I should also note that while the Slashdot story says these routes were maliciously announced, there is no evidence of this. This type of thing has happened before by accident many times. That it was accidental makes more sense anyhow - which is more probable, that there are a bunch of network wizards in Pakistan with state-of-the-art equipment decided to take out Youtube, or that a handful of overworked and undereducated network technicians in Pakistan were told by management that they had to block Youtube immediately, and in their haste their blocked route accidentally leaked to the outside world? I would say the latter, especially considering that they stopped advertising the route soon after they began getting a lot of complaints.
I should also point out that while bureaucrats in Pakistan may be bone-headed for blocking content, companies like Microsoft, Yahoo, Cisco and so forth are the ones who built things like the "Great Firewall of China". Lots of Americans like the point their finger at governments like China, whereas they could actually have more of an effect in making companies in their own countries stop building this sort of stuff.
An auction is where interested parties gather, an item goes up for sale, and people begin bidding (or not). It is quick - "Going once, going twice...sold to so-and-so". On eBay you put an auction up for a week and people watch it or don't. People don't really start bidding on the item (by really I mean the auction almost never reaches even my cost) until the hours and minutes before the auction ends. And who knows who is watching and bidding then? Then there are "secret" reserve prices, where if an auction doesn't hit a certain price it doesn't sell. A secret reserve price is a ridiculous thing, except for eBay which rakes in secret reserve price fees.
I used to do split auction/Buy-It-Nows. I think those are good - if someone needs it NOW, not a week from now, they can get it. If they can wait a week and want a chance at a good price, they can bid on the auction. The best of both worlds. I sometimes had the auction start at my exact cost, so anything over that was profit. Sometimes someone got a good deal, sometimes I had a bunch of bidders bid it up to something ridiculous.
Some people have long descriptions, but mine isn't. I have two paragraphs of product description, and then eight sentences with everything else, three of those sentences being eBay required boilerplate. The third sentence is how many days a shipment may be postponed due to checks clearing. Yet people complain that the items were not shipped the day they mailed their check, never mind getting to you and clearing. Of course, I could disallow checks, but then I might being losing money on auctions, shelling out $1-2 for an item someone didn't buy, but might have bought if I accepted checks. I'm sure my shipping time will be marked as low for this person.
eBay has just opened the door for buyer scam artists to rip off sellers. Someone can just have it marked as payed, which will later be rescinded, and grab stuff left and right. What can buyers do to warn people of this if they can't leave feedback regarding this?
As far as discussion here of scamming sellers - that is what the feedback system is for. If someone has little or often negative feedback, then they might be a rip-off seller. The problem is two-fold: one, people who are new to eBay and don't understand checking someone's feedback and two, people who are cheap and will buy something for $39 from someone with little feedback, much of it negative, rather than $40 from someone who has been around for years, had thousands of sales and has almost all positive feedback. I don't really understand this talk of ripoff sellers - if the last 99 people have been happy with a sellers transaction, odds are yours will go good as well, and even if there is a problem you can get a refund (a policy which you can look for ahead of time).
Also, eBay is raising rates - there are some small cosmetic lower rates so their press release can say rates are belong lowered, but actually they're being raised for almost everyone including myself. So now more of the few pennies I'm making that is not going to Paypal (which eBay owns), the post office, shipping supplies or my product distributor is going to eBay. A lot of people on Power Sellers Unite are talking about moving to non-eBay methods of selling. Since I heard about the rates I have signed up with Amazon, and have been working on my web site as well as web site related stuff (Google Ads, Google Base, Shopzilla/Bizrate etc.) And on my web site I am not forking over $2.15 of the first $25 of my sale, plus the rest of the final value fee, plus the listing fee of $1 to $2. That's an extra dollar off for my customers and an extra dollar for me. I've been selling from my web site for a while, now I just have to work on it some more.
* Needs. It doesn't matter if you can easily fill those needs or not.
* Trade. Some sort of means to exchange economic goods and services.
* Comparative advantage. There are goods and services that it makes sense for someone else to provide even if you can do every task better and cheaper than anyone else.
* Existence of capital. Some goods or services require infrastructure in order to be provided.
* Private ownership of capital. It is possible for someone to own this infrastructure.
How is most of this different than the USSR? Did people need things there? Yes. Did COMECON trade? Yes. Was there comparative advantage - did Kazakhs farm while European urbanites did more skilled work? Yes. Did capital exist? Well it's a question of nomenclature, if you use the phrase means of production to describe "Some goods or services require infrastructure in order to be provided." then yes, the means of production existed in the USSR. You are calling things that the socialist countries did capitalism, whereas those things are obviously not things unique to capitalism. The only difference is the last thing you mentioned, private ownership of capital.
You say "Poverty is a necessity for capitalism only in the sense that not everyone may posess (sic) the same amount of wealth." You seem to have missed my main point, although four paragraphs is not a lot of space to have made it in anyhow. To put it another way, I would put it thus - a company spends $50 million on capital costs in a year, and has made $55 million by the end of this year. Lets assume $50 million of that is set aside for capital costs in the next year. What force determines whether that extra 5 million goes to wages or profits in that year? Answering that question is what starts one down the road to why there is poverty.
