Another case of the US feeling that it is perfectly acceptable to treat foreigners in a way that would bring outrage if it tried it on its own citizens.
Waddaya mean, "if it tried it"? There's tons of propaganda from the US government aimed at US citizens, from the most obvious (e.g. White House news briefings) to the not-so-obvious (e.g. describing generals on Pentagon payroll as "independent analysts" who just happen to have a pro-war viewpoint), to the downright illegal (e.g. agents provocateur to start violence in otherwise peaceful protests).
If you want a real open source database, with a real commitment to not being evil, check out PostGres. I've preferred it over MySql for a really long time, for technical as well as political reasons.
MySql might have had better marketing, but for most purposes it was never the best open source database.
My basic view on the New York Times is that it is best read the way the Soviets used to read Pravda: The purpose of reading it isn't to learn the truth, it's to learn what those in power want you to think.
That's not a useless exercise, but it's also not what it appears to be.
In a way the decline reminds me of the local police - 30 or 40 years ago the local police were your friend - someone you could go to and talk to and who would be willing to help you out. These days it seems like you're best off staying as far away from the police as possible.
As bad as the music business is today, imagine no copyrights. I write a great new song, perform it a few times while I'm working out the kinks, saving up for studio time, etc.
Yeah, think of all the music that would never have been written if Mozart or Beethoven had had to work in a world where music wasn't copyrighted!
Take away enough people's right to bear arms, vote or otherwise have a say in society and the remaining population is much easier to control.
They don't need to do that.
As far as taking away the right to bear arms, if the government is desperate enough that the right to bear arms is going to decide whether the population can fight back, We The People are very likely completely screwed. Generally speaking, in modern times, when you have an armed citizenry fighting their own country's professional military, the professional military wins, because they have more weapons, more training, more organization, an equal knowledge of the battlefield, and a surprisingly large amount of support from the population. In some cases, the threat of other professional militaries getting involved can act as a check on that advantage, but if, say, a military coup happened in the US and Michigan revolted, the military could just level Michigan without any trouble at all.
As far as voting is concerned, they've discovered that it's far simpler to give people some candidates to vote for, but ensure that anyone who has a chance of winning is in your pocket. If somebody unexpected starts to look like they're going to win, buy them off. If they won't be bought off, pull some dirty tricks to wreck their candidacy.
As far as free speech, they will let the little people yell and scream all they like, just suppress media coverage of anything really threatening by telling all political reporters that if their organizations even consider giving them a front-page article, they'll cut off access to the inside sources that nearly all reporters rely on. That's how a protest by around 5-10 million people worldwide gets totally forgotten.
And of course, privatize everything you can, because (as Noam Chomsky put it) democratic institutions might carry out the will of the people, whereas private corporations are pure tyrannies.
With no privacy of any kind, you'd see exactly what all your neighbors look like in the shower. Whether that's a benefit or a drawback would depend on your neighbors.
The problem with communism (Marx/Engels version) is that violent revolution is part of the Communist Manifesto's implementation plan for Communism (read it if you don't believe me).
If you read Engels' commentary on the Communist Manifesto, they're perfectly ok with a thoroughly democratic government being the way the workers assert their control over industry. Engels specifically states that all the workers in the US have to do to achieve their communist revolution is to vote for it.
The disparity between the wealthy and the masses in Cuba is very, very sharp.
The disparity is there, no question. But poor Cubans generally have decent food and housing, very good medical care, and educational opportunities (including near-universal literacy), which actually puts them in significantly better condition than many poor areas of the United States.
(My information is mostly second-hand: I've been lucky enough to have the opportunity to meet and talk with both Cubans and people who've been able to visit Cuba.)
I write software for a living. My employer is not in the software business, it's in the entertainment website business, so software is a tool to sell stuff, not what we sell.
As a result, we can and have open-sourced some of our packages. Not the stuff that would differentiate what we do from what our competitors do, but things like logging tools, web frameworks, and testing tools that every developer needs. Since some of this stuff doesn't exist the way we want it, we'd have to write it anyway, but since we lose nothing of value by giving it away, we do just that.
Very relevant quote: "I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class thug for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902–1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents." - Maj Gen Smedley Butler
People aren't arrested there for just disagreeing. There is no torture. People aren't kept in jail without trial.
