For one thing, news stories which damage Debian damage Linux, that's just life. In the case of this bug was a major strike against the concept of many eyes finding bugs concept. I'd also say that a package maintainer modifying code he didn't understand is a pretty good example of arrogance.
Except of course that no one wants multicast for any purpose whatsoever on the internet. They might want the speed, but a good chunk of the reason why people go to the internet for TV in the first place is to choose when they can watch it, no one wants scheduled broadcast on the internet, they have TV for that and it works better.
He and for that matter Balmer also own enough of Microsoft to override the rest of the shareholders anyway. The same is true of Zuckerberg, and I'd presume Larry as well.
Except this isn't about jealous at all. There's no cap on executive salaries in this law, no change the minimum wage. What it does is give shareholders(ie the people who own the company) some control over the salaries of the people who run said company on their behalf.
At the present time, these things are determined exclusively by the board with very limited accountability(here in Oz if the shareholders vote against executive salaries two years in a row it causes a spill of the board, but shareholders still have no actual say). This wouldn't be a problem in theory, but all the people on corporate boards are executives of other companies and the executives of the companies they are on the board for are on the board for the company they are executives of. That is to say all the people voting on these things have a vested interest in keeping executive salaries high and golden handshakes particularly golden. Shareholder votes aren't actually generally all that much better of course since the institutional shareholders(retirement funds) are the same sort of people, but at least this is theoretically better.
I should have been more clear. If you're currently 18 and you decide not to get a university education, in the US, unless you are really exceptional and lucky or have seriously connected parents, your shot at any kind of middle class lifestyle is a long one, not impossible, but it's going to be hard. If you're in your 30's with a decade of experience you'll probably be Ok without a degree, if you're in your 40's a lot of successful folks won't have a degree, becoming less important as you get older and fewer people in your experience range have degrees.
Because the alternative is having cable television become exactly like network television but with more sex and violence. Don't get me wrong I like sex and violence as much as the next guy, but if I wanted naked women and no plot I have the internet for that.
The fundamental issue with a replacement of Xorg is redefining the problem domain. Xorg(and X11) before it runs on a client server model, which is dead set sexy and really really useful if you're operating in a client server environment. The problem is that it's a horribly inefficient kludge if you happen to be running the client and the server on the same machine. This is more important if you're trying to run in a limited resource environment like a Tablet while still having all the new shiny. Yes you can run something like xfce on much older hardware, but the new hotness it ain't.
The upshot of this is that if you make the changes necessary to make X not a horrible pain in the ass on a desktop machine you need to 1) remove an important part of what makes X X and 2) seriously modify a crap tonne of software, which is why of course X replacements tend to fail. In order to be markedly better they have to stop being compatible with X and the expectations you have of it.
From the most practical point of view the SSL "patch" one of their maintainers did was pretty damaging, years of trivially breakable certificates because some idiot doesn't like compiler warnings wasn't great for the reputation of Linux as secure, it didn't do much for the many eyes idea either.
That said, OP was probably referring to their over religious nature wrt free software and/or the excessive bloat and slow release cycle caused by their need to support such a large number of architectures.
They may very well have known exactly what the Onion is. They also definitely know that the average North Korean doesn't know what the Onion is, won't see any of the foreign news pointing out what the Onion is, and will only see a "western" article talking about how wonderful their leader is. Deprived of its context and in with a likely rough translation, the sarcasm won't even be evident.
Well for one, those public libraries are getting less and less funding so their collections are even more limited than they used to be and even that wasn't really all that fantastic. Unless you were really lucky, finding anything particularly recent, specialized or rare at your local library, even with getting it sent in from another branch wasn't all that common(ever tried finding a Comp Sci book at your local that was written in the last 10 years?).
For another, for better or worse, a university education is becoming the standard level of education required for any job not requiring manual labor and a lot of manual labor jobs are being off shored. If you want a shot at even a lower middle class lifestyle in the US these days you need that piece of paper, however useless it might be.
I always find this comment somewhat amusing from Slashdot posters.