Having friends who have traveled through East Texas, your view of how easy living in poverty is in Texas sounds quite out of kilter with what I have heard, but that is immaterial. You are correct that poor people in industrializing countries are poorer than those in industrial countries. I don't know what that has to do with anything though or what it contradicts with anything I said. My whole point was poverty itself is a tangential necessity over the question of whether money at a company goes to wages or profits. Poverty is an essential pillar of a capitalist economy, which is not the case with other types of economies - slave economies, socialist economies, feudal economies.
In the US the media is dominated by corporations, whose majority-stake owners are capitalists, and their hegemony reaches to everything - schools, churches, the current major political parties, even the currently existing unions. Thus, almost all thought by people is steeped in this thinking by people, whether they are aware of it or not, especially amongst professionals and the like - but really almost everyone. We are not like Italy in the 1970s, where there were general strikes all of the time and communists were almost voted into power, leading to things like Operation Gladio and
P2.
The notion that the rich are not concerned enough for the poor is laughable. It is laughable because the rich are very concerned for the poor. Just not in the poor's interest. This is false political spectrum allowed in the US - conservatives or Republicans or whatever speak of a free market (whatever the phrase "free market" means - I don't see how a market selling potatos in the USSR for rubles is any difference than a market in the US selling potatos for dollars - the difference was always in production, not exchange). Speak of how opening restrictions on capitalism will help everyone, or some even say it doesn't matter, because people do not have an obligation to one another. Then there is liberalism and the Democrats - the problem is the rich do not care enough about the poor.
Both are nonsense and are really two sides of the same coin. Just take a look at China today to see the purpose of the poor. With a 20% growth rate per year it is quite open what happens - the "market" heats up, profits go down as workers make and demand more (even in repressive labor conditions reminiscent of the early days of the western industrialization). So what happens? The state, controlled by Deng-Xiaoping-following "capitalist roaders" as they used to be called, begins laying off workers, and enclosure and the like happens in the farms out west, creating a flood of new workers, lower wages and higher profits. This has been happening in rural Mexico because of NAFTA (and other similar recent trade agreements), which is why the US's neighbor to the south for so many centuries suddenly has so many undocumented types from rural Mexico flooding over the border.
The point is is that unlike in other economic systems - slave systems, the former eastern socialist systems, feudal systems - poverty is a necessity for capitalism. If it did not exist, workers would demand all of the surplus they create at their companies, and their would be no dividend checks going out. A practical truth, the framework (but not the details) of which were spelled out by Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Say, Malthus and all of the founders of economics. But this framework was tossed in the garbage can in the late 19th century, and Smith, Ricardo and all of the early economists realization of value being created by labor was tossed in the garbage and some new nonsense was brought in. Without unemployment, poverty, longer and longer hours and that sort of thing, Gates would have no fortune. His fortune is on the backs of his overworked, often H1B'd staff, but the poor and unemployed are an essential component and necessity to keep those profits. This view is one which is rarely expressed nowadays, yet, usually the less it is heard of, the more true it is.
From the New York Times:
Dr. Khan recounts how Western companies sold him whatever was desired. These were the same businesses, he says, that sold equipment to the nuclear enrichment facilities at Almelo, in the Netherlands, where Dr. Khan worked in the 1970's, and at Capenhurst, England:
While a lot of biased and unfounded propaganda is directed against us, the Western world never talked about their own hectic and persistent efforts to sell everything to us. When we bought inverters from Emerson, England, we found them to be less efficient than we wanted them to be. We asked Emerson to improve upon some parameters and we suggested the method .
At that time we received many letters and telexes and people chased us with figures and details of equipment they had sold to Almelo, Capenhurst, etc. They literally begged us to buy their equipment. We bought what we considered to be suitable for our plant and very often asked them to make changes and modifications according to our requirements.
In the past few years at Fortune 1000 companies I have seen just the opposite happening. I have seen centralized IT for the corporation starved, while divisions built up their own IT departments. This has been happening at the IT departments my friends work at as well. Things are not becoming centralized, but decentralized. This person has the opposite happening - instead of centralized corporate IT being decentralized to divisions, centralized corporate IT is being super-centralized so a utility is the center of IT for multiple corporations. This is not what is happening on the ground, the opposite is happening.
If it was, Marc Andreessen would have struck lucky with not only Netscape but Loudcloud. But he didn't, Loudcloud wasn't successful because corporations are not doing this. I can see how it makes sense to Andreessen and this fellow that this should happen. But corporations do not follow this logic, nor the logic of a Scott Adams or other techies who often puzzle at why corporations do things in a way that appears so peculiar to them. IMHO, it does make sense what corporations are doing, the problem is the Andreessens and Carrs and Adams of the world don't fully understand what the purpose of a corporation is.
I remember in early IRC days, we used to dislike the idea of some bot coming on and logging to the channel. The solution was not that difficult - if they did not say anything for a certain amount of time, they would be kicked for being idle too long. Of course that automation is only a start, you also need a person watching it to make sure a coherent person is there saying things, and not just some Eliza-type script.
It really depends on the channel. I'm sure #linux-help wouldn't mind having a bot called LogBot logging the channel and posting the results somewhere. This bot seems to be sneaking in, which indicates it is going where it is unwanted, and it seems it should be sought and destroyed.
IRC was and is a great thing. I was on IRC back when channels had plus signs instead of pound signs. I frequented a channel on EFNet of a particular clique I was in, or really a sub-culture. Many of the people from my local area I had known even before joining the channel, but I got to talk to people in that scene from around the country. When they came out here we would show them around, and when I traveled around I was often greeted warmly in a foreign city by the local group, whom I may have never had met, and we would have a grand old time at night or on the weekend, when my business in the city was done with.
