Re:All I know is...
on
The Jobs Crunch
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Take a look at how the survey is conducted. The people who're part of it don't get to decide whether or not they're 'unemployed' or 'not part of the work force'; the GOVERNMENT makes that determination. Which means that the government can fuck with the numbers any way it pleases.
Forgive me if I don't believe the government unbiased.
Max
Re:low unemployment compared to europe
on
The Jobs Crunch
·
· Score: 1
That is how the government knows how many people are employed, how many are unemployed and how many are not in the labor force.
The figures are still bullshit. People are moved from the 'unemployed' to 'not in the labor force' how, exactly? The last classification apparently includes housewives/househusbands, even if they've joined that part of the sample involuntarily. In fact, from what I can see the GOVERNMENT decides who's looking for work and who isn't, not the people who fall into those classifications themselves.
Free trade is fine, so long as you confine it to the 50 states and nations whose economies are closely tied with our own *and whose pay scales are close to our own*. Japan, Canada, South Korea, certain Western European nations (but not all); sure, free trade is the way to go.
Free trade with nations which don't operate by the same principles and whose average pay scale is considerably lower than that of a worker in America is just fucking begging for a disaster. When it comes to places like India, China, et. al. we should raise trade barriers and tariffs like they were going out of style; make it so expensive for companies to 'outsource' (really hate that word; I much prefer 'rape and ream the American public for a quick buck') jobs that it becomes less expensive to just build the damned plant in the U.S. and hire American workers.
Inflation will go up - so what? It won't rise nearly as fast as average wage rates, nor will it counter the huge additional currency turnover in the economy. Not to mention the demand produced by now-employed or better-employed workers spending their excess cash on items produced within the United States. It'll damage the economies of India/China/et. al., but again, why should I give a shit? That's a problem for the Indian/Chinese/etc. people and their governments; it isn't part of the mandate of my government, nor do I feel the need to compromise the economic security of my friends, family and neighbors for people half-way around the world.
Perhaps instead of voting for President and the Congress we should draw for them randomly, like jury duty. Although we'd have to make it considerably harder to get out of than jury duty is.
I mean, really - could it possibly be any worse than the system we have now? Especially since the percentage of Americans who have a criminal record is considerably lower than the percentage of Congressmen who have criminal records? Or bankruptcies, for that matter?
Max
Re:low unemployment compared to europe
on
The Jobs Crunch
·
· Score: 1
It comes from the CPS, which means it counts people as unemployed for as long as they are looking for work.
This has to be crap. If you aren't drawing unemployment benefits the government has absolutely no way to track whether or not you're looking for work. It's not as if you have to file with the government whenever you apply for a job, nor do employers have to report that person X just dropped off a resume at their place of establishment.
Unemployment figures *are* tied to unemployment benefits. There is no way for the government to determine what you're doing if you aren't drawing benefits.
Max
Re:low unemployment compared to europe
on
The Jobs Crunch
·
· Score: 1
Tell me why I should give a shit what the unemployment numbers are in Europe (assuming they're even counted the same way as they are here, i.e., people who give up or drop off the unemployment rolls somehow magically disappear from the equation).
Really - why should I give a rat's ass how Europe is doing? As an American I'm concerned with unemployment in THIS country and I have every right to question the situation without having some asshat say "look at country X and count yourself lucky!"
Max
Re:All I know is...
on
The Jobs Crunch
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
5.4 are the latest numbers, the lowest since Oct 2001.
These figures are inaccurate. They don't count people who're no longer collecting unemployment and have simply given up. Many households which formerly had two parents working now only have one parent employed but the government, in it's infinite wisdom, doesn't count these folks as being unemployed.
This is nothing short of 'voodoo unemployment numbers': pretending that people who can't find a job prefer not to work, and therefore don't need to be counted.
We should also note that of the jobs created (about half of those lost so far) the average pay is almost $9,000 lower than the jobs lost. Things are much, much grimmer than our government would lead us to believe.
This isn't new, though. The government did the exact same thing during the Reagan Era depression, declaring that things were looking up despite the fact that, for example, nearly one in three people in Oregon were unemployed and that the few jobs created paid about *one-half the wage* of the timber jobs lost.
