Re:RTFA... old technology
on
RFID Hell
·
· Score: 1
Arguing slippery slopes is a very slippery thing indeed
Especially in the USA, where a non-trivial number of people subscribe to the "Jesus wouldn't do porn" philosophy. Yes, I did see a billboard that said exactly this. The arrogance of these people to speak on Jesus' behalf is amazing. It's as if they assume reading a book makes them an expert from someone else's point of view.
These are the people who are the most dangerous in the context of things like tags and other types of surveillence. Imagine in a Christain-run town, where the cameras get put, purely coincidentally, in front of all the liquor stores and porn shops, and patrons of these stores are labeled for the cultural miscreants they certainly must be. At least at a local leve, the town can exercise its right to destroy its own economy and the "miscreants" can move elsewhere. Just wait until these things are federalized...whoo nellie!
Re:Article has nothing to do with RFID tags
on
RFID Hell
·
· Score: 1
who had those powers already, anyway
Using something's existence to justify that very existence is fallacious. We should harshly debate each of these "improvements" to ensure they didn't go through without at least some checks. Oh, the PATRIOT Act wasn't given much time to be debated in Congress...oops.
Complacency is among the worst crimes a citizen can commit against themselves. Not debating each issue is a terrible crime for legislators to commit against their constituents. But with the anticipation surrounding the new Survivor, I guess no one will notice.
Re:"Don't run out and buy an Athlon 64 just yet...
on
Is Prescott 64-bit?
·
· Score: 1
I'm afraid this line of reasoning just doesn't cut it.
It also sounds as if Slashdot just got astroturfed with a top-tier article. Kinda sad, IMO.
At $0.07/KW/hour this is about $60 per year in consumed electricity for a computer left on 24/7.
While the fact that a single-CPU PowerPC or UltraSPARC-based system, for example will save you $30 or $40 per year relative to Intel's offering may seem small, consider the fact that this translates to upwards of $500,000 for a 1000-PC company per year.
Intel's latest CPUs really are a drain on the economy for dubious improvements in performance for most users (movie making ray tracing niche dwellers need not replay). People really should consider the low-power alternatives (sub 20 watt CPUs) for productivity desktops. Also, not only do they use less power, they cost less up-front, too.
Perhaps as more of these are moved to an HTTP-based architecture...
Some claim to be web-based, but insult every intention of the WWW by requiring Internet Explorer as the client.
I am occasionally forced to use a very simple web form, for example, that won't work with Mozilla, simply because some monkey used an IE-specific JavaScript function or DOM object.
So what's the advantage of switching from a Microsoft OS to one from Sun? Since it's not free I actually feel it's a rip-off and a major vendor lock-in. JVMs running everywhere on your machine.
You should read before posting. The "Java" is merely branding and is supported by a pre-installed Java runtime for application developers. The desktop itself is Linux+GNOME+StarOffice. Simply, there is no vendor lock in. Period. You like, now?
You will probably never work on a document that is more than 50 pages.
Word's scalability problems even make it unsuitable for large documents. At this point, OpenOffice.org's Docbook editor might become a good option if it is mature enough.
Nuclear-powered ships are essentially a full-blown nuclear powerplant and infrastructure...just a little smaller but with several hundred people literally tied to them (either that or swim home!).
Because "enterprise" is a word that inflates the egos of small businesses that employ the majority of people (i.e., they aren't even "enterprise" in scale but are willing to waste the company's bottom line to statisfy their ill-founded desire to sound cool).
Because I like to use a full blown wordprocesser when sending emails so that I don't look like a/. poster when emailing my clients.
Would you be suprised to learn your e-mails probably look different on each platform they are viewed on (even among Microsoft platforms?). I use emacs and web-based e-mail exclusively, and one nice thing about emacs is that is exposes the under-the-covers garbage the Microsoft puts into their e-mails. Malformed incomplete HTML on one hand that assumes a forgiving buggy renderer on the recipient's end. Including the body of the e-mail twice (bloat from hell) in the hope that it will work on non-HTML e-mail systems. Word-processed e-mail basically ensures the sender will have a false sense of security in the appearance of what they write.