Yes, there are people arrested just for disagreeing, there are people tortured, and people jailed without trial. A lot fewer than there were back in the 1960's when Che Guevera was summarily executing people daily, but it still occasionally happens.
That said, there's a lot of evidence that Cuba is a lot better place for most of its residents than, say, Haiti or the Dominican Republic.
Re:Is it Twelvember yet?
on
Happy Pi Day
·
· Score: 1
The month I'm referring to here was the lunar month, which is most definitely naturally occurring, and was the basis of many calendars. The modern-day 30ish days per month is a relatively small variation on the Roman attempt at solving the problem of 365 / 28 having a remainder. Many other cultures which focused more on the lunar month rather than the solar year solved the same problem by adding in a leap month periodically.
If we were going to truly make things an internationalized standard, we'd be doing something like: 1. Each country gets a 2-letter code in the UTF-8 character set, to be assigned by ISO standards. 2. Each country is solely responsible for what goes on within that 2-letter code. 3. Each country is responsible for maintaining root nameservers that resolve domains within their country code. If they want to put their country code on some other country's root nameservers, that's between those two countries, but one way or another that's the way it would need to work. 4. All tlds like.com,.org, etc would get phased out in favor of.us addresses.
As far as I can tell, nobody's trying to do that, though.
Re:Is it Twelvember yet?
on
Happy Pi Day
·
· Score: 1
French-made standards often suck
That's a tough case to argue, given that the standards originally developed by the French have been the international and scientific norm for a very very long time. The Revolutionary calendar has its faults, but it's a significant improvement over the Gregorian calendar with all its inconsistencies and references to long-dead political squabbles.
Actually, they aren't Ma Bell. Ma Bell had plenty of faults, but was heavily regulated and thus prevented from pulling stunts like this without at least getting government approval.
These clowns are actually Southern Bell Company, one of the many Baby Bells spawned when AT&T was broken up. They gained an advantage over other Baby Bells using thoroughly sleazy business practices, bought them up with the full support of a deregulation-happy federal government (this was bipartisan: both the Clinton and Bush administrations had the power to do something about the mergers but didn't), and then re-branded themselves as AT&T to give the impression that they were Ma Bell.
For those who think more deregulation would solve the problem, consider that telecommunications has involved the government since the 1860's, if not earlier.
Re:Is it Twelvember yet?
on
Happy Pi Day
·
· Score: 2
The reason why date representations suck so much is partially inherent, and partially human-created.
The inherent part: There are at least 4 naturally occurring measurements of time that have been used as the basis - the day, the month, the year, and the second (measured via an atomic clock). None of them can be fully defined in terms of the others.
The human-created part: Differing base systems for each piece of the time that we tried to create. While the 12-13 months per year and the 365.25... days per year are inherent in the natural world, 24 hours per day, 60 minutes per hour, and 60 seconds per minute are most definitely not. Apparently the idea of 12 hours of daylight goes back to the ancient Egyptians if not further, and we've been stuck with it ever since.
Probably the closest a society has ever come to breaking out of this confusion was the French Revolution, when they instituted 12 30-day months plus 5 or 6 holidays after the months, as well as decimal time and a 10-day equivalent of a week. Arguably Unix epoch time is probably the most elegant technical solution available, by effectively decoupling measurements of time from representations of those measurements.
Also, if credit unions aren't an option for you (which depending on your laws they may not be), at least look for a locally owned bank. They have in general been behaving much better towards their customers and depositors than the big guys.
Katrina had zero to do with "free markets" and everything to do with corrupt local officials and just plain shitty citizens.
"shitty citizens" had fairly little to do with it as well. One could argue that some of the problems in the aftermath were due to ordinary citizens, but it's not the citizen's fault that the levies broke, or that there was no way for those without cars to evacuate, or that when some tried to leave on their own police from a neighboring town fired warning shots.