And what has IRC been replaced by to a large extent? ICQ, AIM, Yahoo Chat. Individuals sending messages to one another in isolation via a corporate network which was doing who knows with all of that. On IRC we had DCC chat - direct chat without any middleman watching. Putting aside encryption (for both), it's the principle and design of the thing - we were allowed privacy, not beholden to some corporation. But more importantly, there was a social context, it was not only individuals messaging one another in isolation, although sometimes it was, but people hanging out in groups of like-minded people. It had a social element lacking in it that AIM does not have. Yes, I know AIM has some awful group-chat thing (which crashes on GAIM constantly) but it is a small tag-on to the isolating thing that AIM is.
Not that IRC is perfect. Sometimes a bunch of idiots would take over the channel. The architecture of control - channel operators, kicking and banning and the like - those are crude tools and something better could have been (or could still be) engineered. Especially in channels more free-wheeling than #gentoo or the like. But it is far better than the isolation of something like AIM.
Some positive things about IRC - Freenode is good. I like Indymedia's IRC network, if that type of thing is up your alley. I also like some uses it has been put to by programs - Wikipedia sends its recent changes to an IRC channel, and a number of different scripts use it to combat vandalism there. Some Gnutella clients used to use it to bootstrap - as do some other p2p programs like Freenet. All inspired uses of a protocol that is ideally suited for the type of social, collaborative efforts going on there.
Iranians aren't allowed because it wouldn't suit US corporations, such as Google, for middle class professionals from here to rub noses with middle class professionals from Iran and see they are just normal people like us. The only news on US television about Iran is how its leader said he wanted "Israel wiped off the map" (although people who actually know Persian here noted how he never said the words wiped or map in the sentence they're quoting - which of course the corporate commissars know all along). Or they say Iran is killing Americans in Iraq. Or are flipping out over Iran saying it wants nuclear power plants. Henry Kissinger supported Iran having nuclear power plants when the Shah was in power, suddenly he's turned against it and said there he's decided there is no reason Iran needs nuclear power. I seriously doubt more than 5% of Americans know the CIA staged a coup in Iran in 1953, putting a brutal dictator in power for 25 years. The main enemy of the US in the Middle East in the minds of the people who run the country are not Islamic fundamentalists - the US supported the mujahideen, the Saudi government etc. It is secular middle class professionals like yourself, especially those with populist and "pan-Arab" leanings (although a Shiite Persian culture is not leaning towards Pan-Arabism).
We use AIM for communication at my company. One problem is half the people use GAIM, the other half use Trillian, and each have separate standard encryption plug-ins which are incompatible. Of course it is free software and I could jump in and work on this but I am too busy. The main reason we had encrypted conversations was to send passwords to one another.
At work I do not listen to a lot of music, but sometimes there is a lot of noise in the next cubicle, so I put in earphones and listen to music. I do not want to have any MP3's that the RIAA might complain about on my PC at work, since listening to so-and-so is not worth it for me in possibly getting in trouble at work. One thing I do do though is go to YouTube and load music videos of different groups. Usually I am not even watching the video, I'm just listening.
In terms of MP3's on my work PC, I usually go to Google and type things like "Beethoven mp3" or "Bach mp3" or "Chopin mp3" or the like. All of the recordings I've downloaded have been free. It is not that difficult to produce this stuff - all you need to make a Chopin mp3 is a piano, a microphone and someone who can play Chopin decently. Plenty of people can. Not all of it is amateur though, I've downloaded fine recordings from professional orchestras for free as well. One of the top Google links I get is Classical Cat - the free classical music "cat-alogue".
I agree China is not socialist. The vast majority of communists that still exist in the world do not consider it so. They date it somewhere between Mao making nice with Nixon and Deng Xiaoping coming to power. Remember that Deng Xiaoping was considered to be one of the biggest villains during the Cultural Revolution.
Karl Marx founded communism on materialist principles, not utopian ones. It doesn't mean all of his theories are correct, but they are not utopian. In fact he founded his school of thought in response to utopian socialist/communist ideologies of the time. I don't know how rational our system is with the president talking about God all the time and appealing to his base with his supposdely shared belief that some Jew 2000 years ago had magic powers.
Marxism is scientific insofar as it is consciously built on materialist, scientific notions. It is not scientific insofar as when it is incorrect. I would say even most educated Americans I know have no arguments against Marxian thought since they know nothing of it. They say "People will not act a certain way because human nature is..." or something like that which is never a scientific, rational argument. There are strong arguments against Marxian thought, but they are more along the lines of "Marx's economic system does not translate values to prices correctly". But most Americans, even educated ones, know too little about Marxism to make arguments against them.
Also, while Marx's socialism involves a proletariat-directed taking over of the economy by the state, there are other forms of socialism, like the anarcho-syndicalists who think economic decisions should be made by workers at their place of employment. Or people who advocate workers councils and so on. Many on the left question whether the USSR was what Marx intended, and Lenin himself talked about pulling away from socialism during the New Economic Policy. Only to Americans does socialism mean big government versus small government, in Europe it means who will control the "means of production".
