That is a bad idea. Given the low error tolerance of nuclear plants, it is better to have a few large nuclear plants that can be easily monitored rather than lots of smaller ones. To keep them safe, nuclear plants need to be constantly supervised and inspected and it is eisier to do that with a few large plants than a lot of smaller ones. Plus, no one likes the idea of toxic radioactive poison being handled right down the street, larger plants keep the risk consolidated at one location, which can be more easily monitored and scrutinised for safety by regulatory agencies.
The fact that governments and corporations seem to think that P2P is an inheritetely dangerous technology which can only be used illegal shows how ignorant they are how little they know. P2P has as we know many legitimate uses, like many technologies. It can be used to legally distribute content. It is similar to another term, file sharing, being labelled as evil, illegal, etc, when the internet could not function without it, since every web server and mail server uses some type of file sharing. It is clearly wrong to go after entire technologies, due to a small few who are abusing them, It is like banning kitchen knives because they can be used as a weapon.
I am concerned that one reason they do not like p2p is it decentralises legal content distribution, such as open source software, and threatens the big media monopoly. P2P can be used by independant artists to distribute legally their own music, and in a way where it is within the means of anyone due to the small amount of resources it requires, and perhaps the big media companies do not like the idea of their monopolistic position being challenged. The big media companies want to be the one and only place to purchase and market music and i do not think their real concern is illegal filesharing, but instead, the idea that they no longer are in the position to control what music can be distributed and to block and allow artists access to a market, and that artists no longer have to go through their monopoly.
The main reason people use Windows is it is a vendor lock in since most software runs only on Windows. It is the anticompetitive grip that microsoft has that keeps it in power by being able to utilise its monopoly to lock software into the platform so to run the software people need Windows. Hopefully one day soon Wine can run windows programs that will be over.
As far as profits and selling programs. My philosophy is the OS, audio, graphics system and core base system should be open source, libraries and other OS infrastructure utilities and such, should be open source. They must be open source and I think that this is very important, no question about it. This levels the playing field by making sure that people have a choice in OSs and there is a right to tinker and keep tabs on what the computer is up to. The OS being open source permits the user to if desired control the entire system and understand how it works. I would not be terribly upset if some complicated applications should be sold on a source included commercial model, for a reasonable price. I can see the point of some that it is hard to make money writing software, and after all it takes time to write software. One should be able to make money from it. I definitely do not like todays closed source model. I do think that previously common models where source was distributed with commercial sofrware was much less problematic. It used to be that was a more common practice but later became more uncommon.
Open source has approached the problem by selling physical distributions which have an added convenience factor, which however has lessened with cable modems, selling books about the software, and selling support to bring in income, as well as asking for voluntary contributions. Still I can see that it can be more difficult to make money off this than with a commercial model.
Probably the most misleading instance where science has been ignored or seriously damaged is the teaching of creationism in science courses or downgrading of evolution by christians who do not like it because it conflicts with their religious beliefs. To teach creationism as coming anywhere near science or being something of which there is any real positive evidence of it is simply lying to children. Evolution is an extremely well supported scientific theory that has a large amount of physical evidence to back it up. Science must be based on physical evidence, not religious superstitions and fantasies. To mention creationism in the same breath as science and suggest it is a competitor to evolution is an insult to everything that science is and that which has made so much progress to our understanding the world better and getting the truths about the universe. If religious fantasy had prevailed, we would still think the earth was flat and stars were little fires several miles above the surface, and that the edge of the earth dropped off into an abyss populated by monsters who ate ships that dared fall into it. Creationism like these theories should be in social studies where it belongs or used only as an example of old, outdated absurd ideas that science has proven wrong.
I think this has value if it will help improve Wine so it can run all Windows programs. That really should be the focus here. I do think funding Wine would really help along Linux adoption and help end the dreadful Microsoft monopoly. So, this is not necessarily just about photoshop, but making all Windows programs run on Linux. and it is the fact that so many programs run only on Windows, which keeps Windows dominate. If we have millionaires reading this who would like to speed up adoption of Linux, funding work on developing a way to run windows hardware drivers on linux would also be a huge help. There is always a lag between hardware being released and running on Linux because companies always spend less time on Linux. While open source or native windows drivers are best, it is not realistic to expect Linux to be adopted when people cannot run their hardware for years perhaps because there is no driver. This would allow as well the hardware to be used with Windows drivers until a native linux driver is produced.
I can see this as valuable if it will allow a greater number of Windows applications to run on Linux and improve wine as a software program. Wine itself needs more funding since currently it does a dismal job of running many Windows programs. But the focus needs to be on improving compatability with all programs. If all this is going to do, is make Photoshop run better, it would be better to spend the money improving the performance of the Gimp and other open source programs. But making all Windows programs run on Linux, over 99%, would be a major accompishment that would hurry up the acceptance of Linux as a complete Windows replacement. There will also be those who say that it would be better to get people to use open source alternatives to windows programs than to use windows programs on linux, although, while we should improve open source programs, since having windows programs run on Linux would help many people move to Linux and would eliminate the main thing that keeps microsoft dominate, I think that improving wine to 99% compatability would also be very valuable as well. Remember as well, that a large number of Windows programs are custom apps for very specific purposes. I used custom windows only programs used by a company I worked for. These are not general purpose programs that I can just replace with open office. So its not necessarily just word processing programs and general windows programs one may need to run on linux that one can just get an open source replacement for, but highly specialised programs for which there is no Linux replacement and might only be used inside a company and no where else. I have had to have Windows XP in addition to Linux because of these custom special windows programs. I would just love to get rid of XP and run them all on Linux. The other major area that would be very useful is funding a compatability layer to support Windows hardware drivers on Linux, if we have millionaires reading this that want to fund something that would speed up Linux adoption, that would be the surest way of getting hardware support on Linux. I agree that open source drivers are always best but still this layer would be essential, especially until open source drivers are written, There is always a long lag between hardware becoming avialable and driver avialability on Linux because the drivers have to be written through back engineering and it takes quite a while, and there is always more resources put by companies on Windows. Linux is always on the back burner. This layer would also make it much eisier as well to backengineer hardware protocols by watching the communication between proprietary drivers and the hardware, a compatability layer for hardware drivers could speed up open source driver development
Capital investment is most important with things like this. The purpose of the prize however might not be that it is necessary, but rather to accelerate development, speed it up. The benefits of course of improving technology would be significant, more powerful, faster computers.
Re:Courtesy of the fortune program
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I get so sick and tired of these old myths about X being bloated, etc. X by modern standards uses very little resources compared with say Vista, and yet it has kept up with latest improvements in graphics technology. Most of these myths were invented at a time 1980s when computer hardware was very slow 4 mhz for instance, ram was small, and where the true performance problems were with the hardware of the time which was not advanced enough to run much of any GUI. They have nothing to do with X itself but were complaints that were caused by the hardware of the day. By todays standards X is fast, efficient and small on modern hardware, and you will find that vista consumes far more resources than X does.