Yet another problem with national health care is that it probably won't allow a person to opt-out. In other words, I will still see money sucked out of my paychecks for a service I didn't ask for nor necessarily want to use. The only effective ways to opt out is to either become ascetic and live in the woods or figure out a way into prison. How convenient that not paying taxes will land me in prison!
So, on top of social security and medicare (services I will probably never use) another percentage of the money I earn will go to insurance I never wanted to buy. I'd rather take that 15% to 20% of my income and put it to real use. Even using it to eat at restaurants more frequently will do more good through generous tips than it will in a 20%-efficient federal system.
I don't mean to be a conspiracist or anything like that, but it is interesting that re-electing the Republican administration brings along recurring threats of "domestic security" (i.e., a power grab that brings immense intelligence-gathering abilities) while electing a Democrat administration may bring national health care (i.e., a power grab that brings immense intelligence-gathering abilities).
It is pretty commonly accepted that orwellian domesic security measures do not really provide good security in the name of freedom. It is more subtle, however, that government-run healthcare (which will not be run well, to say the least) also shifts the balance away from the People. The healthcare plan first sucks up the future medical histories of every man, woman, and child in the USA, which is then leveraged as a tool for politically-motivated policy making. It really is no different than the federal income tax, in this respect. Another very important distinction between private and public health care is that it is unlikely the government will need to ask a judge before accessing a person's history for whatever politically-motivated purpose (they already have the data, so why not take a peek).
Other public services, such as roads and water, are different, in that there really is no detailed person-specific tracking and recording. I can take any one of three routes to work, and no one really cares other than it affects aggregate traffic statistics. The water meter is only on the single input to my home, so no one cares whether I use 1000 gallons for laundry or mud-wrestling cattle in the back yard (not that I do, but it would be entertaining to watch, I suppose).
Perhaps the primary point of my post was to point out the internal conflicts of the Democratic and Republican platforms. Being the "party for the people" doesn't mesh well with programs that takes those people's freedoms away. The Republicans aren't scratch-free, either, as the last couple years has seen the debt increasing by a half-trillion per year while passing domestic surveillence laws that aren't even debated before Congress. It's unfortunate that these things aren't putting more people on edge (the two-party news coverage begins yet again).
How much do you think your electricity, water, and telephone services would cost without government regulation?
Er, how does 5 cents a minute sound?
This isn't a matter of absolute regulation or absolutely no regulation, only a matter of reducing regulation as much as possible. It is arguable that nearly all regulation can be done away with, as all of it really is a variation on a theme: don't lie cheat steal or murder. It shouldn't take millions of pages of federal law to state that.
The current administration supports big business over all else...
This is bound to inflame the leftists out there.
We need to make a distinction, and important one: The current administration supports big business' rights over the rights of the individual. This inequity is terrible and isn't specifically "republican" or "democratic." Rather it is a crime against the US Constitution and all US citizens. It is a sign of corruption that really can only be dealt with over the next several elections. We need to vote to pare down the government very slowly over time, so that subtle abberations like TIA, the DMCA, the PATRIOT Act, etc. don't get by so easily. Even voting for a Democrat isn't sufficient, as they are just as wealthy and under the thumbs of inappropriate interests out there. Vote your conscious and vote for someone else. Make it known at the polls by making a very visible percentage start showing up that isn't the traditional two-party line, even if otherwise disparate third-parties have to band together--temporarily--to reset the political system in the People's favor...to at least get another 228 free years out of the USA.
It is a moral one and its solution therefore lies in the legal system.
Again, why? Codifying morality into law causes immeasurable victimization of otherwise innocent people. We aren't talking about child porn, here, only useless wasteful e-mail. Why should I feel a need to hire an expensive lawyer just so I can feel safe in sending any e-mail, under your new systems of legal checks? Do you think corporate e-mail legal departments are a good thing? Can you propose educating the public in a manner that will be more effective than any current efforts regarding technology?