I have worked for over a decade as a sysadmin and have seen firsthand the correlation between temperatures and server failure. I have witnessed two small server rooms melt down to lack of A/C. It is important to me because I know high temperatures will mean more likelihood that I will get a phone call in the middle of the night or on a weekend that a drive, processor or whatnot has failed on a machine.
One thing to consider is if the heat measured outside a box is high, the heat on the surface of the processor is much higher. Even with little fans or heatsinks on them, it doesn't do much, remember, fans and heatsinks don't change temperature they just displace heat - and the heat is attempting to be displaced in an environment of a lot of other boxes trying to displace heat.
In our current data center, run by a respected name, I have measured external temperatures in excess of 100 degrees Fahrenheit on some machines. Machines that run 24/7/365. We have small non-production rooms which have cheap fans that fill up with condensation, and a building staff which is supposed to empty the water when it fills up, but often doesn't.
Sometimes it gets kind of insane - I worked for a Fortune 100 financial company that had tons of money, and had a data center with Sun Enterprise 4000 series servers all over the place - yet the server room was above room temperature, and even more so in certain areas. We had disk and processor/memory board failures all the time, but they never really cared about the room temperature - they spent more time making sure the insides of the fibre optic cables were clean.
I have always brought up my concerns, but management has never really taken them seriously, and then I become overloaded with other work and forget about it as well. The ideal temperature for servers is a few degress above 0 Celsius, or even below 0 depending on the equipment. Meanwhile, if you find a server room where the temperature is below 20 degrees Celsius, you're lucky. It's just one of those things where it is cheaper and easier for them to just waste my time than to fix the problem.
I have worked at or have friends who have worked at Fortune 500 companies where when layoffs come, a security guard appears and people are told they have five minutes to pack their things and exit the building. This is often after years of working at the company, including unpaid 24/7 oncall and late night, weekend and early morning work. Sometimes the guards are even armed. Not every company is the same, but some of them really make clear what their view of you is - you are a wage slave, to be used up through long hours and even after years of being there, thrown away because some executive a few steps up on the management chain decided the rate of profit was threatened. And we are supposed to be professionals, or at least skilled workers - look at all the easily avoidable mine collapses that have been happening around the US in the past few years. In 1991, 25 people died in a North Carolina slaughterhouse because management kept the fire doors locked, most of the bodies were found near the locked exits. While IT workers generally get better treatment than this, most IT workers I know work much more than 40 hours a week, one result of this is they have little or no social life. In a way they are an ideal creation of this type of society - poorly socialized, skilled, working many unpaid hours, and for the most part disposable after a certain age.
I previously worked for a large IT department in a Fortune 100 financial company, and their process of deciding to use a product is not the same as at a small company. The IT managers wanted support, business-compliant processes, and that sort of thing for the products they were buying. A good example of this was they preferred the technically inferior Sun ('nee Netscape) web server to Apache, simply because they were not happy with the official support for Apache. Or for an example from my current company, one of the reasons they run Jboss instead of Tomcat is the support. If there is a problem, an adminstrator can tell his manager, and a manager his manager, that they have a trouble ticket open with a company that sold them the product.
The main reason we want Red Hat support now if for JBoss support, and for access to Red Hat CD's and packages. Also we have a goal of having all our systems patched with the latest necessary patches, and want support for that. Finally, if our server crashes on systems which are Red Hat certified, we might want to send the crash dump to Red Hat and our hardware vendor to find out why our system crashed.
Our systems are not all patched, but on another note, are fairly stable. However, if I was in a different enterprise, I would want to know that if there was a serious and persistent problem affecting stability, that if that was sent back up the pipeline it would be worked on. For the hardware supplier, be it Dell or HP/Compaq, I would expect they would fix the problem, and on the OS side, if something was causing the system to crash on that end, that Red Hat would be able to push the stability fix into the kernel - or at least be aware of it and have a patch for it so we would be unaffected.
The Nixon library keeps releasing tapes of his conversations - recently they released tapes of him talking to J. Edgar Hoover where Hoover is not lambasting even out of the mainstream people but columnists from the New York Times and Washington Post and the newspapers themselves. The FBI had a massive campaign of political intimidation and involvement, not only monitoring people like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., but sending him blackmail letters if he didn't conform his political speeches to those of Hoover's liking. Not to mention the massive
COINTELPRO campaign of harassment against organizers in the 1960s.
Insofar as King, the memo regarding COINTELPRO against blacks said "The Counterintelligence Program is now being expanded to include 41 offices... For maximum effectiveness of the Counterintelligence Program, and to prevent wasted effort, long range goals are being set...Prevent the rise of a 'messiah' who could unify, and electrify, the militant black nationalist movement...King could be a very real contender for this position should he abandon his supposed 'obedience' to 'white, liberal doctrines'". This is simply a secret police, a political police, trying to undermine the democratic process in this country. I know old-timer activists from the 1960s who found out due to FOIAs that the FBI had tried to get them fired from their jobs by sending anonymous letters to their employers.
Then on Fox News they whine how the liberals shackled the CIA and FBI in the 1970s - they neglect to mention how Nixon's White House staff, including old CIA hands like Hunt, were doing things like breaking into the Democratic Party campaign headquarters at the Watergate hotel however. The CIA was undermining democratic governments not only in places like Chile, but in Australia (Whitlam affair) and Italy (P2, Gladio). Even after the FBI was supposedly cleaned up in the 1970s, Reagan had them trying to seduce nuns (who were unhappy about nuns being raped and hacked up in El Salvador, as well as the archbishop being assassinated) involved in CISPES. Now with the Patriot Act etc., all of the constraints and watchdog functions over these organizations have disappeared.
