Um. Socialist bullshit would have Celine paying you for being an emerging artist out of her obscene profits. This gouge of the grassroots is something else, not socialism.
Ars Technica reported on S.Jobs eating some humble pie in august... he admitted that MobileMe wasn't up to "apple" standards and they screwed up by rushing releases of its features.
Apple always seems to have one or two major screwups in process at any one time... keeping their product line is slim probably helps them manage that sort of thing (and protect the all-important brand rep).
Then there's the intentional user-abusive @#!$* they pull---last night a client brought over his new very Sleek 'n Slick macbook for setup, all excited... until I said "how are you going to use this to work with that fancy HD camera you bought last year? No Firewire..."
I'm aware of the different subgroups (1000's) of native americans, but I didn't have room for all of them.
OK! but this is a nerd site--if I called the computer case and everything in it "the hard drive" (like most of my elderly customers do) would I be excused? Likewise, authoritatively referring to a particular plains culture as "the american indians" is not developing your credibility.
I'm responding because you present yourself as an expert, and your conclusions as obvious, and yet your attitudes and tone reinforce popular prejudice rather than 100 years of anthropology and 40 years of ecological studies.
more population, these easy sedentary populations wouldn't be possible. While they might have worked less than we do to feed themselves, ask yourself this: in a bucolic place with no warfare and no birth control, why would a population stay relatively stable for generations? Why would no agriculture be needed? Because most of them were dying in childbirth/as children/at young ages. Is this your conservation ethic? High mortality rates?
Again with the authoritative voice, but obviously no research or experience to back it up. What do you know about the hard physical and intellectual work of a sedentary quasi-paleolithic life? Ask yourself this: what was the actual rate of pacific nw infant mortality and disease pre-contact, and how does it compare to various modern societies? Did a superior diet, effective plant-based medicine for chronic ailments, and vigorous lifestyle make the data comparisons more difficult? Are your conclusions based on established facts or your personal (non-ideological, of course) inference? I expect you'll be very surprised if you look deeply enough at the data.
hunter-gatherer systems of knowledge are complex and work from different paradigms than urban ones, but they are no more complex than those, and they are no more moral or noble or whatever it is you're trying to argue.
Well there, see? a fine illustration--you're confused about a basic point---that the issue isn't a dick-measuring competition of complexity, but whether or not civilization loses the ingrained conservation ethic that we've been developing discretely all over the globe for a 100K years. The notion that people without Viagra or skyscrapers might have a complex regional trade-kinship-sovereignty-narrative system that spans multiple cultures and is devoted to "resource management" (excuse the industrial paradigm) with a religious mental-health and ecological basis needn't be threatening to your sense of civil worth. You just had to go and bring up the noble savage thing, eh? Populations are a resource to be managed with all the rest, by the way--- my euro ancestors also did that through kinship rites, like most pre-civ peoples.
I'm not claiming power=rapist like some first-year critical-theory grad student
But you are! "if the population of indians had been powers greater, they would have raped their environment dry the same way the white men did" is pretty unequivocal. You're saying that bad medicine meant the savages had low population levels, and that european and the central plains cultures were functionally equivalent (that's right and wrong on so many levels, it's hard to know where to start). Cultures that lived in "harmony" (and I think the idiom of that went over your head--it's short form for "they had a good working knowledge of practical long-term ecological integration and its effects on society") were by no means perfect, but they were (and in some cases "are") an effective epistemology... i.e. better than ours with respect to resource management.
ps. the megafauna comment refers to earlier threads
this is a basic ecological fact. +Population=resource-depletion.
The last 20 years of study in ecological dynamics show them to be anything but simple arithmetic -- as any pre-civ person could tell you. And what makes you so sure that populations weren't managed as a resource, if it isn't just settler-think talking?
not giving them enough food, killing most of their children, and because their were a million buffalo to every indian - if the population of indians had been powers greater, they would have raped their environment dry the same way the white men did.
Bad stereotyping. North America has long had a wide variety of cultures. Where I live, for instance, food was so abundant that hunting and gathering was easy even for sedentary cultures; they worked less than we do to feed themselves, and had better food security for thousands of years. They built villages, but no agriculture was needed.