Don't trust the government for unbiased numbers; you won't get them.
...who're bitching about the flaws in the movie, please provide a link to a short that you think is more impressively realistic. That is, instead of just moaning about the flaws in the piece, do us all a favor and give us a link to something better.
I swear to god, Slashdot is home to more nasty, jealous pricks than any other open forum on the net. Even Spaceship One had a horde of vile little losers trying to cut down Rutan and Melville's achievement seconds after the craft put down in the desert after an historic first.
No doubt y'all think you're cool in some pseudo-intellectual fashion when you rave on as some self-appointed not-so-expert critic, but here's a newsflash: You aren't! Blasting the achievements of others doesn't make you look cool or chicly rebellious, it just shows you up as a pathetic, common, unaccomplished little man green with envy and burning with vitriol.
And in case you haven't figured it out, I thought the stuff was very nicely done. It's certainly better than anything I could ever do, even if I spent my entire life working at it. The artist deserves kudos, and he's getting them, at least from me.
That's the plain and simple of it. No one has ever been able to demonstrate that they'll save money during an election, nor that they're anywhere close to being secure. Diebold's machines are black-box proprietary and it's essentially impossible to determine if someone (say, a bought-and-paid-for Diebold exec) has tampered with the results.
I used to work with county and city elections. No machines were used, just a supervisory staff of elections officials and a horde of volunteers. All voting locations would count each box of ballots twice, each time by a different person, and if the tallies weren't exact they'd go through the whole process again for that ballot box. This would continue until two separate individuals got the same count for the box.
Afterwards, all of the paper ballots would be boxed and stored in a secure location in case it became necessary to do a recount. And again, all recounts were done by box, twice, and any discrepancies meant starting over from scratch for that box.
This wasn't a terribly expensive way of doing things. The primary cost was in printing and mailing the ballots (for mail-ins). The elections sites themselves were run by volunteers, and the supervisory staff was already paid for. Fraud was rather difficult to pull off on the part of the volunteers and the entire process was 'open source'. Individual citizen groups could demand to have a representative sit in on the recounts, as could any political party that was running a candidate.
Why, exactly, are we dumping a system like this for Diebold machines? It makes no sense at all unless someone is specifically looking for a way to fuck up the elections in their favor, or in favor of whomever happens to be paying them off.
And don't tell me that this system can't be scaled; that's bullshit. The system I'm speaking of here was used on the city, county, and state level. If it can be done by one state, it can be scaled for any state, and it's the STATES who run the elections, not the federal government.
I agree. If everyone built vehicles along the lines of Rutan's Spaceship One then less would be learned and the contest wouldn't be nearly as interesting. The wackier the designs the more intrigued I am, and the Da Vinci project strikes me as pretty wacky.
Your whole "both parties are the same, people are all biased partisans" is an easily knocked-over strawmen
No, it isn't. It's a matter of perspective. I question the underlying doctrines that both 'sides' take for granted; so long as those doctrines aren't up for discussion then any differences are fairly trivial.
You might think otherwise. But that doesn't make my argument a strawman in any sense of the word.
You fundamentalists have no sense of humor. When my wife took to calling the incredibly bloody "The Passion of the Christ" - y'know, the Mel Gibson schlock that recently came out - "The Jesus Christ Chainsaw Massacre" she got nothing but grief from Christians who got their panties in a wad over it.
Absolutely no sense of humor when it comes to anything remotely connected to your religion.
Actually we don't. The combination of government regulation and corporatism has pretty much put an end to what could honestly be called 'capitalism'; in some respects it looks like a capitalism, but it certainly doesn't meet the definition of capitalism, nor of a free market that capitalism requires.
That's one of the things I was talking about. The premise is assumed to be true and everyone operates on that premise without ever questioning it. Bias, therefore, is inherent in the system right from the outset; and any news article which assumes that America is a capitalism and that it has a free market is going to be hopelessly biased from word one. It doesn't matter how neutral the article itself is so long as these assumptions are thought to be true.
