I think it depends a lot on what you're talking about as a soul. Do I necessarily believe that when you die a translucent version of you goes off to a magical happy place, or gets burned forever. Well I think you can tell from my tone that I don't. That doesn't mean it's not true of course, merely that I don't believe it. On the other hand do I believe that there seems to be something about the whole of a living being(particularly a conscious one) that is more than the sum of its parts? Definitely. Something differentiates us from meat, something about a whole bunch of nerve cells meshed together creates a person with emotions and needs beyong biological survival. To use a computer analogy, when we study the human body we can see the components, all the physical bits and bobs which make up a human, but we can't see or understand the software. We don't know why putting all that stuff together makes a person, or why people who are genetically similar can have vastly different personalities and vice versa. For me the soul isn't some sort of immortal me that goes off to heaven or hell(though it might be, I've never died and no one who has died back has told me what it's like), it's the essence of what makes a person who they are, and that's a hell of a lot more complicated than just a biological machine. Cogito Ergo Sum. Whether animals have souls I'm not sure, they certainly seem to have something which makes them them, even if "them" is generally less complicated than "us". We have no measurable evidence of anything we might call a soul, but we have evidence that there is something which differentiates life from meat, and that life is both changeable in nature, and able to route around damage to the physical body. If we define that thing as the soul(as I do), then even though we can't see it, it must be there.
There's nothing wrong with hiring older people, and there's nothing wrong with hiring young people, but hire them on an individual basis, not because of their age. I've met older IT folks with lots of experience who knew all the quirks of what they were working on, had invaluable industry experience and were worth their weight in gold(and with older IT folks, that's usually a lot:P). I've also met older IT folks who have never progressed and are still stuck in versions of technology that haven't existed in more than a decade. I've met young folks who thought they were the best they'd ever be, or who thought they ought to be earning 6 figures right out of the gate and I've met young folks who were flexible, creative, and inspired. Hire the best person for the job, if that's some guy with 20 years experience or a grad right out of university it doesn't matter. Experience is certainly valuable, but in this industry so much changes so quickly that it isn't as valuable as it is in other places. That doesn't mean you shouldn't hire older technicians, but it does mean that just because someone is older doesn't mean they'll necessarily be better. Whatever your personal preferences are, the last thing you want is someone who isn't right for the job, or isn't right for the team, hire the best person who applies, and hire them for the job you're giving them, not based on some sort of "this is the ideal candidate" bullshit.
If you have a business class internet connection(which costs money) you get an SLA(Service Level Agreement), which means financial penalties for unacceptable(as defined in the agreement) levels of service.
You'd be surprised how good your internet connection can be if you're willing to pay for it, eve from those guys. It's still not 99.999%, but realistically you only get 5 9's for mission critical stuff because it's bloody expensive. Your work/home computer doesn't have anything close to 5 9's.
Somewhat tragically, ogg is pretty much a waste of time at this point. It's a good thing it exists because it keeps the people who own(ed?) mp3 from being totally tools about it as there's an alternative, but aside from being open source, it isn't measurably superior to mp3 in any way I've been able to work out.
It's also not supported by the vast majority of portable media players out there(I have one which does and I selected it specifically for this feature), and that unless you have an excessively large legal music collection(nothing you download will ever be ogg encoded and re-encoding is rather silly) if you're not worried about portability you'd be better off with something lossless.
That aside I think the point of the test is to find errors in the encoders so a standard(lowish so compression is more likely to cause errors) quality level, and a single format are probably pretty necessary.
And the war between morning and night people continues.
Despite all the whinging about rhythms, and clock changing and all that, that's all that the fight over daylight savings has really ever been.
Morning people like getting up early, they tend to have ended up in work that starts early, they exercise in the morning, so in the summer during DST they lose an hour of their precious mornings in exchange for afternoon time they don't particularly want or need.
Since they also tend to get out work a little earlier they're also more affected by late afternoon heat.
The rest of us find trading an hour of daylight which was happening when we were asleep and if anything just interfered with our ability to sleep being transitioned to the afternoon when we're actually awake and functional and it's light outside so we can go for walks and the like to be quite a good deal.
True, we could all get up earlier, or shift our working hours so they align with yours(early), but realistically in modern society you need to have someone working the later shifts as well as someone working the earlier shifts. If we all started getting up earlier and working earlier then you'd have to get up earlier and start working earlier too. Which of course would result in exactly the same situation as daylight savings time only instead of changing the clocks twice a year you'd just start working earlier and it'd be just as tedious and disruptive as daylight savings.
As for the lights argument, the daylight savings time argument is about going outside, if you don't go outside then it really doesn't matter what time it is, just turn on the lights.
(Un)Fortunately, we don't have enough street lights to make it daylight outside at night, so lights just don't solve that problem. Lights won't make your drive to work in the morning daylight and they won't make it daylight in the evening when people want to play with their kids in the park either.
We live in a 24 hour society and that means that we need night people as much as we need day people, and everyone in between. Do I particularly like driving to work in the dark, hell no, and I understand your perspective. I know you like getting up early in the morning and I appreciate that you want it to be light when you do so. In return I'd appreciate some concern for people like me who don't get up that early, but who probably work later than you do. Society needs both of us, and DST is about trying to find a compromise between us. Maybe it's not perfect, but just because mornings work for you doesn't mean they work for everyone.
The old fluros were like that, but I haven't seen flickering or humming from a CFL in any of the houses I've run them in over the last many years.
Can't really say I've noticed much in the way of light quality difference. Nor for that matter have I ever actually broken a CFL.
Traditional fluorescents do suck, they're expensive and tedious to replace and do generally result in poor light and when they get older flicker and all that sort of annoyance(they're not too bad when they're brand new, but that's not all that often).
