They have the biggest and heaviest flying aircraft in the world.
That's because the Soviet Union wants big things to show off. No one else in the world has bigger aircraft, because there's no need for bigger aircraft. The C-5, the USAF's largest plane was made in 1968. It's about two and half times longer than the C-130 which is the longest plane to land on an aircraft carrier. The USAF has been happy with those planes for 30 years. Likewise, 747s are the biggest commerical airliners to fly and they've been in the air for 30 years. Bigger is not better in a lot of cases.
Yet taxes are the least efficient method of funding a beneficial program, since that funding must go through three different bureaucracies before it gets to the program itself: Collection, allocation, and disbursement.
And? How are you going to sanely distribute money throughout any system without collecting it, allocating it and disbursing it?
That is why such private charitable efforts as Goodwill and The Salvation Army operate on rediculously small ammounts of money, while every government program is constantly wasting vast sums.
Some of those organizations waste vast sums of money on their own. Being a private charitable organization doesn't prevent a beaucracy from developing.
If there is only one supplier in a market, it is only because they have priced their product such that no other competitor could come in and undercut them and still make a profit.
Or because that one supplier supplies a huge variety of products and isn't interested in dealing with a company that will buy from a competitor. No company can compete on all those fronts at once, so they compete on none.
It is pointless to pay me a bribe, for instance, because I cannot do anything in return.
But if you were in the hiring department of IBM, or the president of Harvard, it might not be pointless to give you a bribe. It's not about government; it's about power.
Money is wasted on bribes and payoffs that a clean operation would not be paying.
Then again, how much does that really hurt when the CEO of the clean operation is laying in a gutter with two bullets in his brain?
Even the most successful serial killer doesn't match one day of the war in Iraq.
Of course one man can't compete against a large group. But mobs and gangs can rack up quite a count, and would probably rack up an even higher count if there was no government to help them.
It doesn't look like they were bothered one bit by the thought of being seen as "crazies," "perverts," or "anarchists hell-bent on destroying our way of life."
Or they were, but decided it was more important to publish than hide. I know of a couple atheist's sites that were driven off the web because they couldn't deal with the harrassment anymore. Most of the porn on ASSTR.org is written under pseduonyms, and I'm sure many of their readers wouldn't read them if they thought that someone was watching.
So I can go out and beat up all the arabs I want, because if I beat enough of them, I'm sure to beat up a terrorist? He destroyed the lives and freedom of innocent American citizens; does it make him right just because a few of his guesses were correct?
If you don't know what you are doing, then either take it to or buy from someone who does.
That's no way to learn. You probably shouldn't be missing around on a computer you need for more important stuff, or if you can't afford to burn something out, but otherwise it can be an interesting and educational progress. Much better than sitting on your ass and watching what Hollywood or even Slashdot is feeding you for a few hours.
I do also question Britannica's content as it was written by people years ago... here are some examples I can not check myself: Letters to Eb
Of course, those letters are about the Armenian massacre, a violently disputed event. Check out a recent National Geographic for the letters they got on thier most recent article on the massacre. If EB changed all those details, there would be more letters telling them how the new article was all wrong.
I suppose that if you assume people are fair, no one has an agenda and people basically know everything more or less accurately then Wiki is fine. Problem is that none of that is true.
We live in the Post Editorial Age whereby any nugglet of infotainment is accepted as truth and fact and no one need rely on fact checkers, editors or referees that ensure that revisionism doesn't take precident over truth.
Fact checkers, editors and referees are people too. They have biases, agendas, and don't know everything perfectly. Encyclopedias aren't oracles from the gods; they have always included what everyone thinks is true.
So if I round up 10,000 of my closest net friends and I convince them to agree to say that say something then it pretty much becomes fact.
How so? If you round up 10,000 of your closest friends you could probably do a number on Wikipedia. You could probably edit most of the copies of the Brittanica held by English public libraries with razors and glue, too. 10,000 people can have a lot of effect. But there will be countervailing forces, on Wikipedia, the Internet and if you tried it in the real world. The big difference about the Internet is that a dozen people in the right places could totally control with the EB says on a subject, whereas they can be correct on Wikipedia or the Internet at large.