If America is not, indeed, a functional capitalism based on a truly free market, then any argument by the left or right over capitalism and the free market is pretty much a nonsensical one. And a news article which buys into the myth that's being argued over is going to be biased. Not biased to the left or to the right, but biased towards the basic assumptions that the left and right take for granted as true. In effect, the news article is biased towards BOTH the left and the right. A news article will only serve to highlight the quibbles of the left or the right without ever questioning if the premise of the argument is at all valid.
This is actually to the benefit of those who have power in what we call 'the left' or 'the right'. These two groups both want power and they both want to tweak the system according to their views; but neither wants to upset the system itself since mucking with the foundation will most likely result in a radical shift in power and their own disenfranchisement. Like the DemoRepublicans, who argue over details concerning the voting system but who won't for a moment consider changing the system itself to allow for a viable 3rd-party challenge.
Many believe that the government does indeed have a mandate to see that our children are educated -- they just don't think that means it has to be the government *itself* doing the educating.
And this still supports the primary premise of forced government schooling. No one on the left or the right argues over doing away with it altogether; just fiddling with the system to suit their own views. They both have far too much invested in forced schooling to entertain the idea or give it any credence whatsoever. So long as forced schooling is taken for granted by both sides they're sharing the same bed, so far as I'm concerned.
That would depend on what you define as 'fair' or 'biased'. Seems to me that most folks define 'fair' as "whatever I happen to agree with", and 'biased' as "whatever I happen to disagree with"; and that includes the so-called liberals as much as the so-called conservatives.
As a small-l libertarian I don't see much in the way of unbiased news regardless of the source. The very assumptions that most stories are based on are biased in and of themselves, even if the piece is written in the most unbiased manner possible. Example: both the left and the right operate on the assumption that forced government schooling is a good thing, and only argue about how this schooling should be executed. Neither side ever questions the concept of forced government schooling itself, and the media (regardless of whether you class it as 'left' or 'right') also supports the idea of forced government schooling by adopting the assumption without question.
This happens all the time, over a vast array of subjects. Very few people ever question the concepts themselves, just the manner in which those concepts are implemented. From my point of view, any news article which jumps on the bandwagon is biased from the outset and cannot be said to be 'fair' or 'balanced' in any way at all.
It's also one of the reasons I see so little difference between the Democrats and the Republicans. They may quibble over the details but they agree whole-heartedly on all the major points. What good is having two parties when neither of them wants to examine the fundamental assumptions of the system they operate in, much less do anything to change that system in any marked way? The states goals of both parties are so closely in line with one another that it's often difficult to see any real difference. The trivialities are played up to *seem* like big differences, but both parties like things just the way they are and will never work to rock the boat that they both profit from.
Google isn't to blame for any perceived bias; Google can't help but be biased, just like all the other news organizations out there. It's a part of the game and I doubt they even realize that bias is inherent to the system, so long as they never question the system itself.
...to lift the burden of adult supervision from those who're supposed to be exercising it. Yes indeed, it's just too damned hard for parents and babysitters/teachers to keep a lid on those cunning little wretches known as children; time to foist the crushing responsibility off onto a third party. Then we'll have someone else to blame if our brats do something we don't approve of!
Missed the point there, did ya? Next time listen for the "whooshing" sound and try to figure out what it was that went flying over your head before posting.
He didn't say a single thing about gays. He was talking about the sort of lifestyle that increases the rate of infection, e.g., unprotected sex with strangers.
What you're taking offense at exists only within your own mind. Try to engage in a bit of reading comprehension next time before jumping to unwarranted conclusions.
I'm sorry, did you actually think Sun was an ally?
No company is an ally, and that includes the likes of IBM, Redhat, and SuSe. Companies are in the business of making money for their investors and owners; that is their sole purpose. If you thought they were supporting Linux out of the goodness of their hearts then I suggest medication might help with your delusions.
Redhat and SuSe support Linux because it's the core of their business. By supporting Linux they support themselves. Not just good business, but also self-preservation.
IBM supports Linux because commoditizing software can only be good for a company which makes its money through the sale of hardware. Adopting an OS used world-wide and worked on by tens of thousands of pretty bright people *for free* is just plain smart. IBM doesn't have to waste billions building a new OS and continually trying to keep up with open-source competition when they can just adopt Linux for their own and be assured of free, savvy development, improvement, and bug-fixing for the foreseeable future. Any work they themselves do will improve their own fortunes AND build up goodwill with all the Linux geeks out there (especially those who mistakenly think that IBM is some kind of 'ally'). Adopting linux is a win-win for them.