You are correct that the Palestinians are predominately Sunni, and that Hezbollah are mostly Shia currently in Southern Lebanon, and that Hezbollah has Christian members. You are incorrect to say they are not Palestinians though - one tenth of Lebanon's population is comprised of Palestinian refugees, and they comprise a large percentage of Hezbollah's membership.
I've done various work with p2p for a while, including writing my own Gnutella application. Peer to peer technology is much too democratic and egalitarian to be allowed free reign. For example, currently if I wanted to publish a 30 minute video online, I would have to pay a lot of money to host it. Nowadays, I could send it to sites like Youtube if I was willing to accept it being surrounded by advertising (or possibly banned if running afoul of their rules). With peer-to-peer, anyone can publish, and if it's popular enough, the "cost" is really paid for by the consumer. For a society like the US, with most of the media in the hands of a few conglomerates, this is far too much freedom and equality, and I knew it was just a matter of time before they attempted to get their claws on peer-to-peer, at the behest of those conglomerates.
Last year Javed Iqbal, a satellite installer, was thrown in jail. His crime? He allowed people in the US to watch Al-Manar, the television station of Hezbollah. Of course Hezbollah is legally considered to be a terrorist group - if you're a country that is or formerly was a British colony. Or, for some reason, Holland. Outside of Holland and current/former British Dominions, the rest of the world considers Hezbollah to be what it is, a representative of Palestinians pushed into southern Lebanon by the Israelis from 1948 on. But anyhow, the US and UK are at odds with the rest of the world on this as so often they are, Iqbal was thrown in the slammer, and nary a word is heard about it or the supposed First Amendment. Meanwhile, narcissistic attention-seekers like Salman Rushdie are feted and praised year after year. In fact, this is done by the same corporate media propaganda machine which is working to dismantle things like peer-to-peer, all the while of course never reporting on what they are in fact doing, or about many things that are going on in the country of interest but that we'll never know about.
One thing to consider is going to a local college and taking a pre-calculus class. Ratemyprofessors.com and sites like that can tell you if the professor is good or not. You can get a whole semester at a good state school for less than $1000 often. Plus you get college credit, and pre-calc is usually a prerequisite for the Computer Science courses (I had high Math SATs so I didn't need it, I went straight to Calculus). As far as the pre-calc books out there, I liked Barron's precalc book myself. I wanted to brush up on it since I never really did relatively well in trigonometry, and I only had a vague recollection of what the quadratic equation was etc.
These statistics only mean something if the function graphed is born of one piece of logic - which it is not. There are a number of statistics about revert percentage in 2002 versus now. But lots of things have changed on Wikipedia over the past five years - a lot of vandalism reverts have been automated. Hell, I myself wrote a vandalism reversion program. Not to mention changes in MediaWiki allowing easier reverting for admins and the like. So this would tend to increase reversion. Then there are the trends which counter reversion - like semi-protected pages. These variables have changed, and thus the timeline data becomes more useless. Also, what is now easily visible as a vandalism reversion nowadays may not be in the older data. Nowadays it is easy for a program to spot reverts - in the early days it was more manual and the program might miss a lot of vandalism reverts.
As far as Wikipedia - it was a great idea by Larry Sanger, a "Web 2.0" encyclopedia built on wiki technology. This little R&D project by Sanger then gets taken over by the boss of the company, Jimbo Wales, who takes all the credit, and nowadays is concentrating on Wikia, while the project is being run by a mostly incompetent and increasingly nasty cabal. In a lot of ways, Wikipedia has survived despite the management due to Sanger's great idea and the normal user base. Right now it is successful because it is the only game in town, but I am quite sure that it will be knocked off the block by a competitor in the future.
Slashdot Mirror
I should also point out that while bureaucrats in Pakistan may be bone-headed for blocking content, companies like Microsoft, Yahoo, Cisco and so forth are the ones who built things like the "Great Firewall of China". Lots of Americans like the point their finger at governments like China, whereas they could actually have more of an effect in making companies in their own countries stop building this sort of stuff.
There is a NANOG thread about this. Apparently a more specific IP route was advertised.
I used to do split auction/Buy-It-Nows. I think those are good - if someone needs it NOW, not a week from now, they can get it. If they can wait a week and want a chance at a good price, they can bid on the auction. The best of both worlds. I sometimes had the auction start at my exact cost, so anything over that was profit. Sometimes someone got a good deal, sometimes I had a bunch of bidders bid it up to something ridiculous.
Some people have long descriptions, but mine isn't. I have two paragraphs of product description, and then eight sentences with everything else, three of those sentences being eBay required boilerplate. The third sentence is how many days a shipment may be postponed due to checks clearing. Yet people complain that the items were not shipped the day they mailed their check, never mind getting to you and clearing. Of course, I could disallow checks, but then I might being losing money on auctions, shelling out $1-2 for an item someone didn't buy, but might have bought if I accepted checks. I'm sure my shipping time will be marked as low for this person.