Bundling is a pain in the rear, but pretty much everyone on this site with cable television benefits from it. Do you really think that most of the channels we watch would exist without bundling? I'd hazard a guess that with the possible exception of the food channel, any channel remotely educational or special interest would be gone without bundling, because almost no one would sign up for them.
They would be, but only in the same sense that the police steal people's liberty. That is to say that it's true, but when things are functioning correctly, it isn't the whole picture. Sure you can have excessive inflation(like we did in the 80's) and/or corrupt policing, but inflation, like the police force, has its proper role to play in functional society.
Essentially there are really only two ways for a country to have any kind of social mobility whatsoever. The first, which served the US and many other countries well is physical expansion, new land means new people can get rich, and some reward has to be given to get people to actually go there so the rich can't just snap it all up. Problem with that of course is that for the moment, expansion on this planet is pretty much not going to happen. If resources get really tight we might convince ourselves that the folks of a slightly different skin color aren't people or at the least were too weak to hold the land, but we don't really have the stomach for that and haven't for quite some time. Australia, Canada, the US and NZ being about the last places anyone successfully colonized(and they all had really sparse native populations to begin with). We might have a shot in space eventually, but that's a medium term prospect at best.
The other way is through debt, be that in the form of student loans, venture capital, or a more traditional bank loan. All are also forms of investments and the investors always expect a return(even supposed freebies from the government have an expected return). Like all investments they carry risk for both parties. You could presumably set up loans to function in a deflationary society, but it would require that lenders were willing to allow negative interest rates if the rate of deflation got too high(essentially your loan would have an expected rate of return and if deflation was exceeding that rate of return it would start paying off principle), which psychologically is a problem, lenders simply won't want to do it that way.
Even if it did, this wouldn't come close to handling the level of deflation which would happen if Bitcoin became the worlds currency. Approximately 50% of coins have been mined from my understanding and I would hazard to guess that the percentage of the population who have any bitcoins at all is substantially less than 1%. The supply of bitcoins can theoretically double, slowly at this point, where it would have to increase by several orders of magnitude just to handle current population, forget about those people being born next year. That's the kind of levels where if you got paid on Friday afternoon you could retire on that paycheck by the time Monday came around.
Without debt social mobility and therefor social cohesiveness pretty much disappears. That's not to say that our current society doesn't have too much non productive debt, but you don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, and you don't even really want to throw all the bathwater out at once since at its current levels it's likely to flood the metaphorical house.
It's possible to have a functioning society with a deflationary currency, if levels of deflation are sufficiently low(probably far lower than current levels of inflation) and if you completely change basic financial instruments. It's not possible for Bitcoins to be that currency.
Except none of that changes the fact that a very small number of people have more than half the bitcoins which will ever exist. Our current levels of inequality are bad, but they don't come close to this kind on insanity.
You're right, inflation is good for debtors, bad for creditors, but that's something that creditors can and do deal with via variable interest rates. Deflation on the other hand is bad for the debtor because they can't pay their debts back and bad for the creditors because they won't be paid back, and there's simply no market mechanism for deal with that, everyone loses money, so no one borrows and no one lends which is seriously bad news.
There is a certain class of paranoid ignorant fool who wants to stick all their money in a bank or in their mattress and sit on it for retirement. They view inflation as stealing that money away from them and seek anything to destroy it. These are the same people who scream about the fed and fractional lending and everything else. They don't really understand how the economy works or how their employers manage to maintain a sufficient level of liquidity to actually pay their salaries(every single one of these people earns a salary, because you can't have this attitude and run a business or make investments), or how anything actually works. They just understand that inflation is eating away at the value of their horde and it scares and terrifies them.
Deflation is horrible for everyone, because along with prices deflating, so does the overall economy. If you think what's happened since the GFC hit is bad in terms of job losses you can't even imagine what real serious deflation would be like. The Japanese have been trying to battle deflation for 20 years. It's been crushing their economy the whole time and their level of deflation isn't even that bad. Bitcoin level deflation would make the Great Depression seem like a bubble.
Why is Slashdot's categorical example of "injustice" a guy who was actually guilty(whether you think the penalty is appropriate he did it), was offered ridiculously lenient pleas considering the maximum penalties involved and for whatever reasons took his own life before he could actually even see how the justice system was going to treat him.