And don't forget: IBM still has a pretty big axe to grind with MS over past betrayals. So an added bonus of the proliferation of linux and the commoditization of the OS is that MS gets bent over and given a good reaming; perhaps even destroyed, in the long run. Don't think that IBM won't toast every setback MS suffers at the hands of Linux and open-source software, at least privately.
But in the end none of these companies are allies. They operate on the principle of self-interest, and nothing more.
and the distributed control model begins to break down when it reaches a certain size.. if it matures
Nice bit of propaganda. Also complete bullshit. Linux hasn't suffered in any way due to the "distributed control model" you mention; nor is there any evidence whatsoever that it would've developed more quickly if it had gone another route.
Here it is: the geek equivalent of dick-measuring, comparin the 'levels' of their computers to see who has the larger, er, more advanced machinery.
And this system will no doubt appeal to that class of geek who wastes most of his waking life on D&D-like games, the sort of person who bores you into homicidal despair with absurd tales about his "18th level gnome illusionist" or "12th level barbarian assassin". No doubt these little losers will jump up and down at the thought of their COMPUTERS having levels as well as their imaginary alternate egos.
If you want to save your country, don't waste your vote.
On the other hand, if you truly believe in democracy and freedom vote however the hell you want and don't listen to the DemoRepublicans who yammer on about 'wasted' votes.
...how edonkey is any better than gnutella. If I want to go searching for a cd's worth of songs to see if the cd itself is worth purchasing then gnutella works just fine and has oodles of files available. Kazaa was never any great shake over gnutella, and my (brief) experience with a Linux install of edonkey tonight left me completely unimpressed.
The only 'advantage' I was able to see was that Kazaa appears to have a slight edge in the porn department over gnutella (which makes Kazaa even more useless if you aren't looking for porn and have to wade through that crap to find what you want).
Slashdot Mirror
Take a look at how the survey is conducted. The people who're part of it don't get to decide whether or not they're 'unemployed' or 'not part of the work force'; the GOVERNMENT makes that determination. Which means that the government can fuck with the numbers any way it pleases.
Forgive me if I don't believe the government unbiased.
Max
That is how the government knows how many people are employed, how many are unemployed and how many are not in the labor force.
The figures are still bullshit. People are moved from the 'unemployed' to 'not in the labor force' how, exactly? The last classification apparently includes housewives/househusbands, even if they've joined that part of the sample involuntarily. In fact, from what I can see the GOVERNMENT decides who's looking for work and who isn't, not the people who fall into those classifications themselves.
Yes, very unbiased that. Thanks for playing.
Max
Free trade is fine, so long as you confine it to the 50 states and nations whose economies are closely tied with our own *and whose pay scales are close to our own*. Japan, Canada, South Korea, certain Western European nations (but not all); sure, free trade is the way to go.
Free trade with nations which don't operate by the same principles and whose average pay scale is considerably lower than that of a worker in America is just fucking begging for a disaster. When it comes to places like India, China, et. al. we should raise trade barriers and tariffs like they were going out of style; make it so expensive for companies to 'outsource' (really hate that word; I much prefer 'rape and ream the American public for a quick buck') jobs that it becomes less expensive to just build the damned plant in the U.S. and hire American workers.
Inflation will go up - so what? It won't rise nearly as fast as average wage rates, nor will it counter the huge additional currency turnover in the economy. Not to mention the demand produced by now-employed or better-employed workers spending their excess cash on items produced within the United States. It'll damage the economies of India/China/et. al., but again, why should I give a shit? That's a problem for the Indian/Chinese/etc. people and their governments; it isn't part of the mandate of my government, nor do I feel the need to compromise the economic security of my friends, family and neighbors for people half-way around the world.
Max
Perhaps instead of voting for President and the Congress we should draw for them randomly, like jury duty. Although we'd have to make it considerably harder to get out of than jury duty is.