Legal solutions are bound to fail. Period.
What will ultimately be the most effective solution is for culture to adjust. While it will take time for new social rules to develop, it won't be any different than the gradual awareness regarding things like cell phone ringers. We, the public, has been bombarded by a technological eruption never seen before by humanity. In all of human history! How can we even concieve of an appropriate set of laws to constrain this?!?!?
Your eugenics-smelling spiel went out of fashion in science some decades ago, except for the irreparably arrogant, of course.
Where did you get "eugenics" out of my post? I am talking nothing about Hitler-esque manipulation of races, as that is also "playing God." What I am merely saying is it is best to recognize the cards we were dealt and to do the best we can with them.
It is arguable that this is what the US Constitution is attempting to do, by recognizing the absolute power corrupts absolutely and prescribing a highly-distributed manner of government. Outside of that governemnt, it doesn't provide too many restrictions in the understanding that freedom is the greatest gift that can be given to any person, and a free state can be maintained only in the context of limited government power and a free economy that allows natural social hierarchies to exist but without fear of harm to one's person. It lets society largely sort itself out as it "sees" is best, but stopping it short of letting everyone kill eachother.
They are most often protected by their buddies and no one ever knows about what they do. People who try to speak up are silenced or bought, or ignored by the public who don't believe anything unless it's on CNN or Fox News.
Shareholders will demand some transparency in the accounting. Someone will follow the money trails. Someone might "defect." Corruption simply can't go on forever. The corruption at Enron, for example, probably didn't last more than a decade. However, how long has Congress been using their "bank" as a bottomless pit of money?
We'd all be better off if no one could earn more than 100 times as much as the lowest-paid person.
The lowest-paid person earns $0. They are called "volunteers." This is how community-based revolution can unseat monopolies, like Open Source software will do to Microsoft, while generating new unforeseen opportunties surrounding that Open Source platform. For example, the fact that OpenOffice.org runs on Solaris/Java Desktop, Linux, Max OS X, and Windows is absolutely tremendous. Finally, we have an emerging standards-based approach to docuent exchange that 1) was initially provided by Sun Microsystems after an expensive buyout of a German company and 2) is evolving independently of government-imposed regulation and 3) will be a very effective resolution to the problem of Microsoft Office. This is a very real and very efficient way to deal with Microsoft, and the Justice Department barely had a hand in it!
Re:Why do you think Bush gave them tax cuts?
on
Tech Rich Get Richer
·
· Score: 1
Because otherwise there won't be anyone living close enough to actually work at said grocery store.
The grocer would find that out pretty quick and raise their wages, due to there being no choice. We have to let the prices in cities work themselves out properly. Ultimately, that'll help keep the apartments from getting to $900/month in the first place, when fewer people are willing to relocate there, when many other expenses, such as groceries, go up in price. Eventually, the people who can truly live and work in the city will, and those who truly can't won't.
1) Excess male population 2) ??? 3) Don't drop the soap in China
The "single child" regulations in China are a good example of how a goverment can regulate while totally missing the surrounding social context of those regulations. And, once those regulations are in place, getting rid of them is ten times harder.
Since when was grabbing one's own crotch an arrestable offense? Repeatedly grabbing someone else's, perhaps, but it really is a person's right to grab their own as much as they please.
Being tactless isn't a crime, you know. Well, in the USA, who knows.
We should install more cameras, but this time in front of every donut shop in town...and in the police department break room.
The rich and powerful are not stealing by getting me to pay for things, that's not the issue. They steal from their fellow workers in every way possible - pension plan scams, accounting acrobatics, and simple CEO bonuses.
If they get caught, they go to jail. Is this insufficient? How is it different than any other crime?
Slashdot Mirror
Arguing slippery slopes is a very slippery thing indeed
Especially in the USA, where a non-trivial number of people subscribe to the "Jesus wouldn't do porn" philosophy. Yes, I did see a billboard that said exactly this. The arrogance of these people to speak on Jesus' behalf is amazing. It's as if they assume reading a book makes them an expert from someone else's point of view.