Oh really, how do you know what is the cause of human intuition? Last time I checked it was an unexplained phenomena.
Not really. Coming up with supernatural explanations for human intuition in chess is like the people who are taught how to "bend spoons with their mind", but still need to help a little with thier hands. It's simply unnecessary. Even in real life, coming up with supernatural answers for human intuition is copletely unneeded in most cases. We could always assume that we reach into another dimension to add numbers, but there are better simpler answers.
By the way: quantum physics is a real thing, it's not gooblygook. Why don't you read up on it a little before making something up and blaming it on quantum physics.
Personally, I'm curious why game theory software doesn't have the kinds of export restrictions that encryption software or computing hardware does.
Computer chess games have nothing on the fields of Wellington. This has all the bad effects of export restrictions, including the fact that the world outside the US has many good programmers and that it's impossible to stop software from being exported from the US, without being something you can point to and say "This is something only communist spys would use."
complately inane, archaic things that 95% of the Spider-man 2 viewing audience didn't notice and wouldn't give a shit about.
I am not, as a general rule, in the average 95%. Why should I give a damn about what 95% of the audience noticed? I care about what I noticed, and that's what has an effect on how much _I_ enjoy a movie.
It's fucking Spider-man 2.
I think Mary Jane is a she.
Am I the only one who understands that people don't enjoy the same things? Personally, when paying to see a movie in a theater, I like a little more consistency than the average Ed Wood movie. If you don't like that, then fine, but this article was clearly labeled; there's no reason to waste your time here if you aren't interested in such things.
How about polite discourse? I didn't perceive the original poster as insulting at all, be he right or wrong.
Gentoo really isn't about CFLAGS. Its about USE flags. I can build programs as I want with whatever options I want. Portage takes care of the dependencies and my systems are _exactly_ as I want them to be.
How many programs do you really need fine-grained control over? It's not really a misery to have an extra 100k library or two that you don't really need around, and most programs don't have that many compile-time options to mess with. For those that do, it's not much of a problem to recompile them in Debian or most binary-based distributions.
It's called suspending disbelief, and some people, it would appear, are incapable of doing it.
I'll happily suspend belief for the ground rules of the universe. Neither Middle Earth or Harry Potter's world work on plain old science. But those worlds, and more so the world of Spider-Man, share something in common with our world. Completely abstract media isn't popular. The only way we can understand what's going on in the movie is if we have some contact with the real world; there may be elves and humans, but you can kill them all with swords or arrows. There may be radioactive spiders giving people superhuman powers, but water should still boil if you toss superheated stuff into it.
the docs include standards, like RFCs, which _should not_ be changed and redistributed, less confusion ensue.
What if I want to embed it into my code as comments, or embed it into my documentation? What if I want to turn into a manpage--much of the POSIX standard is now being turned directly into manpages. What if I want to proglomate a new standard? DFSG accepts requirements to rename or mark modified versions, which should be more than suitable.
the docs include license texts, like the GPL, APL, etc.
No, they don't. License texts have always been and always will be an exception, under the new or old DFSG requirements.
Software is... software. Its not a cure for some social ills, its purpose is defined by the usability it brings to people.
And free software brings more usability to people by being free.
In any case, everything is just itself. Cotton is just cotton, whether it's grown by slaves or free farmers on their own farm. That doesn't mean that what we use and how we choose it doesn't have consequences.
What kind of Mexican? Yucatan or Veracruz? What kind of American? Florida or Alaskan? As you said, you couldn't really make that distinction.
Just as it pisses me the fuck off when people speak of all Native Americans as if they were just "Indians"
Are you pissed off when people speak of Europeans? Are you pissed off when people speak of Americans (which has Native Americans as a subset)?
I don't give a damn about the fine details of Nigeria. It has no effect on my life, and I'm not going to sit down and study each of the thousands of cultures this world has to offer.
What I was trying to say in the origional post was that OEMs who were dual booting Windows with Linux were using the selling point of Windows to shift Linux, which I beleive is a unfair to MS. No business is going to allow its product to be the selling point of its competitor.
But MS is an convicted monopolist. A monopolist must compete purely on quality; they may not use contracts to exclude their competition from the market.