I mean, really - could it possibly be any worse than the system we have now? Especially since the percentage of Americans who have a criminal record is considerably lower than the percentage of Congressmen who have criminal records? Or bankruptcies, for that matter?
Max
It comes from the CPS, which means it counts people as unemployed for as long as they are looking for work.
This has to be crap. If you aren't drawing unemployment benefits the government has absolutely no way to track whether or not you're looking for work. It's not as if you have to file with the government whenever you apply for a job, nor do employers have to report that person X just dropped off a resume at their place of establishment.
Unemployment figures *are* tied to unemployment benefits. There is no way for the government to determine what you're doing if you aren't drawing benefits.
Max
Tell me why I should give a shit what the unemployment numbers are in Europe (assuming they're even counted the same way as they are here, i.e., people who give up or drop off the unemployment rolls somehow magically disappear from the equation).
Really - why should I give a rat's ass how Europe is doing? As an American I'm concerned with unemployment in THIS country and I have every right to question the situation without having some asshat say "look at country X and count yourself lucky!"
Max
5.4 are the latest numbers, the lowest since Oct 2001.
These figures are inaccurate. They don't count people who're no longer collecting unemployment and have simply given up. Many households which formerly had two parents working now only have one parent employed but the government, in it's infinite wisdom, doesn't count these folks as being unemployed.
This is nothing short of 'voodoo unemployment numbers': pretending that people who can't find a job prefer not to work, and therefore don't need to be counted.
We should also note that of the jobs created (about half of those lost so far) the average pay is almost $9,000 lower than the jobs lost. Things are much, much grimmer than our government would lead us to believe.
This isn't new, though. The government did the exact same thing during the Reagan Era depression, declaring that things were looking up despite the fact that, for example, nearly one in three people in Oregon were unemployed and that the few jobs created paid about *one-half the wage* of the timber jobs lost.
Don't trust the government for unbiased numbers; you won't get them.
Max
...who're bitching about the flaws in the movie, please provide a link to a short that you think is more impressively realistic. That is, instead of just moaning about the flaws in the piece, do us all a favor and give us a link to something better.
I swear to god, Slashdot is home to more nasty, jealous pricks than any other open forum on the net. Even Spaceship One had a horde of vile little losers trying to cut down Rutan and Melville's achievement seconds after the craft put down in the desert after an historic first.
No doubt y'all think you're cool in some pseudo-intellectual fashion when you rave on as some self-appointed not-so-expert critic, but here's a newsflash: You aren't! Blasting the achievements of others doesn't make you look cool or chicly rebellious, it just shows you up as a pathetic, common, unaccomplished little man green with envy and burning with vitriol.
And in case you haven't figured it out, I thought the stuff was very nicely done. It's certainly better than anything I could ever do, even if I spent my entire life working at it. The artist deserves kudos, and he's getting them, at least from me.
Max
That's the plain and simple of it. No one has ever been able to demonstrate that they'll save money during an election, nor that they're anywhere close to being secure. Diebold's machines are black-box proprietary and it's essentially impossible to determine if someone (say, a bought-and-paid-for Diebold exec) has tampered with the results.
I used to work with county and city elections. No machines were used, just a supervisory staff of elections officials and a horde of volunteers. All voting locations would count each box of ballots twice, each time by a different person, and if the tallies weren't exact they'd go through the whole process again for that ballot box. This would continue until two separate individuals got the same count for the box.
Afterwards, all of the paper ballots would be boxed and stored in a secure location in case it became necessary to do a recount. And again, all recounts were done by box, twice, and any discrepancies meant starting over from scratch for that box.
This wasn't a terribly expensive way of doing things. The primary cost was in printing and mailing the ballots (for mail-ins). The elections sites themselves were run by volunteers, and the supervisory staff was already paid for. Fraud was rather difficult to pull off on the part of the volunteers and the entire process was 'open source'. Individual citizen groups could demand to have a representative sit in on the recounts, as could any political party that was running a candidate.
Why, exactly, are we dumping a system like this for Diebold machines? It makes no sense at all unless someone is specifically looking for a way to fuck up the elections in their favor, or in favor of whomever happens to be paying them off.