Far worse injustice happens in the US every single day, but it mostly happens to poor black people who aren't computer nerds so no one on Slashdot gives a shit.
They're comparing the results of giving $100 to your average American, very few of whom, if any, are so poor that $100 is going to make the difference between life and death with offering several days wages to people who are, in all likelihood living much closer to the edge of survival. Of course the giver is going to be a lot less generous when that money can make a huge difference to his or her family and of course the receiver is going to be much less likely to punish their lack of generosity. For one thing they understand what's going through the other person's mind and for another, the cash they have to give up is of significantly higher value.
This isn't an issue of cultural values, it's an issue of scarcity. People are in general a lot less generous in times of scarcity and simultaneously a lot less likely to "prove a point" under the same circumstances.
Go to the same village and perform the same experiment with something they have a relative plenty of and see what results you get then.
I can't tell if you really don't understand photography or if you're just using an absurd definition of "the same shot".
If put a camera on a tripod and electronically took a shot at 6:15:49.123 on the 1st of Jan and then another shot at 6:15:49.123 on the 2nd of Jan you won't actually get the same shot, even presuming that all other factors were identical.
Yes two shots taken at exactly the same time on exactly the same day from exactly the same place with exactly the same camera pointed in exactly the same way would be identical, but the artistry and skill in photography is being in that place at that time with the photograph framed in just that way.
By that same logic you could argue that because if someone used exactly the same paints with exactly the same brushes and made exactly the same strokes in exactly the same places they'd come up with an identical painting and so painting isn't art. Sure the artistry of the painting is a bit more obvious because the you can see that artistry, but that doesn't make the artistry of the photographer any different.
So he wants to split the company into two divisions, one of which probably will fail and the other of which certainly will fail. I guess that makes some sense, but the bit he wants to make private and own himself is the bit which certainly will fail?
The Nook doesn't have a huge shot at beating the kindle, even if they went and enabled their store on everyone's device, but it does have a shot, however remote, at being at least sort of profitable. Brick and Mortar book stores on the other hand are pretty well doomed unless they can offer some sort of specialization and/or excellent customer service which is pretty much the antithesis of the chain book store mind set.
Google's intent with ChromeOS is to create an environment where they have no competition for their services so they can have all your data and all your personal information for ever and ever and ever. To support this end they created an OS where their applications get to run native code but no one else's do. Google's offering will be faster than anyone elses offering because Google gets to cheat. They're essentially creating the FSF's worst nightmare but because the client is creative commons, no one is noticing and a few people are even cheering.
iOS is less locked down than ChromeOS and all of Microsoft's proprietary format tricks put together still gave you more control over your document than Google Docs does.
MAC address white lists are a bit like hidden SSIDs, they cause more hassle than protection. Even WEP which has been broken for years takes longer to break than either of these options. In essence, you'll spend more time white listing new devices you want to allow access to your network than it will take for someone to bypass your security.
Stand Your Ground is a bunch of red neck crap and needs to be wiped out.
Stand Your Ground specifically grants the right for an individual to respond with lethal force, even if they had a reasonable opportunity to escape the conflict. It's not about self defense, it's about pride and ego. All genuine cases of self defense are already covered without the addition of stand your ground.
When I used to live in Wisconsin, we had paper bags, they were renewable, recyclable and they worked better than the horrid plastic. Now I have to choose between plastic bags most of which will end up in a landfill and the reusable ones which will still end up in a landfill but slightly less often and which I inevitably forget in my car?
This isn't deigned to avoid gerrymandering it is gerrymandering.
The whole idea of gerrymandering is to group like minded voters together to minimize their electoral power. Which is precisely what this algorithm does as its fundamental design. Dense population areas generally lean left so the core of the algorithm leads to gerrymandering.
The way to solve the problem is to change to direct voting for president, and likely come form of purely proportional voting for Congress. This would out course essentially eliminate the states at least at the federal level, but no more so than redrawing state lines every few years based on population and would at least work.