What had a lot to do with it: 1. It was a category 4 hurricane when it landed and the levies were theoretically built to withstand a category 3 hurricane. 2. Governments at all levels had decided it was cheaper to give the appearance of solid levies rather than actually building solid levies, so even the category 3 rating was suspect. 3. The top federal officials were either massively misinformed, intentionally playing really really dumb, or were actually really really dumb. What surprised at least one reporter talking to FEMA director Michael Brown was that the reporter knew a lot more about what was going on than Michael Brown did. 4. Military command & control actually interfered with effective rescue operations. The only agency who really handled things well was the Coast Guard, which basically said "forget the rules, don't worry too much about orders, do whatever you need to do to get people out of there as quickly as you can." In other words, management that trusted the grunts to do their job well, and got the heck out of the way.
Actually, the primary point of the "extra hour of daylight" is that (in the eyes of Congress at least) it encourages people to go out and shop during the summer evenings. That's why the latest changes to when DST started and stopped were billed as a measure to revive the economy.
Practicality, or the free time available to us peons, had nothing to do with it.
By all means, get the homeless the help they need, mental illness treatment or otherwise. And I'm somebody who fairly regularly volunteers my time and money to help do just that. Also important on that front is better VA funding, since far too many of the folks on the streets are veterans who were denied proper treatment.
I'm just saying that you can't legitimately turn them away at other public spaces just because they're using stuff that you want to use too, and that as far as places to be for the other 60-80% who are not mentally ill the library is probably a better choice than many.
The basic thing I'm noticing is that for a guy who in his history of GNOME describes himself as a "free software entusiast" [sic], he seems awfully disinterested in making Gnome better, or if the Gnome devs don't like his ideas forking off something of his own.
The other fascinating point I see in your second statement is that it's not the open source world's fault that the latest and greatest high-performance video and audio cards aren't supported as well as they are on Windows. Microsoft, Apple, etc have very little to do with that level of support - it's Intel, ATI, NVidia, etc that are doing the hard work to make their stuff work on Windows, and just don't care about the Linux market.
On the flip side, unless you're doing high performance gaming, you really don't need to care about having the latest and greatest hardware. And one thing Linux does very very well is support older hardware.
Slashdot Mirror
Another case of the US feeling that it is perfectly acceptable to treat foreigners in a way that would bring outrage if it tried it on its own citizens.
Waddaya mean, "if it tried it"? There's tons of propaganda from the US government aimed at US citizens, from the most obvious (e.g. White House news briefings) to the not-so-obvious (e.g. describing generals on Pentagon payroll as "independent analysts" who just happen to have a pro-war viewpoint), to the downright illegal (e.g. agents provocateur to start violence in otherwise peaceful protests).
If you want a real open source database, with a real commitment to not being evil, check out PostGres. I've preferred it over MySql for a really long time, for technical as well as political reasons.
MySql might have had better marketing, but for most purposes it was never the best open source database.
My basic view on the New York Times is that it is best read the way the Soviets used to read Pravda: The purpose of reading it isn't to learn the truth, it's to learn what those in power want you to think.
That's not a useless exercise, but it's also not what it appears to be.
In a way the decline reminds me of the local police - 30 or 40 years ago the local police were your friend - someone you could go to and talk to and who would be willing to help you out. These days it seems like you're best off staying as far away from the police as possible.
Actually, that depends. If you aren't white and are male, then generally speaking the local police hasn't been a friend to you or your family. Ever. It doesn't matter if you're a respected academic, walking down the street minding your own business, or standing in front of your home.
As bad as the music business is today, imagine no copyrights. I write a great new song, perform it a few times while I'm working out the kinks, saving up for studio time, etc.
Yeah, think of all the music that would never have been written if Mozart or Beethoven had had to work in a world where music wasn't copyrighted!
Take away enough people's right to bear arms, vote or otherwise have a say in society and the remaining population is much easier to control.
They don't need to do that.
As far as taking away the right to bear arms, if the government is desperate enough that the right to bear arms is going to decide whether the population can fight back, We The People are very likely completely screwed. Generally speaking, in modern times, when you have an armed citizenry fighting their own country's professional military, the professional military wins, because they have more weapons, more training, more organization, an equal knowledge of the battlefield, and a surprisingly large amount of support from the population. In some cases, the threat of other professional militaries getting involved can act as a check on that advantage, but if, say, a military coup happened in the US and Michigan revolted, the military could just level Michigan without any trouble at all.