Re:Capitalism inherently creates monopolies
on
Linux Users Are Spoiled
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
If you don't want monopolies, don't use capitalism.
That's absurd. Everything has unwanted side-effects. You either tolerate them, or you introduce things to handle them. We've introduced laws against monopolies to handle the unwanted side-effect of monopolies in a capitalistic system. That's an entirely reasonable solution to get a system that works well enough.
If you don't want to have to roll up your sleeves randomly or unexpectedly, this still isn't the right operating system for you.
Then which one is? The computer sitting across from me runs Windows, and its owner just reinstalled Windows in an attempt to get rid of spyware. Any operating system will sometimes get screwed up when you install a new program, randomly and unexpectedly, and Windows hardly beats Linux for consistently running maintaince-free in normal usage without new programs or config changes.
Imagine Linus releasing his code after the first time it booted - it would really have sucked for him to have to reply to a slew of mails on "well it boots, but that's about it. What next ?"
Have you read the early emails of Linus's? The first Linuxes often didn't boot, and when they did, they didn't do much.
Okay, but when are we going to get a stable Theora? The current codec is alpha, which means all the data they save may be unreadable if they ever update the codec. And if they don't, it probably means that no one has a codec.
Actually, it would be more like gun manufacturers telling bullet manufacturers not to make defective bullets that will blow up in the gun so that the gun manufacturers don't have to add safety against defective bullets.
If fourty years later they're still producing bullets that blow up, it's about time the gun manufacturers start building guns that actually work in the real world.
every time somebody makes an argument against the metric system, they are essentially also making that same argument agaisnt the arabic (our) number system.
And? Base 10 is a really lousy base to use. 12 is a much superior base; 1/2, 1/3, 1/4, 1/6 and to a lesser degree 1/8 and 1/9 are all nice clean fractions in base 12, but only 1/2, 1/5 (and to a lesser degree 1/4 and 1/8) are nice clean fractions in base 10.
Slashdot Mirror
They have the biggest and heaviest flying aircraft in the world.
That's because the Soviet Union wants big things to show off. No one else in the world has bigger aircraft, because there's no need for bigger aircraft. The C-5, the USAF's largest plane was made in 1968. It's about two and half times longer than the C-130 which is the longest plane to land on an aircraft carrier. The USAF has been happy with those planes for 30 years. Likewise, 747s are the biggest commerical airliners to fly and they've been in the air for 30 years. Bigger is not better in a lot of cases.
No, that was posted by an account that uses a .ro freemail account. That doesn't mean I've ever been in Romania.
Yet taxes are the least efficient method of funding a beneficial program, since that funding must go through three different bureaucracies before it gets to the program itself: Collection, allocation, and disbursement.
And? How are you going to sanely distribute money throughout any system without collecting it, allocating it and disbursing it?
That is why such private charitable efforts as Goodwill and The Salvation Army operate on rediculously small ammounts of money, while every government program is constantly wasting vast sums.
Some of those organizations waste vast sums of money on their own. Being a private charitable organization doesn't prevent a beaucracy from developing.
If there is only one supplier in a market, it is only because they have priced their product such that no other competitor could come in and undercut them and still make a profit.
Or because that one supplier supplies a huge variety of products and isn't interested in dealing with a company that will buy from a competitor. No company can compete on all those fronts at once, so they compete on none.
It is pointless to pay me a bribe, for instance, because I cannot do anything in return.
But if you were in the hiring department of IBM, or the president of Harvard, it might not be pointless to give you a bribe. It's not about government; it's about power.
Money is wasted on bribes and payoffs that a clean operation would not be paying.
Then again, how much does that really hurt when the CEO of the clean operation is laying in a gutter with two bullets in his brain?
Even the most successful serial killer doesn't match one day of the war in Iraq.
Of course one man can't compete against a large group. But mobs and gangs can rack up quite a count, and would probably rack up an even higher count if there was no government to help them.
It doesn't look like they were bothered one bit by the thought of being seen as "crazies," "perverts," or "anarchists hell-bent on destroying our way of life."
Or they were, but decided it was more important to publish than hide. I know of a couple atheist's sites that were driven off the web because they couldn't deal with the harrassment anymore. Most of the porn on ASSTR.org is written under pseduonyms, and I'm sure many of their readers wouldn't read them if they thought that someone was watching.