Slashdot Mirror
For one thing, news stories which damage Debian damage Linux, that's just life. In the case of this bug was a major strike against the concept of many eyes finding bugs concept. I'd also say that a package maintainer modifying code he didn't understand is a pretty good example of arrogance.
Except of course that no one wants multicast for any purpose whatsoever on the internet. They might want the speed, but a good chunk of the reason why people go to the internet for TV in the first place is to choose when they can watch it, no one wants scheduled broadcast on the internet, they have TV for that and it works better.
He and for that matter Balmer also own enough of Microsoft to override the rest of the shareholders anyway. The same is true of Zuckerberg, and I'd presume Larry as well.
Except this isn't about jealous at all. There's no cap on executive salaries in this law, no change the minimum wage. What it does is give shareholders(ie the people who own the company) some control over the salaries of the people who run said company on their behalf.
At the present time, these things are determined exclusively by the board with very limited accountability(here in Oz if the shareholders vote against executive salaries two years in a row it causes a spill of the board, but shareholders still have no actual say). This wouldn't be a problem in theory, but all the people on corporate boards are executives of other companies and the executives of the companies they are on the board for are on the board for the company they are executives of. That is to say all the people voting on these things have a vested interest in keeping executive salaries high and golden handshakes particularly golden. Shareholder votes aren't actually generally all that much better of course since the institutional shareholders(retirement funds) are the same sort of people, but at least this is theoretically better.
I should have been more clear. If you're currently 18 and you decide not to get a university education, in the US, unless you are really exceptional and lucky or have seriously connected parents, your shot at any kind of middle class lifestyle is a long one, not impossible, but it's going to be hard. If you're in your 30's with a decade of experience you'll probably be Ok without a degree, if you're in your 40's a lot of successful folks won't have a degree, becoming less important as you get older and fewer people in your experience range have degrees.
Because the alternative is having cable television become exactly like network television but with more sex and violence. Don't get me wrong I like sex and violence as much as the next guy, but if I wanted naked women and no plot I have the internet for that.
And on the internet, channel bundles don't exist, on cable television however where none of those things are true, they do.
The fundamental issue with a replacement of Xorg is redefining the problem domain. Xorg(and X11) before it runs on a client server model, which is dead set sexy and really really useful if you're operating in a client server environment. The problem is that it's a horribly inefficient kludge if you happen to be running the client and the server on the same machine. This is more important if you're trying to run in a limited resource environment like a Tablet while still having all the new shiny. Yes you can run something like xfce on much older hardware, but the new hotness it ain't.
The upshot of this is that if you make the changes necessary to make X not a horrible pain in the ass on a desktop machine you need to 1) remove an important part of what makes X X and 2) seriously modify a crap tonne of software, which is why of course X replacements tend to fail. In order to be markedly better they have to stop being compatible with X and the expectations you have of it.
From the most practical point of view the SSL "patch" one of their maintainers did was pretty damaging, years of trivially breakable certificates because some idiot doesn't like compiler warnings wasn't great for the reputation of Linux as secure, it didn't do much for the many eyes idea either.
That said, OP was probably referring to their over religious nature wrt free software and/or the excessive bloat and slow release cycle caused by their need to support such a large number of architectures.
They may very well have known exactly what the Onion is. They also definitely know that the average North Korean doesn't know what the Onion is, won't see any of the foreign news pointing out what the Onion is, and will only see a "western" article talking about how wonderful their leader is. Deprived of its context and in with a likely rough translation, the sarcasm won't even be evident.
Well for one, those public libraries are getting less and less funding so their collections are even more limited than they used to be and even that wasn't really all that fantastic. Unless you were really lucky, finding anything particularly recent, specialized or rare at your local library, even with getting it sent in from another branch wasn't all that common(ever tried finding a Comp Sci book at your local that was written in the last 10 years?).
For another, for better or worse, a university education is becoming the standard level of education required for any job not requiring manual labor and a lot of manual labor jobs are being off shored. If you want a shot at even a lower middle class lifestyle in the US these days you need that piece of paper, however useless it might be.
I always find this comment somewhat amusing from Slashdot posters.