You show a lack of understanding of a conservation ethic that is built into a society. First: the extinction of the megafauna, if actually precipitated by humans at all, was carried out by entirely different societies: that was 10K years ago! Second, hunter-gatherers usually have systems of knowledge that are difficult for civilized (city-based) people and investigators to understand, they're usually so complex and working from different paradigms -- so your claims of power=rapist are intellectual masturbation at best and settler-think at worst.
By all estimates, nuking Japan not only saved countless American lives (the only ones that matter in war)
That's morally and ethically bankrupt. The lives of civilians matter more than soldiers... no matter whose side they happen to live on. You CAN apply honour and ethics to warfare. Innocent before proven guilty, and all that. Anything else is murder (and yes, that is an accusation levelled at all modern conflicts). My family tradition includes the military; all of those who serve(d) bemoan the lack of a true warrior ethic in the modern military, and the machine-like obedience that replaced it and makes atrocities possible.
Remember that former Sec. of Defense and World Bank Prez McNamara (who was a strategic analyst in the Pacific theatre at the time) admitted, bleary-eyed, that the widespread inexorable firebombing of many wooden Japanese cities was a war crime that was never prosecuted (cf. "Fog of War"). You cannot justify nor clarify this strategy (the wholesale slaughter of civilians from the air, including the nukes) by praising its benefit for the Homeland.
The market should be allowed to determine what lives and what dies, Government propping up failed policies and institutions teaches no one a lesson, specifically the market.
I agree fully, but this 'market' you speak of is the mythical free market. The one you're pointing at, however, isn't free: it's cross-regulated by contradictory and politically motivated agreements, its key power nodes are run in collusion by ostensibly competitive agencies and industries, it is rife with corruption, and the whole thing is distorted by deception, misrepresentation and advertising.
In short, the 'market' is a rigged game, not an independent entity. You will have to do more than withdraw government interference to get anywhere near the idealism you propose.
We should choose politicians like the process for jury duty: citizen, your services are needed for two years, please take a leave of absence and join the Senate/council/etc.
This would eliminate the blindly ambitious opportunists and I wager we'd have roughly the same chance at getting someone competent to represent us. Politics should be seen as a noble chore, not an opportunity to make your friends rich or to bask in glory.
Not only that, a short tour of duty is a good starting strategy for fighting corruption.
We're all cynical about it in some degree: lying politicians, a tautology. As it is, the system attracts politicians who are idealists, demagogues, or power mongers in varying degrees. How can you have true leadership in a progressive democracy with deception at the helm?
When I was growing up, I read hypertext years before the 'web: encyclopedias. All the related articles listed at the end of each article were links to contextual aspects of the subject.
Wikipedia takes it further. I read an article that I intend to take seriously by also looking at the discussion page, and the history of edits. It is the saving grace of WP.
Good WP articles have two new dimensions available to the reader: TIME, and DEBATE. This is an astoundingly more efficient way to stimulate critical thinking about the topic than a simple article with references. Each article has multiple exposed viewpoints, and its growth pattern is part of its verifiability.
I can't stress this enough. It is a new kind of reading, something that will eventually become crucial to knowledge repositories.
I'm entirely sympathetic to your disaffection, but this strategy is worse than lame.
Absence from the polls is ambiguous and says very little. If there were 10 million spoiled ballots in the last election, however, it would have been impossible to ignore. (And yes folks, in Canada we use paper, pencil, and human accountability at the ballot box, so it would be noted at that scale.)
To change things, you must act. Success requires showing up.
Also, for another poster: MP stands for Member of Parliament, somewhat similar to congress(wo)man. We also have a Senate, but they are appointed, not elected.
I agree! though, lawyers, industrialists, and bankers make up even less of the population, yet we allow them to control policy. The problem of just representation isn't solved in the current system either.
The other part of it is that First Nations communities aren't monolithic, they're divided along lines determined in large part by years of colonial policies aimed at satisfying electors, bureaucrats, populist ideology, and resource corporations. You couldn't just hand over seats without causing a whole raft of other problems.
The UN definitions of genocide include inundation with settlers as one strategy to that end. As long as the land base of the country still legally and morally remains divided in its stewardship, some gesture at representation would start making up for the ongoing effects of a shameful history.