Generally, I've had pretty much nothing but good things to say about CFL bulbs, they last for bloody ever, you can get a nice white light(if you like that sort of thing which I do), they're cheaper to run, and they're good for the environment, ticks all the boxes for me.
They released the specs months ago, check out the alsa-project page.
Realistically we're still not going to see much for quite a while. From all accounts creative's attempts at a linux driver were crap(I didn't bother trying them after reading what people were having to do to make them even compile), and there will still probably have to be a complete rewrite, but at least with the new license they'll be able to reuse some of that code and it might speed things up a bit.
I've been fairly lucky lately, and it's really only nvidia anymore, and after a number of instances of random interface changes breaking drivers(on the kernel side of things) things have been fairly stable lately.
Linux has no concept of change control for the most part, you have to upgrade everything or nothing, stuff changes whenever it suits the developers to do so. I know I'm not the only person who has noticed this sort of thing. Xorg has changed the way it handles peripherals a half a dozen times in the last few years.
There are certainly benefits to doing this, it means cleaner, faster code, and fewer bugs.
It also means that you can never be absolutely sure that anything open source or otherwise will ever work on any particular version of linux(new open source stuff won't always work with older system libraries, old closed source stuff won't always work with new libraries) and makes getting a vendor to sign off on support for any particular distribution(other than redhat, and we're a novell/suse shop) is more than a little tedious.
Like I said, there are a lot of advantages to it, but I just get a little frustrated when I see people on slashdot constantly bashing Microsoft. They're not really all that evil anymore, even if Steve Balmer does look like some sort of alien. Vista had a lot of problems, most of them weren't Microsoft's fault and most of them were fixed. Vista has some tedious DRM, but it hasn't affected me in any way shape or form in 18 months. Admitedly I don't have a blu-ray drive and I don't watch any DRM'd HD content, but it hasn't stopped me from doing anything I did before DRM.
It's part of my personality to tell it like I see it, and I'm just getting so tired of the general Microsoft and in particular the Vista bashing. Vista really isn't all that bad, it's not particularly exciting, and a few features were implemented incorrectly(UAC for one), but I've most certainly used worse operating systems, and it's not deserving of even half the vitriole that it gets. Microsoft did some moderately dodgy things, twenty years ago. They've released some less than perfect software, and their less than perfect software is still beating Linux on the desktop. It's going to continue beating Linux on the desktop for the forseeable future too. They have a somewhat annoying obsession with crippling their own innovations to try and keep people using Windows, even when there isn't any viable alternative. A lot of this might just be that they don't know how to turn things like silverlight or.NET into cash in any way other than by selling OS licenses, and maybe they need a more creative management team. In the grand scheme of things, they're far from being even the most evil software company in the world, let alone the most evil company in the world.
There are places in this world for open source software, and there are places in this world for closed software. Sometimes we need to reward innovation with money, and sometimes it costs money to get programmers to do the uncool, unsexy, generally unpleasant things that are necessary for business to function. Some companies can find ways to do these things and still release their software open source(mostly companies whose prime market is the enterprise and so can get reliable support money), but some can't. Until and unless the linux community can find a way to work with the companies who can't there is never going to be a year of the linux desktop. There may be a "year of the proprietary internet appliance that happens to be running embedded linux", but there won't be linux on the desktop.
Ideology and the real world don't mix. RMS has had some brilliant ideas, and has likely forseen some problems that we haven't yet dealt with. He's contributed amazingly to the world of computing, but he's a zealot and an extremist. There seems to be no room for pragmatism and compromise in his world. The world of business, the one which pays all our salaries and which pays for all the bits of software which has to be made but is
I'm don't make binary kernel drivers, I do however use hardware which uses binary kernel drivers and I've seen enough of the bullshit.
Binary kernel drivers are illegal because the kernel devs want them to be, it wouldn't take all that much to modify the license to allow it or to provide some sort of LGPL interface they were willing to support.
I defend Microsoft not because they're a particularly great company, but because I feel someone has to. The linux community does a lot of wonderful things, but they run around pissing off whoever they feel like, taking their code in any direction they feel like and ignore whatever laws(stupid though those laws may be) that they fell like.
Microsoft doesn't get to do that, they can't just stop being backwards compatible with all the shit software that people have written. They can't change their APIs every five minutes. They can't ignore US law no matter how stupid or idiotic they might believe it to be.
Linux does some wonderful things for the world, but there's just too much ideology to it. Why on earth do we have a kernel which you can't create drivers for without violating the GPL. Isn't it better to have companies which support Linux but don't open source their drivers than to not have support at all? I know RMS believes that wherever we don't have an open source solution we should go without or build one, but this just isn't practical for most IT people, not even counting everyone else.
Make a correction to that. The linux community will help you with your drivers, if you're willing to open source them or release detailed hardware specifications, eventually, if someone who cares owns that hardware, and for as long a driver developer still cares.
If you want to maintain your own driver because for any number of reasons you can't, or don't want to open source your drivers or release your specification, then they'll do their damndest to make your life as miserable as humanly possible.
There are a lot of good reasons why companies wouldn't be able to, or want to do this. This however means that they've got to pull the finger out and keep their drivers up to date. Keeping your drivers up to date on Windows is a heck of a lot easier(for the most part you've only got to do major modifications every couple of years or more when a new windows version is released) than trying to keep them up to date on the kernel(which can vary rather wildly from version to version and may change just to shaft you).
Generally speaking though, these hardware manufacturers(especially in today's climate where upgrading is substantially less necessary than a few years ago), don't want to upgrade their drivers, and wouldn't want to upgrade them on linux either. They want you to buy new hardware.
These same manufacturers saw Vista as a way to finally get someone buying new stuff again, and a lot of them just didn't update drivers simply to try and generate more sales. They'd have done exactly the same thing on Linux.