And don't tell me that this system can't be scaled; that's bullshit. The system I'm speaking of here was used on the city, county, and state level. If it can be done by one state, it can be scaled for any state, and it's the STATES who run the elections, not the federal government.
Max
Because they aren't anywhere close to launch?
Max
I agree. If everyone built vehicles along the lines of Rutan's Spaceship One then less would be learned and the contest wouldn't be nearly as interesting. The wackier the designs the more intrigued I am, and the Da Vinci project strikes me as pretty wacky.
Max
Your whole "both parties are the same, people are all biased partisans" is an easily knocked-over strawmen
No, it isn't. It's a matter of perspective. I question the underlying doctrines that both 'sides' take for granted; so long as those doctrines aren't up for discussion then any differences are fairly trivial.
You might think otherwise. But that doesn't make my argument a strawman in any sense of the word.
Max
I would expect no less from an anonymous coward.
Max
You fundamentalists have no sense of humor. When my wife took to calling the incredibly bloody "The Passion of the Christ" - y'know, the Mel Gibson schlock that recently came out - "The Jesus Christ Chainsaw Massacre" she got nothing but grief from Christians who got their panties in a wad over it.
Absolutely no sense of humor when it comes to anything remotely connected to your religion.
Max
and the fact is, we do have a capitalist economy.
Actually we don't. The combination of government regulation and corporatism has pretty much put an end to what could honestly be called 'capitalism'; in some respects it looks like a capitalism, but it certainly doesn't meet the definition of capitalism, nor of a free market that capitalism requires.
That's one of the things I was talking about. The premise is assumed to be true and everyone operates on that premise without ever questioning it. Bias, therefore, is inherent in the system right from the outset; and any news article which assumes that America is a capitalism and that it has a free market is going to be hopelessly biased from word one. It doesn't matter how neutral the article itself is so long as these assumptions are thought to be true.
If America is not, indeed, a functional capitalism based on a truly free market, then any argument by the left or right over capitalism and the free market is pretty much a nonsensical one. And a news article which buys into the myth that's being argued over is going to be biased. Not biased to the left or to the right, but biased towards the basic assumptions that the left and right take for granted as true. In effect, the news article is biased towards BOTH the left and the right. A news article will only serve to highlight the quibbles of the left or the right without ever questioning if the premise of the argument is at all valid.
This is actually to the benefit of those who have power in what we call 'the left' or 'the right'. These two groups both want power and they both want to tweak the system according to their views; but neither wants to upset the system itself since mucking with the foundation will most likely result in a radical shift in power and their own disenfranchisement. Like the DemoRepublicans, who argue over details concerning the voting system but who won't for a moment consider changing the system itself to allow for a viable 3rd-party challenge.
Many believe that the government does indeed have a mandate to see that our children are educated -- they just don't think that means it has to be the government *itself* doing the educating.
And this still supports the primary premise of forced government schooling. No one on the left or the right argues over doing away with it altogether; just fiddling with the system to suit their own views. They both have far too much invested in forced schooling to entertain the idea or give it any credence whatsoever. So long as forced schooling is taken for granted by both sides they're sharing the same bed, so far as I'm concerned.
Max
Only to those who can't laugh at themselves.
Max
That would depend on what you define as 'fair' or 'biased'. Seems to me that most folks define 'fair' as "whatever I happen to agree with", and 'biased' as "whatever I happen to disagree with"; and that includes the so-called liberals as much as the so-called conservatives.
As a small-l libertarian I don't see much in the way of unbiased news regardless of the source. The very assumptions that most stories are based on are biased in and of themselves, even if the piece is written in the most unbiased manner possible. Example: both the left and the right operate on the assumption that forced government schooling is a good thing, and only argue about how this schooling should be executed. Neither side ever questions the concept of forced government schooling itself, and the media (regardless of whether you class it as 'left' or 'right') also supports the idea of forced government schooling by adopting the assumption without question.
This happens all the time, over a vast array of subjects. Very few people ever question the concepts themselves, just the manner in which those concepts are implemented. From my point of view, any news article which jumps on the bandwagon is biased from the outset and cannot be said to be 'fair' or 'balanced' in any way at all.