X is not at all a fossil and in fact is at the cutting edge of design improvements and technology such as with compiz. Anyone who says X is a fossil does not have the slightest clue what they are talking about and they apparently have been living under a rock for they have not seen compiz and the amazing things it does. X is polished and a mature code base, it has the benefit of backwards compatability as well. ALl of the downsides of trying to replace something so mature and well developed, with something which is likely going to be, with todays coding standards (sloppy, bloated), to consume far more ram, would probabaly end up being slower, which would be immature and filled with bugs, and which would not be backwards compatable, would create far more problems than it can solve. This is the way most new software is today and X by todays standards is pretty darn efficient and uses less resources than most modern programs I have seen. It makes far more sense as well to develop extensions to X to improve it and in this manner we can make it do whatever we need to do and keep it up to date with the times while backwards compatable. This has what has worked now since 1987 when X11 was released. I am glad people who say that X needs to be replaced are not making design decisions because they do not know what they are talking about and their ideas would give us huge problems for something that carries no benefit to what we have now. X can continue to improve and keep up with whatever new demands may arise while keeping the benefits of backwards compatability. As far as X being slow this is an old myth that refuses to die. It is far faster and uses less memory than vista. I have used X successfully on a 486 with 8 mb of ram! Just try that with vista, you wont get far! ANd yet X with compiz is at the cuting edge support more high end graphics features than Vista does. You have everything you want with X, so I dont see why people are trying to bash it!
Re:So when do we get its successor?
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I agree that X is not at all a fossil and in fact is at the cutting edge of design improvements and technology such as with compiz. Anyone who says X is a fossil does not have the slightest clue what they are talking about and they apparently have been living under a rock for they have not seen compiz and the amazing things it does. X is polished and a mature code base, it has the benefit of backwards compatability as well. ALl of the downsides of trying to replace something so mature and well developed, with something which is likely going to be, with todays coding standards (sloppy, bloated), to consume far more ram, would probabaly end up being slower, which would be immature and filled with bugs, and which would not be backwards compatable, would create far more problems than it can solve. This is the way most new software is today and X by todays standards is pretty darn efficient and uses less resources than most modern programs I have seen. It makes far more sense as well to develop extensions to X to improve it and in this manner we can make it do whatever we need to do and keep it up to date with the times while backwards compatable. This has what has worked now since 1987 when X11 was released. I am glad people who say that X needs to be replaced are not making design decisions because they do not know what they are talking about and their ideas would give us huge problems for something that carries no benefit to what we have now. X can continue to improve and keep up with whatever new demands may arise while keeping the benefits of backwards compatability. As far as X being slow this is an old myth that refuses to die. It is far faster and uses less memory than vista. I have used X successfully on a 486 with 8 mb of ram! Just try that with vista, you wont get far! ANd yet X with compiz is at the cuting edge support more high end graphics features than Vista does. You have everything you want with X, so I dont see why people are trying to bash it!
I am not in favor of building sound support into X per se. X should remain a graphics system (do one thing and do it well). That said, we should have a network transparant sound system that works alongside X. I believe pulseaudio is promosing and may fill that niche.
Re:So when do we get its successor?
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I disagree with this. Totally. X is not really all that bad or difficult to manage, and it is not a dinosaur. It is the case sometiems that trying to replace something as mature and refined as X with something that is bound to be flaky, buggy and immature would likely create more problems than it claims to solve. When something just works well it does not make sense to replace it. X has been improved with extensions and that is how it can continue to be improved, in a backwards compatable manner. And do we really want 100 different window systems? X being the main standard is actually a good thing. This allows me to know that I can always run an application on an X server, no matter how old the app is, it is supported. X provides a standard interface for the window system. Can you imagine what things would be like if there were 10 different window systems or if some smartass came along and decided to make an incompatable system to fix problems that dont exist with X, or which can be fixed without breaking backward compatability? You would have a dozen different systems, with applications that would run on one and not the other, it would be a nightmare of incompatability. X is actually one of the things that works best on Linux and as far as X itself, i have never had a problem with it. Most problems exist at the driver level, which is not at all actually a part of the X core at all. Work has been done to as well improve X and build new extensions that improve its performance. Anyone who says X is a dinosaur has absolutely no clue what they are talking about and i am GLAD they are not the ones making design and archicture decisions.
Re:So when do we get its successor?
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This is nonsense and follows "if its old its bad" fallacy. Actually X performs quite well, is mature and stable. Quite frankly, trying to switch to something else would lead to a code base that is far more immature and buggy and which has not been as well refined as X has. Sometimes. something is well designed enough that it does not make sense to replace it, this is the case with X. Its clean network client design makes it highly flexible, and it has an extension mechanism that has allowed it to keep up with changing technology requirements. Your views on X are based on nothing more than this idea that if its old its bad, but often it is the case that older software is often better, less buggy and more mature, which is the case with X. I see no reason why X cannot continue to fulfill all of the desktop needs for the forseeable future in a completely backwards and forwards compatable manner.
It is surprising that one is not able to disable JS on a per site basis by default. However, I have written firefox for years about a feature called security profiles which would allow the user to specify on a per site basis not only whether JS should run, but whether applets should run and a large number of options and settings. Sites could then be placed into one of these profiles. The idea has been ignored by Firefox even though it would give more control to the user, and used the tacky excuse to use user profiles, but which would be terribly inconvient, involving launching a seperate browser for each set of security settings and keep track of which is which. Between this and Firefoxs outrageous memory leaks, I am not impressed.
So much for OpenBSD being the highest security OS. Even if the bug is a minor one does not pose a great risk, it seems that one should still fix it to ensure the system is functions properly and as expected. To leave a security bug in place because of an assumption does not make a whole lot of sense and shows a bit of arrogance, when they could just fix it instead. It reminds me of the instance where Microsoft Windows 95 had the problem that even if the user had not explicitely made certain directories accessible via file sharing, all the server did was tell the client not to look at them, but would still let the client access them if it asked. The problem was reported to Microsoft by Samba, who pretty much displayed apathy about the matter and didnt seem to recognise it a as a security problem. The OpenBSD bug is not as severe, but when they have a chance to make OpenBSD a little bit more secure, why not take it, especially when their focus is on security.
Well, actually Microsoft going bye bye would be a good thing. It would give Linux the chance to take the lead in the OS domain. As far as yahoo, I dont really know why they are in such trouble. I have used their service, such as their music service and they seemed to be pretty decent. Ive always used yahoo even for search.I became very concerned when microsoft was making this offer, since I do not trust microsoft at all especially with my mail, so I might have had to consider moving away from using it. I actually like yahoo mail and their other services, and knowing MS the quality would probably degrade for all except the windows users on IE as MS.
Under no circumstances should Yahoo merge with Microsoft, for any amount of money. Increased consolidation would be very bad for consumers, and especially for users of non microsoft OSs. Given microsofts track record, they tend to use products to support their OS monopoly for instance by making pages only viewable on IE. So I am very glad to hear this development.