Your webcams don't work in Windows because the people who made them want you to buy a new one. They work in linux because someone managed to reverse engineer the spec and released drivers. Microsoft can't do that, just like Microsoft can't provide HD-DVD playback without DRM, not because they're not technically capable, but because they're too big a legal target.
Why would they export cheaper? If you can produce something for $10, and everyone else can produce it at $500 why would you sell it at $15 when you can sell it for $499 or even for $510 and still undercut your competition. Capitalism isn't about selling at the lowest price it's about maximizing profits. That's why you don't see large companies frequently undercutting one another. They realize that all that will do in the end is drive margins down to the lowest level that can be sustained, and all for a few months competitive advantage. Better to be roughly equal and have high margins than be the winner for 6 months and end up just barely scraping by.
The problem with revolution is that it generally tends to either be relatively short lived, or simply replace one set of tyrants with another.
Even the American revolution only localized essentially the same system. True it got rid of the king, but the Brittish have been cutting the power of their monarchy for more than a millenia now, and by 1776 the King wasn't all that powerful anymore.
The Russians and the Chinese weren't that much better for all that they pretended to change the underlying dynamic of the country.
Revolution is like everything else in life, the people who take the risks win big or lose big, for everyone else not a whole lot changes. Personally I'm not particularly convinced that a successful slashdot revolution would be any better for the country than the current lot of idiots.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again. If you want third parties in power in the federal government(and not just independents who are essentially members of one of the existing parties) then you need to campaign not for the third party of your choice, but for run off voting(instant or otherwise).
Without this you're pretty much never going to see a third party get into power without a massive shift in viewpoint amongst the voting population.
Right now, unless the vast majority of people switch with you(which doesn't happen for third parties without a massive shift in society) voting for a third party is essentially voting for the majority party on the opposite side of the fence. A vote for Nader was a vote for Bush.
It shouldn't be that way, but in the current system it is and always will be.
With run off voting(ie a system where someone must get greater than 50% and people get to select their second, third, fourth choices(or the party they voted for negotiates for concessions if they haven't selected a preference) you still end up with two parties in the end, but you can vote your conscience without getting the opposite of what you want.
With instant run off voting you could have voted Nader and given your second preference to Gore(presuming that's who your second preference actually was) or on the other side of the fence voted for Buchanan and given your second preference to Bush Sr in 1992.
You would probably still not have gotten your third party candidate in, because tbh third party candidates are usually too extreme to get 50% or more of the vote, but you wouldn't have ended up with Bush Jr or Clinton instead of the major party closest to what you actually believe(unless that's what you wanted).
You may say "what's the point if third parties still won't get in", and the answer is that gradual political shift becomes possible. You can vote for libertarian, green, or whatever other third party you choose and still get the lesser of two evils. So an everyone else, and so your third party will get more votes, eventually possibly enough to actually win. You can also show your second choice where the political winds are blowing. Both the Democrats and the Republicans could see where the voter base actually is and shift their policies accordingly.
Without run off voting, this cannot happen, and will not happen without a massive shift in society. People have to be sure that voting their conscience isn't going to get them the 4-8 years of the exact opposite of what they want(as happened with both Clinton and Dubya when people voted third party) before the sensible ones will vote third party.
I never voted third party in the US, and I never will, but since moving to a country(of which I'm also a citizen) which has run off voting, I've never voted for a major. I can do this because I know that voting for what I believe won't end up giving me the opposite of what I want.
If you want to know what happened to the Republican party, have a listen to McCain's concession speech.
McCain shows integrity, dignity, and all the things which made me want to vote for him in 2000(not that I got a chance) left winger though I might be.
If you listen to his supporters though, you don't hear any of that, you hear boos, and hootin and hollerin, you hear the essence of what the republican party has become.
The Republican party has become not a party of fiscal conservatism, not a party of small government, but a party of fear, hatred, intolerance and greed.
I'm thrilled that Obama won the presidency, but watching that concession speech made me sad because the John McCain who ran in 2000 and the John McCain in that speech showed a level of reason and dignity that reaches accross party lines. That John McCain would have made a good president, but he didn't run that campaign, he didn't choose that VP, and he didn't cater to those voters.
Instead he ran a dirty campaign, chose Sarah Palin, and catered to the ignorant and bigotted.
There are in this world genuine supporters of the ideals of the republican party, and I can understand their view points, even if I don't always agree with them. Unfortunately the party has sold itself to a group of people I cannot and never will find common political ground with.
Whenever I read that stat I have to give a little cheer for Russ Feingold, Senator for Wisconsin and the only senator to vote against that thing, even if he only did so because he thought they ought to read it first. I lived in Wisconsin when this was going on, and he made me proud to have done so. Only politician I've ever written anything to, and it was a congratulations.
He sells out a bit to the gun nuts(has to in a hunting state), but otherwise a great man.
I didn't RTFA of course, and I didn't say that this was definitely the case.
That said, a tv made for the chinese market probably wouldn't work in the US(or even plug into the wall) and China has an iron grip on a lot of their trade practices so it might be possible for someone to send you one.
You've also got to consider that a PC in the US which could run WoW would cost you several months wages at that rate, which sort of indicates that they might possibly be getting stuff a little cheaper if they can make a living that way.
You also haven't addressed the idea that there's more to wealth than big screen tv's and new cars.
I'm not saying that $145 a month is a massive amount of money in China, I don't live there so I really don't know, I'd say it's not an unreasonable living though, particularly for non manual labour.
I'm also the first to acknowledge(having been a WoW player) that while WoW can be fun, if all you ever did was gold farm and you had quotas to deliver and all that stress, it wouldn't be all that cushy a job.