So, McCarthy was right.
So I can go out and beat up all the arabs I want, because if I beat enough of them, I'm sure to beat up a terrorist? He destroyed the lives and freedom of innocent American citizens; does it make him right just because a few of his guesses were correct?
If you don't know what you are doing, then either take it to or buy from someone who does.
That's no way to learn. You probably shouldn't be missing around on a computer you need for more important stuff, or if you can't afford to burn something out, but otherwise it can be an interesting and educational progress. Much better than sitting on your ass and watching what Hollywood or even Slashdot is feeding you for a few hours.
I do also question Britannica's content as it was written by people years ago... here are some examples I can not check myself: Letters to Eb
Of course, those letters are about the Armenian massacre, a violently disputed event. Check out a recent National Geographic for the letters they got on thier most recent article on the massacre. If EB changed all those details, there would be more letters telling them how the new article was all wrong.
I suppose that if you assume people are fair, no one has an agenda and people basically know everything more or less accurately then Wiki is fine. Problem is that none of that is true.
We live in the Post Editorial Age whereby any nugglet of infotainment is accepted as truth and fact and no one need rely on fact checkers, editors or referees that ensure that revisionism doesn't take precident over truth.
Fact checkers, editors and referees are people too. They have biases, agendas, and don't know everything perfectly. Encyclopedias aren't oracles from the gods; they have always included what everyone thinks is true.
So if I round up 10,000 of my closest net friends and I convince them to agree to say that say something then it pretty much becomes fact.
How so? If you round up 10,000 of your closest friends you could probably do a number on Wikipedia. You could probably edit most of the copies of the Brittanica held by English public libraries with razors and glue, too. 10,000 people can have a lot of effect. But there will be countervailing forces, on Wikipedia, the Internet and if you tried it in the real world. The big difference about the Internet is that a dozen people in the right places could totally control with the EB says on a subject, whereas they can be correct on Wikipedia or the Internet at large.
Oh really, how do you know what is the cause of human intuition? Last time I checked it was an unexplained phenomena.
Not really. Coming up with supernatural explanations for human intuition in chess is like the people who are taught how to "bend spoons with their mind", but still need to help a little with thier hands. It's simply unnecessary. Even in real life, coming up with
supernatural answers for human intuition is copletely unneeded in most cases. We could always assume that we reach into another dimension to add numbers, but there are better simpler answers.
By the way: quantum physics is a real thing, it's not gooblygook. Why don't you read up on it a little before making something up and blaming it on quantum physics.
Personally, I'm curious why game theory software doesn't have the kinds of export restrictions that encryption software or computing hardware does.
Computer chess games have nothing on the fields of Wellington. This has all the bad effects of export restrictions, including the fact that the world outside the US has many good programmers and that it's impossible to stop software from being exported from the US, without being something you can point to and say "This is something only communist spys would use."
complately inane, archaic things that 95% of the Spider-man 2 viewing audience didn't notice and wouldn't give a shit about.
I am not, as a general rule, in the average 95%. Why should I give a damn about what 95% of the audience noticed? I care about what I noticed, and that's what has an effect on how much _I_ enjoy a movie.
It's fucking Spider-man 2.
I think Mary Jane is a she.
Am I the only one who understands that people don't enjoy the same things? Personally, when paying to see a movie in a theater, I like a little more consistency than the average Ed Wood movie. If you don't like that, then fine, but this article was clearly labeled; there's no reason to waste your time here if you aren't interested in such things.
Keep your insults to yourself.
How about polite discourse? I didn't perceive the original poster as insulting at all, be he right or wrong.
Gentoo really isn't about CFLAGS. Its about USE flags. I can build programs as I want with whatever options I want. Portage takes care of the dependencies and my systems are _exactly_ as I want them to be.
How many programs do you really need fine-grained control over? It's not really a misery to have an extra 100k library or two that you don't really need around, and most programs don't have that many compile-time options to mess with. For those that do, it's not much of a problem to recompile them in Debian or most binary-based distributions.
It's called suspending disbelief, and some people, it would appear, are incapable of doing it.