Please elaborate on why aboriginals need guaranteed seats. Maybe we should give guaranteed seats to jews, muslims, indians, haitians, homosexual, woman, clowns, dentists, and nurses, too.
On the other hand, aboriginals already have a garanteed [sic] seat in the form of the seat for Nunavut.
I'll just ignore the ignorant bigoted flamebait content of your post, and move on to the enquiry.
The idea of guaranteed aboriginal seats is interesting for many reasons, not the least of which would be redress. The most interesting reason, for me, would be that the Royal Proclamation of 1763 has never been fully retired in the snarl that is land claims law, and thus the tenure of Canadian soil is in some ambiguity in many parts.
Your point about Nunavut would be good if it didn't lump different cultures-societies-nations falsely together. Nunavut is very different from Treaty 8 or Nisga'a or the vast regions of the Ojibwa.
Now let's look at the back of my computers. Count the number of Firewire ports you see and compare them to USB ports. My computers have 0 or 1 fw ports but they all have 3-5 usb ports on the back alone(not including my usb hub for my golden oldie).
The number of ports on your computer does not indicate popularity so much as differences in the bus.
Firewire devices can be connected in one long daisy-chain up to 70 devices or so. This means that one or two ports is often enough, theoretically two ports would support 140+ devices (not really advisable if you want to capture a video stream, but you get the idea).
USB, on the other hand, needs a hub to connect multiple devices to a port. I have a passel of both devices, and I run all the firewire drives off one port just to keep the other one convenient, while the usb stuff is a tangle of cables and juggle of ports.
R. Murry Schafer, composer and one of the founders of soundscape studies and the World Soundscape Project, would glibly call that 'schizophonia' -- a disconnect between what is heard and what is happening.
There are actually many reasons for listening privately in a public space: - attempted privacy in the middle of crowds - the druglike effect of some music on mood and body - reinforcement of identity (like a security blanket!) - soundtrack to life: the ability to better cope with an alienated situation by abstracting it through music.
Not only is the ability to hear damaged by headphone abuse, so is the ability to listen.
The problem is also duration. Listen to a less-than-loud noise for a long time and you'll still have some damage... think about that computer fan for instance.
There are other factors like frequency and distortion but they are complicated.
We're very tolerant of hearing loss in this society. A ground-breaking study of tribal elders in the Sahel desert found that the hearing of 70-year-olds was as good as the 20 somethings. They had a low-fat diet and a very quiet soundscape.
Small businesses often have sporadic file sharing and database needs throughout the day, it isn't unusual to find a company with a need for a 10-client semi-custom db.
The mini is a perfect machine for this. Enough power for small networks. Silent, cool, sips power, reliable, and can be screwed to a wall or under a desk, so it is invisible too. Easy to run headless, set it and forget it, with built-in tools for automation and no licensing grief and hardly any set-up time... and in a pinch, the local in-house semi-geek can perform maintenance (say, when the sftp backup fails) with gui tools.
I've set up a number of these, running multiple services. Usually, I don't hear from the company again until they need upgrades; everything just works, and their TCO winds up being really low.
We walked into a Burger Thing in Fargo, and heads snapped around, people stopped eating... it was like walking into a saloon in a movie. That capped off the experience of the trip, somehow. It was a relief to cross the border. In the public gut response to race issues, at least, there's a huge difference between the behaviour in ND and Manitoba.
We also bought Umax clones. They had a significantly high failure rate a year or two out of warranty. In the end the old apples were sold or turned into backup servers and the old umaxes were junked, so the price difference was more than recouped... the TCO was lower on the Apples, and to a non-profit org, it made a difference.
Slashdot Mirror
This is utter socialist bullshit.
Um. Socialist bullshit would have Celine paying you for being an emerging artist out of her obscene profits. This gouge of the grassroots is something else, not socialism.
we elected a Prime Minister over a month ago
Speak fer yerself, 62% of us who voted voted for the other teams.
+ 1 funny or insightful...
Ars Technica reported on S.Jobs eating some humble pie in august... he admitted that MobileMe wasn't up to "apple" standards and they screwed up by rushing releases of its features.