If you buy a big screen TV in china, made by a Chinese company, who is paying Chinese workers at Chinese pay scales to make the TV why would they have to sell it to other Chinese people for any particularly high price. Same goes for a car.
The materials for making these things aren't really all that expensive, and if everyone involved is making Chinese salaries the labor costs would be a lot lower too.
Just because the Chinese don't sell their TV's to us at a price you could afford on $145 a week doesn't mean that they don't sell those TV's internally for a price that you could afford on $145.
There's also more to measuring wealth than TV's and cars.
Well yes, but for the purposes of this particular argument I was talking more about criminal cases.
The independent judiciary is slightly less important in the case of civil trials as, generally speaking there are far fewer decisions of law in civil cases, and the jury(the people) are more heavily involved in the process anyway.
There probably would be few disadvantages and possibly some advantages to elected judges for civil trials(presuming you put a stop to being able to sue someone for damages caused by a crime they were found not guilty of), generally the mob doesn't care much one way or another in civil cases, and when they do it tends generally to be anti-corporate which fits the slashdot ethos fairly well.
That said, unless we want to have two systems of judges(and never the twain shall meet), then it's important that the judiciary be independent, because it's the only way for criminal trials to have any hope of being fair. They're still not generally fair because fairness isn't a particularly common human characteristic and juries are generally chosen based on their stupidity, but they're fairer than they would otherwise be. The police are nearly always "absolutely" convinced that the person they think is guilty is guilty even when there's no real evidence, and the mob is pretty much out for blood against anyone they believe committed certain kinds of crimes(particularly involving children), without independent judges all the problems of the modern jury system would be multiplied ten fold.
The creation of the law is "by the people, for the people"(legislative branch), the enforcement of the law is "by the people, for the people"(executive branch), these groups must be elected and for the most part are(we don't vote for everyone who creates or enforces the law, but we do vote for their bosses who are responsible for these activities). Whether that process is working as intended is another question, but it's set up correctly and should in theory provide the appropriate represenation.
The application of the law is not "by the people, for the people", nor can it ever be. The application of the law, is by the law for the law with a smattering of justice thrown in depending on how just the law is in the first place. The people can(in theory) change the law, they can certainly change the people who made it, they can change the people who enforce it, and they can even change the constitution if enough of them want to.
They can't decide how the laws which have been written will be applied(without rewriting them at least), and should not be able to. It is the judiciary's job to decide whether the law is in violation of the constitution, and whether everything has been done according to the law. We have juries to decide facts, but we need independent and ideally impartial judges to decide the law.
We need this because neither the mob, nor the government can be trusted to protect the rights of those it believes guilty of a crime. If either group had complete control of the application of the law then anyone who the public(or government) believed was guilty of a crime would have no protections under the law. No judge who has to face reelection will ever throw out evidence against someone accused of a crime which the public finds particularly heinous because it was illegaly obtained. No judge who has to face reappointment by the government will protect the rights of someone who speaks out against that government.
The law must presume that everyone is innocent until proven guilty, and must protect the rights not only of the innocent, but also the accused, and even the guilty. It must do this because the protection of those rights is what makes the USA what it is, it is, or at least was, the shining light of our society, it's what allows any degree of fairness in our legal system whatsoever, and allows us the freedoms which construct our lives.
The people have the right, and the ability to determine what those rights are, they have the right and the ability to determine both the content and the enforcement of the law, but they cannot control its application, because they cannot(at least as a group) be trusted to treat everyone, even the guilty, as equal before the law.
That doesn't mean that judges are perfect, or that they are always capable of the impartiality which they are charged to uphold, but an educated, reasoned individual has a lot better chance than a mob. If you want to continually reelect/appoint judges then you can kiss you rights goodbye if anyone ever accuses you(guilty or not) of anything which gets the mobs blood boiling.
My problem with brokers is that they while they create "wealth" they rarely create value.
These days stock brokers are more interested in making a quick buck at anyone's expense than they are in really investing.
Investment creates value because it allows companies and individuals to create more value, but playing the markets, short selling, and all the other things they get up to now doesn't even do that.
I patently dislike people making themselves rich without creating value because these are the scum sucking weasels who created the situation we're in now. Billions of dollars of worthlessness that we've had to bail out with billions of dollars of money the government doesn't have.
There's also nothing wrong with "wealth creation" per see, there's just something spectacularly wrong with focusing on wealth creation and not being at all concerned about where all that created wealth ends up.
Neo -liberal capitalism provides excessive reward to people who produce absolutely nothing whatever.
Well, when I say that comparatively everyone got poorer, it's because of inflation.
If you split 1000 dollars between two people, give 100 dollars to one person and 900 dollars to the other, then your rich person has 90% of the wealth and your poor person has 10%.
Now lets say that you "create" an additional $2900 and you give $2700 to the rich person and $200 to the poor person. The poor person's wealth has now tripled, but he now only owns 7.6% of the wealth(300/3900). His wealth has tripled, but he's actually poorer than he used to be in real terms.
My problem with wealth creation is not that it's fundamentally a bad idea. Certainly creating value is a good thing(ie making your knife).
My problem with wealth creation is that, in practice, under the kinds of system that the republicans run, the vast majority of that wealth goes the same group of people who have most of it now.
This means that due to fun things like inflation when their income increases by a greater percentage than yours does(through all this created wealth), that you get poorer.
If both increase at the same rate, nothing much happens at all(there's just more stuff).
What real wealth distribution is about, at least IMO, is ensuring that the regular schmoes personal wealth increases at a greater rate than the folks who already have everything. This can be done without taking anything away from anyone. It does however mean that while the vast majority get richer, the rich get overall poorer.
The problems you're talking about are not caused by the bailout, they're caused by the fact that the US government hasn't got the balls to actually socialize anything and instead just gave them money.