I would like to see more schematics, plans, independant verifications for this. The inventor needs to subject this to scientific scrutiny by providing the plans and publishing papers on it to see if it can be duplicated. If it could act as a PMM, why not use it as such. Why stop at making motors more efficient. The question here as to whether this is real is not whether or not it is politically accepted or not, or politically correct, but what the physical evidence shows. I am sick of the political correctness and dogma in science today, where scientists are ridiculed and ostracised if they even dare look for possible ways holy, sacred cow scientific laws can be broken, which either can assert their validity or show they are not entirely complete. It also does make it at least look like there is a conspiracy to try to cover up free energy by reprimanding and attacking anyone who dares look, so scientists are too afraid to look or they may lose their careers, etc. Science is about looking not ridiculing and attacking those who look. It is about testing and trying different things to find what works and what doesn't, and not refusing to test or look into something because a theory says it is "impossible". Science is about testing and retesting, and also not making assumption, there might be some peculiar case where one of these theories can be circumvented, such as conservation of energy. With the oil companies likely hell bent to maintain their power and control, it makes one wonder if there is such a conspiracy involving the scientific establishment, that is perhaps reinforced with research grants from these corporations, which could be pulled in an instant if you dare begin to take the forbidden fruit and go beyond the box of what is sanctioned by the corporate/political/mainstream establishment, even if it might lead to discoveries that lead to saving millions of lives or fixing global warming and the energy crisis. I wouild not put it past the powers of greed and arrogance to supress technologies that could save lives and alleviate the ever impending doom of environmental damage and depleation, peak oil and economic collapse that results from fossil fuels, in order to assure the profits of a few wealthy elite. Scientists need to ask themselves, what is more important, their sacred dogma or finding the truth, corporate profits of a few wealthy elites or technologies which will provide cheap, free clean energy to all of humanity? Theories are meant to be tested and ways found to try to break them, not become a box where no one is dared to try to find a way out of that box. If you dont even look for a way out of the box you wont find it. And it can can shown with conservation of energy there are plenty of places there could be a way around it hiding someplace, some particular configuration of magnets perhaps out of millions of untested configurations.
That scientists would refuse to consider that this device could be PMM and actively test to confirm or deny that shows how far so called scientists have come from real science. True there are theories such conservation of energy, but there is still an open possibilities that there may be certain circumstances where this may be able to be circumvented that remain unidentified. It is not proper scientific practice to assume a law is absolute and refuse to test and try to violate and break it. Such is rather the domain of religions. Instead of refusing to even consider PMM, if we had real scientists today they would be testing their theory and trying to find ways it might be broken. If the theory could be broken, great as well, I cant imagine someone not wanting to find a way to violate it, since it would solve all of the worlds energy problems, solve global warming, end poverty, etc. The question is whether it puts out more energy than is put into it. So following the spirit of science we would want to confirm that or rule it out, and then try to think of other ways the COE might be violated. If it is confirmed, and replicated, then it is obvious the experimental evide
One would think the next logical step would be to close the loop, if more energy is being generated than what goes into the device, to loop some of the output energy back into the input, and take the excess and make it drive a load of say 50 or more watts, say a lightbulb, and therefore a self powering closed device that can do useful work without requiring any external energy source. That is the ultimate test that can prove with a shadow of a doubt that it is free energy. It would seem illogical to stop before reaching this point just because it is said to be impossible by the dogma. We go where the evidence leads and regardless of what a theory says, we can test it, either confirming or it or finding it incomplete. Most scientists refuse to even consider that their sacred theories are not infallible and refuse to even look into the possibility. This is not the way of real science. Real scientists, would be trying to find ways to break these theories, especially COE, which if a way could be found to circumvent it we should be happy since it would lead to a solution for global warming, peak oil, supply cheap clean energy to everyone on the planet, end poverty and so on. It was once said to be impossible to build a flying machine, for a human to travel faster than 60 mph, or that if one travelled to far from the coast one would fall off the edge of the world and be eaten by monsters waiting in the abyss. Today, our present scientific "laws" of conservation of energy are little more than assumptions, since while they are proven to work in some cases, it is only an assumption that they apply in all cases, since there are many cases where they have not been tested, there are millions of possible configurations of magnets and not all have been tested. So you see, how this part of modern scientists is based on dogma and belief, rather than proven evidence.
if it could act as a PMM, why not use it as such. Why stop at making motors more efficient. The question here as to whether this is real is not whether or not it is politically accepted or not, or politically correct, but what the physical evidence shows. I am sick of the political correctness and dogma in science today, where scientists are ridiculed and ostracised if they even dare look for possible ways holy sacred cow scientific ways can be broken, which either can assert their validity or show they are not entirely complete. It also does make it look like at least there is a conspiracy to try to cover up free energy by reprimanding and attacking anyone who dares look, so scientists are too afraid to look or they may lose their careers, etx. With the oil companies likely as hell bent to maintain their power and control, it makes one wonder if there is such a conspiracy involving the scientific establishment, that is perhaps reinforced with research grants from these corporations, which could be pulled in an instant if you dare begin to take the forbidden fruit and go beyond the box of what is sanctioned by the corporate/political/mainstream establishment, even if it might lead to discoveries that lead to saving millions of lives or fixing global warming and the energy crisis. I wouild not put it past the powers of greed and arrogance to supress technologies that could save lives and alleviate the ever impending doom of environmental damage and depleation, peak oil and economic collapse that results from fossil fuels, in order to assure the profits of a few wealthy elite. Scientists need to ask themselves, what is more important, their sacred theories or finding the truth, corporate profits of a few wealthy elites or technologies which will provide cheap, free clean energy to all of humanity? That scientists would refuse to consider that this could be PMM and actively test to confirm or deny that shows how far so called scientists have come from real science. True there are theories such conservation of energy, but there is still an open possibilities that there may be certain circumstances where this may be able to be circumvented that remain unidentified. It is not proper scientific practice to assume a law is absolute and refuse to test and try to violate and break it. Such is rather the domain of religions. Instead of refusing to even consider PMM, if we had real scientists today they would be testing their theory and trying to find ways it might be broken. If the theory could be broken, great as well, I cant imagine someone not wanting to find a way to violate it, since it would solve all of the worlds energy problems, solve global warming, end poverty, etc. The question is whether it puts out more energy than is put into it. So following the spirit of science we would want to confirm that or rule it out. If it is confirmed, and replicated, then it is obvious the experimental evidence speaks louder than the theories, that there must be something wrong with the theories if they can be consistantly shown to be violated. Unfortunately it seems many scientists and many here, are interested in answering this question and feel afraid of violating their sacred scientific theories, and feel it is more important to protect them than to discover the truth. Many scientists just assume that these theories apply the same way in all cases, without even testing all cases. You cannot find PMM if it existed unless you are looking for it, and most scientists are not. But their notions that is impossible is not based on evidence, it is based on assumption. So we see that this is more of a religion than science, based on faith rather than evidence. There are billions of possible configuration of magnets that are untested, one cannot say free energy is impossible in those configurations until they have been tested. It is easy to prove a positive, that something is possible in a certain condition, but hard to prove a negative that is impossible under any circumstance, when all of the circumstances have not been tested. The attitude o
This article is misleading and makes it seem there is a problem where there is none. It acts like Linus is responsible for the graphical user interfaces. Linus is doing what he does well which is develop the kernel. Kernel development generally a seperate area from graphical user interfaces that the average user sees and requires a different mindset from UI design. User interface development is handled by higher level application developers, so I dont know why Linus would be particularly concerned with it unless he is also interested in the GUI aspects. Linus is concerned with providing a high quality, flexible and technically superior kernel and excellent programming interfaces to it, but these arent things the normal user sees. The area of end user UI design tends to be a seperate area from kernel design. I do think that more focus is needed on useability and that is something that is of concern to user interface designers. There are also useability issues regarding the kernel, but these involve making sure drivers work okay, the system is stable, and hardware gets utilised, etc. Ideally however the operating system should be useable to experts and average users for the like, we should not sacrifice configurability, expert friendliness, flexibility and high level of control and customisability for average user friendliness and it is not necessary to do so. The system can be average and expert friendly at the same time. For instance everything can be done on both the CLI and GUI, a user should have a choice between directly writing configuration files or using a GUI to do so, and software should come with reasonable defaults and whenever possible work out of the box, but the user should be free if they choose to customise it to as much extant as possible. Useability in a GUI as well has less to do with the number of option than the placement and layout of the options which is much more important. In fact, removing options should not be done and we should not be minimilastic about the options presented to the user, but put lesser used options in "advanced" screens where they can be accessed if needed by more advanced users.