Apple always seems to have one or two major screwups in process at any one time... keeping their product line is slim probably helps them manage that sort of thing (and protect the all-important brand rep).
Then there's the intentional user-abusive @#!$* they pull---last night a client brought over his new very Sleek 'n Slick macbook for setup, all excited... until I said "how are you going to use this to work with that fancy HD camera you bought last year? No Firewire..."
He's returning it today. The Idiots!
I'm aware of the different subgroups (1000's) of native americans, but I didn't have room for all of them.
OK! but this is a nerd site--if I called the computer case and everything in it "the hard drive" (like most of my elderly customers do) would I be excused? Likewise, authoritatively referring to a particular plains culture as "the american indians" is not developing your credibility.
I'm responding because you present yourself as an expert, and your conclusions as obvious, and yet your attitudes and tone reinforce popular prejudice rather than 100 years of anthropology and 40 years of ecological studies.
more population, these easy sedentary populations wouldn't be possible. While they might have worked less than we do to feed themselves, ask yourself this: in a bucolic place with no warfare and no birth control, why would a population stay relatively stable for generations? Why would no agriculture be needed? Because most of them were dying in childbirth/as children/at young ages. Is this your conservation ethic? High mortality rates?
Again with the authoritative voice, but obviously no research or experience to back it up. What do you know about the hard physical and intellectual work of a sedentary quasi-paleolithic life? Ask yourself this: what was the actual rate of pacific nw infant mortality and disease pre-contact, and how does it compare to various modern societies? Did a superior diet, effective plant-based medicine for chronic ailments, and vigorous lifestyle make the data comparisons more difficult? Are your conclusions based on established facts or your personal (non-ideological, of course) inference? I expect you'll be very surprised if you look deeply enough at the data.
hunter-gatherer systems of knowledge are complex and work from different paradigms than urban ones, but they are no more complex than those, and they are no more moral or noble or whatever it is you're trying to argue.
Well there, see? a fine illustration--you're confused about a basic point---that the issue isn't a dick-measuring competition of complexity, but whether or not civilization loses the ingrained conservation ethic that we've been developing discretely all over the globe for a 100K years. The notion that people without Viagra or skyscrapers might have a complex regional trade-kinship-sovereignty-narrative system that spans multiple cultures and is devoted to "resource management" (excuse the industrial paradigm) with a religious mental-health and ecological basis needn't be threatening to your sense of civil worth. You just had to go and bring up the noble savage thing, eh? Populations are a resource to be managed with all the rest, by the way--- my euro ancestors also did that through kinship rites, like most pre-civ peoples.
I'm not claiming power=rapist like some first-year critical-theory grad student
But you are! "if the population of indians had been powers greater, they would have raped their environment dry the same way the white men did" is pretty unequivocal. You're saying that bad medicine meant the savages had low population levels, and that european and the central plains cultures were functionally equivalent (that's right and wrong on so many levels, it's hard to know where to start). Cultures that lived in "harmony" (and I think the idiom of that went over your head--it's short form for "they had a good working knowledge of practical long-term ecological integration and its effects on society") were by no means perfect, but they were (and in some cases "are") an effective epistemology... i.e. better than ours with respect to resource management.
ps. the megafauna comment refers to earlier threads
this is a basic ecological fact. +Population=resource-depletion.
The last 20 years of study in ecological dynamics show them to be anything but simple arithmetic -- as any pre-civ person could tell you. And what makes you so sure that populations weren't managed as a resource, if it isn't just settler-think talking?
I'll bet they're pretty tasty.
And smarter than dogs. Eating smart things makes them... less tasty, somehow.
not giving them enough food, killing most of their children, and because their were a million buffalo to every indian - if the population of indians had been powers greater, they would have raped their environment dry the same way the white men did.
Bad stereotyping. North America has long had a wide variety of cultures. Where I live, for instance, food was so abundant that hunting and gathering was easy even for sedentary cultures; they worked less than we do to feed themselves, and had better food security for thousands of years. They built villages, but no agriculture was needed.