If you or I(presuming we had that kind of money) bought out a billion dollars worth of bank stock we'd be part owners of the bank, and have a seat on the board. Depending on how big our stake was, we might even run the bank(certainly the 79% of AIG the government owns would give them control). In that situation if anyone blew our money on something stupid we'd shit can them.
The Bush government however doesn't have the stones to admit to what they're doing so they're giving the corps all the money and not getting back any of the say on how it gets spent.
That's not a problem with the bailout as such it's a problem with the government. They also should have done what the brits did and fire everyone at the top of all the banks they bailed out.
As for dropping the interest rates to zero, that wouldn't have helped. Pretty much every business needs credit to run and the corporations they bailed out were the ones who do the lending, if they'd gone under there wouldn't have been anyone to do the lending.
I'm not a big fan of the bailout, and I certainly think that it should have had a hell of a lot more strings attached. I also fully understand how the citizens of a country where the government doesn't give a flying fuck about what happens to them as individuals, the American people(myself included even if I don't live there anymore) might be a little pissed that corporations get unemployment benefits and they don't.
That said, it doesn't change the fact that for reasons of economics as well as domestic and foreign policy the US government couldn't let the banks/insurers rot.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it depends a lot on what you're talking about as a soul.
Do I necessarily believe that when you die a translucent version of you goes off to a magical happy place, or gets burned forever. Well I think you can tell from my tone that I don't. That doesn't mean it's not true of course, merely that I don't believe it.
On the other hand do I believe that there seems to be something about the whole of a living being(particularly a conscious one) that is more than the sum of its parts? Definitely.
Something differentiates us from meat, something about a whole bunch of nerve cells meshed together creates a person with emotions and needs beyong biological survival.
To use a computer analogy, when we study the human body we can see the components, all the physical bits and bobs which make up a human, but we can't see or understand the software. We don't know why putting all that stuff together makes a person, or why people who are genetically similar can have vastly different personalities and vice versa.
For me the soul isn't some sort of immortal me that goes off to heaven or hell(though it might be, I've never died and no one who has died back has told me what it's like), it's the essence of what makes a person who they are, and that's a hell of a lot more complicated than just a biological machine.
Cogito Ergo Sum.
Whether animals have souls I'm not sure, they certainly seem to have something which makes them them, even if "them" is generally less complicated than "us".
We have no measurable evidence of anything we might call a soul, but we have evidence that there is something which differentiates life from meat, and that life is both changeable in nature, and able to route around damage to the physical body. If we define that thing as the soul(as I do), then even though we can't see it, it must be there.
There's nothing wrong with hiring older people, and there's nothing wrong with hiring young people, but hire them on an individual basis, not because of their age. :P). I've also met older IT folks who have never progressed and are still stuck in versions of technology that haven't existed in more than a decade.
I've met older IT folks with lots of experience who knew all the quirks of what they were working on, had invaluable industry experience and were worth their weight in gold(and with older IT folks, that's usually a lot
I've met young folks who thought they were the best they'd ever be, or who thought they ought to be earning 6 figures right out of the gate and I've met young folks who were flexible, creative, and inspired.
Hire the best person for the job, if that's some guy with 20 years experience or a grad right out of university it doesn't matter. Experience is certainly valuable, but in this industry so much changes so quickly that it isn't as valuable as it is in other places. That doesn't mean you shouldn't hire older technicians, but it does mean that just because someone is older doesn't mean they'll necessarily be better.
Whatever your personal preferences are, the last thing you want is someone who isn't right for the job, or isn't right for the team, hire the best person who applies, and hire them for the job you're giving them, not based on some sort of "this is the ideal candidate" bullshit.
This is about certain kinds of electrical components which needed to be made out of PZT.
You'd be surprised how good your internet connection can be if you're willing to pay for it, eve from those guys. It's still not 99.999%, but realistically you only get 5 9's for mission critical stuff because it's bloody expensive. Your work/home computer doesn't have anything close to 5 9's.
It's also not supported by the vast majority of portable media players out there(I have one which does and I selected it specifically for this feature), and that unless you have an excessively large legal music collection(nothing you download will ever be ogg encoded and re-encoding is rather silly) if you're not worried about portability you'd be better off with something lossless.
That aside I think the point of the test is to find errors in the encoders so a standard(lowish so compression is more likely to cause errors) quality level, and a single format are probably pretty necessary.
Despite all the whinging about rhythms, and clock changing and all that, that's all that the fight over daylight savings has really ever been.
Morning people like getting up early, they tend to have ended up in work that starts early, they exercise in the morning, so in the summer during DST they lose an hour of their precious mornings in exchange for afternoon time they don't particularly want or need.
Since they also tend to get out work a little earlier they're also more affected by late afternoon heat.
The rest of us find trading an hour of daylight which was happening when we were asleep and if anything just interfered with our ability to sleep being transitioned to the afternoon when we're actually awake and functional and it's light outside so we can go for walks and the like to be quite a good deal.
True, we could all get up earlier, or shift our working hours so they align with yours(early), but realistically in modern society you need to have someone working the later shifts as well as someone working the earlier shifts. If we all started getting up earlier and working earlier then you'd have to get up earlier and start working earlier too. Which of course would result in exactly the same situation as daylight savings time only instead of changing the clocks twice a year you'd just start working earlier and it'd be just as tedious and disruptive as daylight savings.
As for the lights argument, the daylight savings time argument is about going outside, if you don't go outside then it really doesn't matter what time it is, just turn on the lights.
(Un)Fortunately, we don't have enough street lights to make it daylight outside at night, so lights just don't solve that problem. Lights won't make your drive to work in the morning daylight and they won't make it daylight in the evening when people want to play with their kids in the park either.