As far as voting is concerned, they've discovered that it's far simpler to give people some candidates to vote for, but ensure that anyone who has a chance of winning is in your pocket. If somebody unexpected starts to look like they're going to win, buy them off. If they won't be bought off, pull some dirty tricks to wreck their candidacy.
As far as free speech, they will let the little people yell and scream all they like, just suppress media coverage of anything really threatening by telling all political reporters that if their organizations even consider giving them a front-page article, they'll cut off access to the inside sources that nearly all reporters rely on. That's how a protest by around 5-10 million people worldwide gets totally forgotten.
And of course, privatize everything you can, because (as Noam Chomsky put it) democratic institutions might carry out the will of the people, whereas private corporations are pure tyrannies.
"Yes, as through this world I've wandered, I've seen lots of funny men. Some will rob you with a six-gun, some with a fountain pen." - Woodie Guthrie
Since art is in the eye of the beholder
Which eye?
With no privacy of any kind, you'd see exactly what all your neighbors look like in the shower. Whether that's a benefit or a drawback would depend on your neighbors.
The problem with communism (Marx/Engels version) is that violent revolution is part of the Communist Manifesto's implementation plan for Communism (read it if you don't believe me).
If you read Engels' commentary on the Communist Manifesto, they're perfectly ok with a thoroughly democratic government being the way the workers assert their control over industry. Engels specifically states that all the workers in the US have to do to achieve their communist revolution is to vote for it.
Yeah, that's clearly a much better name than my idea, which was "Sky Network" or "SkyNet" for short.
The disparity between the wealthy and the masses in Cuba is very, very sharp.
The disparity is there, no question. But poor Cubans generally have decent food and housing, very good medical care, and educational opportunities (including near-universal literacy), which actually puts them in significantly better condition than many poor areas of the United States.
(My information is mostly second-hand: I've been lucky enough to have the opportunity to meet and talk with both Cubans and people who've been able to visit Cuba.)
I write software for a living. My employer is not in the software business, it's in the entertainment website business, so software is a tool to sell stuff, not what we sell.
As a result, we can and have open-sourced some of our packages. Not the stuff that would differentiate what we do from what our competitors do, but things like logging tools, web frameworks, and testing tools that every developer needs. Since some of this stuff doesn't exist the way we want it, we'd have to write it anyway, but since we lose nothing of value by giving it away, we do just that.
Very relevant quote:
"I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class thug for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902–1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents." - Maj Gen Smedley Butler
People aren't arrested there for just disagreeing. There is no torture. People aren't kept in jail without trial.
Yes, there are people arrested just for disagreeing, there are people tortured, and people jailed without trial. A lot fewer than there were back in the 1960's when Che Guevera was summarily executing people daily, but it still occasionally happens.
That said, there's a lot of evidence that Cuba is a lot better place for most of its residents than, say, Haiti or the Dominican Republic.
The month I'm referring to here was the lunar month, which is most definitely naturally occurring, and was the basis of many calendars. The modern-day 30ish days per month is a relatively small variation on the Roman attempt at solving the problem of 365 / 28 having a remainder. Many other cultures which focused more on the lunar month rather than the solar year solved the same problem by adding in a leap month periodically.
If we were going to truly make things an internationalized standard, we'd be doing something like: .com, .org, etc would get phased out in favor of .us addresses.
1. Each country gets a 2-letter code in the UTF-8 character set, to be assigned by ISO standards.
2. Each country is solely responsible for what goes on within that 2-letter code.
3. Each country is responsible for maintaining root nameservers that resolve domains within their country code. If they want to put their country code on some other country's root nameservers, that's between those two countries, but one way or another that's the way it would need to work.
4. All tlds like
As far as I can tell, nobody's trying to do that, though.
French-made standards often suck
That's a tough case to argue, given that the standards originally developed by the French have been the international and scientific norm for a very very long time. The Revolutionary calendar has its faults, but it's a significant improvement over the Gregorian calendar with all its inconsistencies and references to long-dead political squabbles.
They are Ma Bell
Actually, they aren't Ma Bell. Ma Bell had plenty of faults, but was heavily regulated and thus prevented from pulling stunts like this without at least getting government approval.