As far as discussion here of scamming sellers - that is what the feedback system is for. If someone has little or often negative feedback, then they might be a rip-off seller. The problem is two-fold: one, people who are new to eBay and don't understand checking someone's feedback and two, people who are cheap and will buy something for $39 from someone with little feedback, much of it negative, rather than $40 from someone who has been around for years, had thousands of sales and has almost all positive feedback. I don't really understand this talk of ripoff sellers - if the last 99 people have been happy with a sellers transaction, odds are yours will go good as well, and even if there is a problem you can get a refund (a policy which you can look for ahead of time).
Also, eBay is raising rates - there are some small cosmetic lower rates so their press release can say rates are belong lowered, but actually they're being raised for almost everyone including myself. So now more of the few pennies I'm making that is not going to Paypal (which eBay owns), the post office, shipping supplies or my product distributor is going to eBay. A lot of people on Power Sellers Unite are talking about moving to non-eBay methods of selling. Since I heard about the rates I have signed up with Amazon, and have been working on my web site as well as web site related stuff (Google Ads, Google Base, Shopzilla/Bizrate etc.) And on my web site I am not forking over $2.15 of the first $25 of my sale, plus the rest of the final value fee, plus the listing fee of $1 to $2. That's an extra dollar off for my customers and an extra dollar for me. I've been selling from my web site for a while, now I just have to work on it some more.
Having friends who have traveled through East Texas, your view of how easy living in poverty is in Texas sounds quite out of kilter with what I have heard, but that is immaterial. You are correct that poor people in industrializing countries are poorer than those in industrial countries. I don't know what that has to do with anything though or what it contradicts with anything I said. My whole point was poverty itself is a tangential necessity over the question of whether money at a company goes to wages or profits. Poverty is an essential pillar of a capitalist economy, which is not the case with other types of economies - slave economies, socialist economies, feudal economies.
The notion that the rich are not concerned enough for the poor is laughable. It is laughable because the rich are very concerned for the poor. Just not in the poor's interest. This is false political spectrum allowed in the US - conservatives or Republicans or whatever speak of a free market (whatever the phrase "free market" means - I don't see how a market selling potatos in the USSR for rubles is any difference than a market in the US selling potatos for dollars - the difference was always in production, not exchange). Speak of how opening restrictions on capitalism will help everyone, or some even say it doesn't matter, because people do not have an obligation to one another. Then there is liberalism and the Democrats - the problem is the rich do not care enough about the poor.
Both are nonsense and are really two sides of the same coin. Just take a look at China today to see the purpose of the poor. With a 20% growth rate per year it is quite open what happens - the "market" heats up, profits go down as workers make and demand more (even in repressive labor conditions reminiscent of the early days of the western industrialization). So what happens? The state, controlled by Deng-Xiaoping-following "capitalist roaders" as they used to be called, begins laying off workers, and enclosure and the like happens in the farms out west, creating a flood of new workers, lower wages and higher profits. This has been happening in rural Mexico because of NAFTA (and other similar recent trade agreements), which is why the US's neighbor to the south for so many centuries suddenly has so many undocumented types from rural Mexico flooding over the border.
The point is is that unlike in other economic systems - slave systems, the former eastern socialist systems, feudal systems - poverty is a necessity for capitalism. If it did not exist, workers would demand all of the surplus they create at their companies, and their would be no dividend checks going out. A practical truth, the framework (but not the details) of which were spelled out by Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Say, Malthus and all of the founders of economics. But this framework was tossed in the garbage can in the late 19th century, and Smith, Ricardo and all of the early economists realization of value being created by labor was tossed in the garbage and some new nonsense was brought in. Without unemployment, poverty, longer and longer hours and that sort of thing, Gates would have no fortune. His fortune is on the backs of his overworked, often H1B'd staff, but the poor and unemployed are an essential component and necessity to keep those profits. This view is one which is rarely expressed nowadays, yet, usually the less it is heard of, the more true it is.
While a lot of biased and unfounded propaganda is directed against us, the Western world never talked about their own hectic and persistent efforts to sell everything to us. When we bought inverters from Emerson, England, we found them to be less efficient than we wanted them to be. We asked Emerson to improve upon some parameters and we suggested the method .
At that time we received many letters and telexes and people chased us with figures and details of equipment they had sold to Almelo, Capenhurst, etc. They literally begged us to buy their equipment. We bought what we considered to be suitable for our plant and very often asked them to make changes and modifications according to our requirements.
If it was, Marc Andreessen would have struck lucky with not only Netscape but Loudcloud. But he didn't, Loudcloud wasn't successful because corporations are not doing this. I can see how it makes sense to Andreessen and this fellow that this should happen. But corporations do not follow this logic, nor the logic of a Scott Adams or other techies who often puzzle at why corporations do things in a way that appears so peculiar to them. IMHO, it does make sense what corporations are doing, the problem is the Andreessens and Carrs and Adams of the world don't fully understand what the purpose of a corporation is.
...then I have a bridge I want to sell you.
It really depends on the channel. I'm sure #linux-help wouldn't mind having a bot called LogBot logging the channel and posting the results somewhere. This bot seems to be sneaking in, which indicates it is going where it is unwanted, and it seems it should be sought and destroyed.
And what has IRC been replaced by to a large extent? ICQ, AIM, Yahoo Chat. Individuals sending messages to one another in isolation via a corporate network which was doing who knows with all of that. On IRC we had DCC chat - direct chat without any middleman watching. Putting aside encryption (for both), it's the principle and design of the thing - we were allowed privacy, not beholden to some corporation. But more importantly, there was a social context, it was not only individuals messaging one another in isolation, although sometimes it was, but people hanging out in groups of like-minded people. It had a social element lacking in it that AIM does not have. Yes, I know AIM has some awful group-chat thing (which crashes on GAIM constantly) but it is a small tag-on to the isolating thing that AIM is.