We live in a 24 hour society and that means that we need night people as much as we need day people, and everyone in between. Do I particularly like driving to work in the dark, hell no, and I understand your perspective. I know you like getting up early in the morning and I appreciate that you want it to be light when you do so. In return I'd appreciate some concern for people like me who don't get up that early, but who probably work later than you do. Society needs both of us, and DST is about trying to find a compromise between us. Maybe it's not perfect, but just because mornings work for you doesn't mean they work for everyone.
Can't really say I've noticed much in the way of light quality difference. Nor for that matter have I ever actually broken a CFL.
Traditional fluorescents do suck, they're expensive and tedious to replace and do generally result in poor light and when they get older flicker and all that sort of annoyance(they're not too bad when they're brand new, but that's not all that often).
Generally, I've had pretty much nothing but good things to say about CFL bulbs, they last for bloody ever, you can get a nice white light(if you like that sort of thing which I do), they're cheaper to run, and they're good for the environment, ticks all the boxes for me.
Realistically we're still not going to see much for quite a while. From all accounts creative's attempts at a linux driver were crap(I didn't bother trying them after reading what people were having to do to make them even compile), and there will still probably have to be a complete rewrite, but at least with the new license they'll be able to reuse some of that code and it might speed things up a bit.
Linux has no concept of change control for the most part, you have to upgrade everything or nothing, stuff changes whenever it suits the developers to do so. I know I'm not the only person who has noticed this sort of thing. Xorg has changed the way it handles peripherals a half a dozen times in the last few years.
There are certainly benefits to doing this, it means cleaner, faster code, and fewer bugs.
It also means that you can never be absolutely sure that anything open source or otherwise will ever work on any particular version of linux(new open source stuff won't always work with older system libraries, old closed source stuff won't always work with new libraries) and makes getting a vendor to sign off on support for any particular distribution(other than redhat, and we're a novell/suse shop) is more than a little tedious.
Like I said, there are a lot of advantages to it, but I just get a little frustrated when I see people on slashdot constantly bashing Microsoft. They're not really all that evil anymore, even if Steve Balmer does look like some sort of alien. Vista had a lot of problems, most of them weren't Microsoft's fault and most of them were fixed. Vista has some tedious DRM, but it hasn't affected me in any way shape or form in 18 months. Admitedly I don't have a blu-ray drive and I don't watch any DRM'd HD content, but it hasn't stopped me from doing anything I did before DRM.
It's part of my personality to tell it like I see it, and I'm just getting so tired of the general Microsoft and in particular the Vista bashing. Vista really isn't all that bad, it's not particularly exciting, and a few features were implemented incorrectly(UAC for one), but I've most certainly used worse operating systems, and it's not deserving of even half the vitriole that it gets. Microsoft did some moderately dodgy things, twenty years ago. They've released some less than perfect software, and their less than perfect software is still beating Linux on the desktop. It's going to continue beating Linux on the desktop for the forseeable future too. They have a somewhat annoying obsession with crippling their own innovations to try and keep people using Windows, even when there isn't any viable alternative. A lot of this might just be that they don't know how to turn things like silverlight or .NET into cash in any way other than by selling OS licenses, and maybe they need a more creative management team. In the grand scheme of things, they're far from being even the most evil software company in the world, let alone the most evil company in the world.
There are places in this world for open source software, and there are places in this world for closed software. Sometimes we need to reward innovation with money, and sometimes it costs money to get programmers to do the uncool, unsexy, generally unpleasant things that are necessary for business to function. Some companies can find ways to do these things and still release their software open source(mostly companies whose prime market is the enterprise and so can get reliable support money), but some can't. Until and unless the linux community can find a way to work with the companies who can't there is never going to be a year of the linux desktop. There may be a "year of the proprietary internet appliance that happens to be running embedded linux", but there won't be linux on the desktop.
Ideology and the real world don't mix. RMS has had some brilliant ideas, and has likely forseen some problems that we haven't yet dealt with. He's contributed amazingly to the world of computing, but he's a zealot and an extremist. There seems to be no room for pragmatism and compromise in his world. The world of business, the one which pays all our salaries and which pays for all the bits of software which has to be made but is
Even then they didn't "get away with it" there was just no effective way of doing anything else.
Binary kernel drivers are illegal because the kernel devs want them to be, it wouldn't take all that much to modify the license to allow it or to provide some sort of LGPL interface they were willing to support.
I defend Microsoft not because they're a particularly great company, but because I feel someone has to. The linux community does a lot of wonderful things, but they run around pissing off whoever they feel like, taking their code in any direction they feel like and ignore whatever laws(stupid though those laws may be) that they fell like.
Microsoft doesn't get to do that, they can't just stop being backwards compatible with all the shit software that people have written. They can't change their APIs every five minutes. They can't ignore US law no matter how stupid or idiotic they might believe it to be.
Linux does some wonderful things for the world, but there's just too much ideology to it. Why on earth do we have a kernel which you can't create drivers for without violating the GPL. Isn't it better to have companies which support Linux but don't open source their drivers than to not have support at all? I know RMS believes that wherever we don't have an open source solution we should go without or build one, but this just isn't practical for most IT people, not even counting everyone else.
If you want to maintain your own driver because for any number of reasons you can't, or don't want to open source your drivers or release your specification, then they'll do their damndest to make your life as miserable as humanly possible.
There are a lot of good reasons why companies wouldn't be able to, or want to do this. This however means that they've got to pull the finger out and keep their drivers up to date. Keeping your drivers up to date on Windows is a heck of a lot easier(for the most part you've only got to do major modifications every couple of years or more when a new windows version is released) than trying to keep them up to date on the kernel(which can vary rather wildly from version to version and may change just to shaft you).