Bundling is a pain in the rear, but pretty much everyone on this site with cable television benefits from it. Do you really think that most of the channels we watch would exist without bundling? I'd hazard a guess that with the possible exception of the food channel, any channel remotely educational or special interest would be gone without bundling, because almost no one would sign up for them.
They would be, but only in the same sense that the police steal people's liberty. That is to say that it's true, but when things are functioning correctly, it isn't the whole picture. Sure you can have excessive inflation(like we did in the 80's) and/or corrupt policing, but inflation, like the police force, has its proper role to play in functional society.
Essentially there are really only two ways for a country to have any kind of social mobility whatsoever. The first, which served the US and many other countries well is physical expansion, new land means new people can get rich, and some reward has to be given to get people to actually go there so the rich can't just snap it all up. Problem with that of course is that for the moment, expansion on this planet is pretty much not going to happen. If resources get really tight we might convince ourselves that the folks of a slightly different skin color aren't people or at the least were too weak to hold the land, but we don't really have the stomach for that and haven't for quite some time. Australia, Canada, the US and NZ being about the last places anyone successfully colonized(and they all had really sparse native populations to begin with). We might have a shot in space eventually, but that's a medium term prospect at best.
The other way is through debt, be that in the form of student loans, venture capital, or a more traditional bank loan. All are also forms of investments and the investors always expect a return(even supposed freebies from the government have an expected return). Like all investments they carry risk for both parties. You could presumably set up loans to function in a deflationary society, but it would require that lenders were willing to allow negative interest rates if the rate of deflation got too high(essentially your loan would have an expected rate of return and if deflation was exceeding that rate of return it would start paying off principle), which psychologically is a problem, lenders simply won't want to do it that way.
Even if it did, this wouldn't come close to handling the level of deflation which would happen if Bitcoin became the worlds currency. Approximately 50% of coins have been mined from my understanding and I would hazard to guess that the percentage of the population who have any bitcoins at all is substantially less than 1%. The supply of bitcoins can theoretically double, slowly at this point, where it would have to increase by several orders of magnitude just to handle current population, forget about those people being born next year. That's the kind of levels where if you got paid on Friday afternoon you could retire on that paycheck by the time Monday came around.
Without debt social mobility and therefor social cohesiveness pretty much disappears. That's not to say that our current society doesn't have too much non productive debt, but you don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, and you don't even really want to throw all the bathwater out at once since at its current levels it's likely to flood the metaphorical house.
It's possible to have a functioning society with a deflationary currency, if levels of deflation are sufficiently low(probably far lower than current levels of inflation) and if you completely change basic financial instruments. It's not possible for Bitcoins to be that currency.
Except none of that changes the fact that a very small number of people have more than half the bitcoins which will ever exist. Our current levels of inequality are bad, but they don't come close to this kind on insanity.
You're right, inflation is good for debtors, bad for creditors, but that's something that creditors can and do deal with via variable interest rates. Deflation on the other hand is bad for the debtor because they can't pay their debts back and bad for the creditors because they won't be paid back, and there's simply no market mechanism for deal with that, everyone loses money, so no one borrows and no one lends which is seriously bad news.
There is a certain class of paranoid ignorant fool who wants to stick all their money in a bank or in their mattress and sit on it for retirement. They view inflation as stealing that money away from them and seek anything to destroy it. These are the same people who scream about the fed and fractional lending and everything else. They don't really understand how the economy works or how their employers manage to maintain a sufficient level of liquidity to actually pay their salaries(every single one of these people earns a salary, because you can't have this attitude and run a business or make investments), or how anything actually works. They just understand that inflation is eating away at the value of their horde and it scares and terrifies them.
Deflation is horrible for everyone, because along with prices deflating, so does the overall economy. If you think what's happened since the GFC hit is bad in terms of job losses you can't even imagine what real serious deflation would be like. The Japanese have been trying to battle deflation for 20 years. It's been crushing their economy the whole time and their level of deflation isn't even that bad. Bitcoin level deflation would make the Great Depression seem like a bubble.
Why is Slashdot's categorical example of "injustice" a guy who was actually guilty(whether you think the penalty is appropriate he did it), was offered ridiculously lenient pleas considering the maximum penalties involved and for whatever reasons took his own life before he could actually even see how the justice system was going to treat him.