It's also one of the reasons I see so little difference between the Democrats and the Republicans. They may quibble over the details but they agree whole-heartedly on all the major points. What good is having two parties when neither of them wants to examine the fundamental assumptions of the system they operate in, much less do anything to change that system in any marked way? The states goals of both parties are so closely in line with one another that it's often difficult to see any real difference. The trivialities are played up to *seem* like big differences, but both parties like things just the way they are and will never work to rock the boat that they both profit from.
Google isn't to blame for any perceived bias; Google can't help but be biased, just like all the other news organizations out there. It's a part of the game and I doubt they even realize that bias is inherent to the system, so long as they never question the system itself.
Max
...to lift the burden of adult supervision from those who're supposed to be exercising it. Yes indeed, it's just too damned hard for parents and babysitters/teachers to keep a lid on those cunning little wretches known as children; time to foist the crushing responsibility off onto a third party. Then we'll have someone else to blame if our brats do something we don't approve of!
Like Canada!
Max
Missed the point there, did ya? Next time listen for the "whooshing" sound and try to figure out what it was that went flying over your head before posting.
Max
He didn't say a single thing about gays. He was talking about the sort of lifestyle that increases the rate of infection, e.g., unprotected sex with strangers.
What you're taking offense at exists only within your own mind. Try to engage in a bit of reading comprehension next time before jumping to unwarranted conclusions.
Max
I'm sorry, did you actually think Sun was an ally?
No company is an ally, and that includes the likes of IBM, Redhat, and SuSe. Companies are in the business of making money for their investors and owners; that is their sole purpose. If you thought they were supporting Linux out of the goodness of their hearts then I suggest medication might help with your delusions.
Redhat and SuSe support Linux because it's the core of their business. By supporting Linux they support themselves. Not just good business, but also self-preservation.
IBM supports Linux because commoditizing software can only be good for a company which makes its money through the sale of hardware. Adopting an OS used world-wide and worked on by tens of thousands of pretty bright people *for free* is just plain smart. IBM doesn't have to waste billions building a new OS and continually trying to keep up with open-source competition when they can just adopt Linux for their own and be assured of free, savvy development, improvement, and bug-fixing for the foreseeable future. Any work they themselves do will improve their own fortunes AND build up goodwill with all the Linux geeks out there (especially those who mistakenly think that IBM is some kind of 'ally'). Adopting linux is a win-win for them.
And don't forget: IBM still has a pretty big axe to grind with MS over past betrayals. So an added bonus of the proliferation of linux and the commoditization of the OS is that MS gets bent over and given a good reaming; perhaps even destroyed, in the long run. Don't think that IBM won't toast every setback MS suffers at the hands of Linux and open-source software, at least privately.
But in the end none of these companies are allies. They operate on the principle of self-interest, and nothing more.
Max
and the distributed control model begins to break down when it reaches a certain size .. if it matures
Nice bit of propaganda. Also complete bullshit. Linux hasn't suffered in any way due to the "distributed control model" you mention; nor is there any evidence whatsoever that it would've developed more quickly if it had gone another route.
Leave the FUD at the door, please.
Max
Here it is: the geek equivalent of dick-measuring, comparin the 'levels' of their computers to see who has the larger, er, more advanced machinery.
And this system will no doubt appeal to that class of geek who wastes most of his waking life on D&D-like games, the sort of person who bores you into homicidal despair with absurd tales about his "18th level gnome illusionist" or "12th level barbarian assassin". No doubt these little losers will jump up and down at the thought of their COMPUTERS having levels as well as their imaginary alternate egos.
Max
If you want to save your country, don't waste your vote.
On the other hand, if you truly believe in democracy and freedom vote however the hell you want and don't listen to the DemoRepublicans who yammer on about 'wasted' votes.
Max
...how edonkey is any better than gnutella. If I want to go searching for a cd's worth of songs to see if the cd itself is worth purchasing then gnutella works just fine and has oodles of files available. Kazaa was never any great shake over gnutella, and my (brief) experience with a Linux install of edonkey tonight left me completely unimpressed.
The only 'advantage' I was able to see was that Kazaa appears to have a slight edge in the porn department over gnutella (which makes Kazaa even more useless if you aren't looking for porn and have to wade through that crap to find what you want).
Max