Generally speaking though, these hardware manufacturers(especially in today's climate where upgrading is substantially less necessary than a few years ago), don't want to upgrade their drivers, and wouldn't want to upgrade them on linux either. They want you to buy new hardware.
These same manufacturers saw Vista as a way to finally get someone buying new stuff again, and a lot of them just didn't update drivers simply to try and generate more sales. They'd have done exactly the same thing on Linux.
Your webcams don't work in Windows because the people who made them want you to buy a new one. They work in linux because someone managed to reverse engineer the spec and released drivers. Microsoft can't do that, just like Microsoft can't provide HD-DVD playback without DRM, not because they're not technically capable, but because they're too big a legal target.
Why would they export cheaper? If you can produce something for $10, and everyone else can produce it at $500 why would you sell it at $15 when you can sell it for $499 or even for $510 and still undercut your competition. Capitalism isn't about selling at the lowest price it's about maximizing profits. That's why you don't see large companies frequently undercutting one another. They realize that all that will do in the end is drive margins down to the lowest level that can be sustained, and all for a few months competitive advantage. Better to be roughly equal and have high margins than be the winner for 6 months and end up just barely scraping by.
Even the American revolution only localized essentially the same system. True it got rid of the king, but the Brittish have been cutting the power of their monarchy for more than a millenia now, and by 1776 the King wasn't all that powerful anymore.
The Russians and the Chinese weren't that much better for all that they pretended to change the underlying dynamic of the country.
Revolution is like everything else in life, the people who take the risks win big or lose big, for everyone else not a whole lot changes. Personally I'm not particularly convinced that a successful slashdot revolution would be any better for the country than the current lot of idiots.
Without this you're pretty much never going to see a third party get into power without a massive shift in viewpoint amongst the voting population.
Right now, unless the vast majority of people switch with you(which doesn't happen for third parties without a massive shift in society) voting for a third party is essentially voting for the majority party on the opposite side of the fence. A vote for Nader was a vote for Bush.
It shouldn't be that way, but in the current system it is and always will be.
With run off voting(ie a system where someone must get greater than 50% and people get to select their second, third, fourth choices(or the party they voted for negotiates for concessions if they haven't selected a preference) you still end up with two parties in the end, but you can vote your conscience without getting the opposite of what you want.
With instant run off voting you could have voted Nader and given your second preference to Gore(presuming that's who your second preference actually was) or on the other side of the fence voted for Buchanan and given your second preference to Bush Sr in 1992.
You would probably still not have gotten your third party candidate in, because tbh third party candidates are usually too extreme to get 50% or more of the vote, but you wouldn't have ended up with Bush Jr or Clinton instead of the major party closest to what you actually believe(unless that's what you wanted).
You may say "what's the point if third parties still won't get in", and the answer is that gradual political shift becomes possible. You can vote for libertarian, green, or whatever other third party you choose and still get the lesser of two evils. So an everyone else, and so your third party will get more votes, eventually possibly enough to actually win. You can also show your second choice where the political winds are blowing. Both the Democrats and the Republicans could see where the voter base actually is and shift their policies accordingly.
Without run off voting, this cannot happen, and will not happen without a massive shift in society. People have to be sure that voting their conscience isn't going to get them the 4-8 years of the exact opposite of what they want(as happened with both Clinton and Dubya when people voted third party) before the sensible ones will vote third party.
I never voted third party in the US, and I never will, but since moving to a country(of which I'm also a citizen) which has run off voting, I've never voted for a major. I can do this because I know that voting for what I believe won't end up giving me the opposite of what I want.
McCain shows integrity, dignity, and all the things which made me want to vote for him in 2000(not that I got a chance) left winger though I might be.
If you listen to his supporters though, you don't hear any of that, you hear boos, and hootin and hollerin, you hear the essence of what the republican party has become.
The Republican party has become not a party of fiscal conservatism, not a party of small government, but a party of fear, hatred, intolerance and greed.
I'm thrilled that Obama won the presidency, but watching that concession speech made me sad because the John McCain who ran in 2000 and the John McCain in that speech showed a level of reason and dignity that reaches accross party lines. That John McCain would have made a good president, but he didn't run that campaign, he didn't choose that VP, and he didn't cater to those voters.
Instead he ran a dirty campaign, chose Sarah Palin, and catered to the ignorant and bigotted.
There are in this world genuine supporters of the ideals of the republican party, and I can understand their view points, even if I don't always agree with them. Unfortunately the party has sold itself to a group of people I cannot and never will find common political ground with.
The religious right is destroying America.
He sells out a bit to the gun nuts(has to in a hunting state), but otherwise a great man.
That said, a tv made for the chinese market probably wouldn't work in the US(or even plug into the wall) and China has an iron grip on a lot of their trade practices so it might be possible for someone to send you one.
You've also got to consider that a PC in the US which could run WoW would cost you several months wages at that rate, which sort of indicates that they might possibly be getting stuff a little cheaper if they can make a living that way.
You also haven't addressed the idea that there's more to wealth than big screen tv's and new cars.
I'm not saying that $145 a month is a massive amount of money in China, I don't live there so I really don't know, I'd say it's not an unreasonable living though, particularly for non manual labour.
I'm also the first to acknowledge(having been a WoW player) that while WoW can be fun, if all you ever did was gold farm and you had quotas to deliver and all that stress, it wouldn't be all that cushy a job.
If you buy a big screen TV in china, made by a Chinese company, who is paying Chinese workers at Chinese pay scales to make the TV why would they have to sell it to other Chinese people for any particularly high price. Same goes for a car.
The materials for making these things aren't really all that expensive, and if everyone involved is making Chinese salaries the labor costs would be a lot lower too.
Just because the Chinese don't sell their TV's to us at a price you could afford on $145 a week doesn't mean that they don't sell those TV's internally for a price that you could afford on $145.