These are the people who are the most dangerous in the context of things like tags and other types of surveillence. Imagine in a Christain-run town, where the cameras get put, purely coincidentally, in front of all the liquor stores and porn shops, and patrons of these stores are labeled for the cultural miscreants they certainly must be. At least at a local leve, the town can exercise its right to destroy its own economy and the "miscreants" can move elsewhere. Just wait until these things are federalized...whoo nellie!
who had those powers already, anyway
Using something's existence to justify that very existence is fallacious. We should harshly debate each of these "improvements" to ensure they didn't go through without at least some checks. Oh, the PATRIOT Act wasn't given much time to be debated in Congress...oops.
Complacency is among the worst crimes a citizen can commit against themselves. Not debating each issue is a terrible crime for legislators to commit against their constituents. But with the anticipation surrounding the new Survivor, I guess no one will notice.
I'm afraid this line of reasoning just doesn't cut it.
It also sounds as if Slashdot just got astroturfed with a top-tier article. Kinda sad, IMO.
Then the only other option for consumers are VIA C3's and Transmeta which will never match Intel's.
Only for people tied by the balls to x86-only platforms like Windows. Windows on Itanic is rare enough to make it inconsequential.
Thus, we see an advantage of Open Source coupled with GCC and POSIX runtimes.
Oh, I get it! I get jokes! HAHAHAHAHA...
100W power dissipation
100W for one year (8760 hours) is 876 KW/hours.
At $0.07/KW/hour this is about $60 per year in consumed electricity for a computer left on 24/7.
While the fact that a single-CPU PowerPC or UltraSPARC-based system, for example will save you $30 or $40 per year relative to Intel's offering may seem small, consider the fact that this translates to upwards of $500,000 for a 1000-PC company per year.
Intel's latest CPUs really are a drain on the economy for dubious improvements in performance for most users (movie making ray tracing niche dwellers need not replay). People really should consider the low-power alternatives (sub 20 watt CPUs) for productivity desktops. Also, not only do they use less power, they cost less up-front, too.
Perhaps as more of these are moved to an HTTP-based architecture...
Some claim to be web-based, but insult every intention of the WWW by requiring Internet Explorer as the client.
I am occasionally forced to use a very simple web form, for example, that won't work with Mozilla, simply because some monkey used an IE-specific JavaScript function or DOM object.
So what's the advantage of switching from a Microsoft OS to one from Sun? Since it's not free I actually feel it's a rip-off and a major vendor lock-in. JVMs running everywhere on your machine.
You should read before posting. The "Java" is merely branding and is supported by a pre-installed Java runtime for application developers. The desktop itself is Linux+GNOME+StarOffice. Simply, there is no vendor lock in. Period. You like, now?
1. Whore 2. ??? 3. Profit!!!
With a one like that, you need no two--it is implied.
You will probably never work on a document that is more than 50 pages.
Word's scalability problems even make it unsuitable for large documents. At this point, OpenOffice.org's Docbook editor might become a good option if it is mature enough.
What about bomber subs?
Nuclear-powered ships are essentially a full-blown nuclear powerplant and infrastructure...just a little smaller but with several hundred people literally tied to them (either that or swim home!).
Why is everyone so hung up on the enterprise?
Because "enterprise" is a word that inflates the egos of small businesses that employ the majority of people (i.e., they aren't even "enterprise" in scale but are willing to waste the company's bottom line to statisfy their ill-founded desire to sound cool).
Because I like to use a full blown wordprocesser when sending emails so that I don't look like a /. poster when emailing my clients.
Would you be suprised to learn your e-mails probably look different on each platform they are viewed on (even among Microsoft platforms?). I use emacs and web-based e-mail exclusively, and one nice thing about emacs is that is exposes the under-the-covers garbage the Microsoft puts into their e-mails. Malformed incomplete HTML on one hand that assumes a forgiving buggy renderer on the recipient's end. Including the body of the e-mail twice (bloat from hell) in the hope that it will work on non-HTML e-mail systems. Word-processed e-mail basically ensures the sender will have a false sense of security in the appearance of what they write.