You show a lack of understanding of a conservation ethic that is built into a society. First: the extinction of the megafauna, if actually precipitated by humans at all, was carried out by entirely different societies: that was 10K years ago! Second, hunter-gatherers usually have systems of knowledge that are difficult for civilized (city-based) people and investigators to understand, they're usually so complex and working from different paradigms -- so your claims of power=rapist are intellectual masturbation at best and settler-think at worst.
By all estimates, nuking Japan not only saved countless American lives (the only ones that matter in war)
That's morally and ethically bankrupt. The lives of civilians matter more than soldiers... no matter whose side they happen to live on. You CAN apply honour and ethics to warfare. Innocent before proven guilty, and all that. Anything else is murder (and yes, that is an accusation levelled at all modern conflicts). My family tradition includes the military; all of those who serve(d) bemoan the lack of a true warrior ethic in the modern military, and the machine-like obedience that replaced it and makes atrocities possible.
Remember that former Sec. of Defense and World Bank Prez McNamara (who was a strategic analyst in the Pacific theatre at the time) admitted, bleary-eyed, that the widespread inexorable firebombing of many wooden Japanese cities was a war crime that was never prosecuted (cf. "Fog of War"). You cannot justify nor clarify this strategy (the wholesale slaughter of civilians from the air, including the nukes) by praising its benefit for the Homeland.
The market should be allowed to determine what lives and what dies, Government propping up failed policies and institutions teaches no one a lesson, specifically the market.
I agree fully, but this 'market' you speak of is the mythical free market. The one you're pointing at, however, isn't free: it's cross-regulated by contradictory and politically motivated agreements, its key power nodes are run in collusion by ostensibly competitive agencies and industries, it is rife with corruption, and the whole thing is distorted by deception, misrepresentation and advertising.
In short, the 'market' is a rigged game, not an independent entity. You will have to do more than withdraw government interference to get anywhere near the idealism you propose.
We should choose politicians like the process for jury duty: citizen, your services are needed for two years, please take a leave of absence and join the Senate/council/etc.
This would eliminate the blindly ambitious opportunists and I wager we'd have roughly the same chance at getting someone competent to represent us. Politics should be seen as a noble chore, not an opportunity to make your friends rich or to bask in glory.
Not only that, a short tour of duty is a good starting strategy for fighting corruption.
We're all cynical about it in some degree: lying politicians, a tautology. As it is, the system attracts politicians who are idealists, demagogues, or power mongers in varying degrees. How can you have true leadership in a progressive democracy with deception at the helm?
When I was growing up, I read hypertext years before the 'web: encyclopedias. All the related articles listed at the end of each article were links to contextual aspects of the subject.
Wikipedia takes it further. I read an article that I intend to take seriously by also looking at the discussion page, and the history of edits. It is the saving grace of WP.
Good WP articles have two new dimensions available to the reader: TIME, and DEBATE. This is an astoundingly more efficient way to stimulate critical thinking about the topic than a simple article with references. Each article has multiple exposed viewpoints, and its growth pattern is part of its verifiability.
I can't stress this enough. It is a new kind of reading, something that will eventually become crucial to knowledge repositories.
I'm entirely sympathetic to your disaffection, but this strategy is worse than lame.
Absence from the polls is ambiguous and says very little. If there were 10 million spoiled ballots in the last election, however, it would have been impossible to ignore. (And yes folks, in Canada we use paper, pencil, and human accountability at the ballot box, so it would be noted at that scale.)
To change things, you must act. Success requires showing up.
In socialist Canada, the party line tows YOU!!
(BTW, it's 'toe' -- to stand in formation)
Also, for another poster: MP stands for Member of Parliament, somewhat similar to congress(wo)man. We also have a Senate, but they are appointed, not elected.
Logical fallacy, AC troll.
I agree! though, lawyers, industrialists, and bankers make up even less of the population, yet we allow them to control policy. The problem of just representation isn't solved in the current system either.
The other part of it is that First Nations communities aren't monolithic, they're divided along lines determined in large part by years of colonial policies aimed at satisfying electors, bureaucrats, populist ideology, and resource corporations. You couldn't just hand over seats without causing a whole raft of other problems.
The UN definitions of genocide include inundation with settlers as one strategy to that end. As long as the land base of the country still legally and morally remains divided in its stewardship, some gesture at representation would start making up for the ongoing effects of a shameful history.