There's also more to measuring wealth than TV's and cars.
The independent judiciary is slightly less important in the case of civil trials as, generally speaking there are far fewer decisions of law in civil cases, and the jury(the people) are more heavily involved in the process anyway.
There probably would be few disadvantages and possibly some advantages to elected judges for civil trials(presuming you put a stop to being able to sue someone for damages caused by a crime they were found not guilty of), generally the mob doesn't care much one way or another in civil cases, and when they do it tends generally to be anti-corporate which fits the slashdot ethos fairly well.
That said, unless we want to have two systems of judges(and never the twain shall meet), then it's important that the judiciary be independent, because it's the only way for criminal trials to have any hope of being fair. They're still not generally fair because fairness isn't a particularly common human characteristic and juries are generally chosen based on their stupidity, but they're fairer than they would otherwise be. The police are nearly always "absolutely" convinced that the person they think is guilty is guilty even when there's no real evidence, and the mob is pretty much out for blood against anyone they believe committed certain kinds of crimes(particularly involving children), without independent judges all the problems of the modern jury system would be multiplied ten fold.
The application of the law is not "by the people, for the people", nor can it ever be. The application of the law, is by the law for the law with a smattering of justice thrown in depending on how just the law is in the first place. The people can(in theory) change the law, they can certainly change the people who made it, they can change the people who enforce it, and they can even change the constitution if enough of them want to.
They can't decide how the laws which have been written will be applied(without rewriting them at least), and should not be able to. It is the judiciary's job to decide whether the law is in violation of the constitution, and whether everything has been done according to the law. We have juries to decide facts, but we need independent and ideally impartial judges to decide the law.
We need this because neither the mob, nor the government can be trusted to protect the rights of those it believes guilty of a crime. If either group had complete control of the application of the law then anyone who the public(or government) believed was guilty of a crime would have no protections under the law. No judge who has to face reelection will ever throw out evidence against someone accused of a crime which the public finds particularly heinous because it was illegaly obtained. No judge who has to face reappointment by the government will protect the rights of someone who speaks out against that government.
The law must presume that everyone is innocent until proven guilty, and must protect the rights not only of the innocent, but also the accused, and even the guilty. It must do this because the protection of those rights is what makes the USA what it is, it is, or at least was, the shining light of our society, it's what allows any degree of fairness in our legal system whatsoever, and allows us the freedoms which construct our lives.
The people have the right, and the ability to determine what those rights are, they have the right and the ability to determine both the content and the enforcement of the law, but they cannot control its application, because they cannot(at least as a group) be trusted to treat everyone, even the guilty, as equal before the law.
That doesn't mean that judges are perfect, or that they are always capable of the impartiality which they are charged to uphold, but an educated, reasoned individual has a lot better chance than a mob. If you want to continually reelect/appoint judges then you can kiss you rights goodbye if anyone ever accuses you(guilty or not) of anything which gets the mobs blood boiling.
These days stock brokers are more interested in making a quick buck at anyone's expense than they are in really investing.
Investment creates value because it allows companies and individuals to create more value, but playing the markets, short selling, and all the other things they get up to now doesn't even do that.
I patently dislike people making themselves rich without creating value because these are the scum sucking weasels who created the situation we're in now. Billions of dollars of worthlessness that we've had to bail out with billions of dollars of money the government doesn't have.
There's also nothing wrong with "wealth creation" per see, there's just something spectacularly wrong with focusing on wealth creation and not being at all concerned about where all that created wealth ends up.
Neo -liberal capitalism provides excessive reward to people who produce absolutely nothing whatever.
If you split 1000 dollars between two people, give 100 dollars to one person and 900 dollars to the other, then your rich person has 90% of the wealth and your poor person has 10%.
Now lets say that you "create" an additional $2900 and you give $2700 to the rich person and $200 to the poor person. The poor person's wealth has now tripled, but he now only owns 7.6% of the wealth(300/3900). His wealth has tripled, but he's actually poorer than he used to be in real terms.
My problem with wealth creation is that, in practice, under the kinds of system that the republicans run, the vast majority of that wealth goes the same group of people who have most of it now.
This means that due to fun things like inflation when their income increases by a greater percentage than yours does(through all this created wealth), that you get poorer.
If both increase at the same rate, nothing much happens at all(there's just more stuff).
What real wealth distribution is about, at least IMO, is ensuring that the regular schmoes personal wealth increases at a greater rate than the folks who already have everything. This can be done without taking anything away from anyone. It does however mean that while the vast majority get richer, the rich get overall poorer.
If you or I(presuming we had that kind of money) bought out a billion dollars worth of bank stock we'd be part owners of the bank, and have a seat on the board. Depending on how big our stake was, we might even run the bank(certainly the 79% of AIG the government owns would give them control). In that situation if anyone blew our money on something stupid we'd shit can them.
The Bush government however doesn't have the stones to admit to what they're doing so they're giving the corps all the money and not getting back any of the say on how it gets spent.
That's not a problem with the bailout as such it's a problem with the government. They also should have done what the brits did and fire everyone at the top of all the banks they bailed out.
As for dropping the interest rates to zero, that wouldn't have helped. Pretty much every business needs credit to run and the corporations they bailed out were the ones who do the lending, if they'd gone under there wouldn't have been anyone to do the lending.
I'm not a big fan of the bailout, and I certainly think that it should have had a hell of a lot more strings attached. I also fully understand how the citizens of a country where the government doesn't give a flying fuck about what happens to them as individuals, the American people(myself included even if I don't live there anymore) might be a little pissed that corporations get unemployment benefits and they don't.
That said, it doesn't change the fact that for reasons of economics as well as domestic and foreign policy the US government couldn't let the banks/insurers rot.