Yet another problem with national health care is that it probably won't allow a person to opt-out. In other words, I will still see money sucked out of my paychecks for a service I didn't ask for nor necessarily want to use. The only effective ways to opt out is to either become ascetic and live in the woods or figure out a way into prison. How convenient that not paying taxes will land me in prison!
So, on top of social security and medicare (services I will probably never use) another percentage of the money I earn will go to insurance I never wanted to buy. I'd rather take that 15% to 20% of my income and put it to real use. Even using it to eat at restaurants more frequently will do more good through generous tips than it will in a 20%-efficient federal system.
I fail to see the connection.
I don't mean to be a conspiracist or anything like that, but it is interesting that re-electing the Republican administration brings along recurring threats of "domestic security" (i.e., a power grab that brings immense intelligence-gathering abilities) while electing a Democrat administration may bring national health care (i.e., a power grab that brings immense intelligence-gathering abilities).
It is pretty commonly accepted that orwellian domesic security measures do not really provide good security in the name of freedom. It is more subtle, however, that government-run healthcare (which will not be run well, to say the least) also shifts the balance away from the People. The healthcare plan first sucks up the future medical histories of every man, woman, and child in the USA, which is then leveraged as a tool for politically-motivated policy making. It really is no different than the federal income tax, in this respect. Another very important distinction between private and public health care is that it is unlikely the government will need to ask a judge before accessing a person's history for whatever politically-motivated purpose (they already have the data, so why not take a peek).
Other public services, such as roads and water, are different, in that there really is no detailed person-specific tracking and recording. I can take any one of three routes to work, and no one really cares other than it affects aggregate traffic statistics. The water meter is only on the single input to my home, so no one cares whether I use 1000 gallons for laundry or mud-wrestling cattle in the back yard (not that I do, but it would be entertaining to watch, I suppose).
Perhaps the primary point of my post was to point out the internal conflicts of the Democratic and Republican platforms. Being the "party for the people" doesn't mesh well with programs that takes those people's freedoms away. The Republicans aren't scratch-free, either, as the last couple years has seen the debt increasing by a half-trillion per year while passing domestic surveillence laws that aren't even debated before Congress. It's unfortunate that these things aren't putting more people on edge (the two-party news coverage begins yet again).
They want to be able to run nifty multimedia marking kiosks.
This certainly doesn't require Microsoft or their software. The only reason they choose Windows is because thei think that's the only choice.
The banks are a victim of the very marketing they are trying to propogate with these kiosks. How interesting.
How much do you think your electricity, water, and telephone services would cost without government regulation?
Er, how does 5 cents a minute sound?
This isn't a matter of absolute regulation or absolutely no regulation, only a matter of reducing regulation as much as possible. It is arguable that nearly all regulation can be done away with, as all of it really is a variation on a theme: don't lie cheat steal or murder. It shouldn't take millions of pages of federal law to state that.
The current administration supports big business over all else...
This is bound to inflame the leftists out there.
We need to make a distinction, and important one: The current administration supports big business' rights over the rights of the individual. This inequity is terrible and isn't specifically "republican" or "democratic." Rather it is a crime against the US Constitution and all US citizens. It is a sign of corruption that really can only be dealt with over the next several elections. We need to vote to pare down the government very slowly over time, so that subtle abberations like TIA, the DMCA, the PATRIOT Act, etc. don't get by so easily. Even voting for a Democrat isn't sufficient, as they are just as wealthy and under the thumbs of inappropriate interests out there. Vote your conscious and vote for someone else. Make it known at the polls by making a very visible percentage start showing up that isn't the traditional two-party line, even if otherwise disparate third-parties have to band together--temporarily--to reset the political system in the People's favor...to at least get another 228 free years out of the USA.
It is a moral one and its solution therefore lies in the legal system.