Far worse injustice happens in the US every single day, but it mostly happens to poor black people who aren't computer nerds so no one on Slashdot gives a shit.
They're comparing the results of giving $100 to your average American, very few of whom, if any, are so poor that $100 is going to make the difference between life and death with offering several days wages to people who are, in all likelihood living much closer to the edge of survival. Of course the giver is going to be a lot less generous when that money can make a huge difference to his or her family and of course the receiver is going to be much less likely to punish their lack of generosity. For one thing they understand what's going through the other person's mind and for another, the cash they have to give up is of significantly higher value.
This isn't an issue of cultural values, it's an issue of scarcity. People are in general a lot less generous in times of scarcity and simultaneously a lot less likely to "prove a point" under the same circumstances.
Go to the same village and perform the same experiment with something they have a relative plenty of and see what results you get then.
I can't tell if you really don't understand photography or if you're just using an absurd definition of "the same shot".
If put a camera on a tripod and electronically took a shot at 6:15:49.123 on the 1st of Jan and then another shot at 6:15:49.123 on the 2nd of Jan you won't actually get the same shot, even presuming that all other factors were identical.
Yes two shots taken at exactly the same time on exactly the same day from exactly the same place with exactly the same camera pointed in exactly the same way would be identical, but the artistry and skill in photography is being in that place at that time with the photograph framed in just that way.
By that same logic you could argue that because if someone used exactly the same paints with exactly the same brushes and made exactly the same strokes in exactly the same places they'd come up with an identical painting and so painting isn't art. Sure the artistry of the painting is a bit more obvious because the you can see that artistry, but that doesn't make the artistry of the photographer any different.
I thought about that, but that presumes that the vast majority of B&N stores are on land actually owned by B&N, not 100% sure of that.
So he wants to split the company into two divisions, one of which probably will fail and the other of which certainly will fail. I guess that makes some sense, but the bit he wants to make private and own himself is the bit which certainly will fail?
The Nook doesn't have a huge shot at beating the kindle, even if they went and enabled their store on everyone's device, but it does have a shot, however remote, at being at least sort of profitable. Brick and Mortar book stores on the other hand are pretty well doomed unless they can offer some sort of specialization and/or excellent customer service which is pretty much the antithesis of the chain book store mind set.
Google's intent with ChromeOS is to create an environment where they have no competition for their services so they can have all your data and all your personal information for ever and ever and ever. To support this end they created an OS where their applications get to run native code but no one else's do. Google's offering will be faster than anyone elses offering because Google gets to cheat. They're essentially creating the FSF's worst nightmare but because the client is creative commons, no one is noticing and a few people are even cheering.
iOS is less locked down than ChromeOS and all of Microsoft's proprietary format tricks put together still gave you more control over your document than Google Docs does.
MAC address white lists are a bit like hidden SSIDs, they cause more hassle than protection. Even WEP which has been broken for years takes longer to break than either of these options. In essence, you'll spend more time white listing new devices you want to allow access to your network than it will take for someone to bypass your security.
Stand Your Ground is a bunch of red neck crap and needs to be wiped out.
Stand Your Ground specifically grants the right for an individual to respond with lethal force, even if they had a reasonable opportunity to escape the conflict. It's not about self defense, it's about pride and ego. All genuine cases of self defense are already covered without the addition of stand your ground.
When I used to live in Wisconsin, we had paper bags, they were renewable, recyclable and they worked better than the horrid plastic. Now I have to choose between plastic bags most of which will end up in a landfill and the reusable ones which will still end up in a landfill but slightly less often and which I inevitably forget in my car?
This isn't deigned to avoid gerrymandering it is gerrymandering.
The whole idea of gerrymandering is to group like minded voters together to minimize their electoral power. Which is precisely what this algorithm does as its fundamental design. Dense population areas generally lean left so the core of the algorithm leads to gerrymandering.
The way to solve the problem is to change to direct voting for president, and likely come form of purely proportional voting for Congress. This would out course essentially eliminate the states at least at the federal level, but no more so than redrawing state lines every few years based on population and would at least work.