Not that IRC is perfect. Sometimes a bunch of idiots would take over the channel. The architecture of control - channel operators, kicking and banning and the like - those are crude tools and something better could have been (or could still be) engineered. Especially in channels more free-wheeling than #gentoo or the like. But it is far better than the isolation of something like AIM.
Some positive things about IRC - Freenode is good. I like Indymedia's IRC network, if that type of thing is up your alley. I also like some uses it has been put to by programs - Wikipedia sends its recent changes to an IRC channel, and a number of different scripts use it to combat vandalism there. Some Gnutella clients used to use it to bootstrap - as do some other p2p programs like Freenet. All inspired uses of a protocol that is ideally suited for the type of social, collaborative efforts going on there.
Iranians aren't allowed because it wouldn't suit US corporations, such as Google, for middle class professionals from here to rub noses with middle class professionals from Iran and see they are just normal people like us. The only news on US television about Iran is how its leader said he wanted "Israel wiped off the map" (although people who actually know Persian here noted how he never said the words wiped or map in the sentence they're quoting - which of course the corporate commissars know all along). Or they say Iran is killing Americans in Iraq. Or are flipping out over Iran saying it wants nuclear power plants. Henry Kissinger supported Iran having nuclear power plants when the Shah was in power, suddenly he's turned against it and said there he's decided there is no reason Iran needs nuclear power. I seriously doubt more than 5% of Americans know the CIA staged a coup in Iran in 1953, putting a brutal dictator in power for 25 years. The main enemy of the US in the Middle East in the minds of the people who run the country are not Islamic fundamentalists - the US supported the mujahideen, the Saudi government etc. It is secular middle class professionals like yourself, especially those with populist and "pan-Arab" leanings (although a Shiite Persian culture is not leaning towards Pan-Arabism).
We use AIM for communication at my company. One problem is half the people use GAIM, the other half use Trillian, and each have separate standard encryption plug-ins which are incompatible. Of course it is free software and I could jump in and work on this but I am too busy. The main reason we had encrypted conversations was to send passwords to one another.
In terms of MP3's on my work PC, I usually go to Google and type things like "Beethoven mp3" or "Bach mp3" or "Chopin mp3" or the like. All of the recordings I've downloaded have been free. It is not that difficult to produce this stuff - all you need to make a Chopin mp3 is a piano, a microphone and someone who can play Chopin decently. Plenty of people can. Not all of it is amateur though, I've downloaded fine recordings from professional orchestras for free as well. One of the top Google links I get is Classical Cat - the free classical music "cat-alogue".
Karl Marx founded communism on materialist principles, not utopian ones. It doesn't mean all of his theories are correct, but they are not utopian. In fact he founded his school of thought in response to utopian socialist/communist ideologies of the time. I don't know how rational our system is with the president talking about God all the time and appealing to his base with his supposdely shared belief that some Jew 2000 years ago had magic powers.
Marxism is scientific insofar as it is consciously built on materialist, scientific notions. It is not scientific insofar as when it is incorrect. I would say even most educated Americans I know have no arguments against Marxian thought since they know nothing of it. They say "People will not act a certain way because human nature is..." or something like that which is never a scientific, rational argument. There are strong arguments against Marxian thought, but they are more along the lines of "Marx's economic system does not translate values to prices correctly". But most Americans, even educated ones, know too little about Marxism to make arguments against them.
Also, while Marx's socialism involves a proletariat-directed taking over of the economy by the state, there are other forms of socialism, like the anarcho-syndicalists who think economic decisions should be made by workers at their place of employment. Or people who advocate workers councils and so on. Many on the left question whether the USSR was what Marx intended, and Lenin himself talked about pulling away from socialism during the New Economic Policy. Only to Americans does socialism mean big government versus small government, in Europe it means who will control the "means of production".
One thing to consider is if the heat measured outside a box is high, the heat on the surface of the processor is much higher. Even with little fans or heatsinks on them, it doesn't do much, remember, fans and heatsinks don't change temperature they just displace heat - and the heat is attempting to be displaced in an environment of a lot of other boxes trying to displace heat.
In our current data center, run by a respected name, I have measured external temperatures in excess of 100 degrees Fahrenheit on some machines. Machines that run 24/7/365. We have small non-production rooms which have cheap fans that fill up with condensation, and a building staff which is supposed to empty the water when it fills up, but often doesn't.
Sometimes it gets kind of insane - I worked for a Fortune 100 financial company that had tons of money, and had a data center with Sun Enterprise 4000 series servers all over the place - yet the server room was above room temperature, and even more so in certain areas. We had disk and processor/memory board failures all the time, but they never really cared about the room temperature - they spent more time making sure the insides of the fibre optic cables were clean.
I have always brought up my concerns, but management has never really taken them seriously, and then I become overloaded with other work and forget about it as well. The ideal temperature for servers is a few degress above 0 Celsius, or even below 0 depending on the equipment. Meanwhile, if you find a server room where the temperature is below 20 degrees Celsius, you're lucky. It's just one of those things where it is cheaper and easier for them to just waste my time than to fix the problem.
