular at home by blocking some legislation, why wouldn't they nominate him?
Why is it undemocratic? The Council of the European Union has a democratic mandate because they're representatives of democratically elected governments (and can be sent home by voters if they don't approve), and more importantly, directives have to be approved by the European Parliament, who are elected directly. (Obligatory link)
You mean the one in which the European Commission just turfed out the democratically elected Prime Minister and replaced him with a Goldman Sachs stooge? That Italian government? Following quick on the heals of rolling the leader of the Greek government (for the high crime of proposing to put the people's future to a vote by, you know, the people) and replacing him with another European central banker?
You're seriously misinformed or just trolling. The European Commission did no such thing - in fact, they have been relatively absent in the entire debt crisis. You could argue that Merkozy got rid of Papandreou and Berlusconi, but that's rather dubious as well: Papandreou did himself in by calling for a referendum (a stupid unilateral move that was rightly met with condemnation from the other EU states; should you organise a referendum when your house is on fire?) and then reversing course a few days later, while Berlusconi (finally!) lost his majority in parliament. Governments fall all the time - I don't see what's undemocratic here.
It's not "lazy developers", it's right there in the IPv6 standard. It's pretty much the standard way of forming IPv6 interface identifiers (basically, the lower 64 bits of most IPv6 addresses). Generating interface identifiers randomly to protect privacy is a later invention.