Why doesnt slashdot support this already? I like the idea of having one login, It is really getting insane trying to keep track of a gazillion logins for all these different services. OpenID would be a lot safer as well than giving each service the same password.
Ron Paul claims to be "pro free market", but the reality of the United States today is that it is getting further away from free market all the time, but not because of government, but because of corporations who hold the real power today, and who are consolidating significant control over the economy and thus peoples lives. If you wanted to go back to a free market economy, you would probably have to completely abolish corporations. Adam Smith himself said that free market capitalist forces could only work in an economy of small buyers and sellers, if there were anything larger than small mom and pop type companies, there was too much chance that one entity could manipulate the market, prices, etc.
Corporations are a de-facto government who controls a good part of peoples lives, including what they have to wear, what they can say, their behaviour, personality, their pay, their hours, and on it goes. The massive consolidation of this power and control into the hands of a few, who can manipulate peoples wages, how much things cost, and so on, makes manipulating peoples lives, in pushing people into poverty, childs play.
Socialism is an attempt to combine the organisation of large organised systems and collective effort with democracy, systems that work for an by the people in the common interest, the common good, where corporations would be operated by a democracy, owned by the public, and the would serve the public interest and the greater good rather than the good of an extremely wealthy elite. They should also not be used by the wealthy to consolidate the wealth generated by the work of the persons who work for these corporations. To do so undermines the health and well being of the economy by taking money out of the hands of the common people. It is critical for money to remain fluid and keep circulating through the economy and changing hands. Since the middle and low income class must spend a larger percentage of their income on purchasing things, there is a better chance it will be spent, than if it lands into a wealthy elite individuals hands, who has more money than they know what to do with. The increasing disparity between rich and poor and the shrinking middle class and purchasing power of the common people, and the corporate enslavement that is underway where corporations make goods in china, charge a 200% markup in the US and keep the profits for themselves. This leaching money, the lifeblood of the economy, right out of it, is a major cause of the economic problems we are now facing, as well as the real estate balloon, which is not a source of economic growth but is a drag on the economy which is sucking money out of the pockets of the common people and causing them to have less money to spend on other things, such as electronics and other goods in the economy.
That this so called corporatism, large corporations like wal-mart and microsoft, I am referring to, which are owned, controlled and largely benefit an elite few, is american is a lie. In fact Thomas Jefferson and Adam Smith both grealty feared corporations and preferred an economic model of small mom and pop type businesses, they were afraid of any large consolidations of economic and as well political power. Consolidations of either can have great and significant effects on your freedom and self determination in your life. As well, there was a strong and growing socialism movement in the US in response to the rise of modern corporations in the late 1800s. During the 1930s the country was coming closer to a move towards socialism and the FDR New Deal programs was a last ditch effort to try to safe capitalism from itself and the shambles it was in. There was a move towards labour unions where employees could have some rights and assure they are paid a living wage, and and greater safety nets and regulation of corporations. These policies were in force from the 40s onward, after which the US economy experienced tremendous growth and the middle class grew in size, due to the force of the labour unions, employee wages were improved an
I have used Wine and it does not seem to run most Windows applications very well. It does not seem apt to call it a windows emulator because it still apparently does not support a large number of critical Windows APIs, or else applications would run on it with few problems. It would be nice to ditch windows completely and use Wine to run windows progs, but it is not nearly reliable enough to even consider that. Often I have software for work I have to use that is for Windows. I Would love to run it on Linux but it does not work at all well with wine.
I accidently posted this to the wrong article, sorry about that. Identical twins is a natural phenomena as well so it is not something which someone is forcing on another person or someone else trying alter another persons body or their life. I should have mentioned the issue since I did think of this. Cloning is a completely different thing from identical twins, one is natural and one is not, one is one person forcing something on someone else and one person taking away anothers right to individuality in physical appearance and body and the other is not, since it is natural. Identical twins is a natural, wonderful thing, a far cry from human cloning which is a deliberate act of manipulation of other peoples lives and control over the most sacred, personal and basic right, thier own bodies.
The way I see it, and this comes not from a religious viewpoint since I am not religious, but entirely a human rights one, is no one else has a right to impose on another person their wishes about their body, including deciding what kind of body that person will have. Every person should have a right to a body that is uniquely theres and no one elses and no one should have a right to force them into someone else's body. At least nature is random and has no agenda. People have agendas and I do not like the idea of people deciding what kind of body a person will have, their facial features, their eye color, etc. People have a right to eb unique and to have things which are uniquely their own and which no one else has control over and the most basic of this is their body. Perhaps people choose their own DNA before they are born, including their phsyical features and characteristics.
Human cloning has a very concerning and unpleasant 1984ish or Brave New World feel to it, a horrific utopian world where every aspect of peoples lives, right down to that which is most personal and sacred to a person, their body, is controlled by others. It is a frightening vision of conformity, uniformity where people are rather than seen as unique individuals instead as carbon copies. It really needs to be completely banned if we care about freedom, the right of each person to be individual, unique, to self determination, the right to a body that is uniquely theres and controlled and manipulated by no one else. We need to respect each person as a unique and diverse person entirely their own, rather than trying to impose ourselves on them and try to determine and control who they are. We need to respect diversity and individuality and eschew totalitarianism and conformism. So I concur with the pope on cloning, not on religious grounds, but on human rights ones.