I have worked at or have friends who have worked at Fortune 500 companies where when layoffs come, a security guard appears and people are told they have five minutes to pack their things and exit the building. This is often after years of working at the company, including unpaid 24/7 oncall and late night, weekend and early morning work. Sometimes the guards are even armed. Not every company is the same, but some of them really make clear what their view of you is - you are a wage slave, to be used up through long hours and even after years of being there, thrown away because some executive a few steps up on the management chain decided the rate of profit was threatened. And we are supposed to be professionals, or at least skilled workers - look at all the easily avoidable mine collapses that have been happening around the US in the past few years. In 1991, 25 people died in a North Carolina slaughterhouse because management kept the fire doors locked, most of the bodies were found near the locked exits. While IT workers generally get better treatment than this, most IT workers I know work much more than 40 hours a week, one result of this is they have little or no social life. In a way they are an ideal creation of this type of society - poorly socialized, skilled, working many unpaid hours, and for the most part disposable after a certain age.
The main reason we want Red Hat support now if for JBoss support, and for access to Red Hat CD's and packages. Also we have a goal of having all our systems patched with the latest necessary patches, and want support for that. Finally, if our server crashes on systems which are Red Hat certified, we might want to send the crash dump to Red Hat and our hardware vendor to find out why our system crashed.
Our systems are not all patched, but on another note, are fairly stable. However, if I was in a different enterprise, I would want to know that if there was a serious and persistent problem affecting stability, that if that was sent back up the pipeline it would be worked on. For the hardware supplier, be it Dell or HP/Compaq, I would expect they would fix the problem, and on the OS side, if something was causing the system to crash on that end, that Red Hat would be able to push the stability fix into the kernel - or at least be aware of it and have a patch for it so we would be unaffected.
Insofar as King, the memo regarding COINTELPRO against blacks said "The Counterintelligence Program is now being expanded to include 41 offices... For maximum effectiveness of the Counterintelligence Program, and to prevent wasted effort, long range goals are being set...Prevent the rise of a 'messiah' who could unify, and electrify, the militant black nationalist movement...King could be a very real contender for this position should he abandon his supposed 'obedience' to 'white, liberal doctrines'". This is simply a secret police, a political police, trying to undermine the democratic process in this country. I know old-timer activists from the 1960s who found out due to FOIAs that the FBI had tried to get them fired from their jobs by sending anonymous letters to their employers.
Then on Fox News they whine how the liberals shackled the CIA and FBI in the 1970s - they neglect to mention how Nixon's White House staff, including old CIA hands like Hunt, were doing things like breaking into the Democratic Party campaign headquarters at the Watergate hotel however. The CIA was undermining democratic governments not only in places like Chile, but in Australia (Whitlam affair) and Italy (P2, Gladio). Even after the FBI was supposedly cleaned up in the 1970s, Reagan had them trying to seduce nuns (who were unhappy about nuns being raped and hacked up in El Salvador, as well as the archbishop being assassinated) involved in CISPES. Now with the Patriot Act etc., all of the constraints and watchdog functions over these organizations have disappeared.
You are correct that the Palestinians are predominately Sunni, and that Hezbollah are mostly Shia currently in Southern Lebanon, and that Hezbollah has Christian members. You are incorrect to say they are not Palestinians though - one tenth of Lebanon's population is comprised of Palestinian refugees, and they comprise a large percentage of Hezbollah's membership.
Last year Javed Iqbal, a satellite installer, was thrown in jail. His crime? He allowed people in the US to watch Al-Manar, the television station of Hezbollah. Of course Hezbollah is legally considered to be a terrorist group - if you're a country that is or formerly was a British colony. Or, for some reason, Holland. Outside of Holland and current/former British Dominions, the rest of the world considers Hezbollah to be what it is, a representative of Palestinians pushed into southern Lebanon by the Israelis from 1948 on. But anyhow, the US and UK are at odds with the rest of the world on this as so often they are, Iqbal was thrown in the slammer, and nary a word is heard about it or the supposed First Amendment. Meanwhile, narcissistic attention-seekers like Salman Rushdie are feted and praised year after year. In fact, this is done by the same corporate media propaganda machine which is working to dismantle things like peer-to-peer, all the while of course never reporting on what they are in fact doing, or about many things that are going on in the country of interest but that we'll never know about.
One thing to consider is going to a local college and taking a pre-calculus class. Ratemyprofessors.com and sites like that can tell you if the professor is good or not. You can get a whole semester at a good state school for less than $1000 often. Plus you get college credit, and pre-calc is usually a prerequisite for the Computer Science courses (I had high Math SATs so I didn't need it, I went straight to Calculus). As far as the pre-calc books out there, I liked Barron's precalc book myself. I wanted to brush up on it since I never really did relatively well in trigonometry, and I only had a vague recollection of what the quadratic equation was etc.
As far as Wikipedia - it was a great idea by Larry Sanger, a "Web 2.0" encyclopedia built on wiki technology. This little R&D project by Sanger then gets taken over by the boss of the company, Jimbo Wales, who takes all the credit, and nowadays is concentrating on Wikia, while the project is being run by a mostly incompetent and increasingly nasty cabal. In a lot of ways, Wikipedia has survived despite the management due to Sanger's great idea and the normal user base. Right now it is successful because it is the only game in town, but I am quite sure that it will be knocked off the block by a competitor in the future.