These clowns are actually Southern Bell Company, one of the many Baby Bells spawned when AT&T was broken up. They gained an advantage over other Baby Bells using thoroughly sleazy business practices, bought them up with the full support of a deregulation-happy federal government (this was bipartisan: both the Clinton and Bush administrations had the power to do something about the mergers but didn't), and then re-branded themselves as AT&T to give the impression that they were Ma Bell.
For those who think more deregulation would solve the problem, consider that telecommunications has involved the government since the 1860's, if not earlier.
The reason why date representations suck so much is partially inherent, and partially human-created.
The inherent part: There are at least 4 naturally occurring measurements of time that have been used as the basis - the day, the month, the year, and the second (measured via an atomic clock). None of them can be fully defined in terms of the others.
The human-created part: Differing base systems for each piece of the time that we tried to create. While the 12-13 months per year and the 365.25... days per year are inherent in the natural world, 24 hours per day, 60 minutes per hour, and 60 seconds per minute are most definitely not. Apparently the idea of 12 hours of daylight goes back to the ancient Egyptians if not further, and we've been stuck with it ever since.
Probably the closest a society has ever come to breaking out of this confusion was the French Revolution, when they instituted 12 30-day months plus 5 or 6 holidays after the months, as well as decimal time and a 10-day equivalent of a week. Arguably Unix epoch time is probably the most elegant technical solution available, by effectively decoupling measurements of time from representations of those measurements.
Also, if credit unions aren't an option for you (which depending on your laws they may not be), at least look for a locally owned bank. They have in general been behaving much better towards their customers and depositors than the big guys.
Katrina had zero to do with "free markets" and everything to do with corrupt local officials and just plain shitty citizens.
"shitty citizens" had fairly little to do with it as well. One could argue that some of the problems in the aftermath were due to ordinary citizens, but it's not the citizen's fault that the levies broke, or that there was no way for those without cars to evacuate, or that when some tried to leave on their own police from a neighboring town fired warning shots.
What had a lot to do with it:
1. It was a category 4 hurricane when it landed and the levies were theoretically built to withstand a category 3 hurricane.
2. Governments at all levels had decided it was cheaper to give the appearance of solid levies rather than actually building solid levies, so even the category 3 rating was suspect.
3. The top federal officials were either massively misinformed, intentionally playing really really dumb, or were actually really really dumb. What surprised at least one reporter talking to FEMA director Michael Brown was that the reporter knew a lot more about what was going on than Michael Brown did.
4. Military command & control actually interfered with effective rescue operations. The only agency who really handled things well was the Coast Guard, which basically said "forget the rules, don't worry too much about orders, do whatever you need to do to get people out of there as quickly as you can." In other words, management that trusted the grunts to do their job well, and got the heck out of the way.
Actually, the primary point of the "extra hour of daylight" is that (in the eyes of Congress at least) it encourages people to go out and shop during the summer evenings. That's why the latest changes to when DST started and stopped were billed as a measure to revive the economy.
Practicality, or the free time available to us peons, had nothing to do with it.
By all means, get the homeless the help they need, mental illness treatment or otherwise. And I'm somebody who fairly regularly volunteers my time and money to help do just that. Also important on that front is better VA funding, since far too many of the folks on the streets are veterans who were denied proper treatment.
I'm just saying that you can't legitimately turn them away at other public spaces just because they're using stuff that you want to use too, and that as far as places to be for the other 60-80% who are not mentally ill the library is probably a better choice than many.
The basic thing I'm noticing is that for a guy who in his history of GNOME describes himself as a "free software entusiast" [sic], he seems awfully disinterested in making Gnome better, or if the Gnome devs don't like his ideas forking off something of his own.
The other fascinating point I see in your second statement is that it's not the open source world's fault that the latest and greatest high-performance video and audio cards aren't supported as well as they are on Windows. Microsoft, Apple, etc have very little to do with that level of support - it's Intel, ATI, NVidia, etc that are doing the hard work to make their stuff work on Windows, and just don't care about the Linux market.
On the flip side, unless you're doing high performance gaming, you really don't need to care about having the latest and greatest hardware. And one thing Linux does very very well is support older hardware.