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That is a bad idea. Given the low error tolerance of nuclear plants, it is better to have a few large nuclear plants that can be easily monitored rather than lots of smaller ones. To keep them safe, nuclear plants need to be constantly supervised and inspected and it is eisier to do that with a few large plants than a lot of smaller ones. Plus, no one likes the idea of toxic radioactive poison being handled right down the street, larger plants keep the risk consolidated at one location, which can be more easily monitored and scrutinised for safety by regulatory agencies.
The fact that governments and corporations seem to think that P2P is an inheritetely dangerous technology which can only be used illegal shows how ignorant they are how little they know. P2P has as we know many legitimate uses, like many technologies. It can be used to legally distribute content. It is similar to another term, file sharing, being labelled as evil, illegal, etc, when the internet could not function without it, since every web server and mail server uses some type of file sharing. It is clearly wrong to go after entire technologies, due to a small few who are abusing them, It is like banning kitchen knives because they can be used as a weapon.
I am concerned that one reason they do not like p2p is it decentralises legal content distribution, such as open source software, and threatens the big media monopoly. P2P can be used by independant artists to distribute legally their own music, and in a way where it is within the means of anyone due to the small amount of resources it requires, and perhaps the big media companies do not like the idea of their monopolistic position being challenged. The big media companies want to be the one and only place to purchase and market music and i do not think their real concern is illegal filesharing, but instead, the idea that they no longer are in the position to control what music can be distributed and to block and allow artists access to a market, and that artists no longer have to go through their monopoly.
The main reason people use Windows is it is a vendor lock in since most software runs only on Windows. It is the anticompetitive grip that microsoft has that keeps it in power by being able to utilise its monopoly to lock software into the platform so to run the software people need Windows. Hopefully one day soon Wine can run windows programs that will be over.
As far as profits and selling programs. My philosophy is the OS, audio, graphics system and core base system should be open source, libraries and other OS infrastructure utilities and such, should be open source. They must be open source and I think that this is very important, no question about it. This levels the playing field by making sure that people have a choice in OSs and there is a right to tinker and keep tabs on what the computer is up to. The OS being open source permits the user to if desired control the entire system and understand how it works. I would not be terribly upset if some complicated applications should be sold on a source included commercial model, for a reasonable price. I can see the point of some that it is hard to make money writing software, and after all it takes time to write software. One should be able to make money from it. I definitely do not like todays closed source model. I do think that previously common models where source was distributed with commercial sofrware was much less problematic. It used to be that was a more common practice but later became more uncommon.
Open source has approached the problem by selling physical distributions which have an added convenience factor, which however has lessened with cable modems, selling books about the software, and selling support to bring in income, as well as asking for voluntary contributions. Still I can see that it can be more difficult to make money off this than with a commercial model.
Probably the most misleading instance where science has been ignored or seriously damaged is the teaching of creationism in science courses or downgrading of evolution by christians who do not like it because it conflicts with their religious beliefs. To teach creationism as coming anywhere near science or being something of which there is any real positive evidence of it is simply lying to children. Evolution is an extremely well supported scientific theory that has a large amount of physical evidence to back it up. Science must be based on physical evidence, not religious superstitions and fantasies. To mention creationism in the same breath as science and suggest it is a competitor to evolution is an insult to everything that science is and that which has made so much progress to our understanding the world better and getting the truths about the universe. If religious fantasy had prevailed, we would still think the earth was flat and stars were little fires several miles above the surface, and that the edge of the earth dropped off into an abyss populated by monsters who ate ships that dared fall into it. Creationism like these theories should be in social studies where it belongs or used only as an example of old, outdated absurd ideas that science has proven wrong.
I think this has value if it will help improve Wine so it can run all Windows programs. That really should be the focus here. I do think funding Wine would really help along Linux adoption and help end the dreadful Microsoft monopoly. So, this is not necessarily just about photoshop, but making all Windows programs run on Linux. and it is the fact that so many programs run only on Windows, which keeps Windows dominate. If we have millionaires reading this who would like to speed up adoption of Linux, funding work on developing a way to run windows hardware drivers on linux would also be a huge help. There is always a lag between hardware being released and running on Linux because companies always spend less time on Linux. While open source or native windows drivers are best, it is not realistic to expect Linux to be adopted when people cannot run their hardware for years perhaps because there is no driver. This would allow as well the hardware to be used with Windows drivers until a native linux driver is produced.
I can see this as valuable if it will allow a greater number of Windows applications to run on Linux and improve wine as a software program. Wine itself needs more funding since currently it does a dismal job of running many Windows programs. But the focus needs to be on improving compatability with all programs. If all this is going to do, is make Photoshop run better, it would be better to spend the money improving the performance of the Gimp and other open source programs. But making all Windows programs run on Linux, over 99%, would be a major accompishment that would hurry up the acceptance of Linux as a complete Windows replacement. There will also be those who say that it would be better to get people to use open source alternatives to windows programs than to use windows programs on linux, although, while we should improve open source programs, since having windows programs run on Linux would help many people move to Linux and would eliminate the main thing that keeps microsoft dominate, I think that improving wine to 99% compatability would also be very valuable as well. Remember as well, that a large number of Windows programs are custom apps for very specific purposes. I used custom windows only programs used by a company I worked for. These are not general purpose programs that I can just replace with open office. So its not necessarily just word processing programs and general windows programs one may need to run on linux that one can just get an open source replacement for, but highly specialised programs for which there is no Linux replacement and might only be used inside a company and no where else. I have had to have Windows XP in addition to Linux because of these custom special windows programs. I would just love to get rid of XP and run them all on Linux. The other major area that would be very useful is funding a compatability layer to support Windows hardware drivers on Linux, if we have millionaires reading this that want to fund something that would speed up Linux adoption, that would be the surest way of getting hardware support on Linux. I agree that open source drivers are always best but still this layer would be essential, especially until open source drivers are written, There is always a long lag between hardware becoming avialable and driver avialability on Linux because the drivers have to be written through back engineering and it takes quite a while, and there is always more resources put by companies on Windows. Linux is always on the back burner. This layer would also make it much eisier as well to backengineer hardware protocols by watching the communication between proprietary drivers and the hardware, a compatability layer for hardware drivers could speed up open source driver development
Capital investment is most important with things like this. The purpose of the prize however might not be that it is necessary, but rather to accelerate development, speed it up. The benefits of course of improving technology would be significant, more powerful, faster computers.
I get so sick and tired of these old myths about X being bloated, etc. X by modern standards uses very little resources compared with say Vista, and yet it has kept up with latest improvements in graphics technology. Most of these myths were invented at a time 1980s when computer hardware was very slow 4 mhz for instance, ram was small, and where the true performance problems were with the hardware of the time which was not advanced enough to run much of any GUI. They have nothing to do with X itself but were complaints that were caused by the hardware of the day. By todays standards X is fast, efficient and small on modern hardware, and you will find that vista consumes far more resources than X does.