Please elaborate on why aboriginals need guaranteed seats. Maybe we should give guaranteed seats to jews, muslims, indians, haitians, homosexual, woman, clowns, dentists, and nurses, too.
On the other hand, aboriginals already have a garanteed [sic] seat in the form of the seat for Nunavut.
I'll just ignore the ignorant bigoted flamebait content of your post, and move on to the enquiry.
The idea of guaranteed aboriginal seats is interesting for many reasons, not the least of which would be redress. The most interesting reason, for me, would be that the Royal Proclamation of 1763 has never been fully retired in the snarl that is land claims law, and thus the tenure of Canadian soil is in some ambiguity in many parts.
Your point about Nunavut would be good if it didn't lump different cultures-societies-nations falsely together. Nunavut is very different from Treaty 8 or Nisga'a or the vast regions of the Ojibwa.
Now let's look at the back of my computers. Count the number of Firewire ports you see and compare them to USB ports. My computers have 0 or 1 fw ports but they all have 3-5 usb ports on the back alone(not including my usb hub for my golden oldie).
The number of ports on your computer does not indicate popularity so much as differences in the bus.
Firewire devices can be connected in one long daisy-chain up to 70 devices or so. This means that one or two ports is often enough, theoretically two ports would support 140+ devices (not really advisable if you want to capture a video stream, but you get the idea).
USB, on the other hand, needs a hub to connect multiple devices to a port. I have a passel of both devices, and I run all the firewire drives off one port just to keep the other one convenient, while the usb stuff is a tangle of cables and juggle of ports.
R. Murry Schafer, composer and one of the founders of soundscape studies and the World Soundscape Project, would glibly call that 'schizophonia' -- a disconnect between what is heard and what is happening.
There are actually many reasons for listening privately in a public space:
- attempted privacy in the middle of crowds
- the druglike effect of some music on mood and body
- reinforcement of identity (like a security blanket!)
- soundtrack to life: the ability to better cope with an alienated situation by abstracting it through music.
Not only is the ability to hear damaged by headphone abuse, so is the ability to listen.
Right. Until you step in front of that bus you didn't hear coming.
Ha! I usually relax when I see a cop car... take my foot off the gas, check out the mirrors, look for rubberneckers.
Then, I'm at ease, because I know exactly where the fuzz are, and what they're up to -- and it isn't me.
If you listen not so loudly for a long time, that's as damaging as loud for a short time.
Rest your ears frequently, give them variety, they evolved on the savannah and in the forests.
The problem is also duration. Listen to a less-than-loud noise for a long time and you'll still have some damage... think about that computer fan for instance.
There are other factors like frequency and distortion but they are complicated.
We're very tolerant of hearing loss in this society. A ground-breaking study of tribal elders in the Sahel desert found that the hearing of 70-year-olds was as good as the 20 somethings. They had a low-fat diet and a very quiet soundscape.
Small businesses often have sporadic file sharing and database needs throughout the day, it isn't unusual to find a company with a need for a 10-client semi-custom db.
The mini is a perfect machine for this. Enough power for small networks. Silent, cool, sips power, reliable, and can be screwed to a wall or under a desk, so it is invisible too. Easy to run headless, set it and forget it, with built-in tools for automation and no licensing grief and hardly any set-up time... and in a pinch, the local in-house semi-geek can perform maintenance (say, when the sftp backup fails) with gui tools.
I've set up a number of these, running multiple services. Usually, I don't hear from the company again until they need upgrades; everything just works, and their TCO winds up being really low.
how IT effects their lives
Unless they're cyborgs or Cowboy Neal, their existence would be an effect of biology not IT.
We walked into a Burger Thing in Fargo, and heads snapped around, people stopped eating... it was like walking into a saloon in a movie. That capped off the experience of the trip, somehow. It was a relief to cross the border. In the public gut response to race issues, at least, there's a huge difference between the behaviour in ND and Manitoba.
We also bought Umax clones. They had a significantly high failure rate a year or two out of warranty. In the end the old apples were sold or turned into backup servers and the old umaxes were junked, so the price difference was more than recouped... the TCO was lower on the Apples, and to a non-profit org, it made a difference.