I'll happily suspend belief for the ground rules of the universe. Neither Middle Earth or Harry Potter's world work on plain old science. But those worlds, and more so the world of Spider-Man, share something in common with our world. Completely abstract media isn't popular. The only way we can understand what's going on in the movie is if we have some contact with the real world; there may be elves and humans, but you can kill them all with swords or arrows. There may be radioactive spiders giving people superhuman powers, but water should still boil if you toss superheated stuff into it.
the docs include standards, like RFCs, which _should not_ be changed and redistributed, less confusion ensue.
What if I want to embed it into my code as comments, or embed it into my documentation? What if I want to turn into a manpage--much of the POSIX standard is now being turned directly into manpages. What if I want to proglomate a new standard? DFSG accepts requirements to rename or mark modified versions, which should be more than suitable.
the docs include license texts, like the GPL, APL, etc.
No, they don't. License texts have always been and always will be an exception, under the new or old DFSG requirements.
Software is... software. Its not a cure for some social ills, its purpose is defined by the usability it brings to people.
And free software brings more usability to people by being free.
In any case, everything is just itself. Cotton is just cotton, whether it's grown by slaves or free farmers on their own farm. That doesn't mean that what we use and how we choose it doesn't have consequences.
'What kind of Nigerian? Yoruba or Ibo?'
What kind of Mexican? Yucatan or Veracruz? What kind of American? Florida or Alaskan? As you said, you couldn't really make that distinction.
Just as it pisses me the fuck off when people speak of all Native Americans as if they were just "Indians"
Are you pissed off when people speak of Europeans? Are you pissed off when people speak of Americans (which has Native Americans as a subset)?
I don't give a damn about the fine details of Nigeria. It has no effect on my life, and I'm not going to sit down and study each of the thousands of cultures this world has to offer.
What I was trying to say in the origional post was that OEMs who were dual booting Windows with Linux were using the selling point of Windows to shift Linux, which I beleive is a unfair to MS. No business is going to allow its product to be the selling point of its competitor.
But MS is an convicted monopolist. A monopolist must compete purely on quality; they may not use contracts to exclude their competition from the market.
If you don't want monopolies, don't use capitalism.
That's absurd. Everything has unwanted side-effects. You either tolerate them, or you introduce things to handle them. We've introduced laws against monopolies to handle the unwanted side-effect of monopolies in a capitalistic system. That's an entirely reasonable solution to get a system that works well enough.
often what people want is one good app. to do whatever their current task is, not lots of choice.
Each person may have a one preferred application, but that doesn't mean that everyone will prefer that application.
If you don't want to have to roll up your sleeves randomly or unexpectedly, this still isn't the right operating system for you.
Then which one is? The computer sitting across from me runs Windows, and its owner just reinstalled Windows in an attempt to get rid of spyware. Any operating system will sometimes get screwed up when you install a new program, randomly and unexpectedly, and Windows hardly beats Linux for consistently running maintaince-free in normal usage without new programs or config changes.
Imagine Linus releasing his code after the first time it booted - it would really have sucked for him to have to reply to a slew of mails on "well it boots, but that's about it. What next ?"
Have you read the early emails of Linus's? The first Linuxes often didn't boot, and when they did, they didn't do much.
Okay, but when are we going to get a stable Theora? The current codec is alpha, which means all the data they save may be unreadable if they ever update the codec. And if they don't, it probably means that no one has a codec.
Actually, it would be more like gun manufacturers telling bullet manufacturers not to make defective bullets that will blow up in the gun so that the gun manufacturers don't have to add safety against defective bullets.
If fourty years later they're still producing bullets that blow up, it's about time the gun manufacturers start building guns that actually work in the real world.
Assigning blame is stupid; solve the problem.
then why dont we use it?
Because we have 10 fingers. Duh. No one really considered the issue until centuries after it was settled.
every time somebody makes an argument against the metric system, they are essentially also making that same argument agaisnt the arabic (our) number system.
And? Base 10 is a really lousy base to use. 12 is a much superior base; 1/2, 1/3, 1/4, 1/6 and to a lesser degree 1/8 and 1/9 are all nice clean fractions in base 12, but only 1/2, 1/5 (and to a lesser degree 1/4 and 1/8) are nice clean fractions in base 10.