Again, why? Codifying morality into law causes immeasurable victimization of otherwise innocent people. We aren't talking about child porn, here, only useless wasteful e-mail. Why should I feel a need to hire an expensive lawyer just so I can feel safe in sending any e-mail, under your new systems of legal checks? Do you think corporate e-mail legal departments are a good thing? Can you propose educating the public in a manner that will be more effective than any current efforts regarding technology?
Legal solutions are bound to fail. Period.
What will ultimately be the most effective solution is for culture to adjust. While it will take time for new social rules to develop, it won't be any different than the gradual awareness regarding things like cell phone ringers. We, the public, has been bombarded by a technological eruption never seen before by humanity. In all of human history! How can we even concieve of an appropriate set of laws to constrain this?!?!?
Your eugenics-smelling spiel went out of fashion in science some decades ago, except for the irreparably arrogant, of course.
Where did you get "eugenics" out of my post? I am talking nothing about Hitler-esque manipulation of races, as that is also "playing God." What I am merely saying is it is best to recognize the cards we were dealt and to do the best we can with them.
It is arguable that this is what the US Constitution is attempting to do, by recognizing the absolute power corrupts absolutely and prescribing a highly-distributed manner of government. Outside of that governemnt, it doesn't provide too many restrictions in the understanding that freedom is the greatest gift that can be given to any person, and a free state can be maintained only in the context of limited government power and a free economy that allows natural social hierarchies to exist but without fear of harm to one's person. It lets society largely sort itself out as it "sees" is best, but stopping it short of letting everyone kill eachother.
They are most often protected by their buddies and no one ever knows about what they do. People who try to speak up are silenced or bought, or ignored by the public who don't believe anything unless it's on CNN or Fox News.
Shareholders will demand some transparency in the accounting. Someone will follow the money trails. Someone might "defect." Corruption simply can't go on forever. The corruption at Enron, for example, probably didn't last more than a decade. However, how long has Congress been using their "bank" as a bottomless pit of money?
We'd all be better off if no one could earn more than 100 times as much as the lowest-paid person.
The lowest-paid person earns $0. They are called "volunteers." This is how community-based revolution can unseat monopolies, like Open Source software will do to Microsoft, while generating new unforeseen opportunties surrounding that Open Source platform. For example, the fact that OpenOffice.org runs on Solaris/Java Desktop, Linux, Max OS X, and Windows is absolutely tremendous. Finally, we have an emerging standards-based approach to docuent exchange that 1) was initially provided by Sun Microsystems after an expensive buyout of a German company and 2) is evolving independently of government-imposed regulation and 3) will be a very effective resolution to the problem of Microsoft Office. This is a very real and very efficient way to deal with Microsoft, and the Justice Department barely had a hand in it!
Because otherwise there won't be anyone living close enough to actually work at said grocery store.
The grocer would find that out pretty quick and raise their wages, due to there being no choice. We have to let the prices in cities work themselves out properly. Ultimately, that'll help keep the apartments from getting to $900/month in the first place, when fewer people are willing to relocate there, when many other expenses, such as groceries, go up in price. Eventually, the people who can truly live and work in the city will, and those who truly can't won't.
How about:
1) Excess male population
2) ???
3) Don't drop the soap in China
The "single child" regulations in China are a good example of how a goverment can regulate while totally missing the surrounding social context of those regulations. And, once those regulations are in place, getting rid of them is ten times harder.
"including one man for grabbing his crotch"
Since when was grabbing one's own crotch an arrestable offense? Repeatedly grabbing someone else's, perhaps, but it really is a person's right to grab their own as much as they please.
Being tactless isn't a crime, you know. Well, in the USA, who knows.
We should install more cameras, but this time in front of every donut shop in town...and in the police department break room.
The rich and powerful are not stealing by getting me to pay for things, that's not the issue. They steal from their fellow workers in every way possible - pension plan scams, accounting acrobatics, and simple CEO bonuses.
If they get caught, they go to jail. Is this insufficient? How is it different than any other crime?