X is not at all a fossil and in fact is at the cutting edge of design improvements and technology such as with compiz. Anyone who says X is a fossil does not have the slightest clue what they are talking about and they apparently have been living under a rock for they have not seen compiz and the amazing things it does. X is polished and a mature code base, it has the benefit of backwards compatability as well. ALl of the downsides of trying to replace something so mature and well developed, with something which is likely going to be, with todays coding standards (sloppy, bloated), to consume far more ram, would probabaly end up being slower, which would be immature and filled with bugs, and which would not be backwards compatable, would create far more problems than it can solve. This is the way most new software is today and X by todays standards is pretty darn efficient and uses less resources than most modern programs I have seen. It makes far more sense as well to develop extensions to X to improve it and in this manner we can make it do whatever we need to do and keep it up to date with the times while backwards compatable. This has what has worked now since 1987 when X11 was released. I am glad people who say that X needs to be replaced are not making design decisions because they do not know what they are talking about and their ideas would give us huge problems for something that carries no benefit to what we have now. X can continue to improve and keep up with whatever new demands may arise while keeping the benefits of backwards compatability. As far as X being slow this is an old myth that refuses to die. It is far faster and uses less memory than vista. I have used X successfully on a 486 with 8 mb of ram! Just try that with vista, you wont get far! ANd yet X with compiz is at the cuting edge support more high end graphics features than Vista does. You have everything you want with X, so I dont see why people are trying to bash it!
I agree that X is not at all a fossil and in fact is at the cutting edge of design improvements and technology such as with compiz. Anyone who says X is a fossil does not have the slightest clue what they are talking about and they apparently have been living under a rock for they have not seen compiz and the amazing things it does. X is polished and a mature code base, it has the benefit of backwards compatability as well. ALl of the downsides of trying to replace something so mature and well developed, with something which is likely going to be, with todays coding standards (sloppy, bloated), to consume far more ram, would probabaly end up being slower, which would be immature and filled with bugs, and which would not be backwards compatable, would create far more problems than it can solve. This is the way most new software is today and X by todays standards is pretty darn efficient and uses less resources than most modern programs I have seen. It makes far more sense as well to develop extensions to X to improve it and in this manner we can make it do whatever we need to do and keep it up to date with the times while backwards compatable. This has what has worked now since 1987 when X11 was released. I am glad people who say that X needs to be replaced are not making design decisions because they do not know what they are talking about and their ideas would give us huge problems for something that carries no benefit to what we have now. X can continue to improve and keep up with whatever new demands may arise while keeping the benefits of backwards compatability. As far as X being slow this is an old myth that refuses to die. It is far faster and uses less memory than vista. I have used X successfully on a 486 with 8 mb of ram! Just try that with vista, you wont get far! ANd yet X with compiz is at the cuting edge support more high end graphics features than Vista does. You have everything you want with X, so I dont see why people are trying to bash it!
I am not in favor of building sound support into X per se. X should remain a graphics system (do one thing and do it well). That said, we should have a network transparant sound system that works alongside X. I believe pulseaudio is promosing and may fill that niche.
I disagree with this. Totally. X is not really all that bad or difficult to manage, and it is not a dinosaur. It is the case sometiems that trying to replace something as mature and refined as X with something that is bound to be flaky, buggy and immature would likely create more problems than it claims to solve. When something just works well it does not make sense to replace it. X has been improved with extensions and that is how it can continue to be improved, in a backwards compatable manner. And do we really want 100 different window systems? X being the main standard is actually a good thing. This allows me to know that I can always run an application on an X server, no matter how old the app is, it is supported. X provides a standard interface for the window system. Can you imagine what things would be like if there were 10 different window systems or if some smartass came along and decided to make an incompatable system to fix problems that dont exist with X, or which can be fixed without breaking backward compatability? You would have a dozen different systems, with applications that would run on one and not the other, it would be a nightmare of incompatability. X is actually one of the things that works best on Linux and as far as X itself, i have never had a problem with it. Most problems exist at the driver level, which is not at all actually a part of the X core at all. Work has been done to as well improve X and build new extensions that improve its performance. Anyone who says X is a dinosaur has absolutely no clue what they are talking about and i am GLAD they are not the ones making design and archicture decisions.
This is nonsense and follows "if its old its bad" fallacy. Actually X performs quite well, is mature and stable. Quite frankly, trying to switch to something else would lead to a code base that is far more immature and buggy and which has not been as well refined as X has. Sometimes. something is well designed enough that it does not make sense to replace it, this is the case with X. Its clean network client design makes it highly flexible, and it has an extension mechanism that has allowed it to keep up with changing technology requirements. Your views on X are based on nothing more than this idea that if its old its bad, but often it is the case that older software is often better, less buggy and more mature, which is the case with X. I see no reason why X cannot continue to fulfill all of the desktop needs for the forseeable future in a completely backwards and forwards compatable manner.
It is surprising that one is not able to disable JS on a per site basis by default. However, I have written firefox for years about a feature called security profiles which would allow the user to specify on a per site basis not only whether JS should run, but whether applets should run and a large number of options and settings. Sites could then be placed into one of these profiles. The idea has been ignored by Firefox even though it would give more control to the user, and used the tacky excuse to use user profiles, but which would be terribly inconvient, involving launching a seperate browser for each set of security settings and keep track of which is which. Between this and Firefoxs outrageous memory leaks, I am not impressed.
So much for OpenBSD being the highest security OS. Even if the bug is a minor one does not pose a great risk, it seems that one should still fix it to ensure the system is functions properly and as expected. To leave a security bug in place because of an assumption does not make a whole lot of sense and shows a bit of arrogance, when they could just fix it instead. It reminds me of the instance where Microsoft Windows 95 had the problem that even if the user had not explicitely made certain directories accessible via file sharing, all the server did was tell the client not to look at them, but would still let the client access them if it asked. The problem was reported to Microsoft by Samba, who pretty much displayed apathy about the matter and didnt seem to recognise it a as a security problem. The OpenBSD bug is not as severe, but when they have a chance to make OpenBSD a little bit more secure, why not take it, especially when their focus is on security.
Well, actually Microsoft going bye bye would be a good thing. It would give Linux the chance to take the lead in the OS domain. As far as yahoo, I dont really know why they are in such trouble. I have used their service, such as their music service and they seemed to be pretty decent. Ive always used yahoo even for search.I became very concerned when microsoft was making this offer, since I do not trust microsoft at all especially with my mail, so I might have had to consider moving away from using it. I actually like yahoo mail and their other services, and knowing MS the quality would probably degrade for all except the windows users on IE as MS.
Under no circumstances should Yahoo merge with Microsoft, for any amount of money. Increased consolidation would be very bad for consumers, and especially for users of non microsoft OSs. Given microsofts track record, they tend to use products to support their OS monopoly for instance by making pages only viewable on IE. So I am very glad to hear this development.
I would like to see more schematics, plans, independant verifications for this. The inventor needs to subject this to scientific scrutiny by providing the plans and publishing papers on it to see if it can be duplicated. If it could act as a PMM, why not use it as such. Why stop at making motors more efficient. The question here as to whether this is real is not whether or not it is politically accepted or not, or politically correct, but what the physical evidence shows. I am sick of the political correctness and dogma in science today, where scientists are ridiculed and ostracised if they even dare look for possible ways holy, sacred cow scientific laws can be broken, which either can assert their validity or show they are not entirely complete. It also does make it at least look like there is a conspiracy to try to cover up free energy by reprimanding and attacking anyone who dares look, so scientists are too afraid to look or they may lose their careers, etc. Science is about looking not ridiculing and attacking those who look. It is about testing and trying different things to find what works and what doesn't, and not refusing to test or look into something because a theory says it is "impossible". Science is about testing and retesting, and also not making assumption, there might be some peculiar case where one of these theories can be circumvented, such as conservation of energy. With the oil companies likely hell bent to maintain their power and control, it makes one wonder if there is such a conspiracy involving the scientific establishment, that is perhaps reinforced with research grants from these corporations, which could be pulled in an instant if you dare begin to take the forbidden fruit and go beyond the box of what is sanctioned by the corporate/political/mainstream establishment, even if it might lead to discoveries that lead to saving millions of lives or fixing global warming and the energy crisis. I wouild not put it past the powers of greed and arrogance to supress technologies that could save lives and alleviate the ever impending doom of environmental damage and depleation, peak oil and economic collapse that results from fossil fuels, in order to assure the profits of a few wealthy elite. Scientists need to ask themselves, what is more important, their sacred dogma or finding the truth, corporate profits of a few wealthy elites or technologies which will provide cheap, free clean energy to all of humanity? Theories are meant to be tested and ways found to try to break them, not become a box where no one is dared to try to find a way out of that box. If you dont even look for a way out of the box you wont find it. And it can can shown with conservation of energy there are plenty of places there could be a way around it hiding someplace, some particular configuration of magnets perhaps out of millions of untested configurations.
That scientists would refuse to consider that this device could be PMM and actively test to confirm or deny that shows how far so called scientists have come from real science. True there are theories such conservation of energy, but there is still an open possibilities that there may be certain circumstances where this may be able to be circumvented that remain unidentified. It is not proper scientific practice to assume a law is absolute and refuse to test and try to violate and break it. Such is rather the domain of religions. Instead of refusing to even consider PMM, if we had real scientists today they would be testing their theory and trying to find ways it might be broken. If the theory could be broken, great as well, I cant imagine someone not wanting to find a way to violate it, since it would solve all of the worlds energy problems, solve global warming, end poverty, etc. The question is whether it puts out more energy than is put into it. So following the spirit of science we would want to confirm that or rule it out, and then try to think of other ways the COE might be violated. If it is confirmed, and replicated, then it is obvious the experimental evide
One would think the next logical step would be to close the loop, if more energy is being generated than what goes into the device, to loop some of the output energy back into the input, and take the excess and make it drive a load of say 50 or more watts, say a lightbulb, and therefore a self powering closed device that can do useful work without requiring any external energy source. That is the ultimate test that can prove with a shadow of a doubt that it is free energy. It would seem illogical to stop before reaching this point just because it is said to be impossible by the dogma. We go where the evidence leads and regardless of what a theory says, we can test it, either confirming or it or finding it incomplete. Most scientists refuse to even consider that their sacred theories are not infallible and refuse to even look into the possibility. This is not the way of real science. Real scientists, would be trying to find ways to break these theories, especially COE, which if a way could be found to circumvent it we should be happy since it would lead to a solution for global warming, peak oil, supply cheap clean energy to everyone on the planet, end poverty and so on. It was once said to be impossible to build a flying machine, for a human to travel faster than 60 mph, or that if one travelled to far from the coast one would fall off the edge of the world and be eaten by monsters waiting in the abyss. Today, our present scientific "laws" of conservation of energy are little more than assumptions, since while they are proven to work in some cases, it is only an assumption that they apply in all cases, since there are many cases where they have not been tested, there are millions of possible configurations of magnets and not all have been tested. So you see, how this part of modern scientists is based on dogma and belief, rather than proven evidence.
if it could act as a PMM, why not use it as such. Why stop at making motors more efficient. The question here as to whether this is real is not whether or not it is politically accepted or not, or politically correct, but what the physical evidence shows. I am sick of the political correctness and dogma in science today, where scientists are ridiculed and ostracised if they even dare look for possible ways holy sacred cow scientific ways can be broken, which either can assert their validity or show they are not entirely complete. It also does make it look like at least there is a conspiracy to try to cover up free energy by reprimanding and attacking anyone who dares look, so scientists are too afraid to look or they may lose their careers, etx. With the oil companies likely as hell bent to maintain their power and control, it makes one wonder if there is such a conspiracy involving the scientific establishment, that is perhaps reinforced with research grants from these corporations, which could be pulled in an instant if you dare begin to take the forbidden fruit and go beyond the box of what is sanctioned by the corporate/political/mainstream establishment, even if it might lead to discoveries that lead to saving millions of lives or fixing global warming and the energy crisis. I wouild not put it past the powers of greed and arrogance to supress technologies that could save lives and alleviate the ever impending doom of environmental damage and depleation, peak oil and economic collapse that results from fossil fuels, in order to assure the profits of a few wealthy elite. Scientists need to ask themselves, what is more important, their sacred theories or finding the truth, corporate profits of a few wealthy elites or technologies which will provide cheap, free clean energy to all of humanity? That scientists would refuse to consider that this could be PMM and actively test to confirm or deny that shows how far so called scientists have come from real science. True there are theories such conservation of energy, but there is still an open possibilities that there may be certain circumstances where this may be able to be circumvented that remain unidentified. It is not proper scientific practice to assume a law is absolute and refuse to test and try to violate and break it. Such is rather the domain of religions. Instead of refusing to even consider PMM, if we had real scientists today they would be testing their theory and trying to find ways it might be broken. If the theory could be broken, great as well, I cant imagine someone not wanting to find a way to violate it, since it would solve all of the worlds energy problems, solve global warming, end poverty, etc. The question is whether it puts out more energy than is put into it. So following the spirit of science we would want to confirm that or rule it out. If it is confirmed, and replicated, then it is obvious the experimental evidence speaks louder than the theories, that there must be something wrong with the theories if they can be consistantly shown to be violated. Unfortunately it seems many scientists and many here, are interested in answering this question and feel afraid of violating their sacred scientific theories, and feel it is more important to protect them than to discover the truth. Many scientists just assume that these theories apply the same way in all cases, without even testing all cases. You cannot find PMM if it existed unless you are looking for it, and most scientists are not. But their notions that is impossible is not based on evidence, it is based on assumption. So we see that this is more of a religion than science, based on faith rather than evidence. There are billions of possible configuration of magnets that are untested, one cannot say free energy is impossible in those configurations until they have been tested. It is easy to prove a positive, that something is possible in a certain condition, but hard to prove a negative that is impossible under any circumstance, when all of the circumstances have not been tested. The attitude o
This article is misleading and makes it seem there is a problem where there is none. It acts like Linus is responsible for the graphical user interfaces. Linus is doing what he does well which is develop the kernel. Kernel development generally a seperate area from graphical user interfaces that the average user sees and requires a different mindset from UI design. User interface development is handled by higher level application developers, so I dont know why Linus would be particularly concerned with it unless he is also interested in the GUI aspects. Linus is concerned with providing a high quality, flexible and technically superior kernel and excellent programming interfaces to it, but these arent things the normal user sees. The area of end user UI design tends to be a seperate area from kernel design. I do think that more focus is needed on useability and that is something that is of concern to user interface designers. There are also useability issues regarding the kernel, but these involve making sure drivers work okay, the system is stable, and hardware gets utilised, etc. Ideally however the operating system should be useable to experts and average users for the like, we should not sacrifice configurability, expert friendliness, flexibility and high level of control and customisability for average user friendliness and it is not necessary to do so. The system can be average and expert friendly at the same time. For instance everything can be done on both the CLI and GUI, a user should have a choice between directly writing configuration files or using a GUI to do so, and software should come with reasonable defaults and whenever possible work out of the box, but the user should be free if they choose to customise it to as much extant as possible. Useability in a GUI as well has less to do with the number of option than the placement and layout of the options which is much more important. In fact, removing options should not be done and we should not be minimilastic about the options presented to the user, but put lesser used options in "advanced" screens where they can be accessed if needed by more advanced users.
Why doesnt slashdot support this already? I like the idea of having one login, It is really getting insane trying to keep track of a gazillion logins for all these different services. OpenID would be a lot safer as well than giving each service the same password.
Ron Paul claims to be "pro free market", but the reality of the United States today is that it is getting further away from free market all the time, but not because of government, but because of corporations who hold the real power today, and who are consolidating significant control over the economy and thus peoples lives. If you wanted to go back to a free market economy, you would probably have to completely abolish corporations. Adam Smith himself said that free market capitalist forces could only work in an economy of small buyers and sellers, if there were anything larger than small mom and pop type companies, there was too much chance that one entity could manipulate the market, prices, etc.
Corporations are a de-facto government who controls a good part of peoples lives, including what they have to wear, what they can say, their behaviour, personality, their pay, their hours, and on it goes. The massive consolidation of this power and control into the hands of a few, who can manipulate peoples wages, how much things cost, and so on, makes manipulating peoples lives, in pushing people into poverty, childs play.
Socialism is an attempt to combine the organisation of large organised systems and collective effort with democracy, systems that work for an by the people in the common interest, the common good, where corporations would be operated by a democracy, owned by the public, and the would serve the public interest and the greater good rather than the good of an extremely wealthy elite. They should also not be used by the wealthy to consolidate the wealth generated by the work of the persons who work for these corporations. To do so undermines the health and well being of the economy by taking money out of the hands of the common people. It is critical for money to remain fluid and keep circulating through the economy and changing hands. Since the middle and low income class must spend a larger percentage of their income on purchasing things, there is a better chance it will be spent, than if it lands into a wealthy elite individuals hands, who has more money than they know what to do with. The increasing disparity between rich and poor and the shrinking middle class and purchasing power of the common people, and the corporate enslavement that is underway where corporations make goods in china, charge a 200% markup in the US and keep the profits for themselves. This leaching money, the lifeblood of the economy, right out of it, is a major cause of the economic problems we are now facing, as well as the real estate balloon, which is not a source of economic growth but is a drag on the economy which is sucking money out of the pockets of the common people and causing them to have less money to spend on other things, such as electronics and other goods in the economy.
That this so called corporatism, large corporations like wal-mart and microsoft, I am referring to, which are owned, controlled and largely benefit an elite few, is american is a lie. In fact Thomas Jefferson and Adam Smith both grealty feared corporations and preferred an economic model of small mom and pop type businesses, they were afraid of any large consolidations of economic and as well political power. Consolidations of either can have great and significant effects on your freedom and self determination in your life. As well, there was a strong and growing socialism movement in the US in response to the rise of modern corporations in the late 1800s. During the 1930s the country was coming closer to a move towards socialism and the FDR New Deal programs was a last ditch effort to try to safe capitalism from itself and the shambles it was in. There was a move towards labour unions where employees could have some rights and assure they are paid a living wage, and and greater safety nets and regulation of corporations. These policies were in force from the 40s onward, after which the US economy experienced tremendous growth and the middle class grew in size, due to the force of the labour unions, employee wages were improved an
I have used Wine and it does not seem to run most Windows applications very well. It does not seem apt to call it a windows emulator because it still apparently does not support a large number of critical Windows APIs, or else applications would run on it with few problems. It would be nice to ditch windows completely and use Wine to run windows progs, but it is not nearly reliable enough to even consider that. Often I have software for work I have to use that is for Windows. I Would love to run it on Linux but it does not work at all well with wine.
I accidently posted this to the wrong article, sorry about that. Identical twins is a natural phenomena as well so it is not something which someone is forcing on another person or someone else trying alter another persons body or their life. I should have mentioned the issue since I did think of this. Cloning is a completely different thing from identical twins, one is natural and one is not, one is one person forcing something on someone else and one person taking away anothers right to individuality in physical appearance and body and the other is not, since it is natural. Identical twins is a natural, wonderful thing, a far cry from human cloning which is a deliberate act of manipulation of other peoples lives and control over the most sacred, personal and basic right, thier own bodies.
The way I see it, and this comes not from a religious viewpoint since I am not religious, but entirely a human rights one, is no one else has a right to impose on another person their wishes about their body, including deciding what kind of body that person will have. Every person should have a right to a body that is uniquely theres and no one elses and no one should have a right to force them into someone else's body. At least nature is random and has no agenda. People have agendas and I do not like the idea of people deciding what kind of body a person will have, their facial features, their eye color, etc. People have a right to eb unique and to have things which are uniquely their own and which no one else has control over and the most basic of this is their body. Perhaps people choose their own DNA before they are born, including their phsyical features and characteristics.
Human cloning has a very concerning and unpleasant 1984ish or Brave New World feel to it, a horrific utopian world where every aspect of peoples lives, right down to that which is most personal and sacred to a person, their body, is controlled by others. It is a frightening vision of conformity, uniformity where people are rather than seen as unique individuals instead as carbon copies. It really needs to be completely banned if we care about freedom, the right of each person to be individual, unique, to self determination, the right to a body that is uniquely theres and controlled and manipulated by no one else. We need to respect each person as a unique and diverse person entirely their own, rather than trying to impose ourselves on them and try to determine and control who they are. We need to respect diversity and individuality and eschew totalitarianism and conformism. So I concur with the pope on cloning, not on religious grounds, but on human rights ones.