I should mention I'm using relatively new drivers from NVidia's site, not the apt-able ones. 313.09, specifically, though after the 310.x series BaseMosaic hasn't broken any more.
This is such a ridiculous comment I had to actually reply, and that doesn't happen often. I would have dismissed it as a troll, but I think you're serious. I'm a DBA (mostly MySQL + random stuff like DB2, Mongo, etc) and we're heavily virtualized on real workloads, real 24x7, on a product you've definitely heard of. And we're not incompetent. Doing real virtualization (we use VMWare with VSphere) is fantastic because:
1) Moving VMs between hosts with no downtime. 2) Hardware abstraction layer 2.a) Hardware upgrades with no downtime to any service 2.b) VM failover on the fly 2.c) Move VMs between datacenters 3) Cloned spinup 4) Snapshot backups (with OS integration) 5) On-the-fly storage expansion 6) multi-SAN connectivity 7) Resource pooling 8) Cost effectiveness 9) Resource oversubscribe (production, but typically unimportant machines get things like the memory balloon driver) 10) Rebalance of resources as workloads change.
Where virtualization really sucks (at least on VMWare)
1) SMP/multi-core VMs 2) Purple Screen of Death 3) 2TB limit on LUN size on ESX 4.x
You're forgetting another critical thing....a lot of security is Cover Your Ass work, and nothing more. If you think too creatively, it means you've moved outside the scope of "best practices." Best Practices are what will Cover Your Ass when something goes wrong and you end up in court because 10k credit card numbers are in the open. Judges and managers don't want to hear that you found a totally awesome way to secure SQL server transactions by using fiberchannel instead of regular ethernet. They just want to know that you did what everybody else does, by buying brand-name firewalls, turning them on, and not changing anything.
Security is an artform only to people who have the glorious laxity of no legal responsibility. I work at a HIPAA compliant facility; if we lose a bunch of patient data, the federal government wants to know what industry standards we were following, regardless of if they make sense. If we have some weird security paradigm that's fantastic, but doesn't involve the word "Cisco", we might well be in trouble. Because, after all, why have industry standards if they aren't good?
I'm drawing a distinction between "science" (see the little s?), in that you are studying a field in the attempt to better understand cause and effect, and "Science" (see the big S?), which is a following that people follow just as blindly as Christianity or Islam. Perhaps it was too subtle, sorry. However, big-S-Science and big-C-Christianity are equally valid (or invalid, as you see fit) in that true science is a disciplined persuit of knowledge, where as both Science and religion rely on followers to believe in certain precepts. Religion believes in gods, Science believes in hadrons, gravitons, the weak nuclear force. Religion attempts to further their knowledge with study, introspection, and philosophy, and Science attempts to further their knowledge with...the same things!
See my point?
little-s-science is methodology, big-S-Science is are people (are are very rarely scientists) who have -replaced- traditional religion with adherence to popular Science.
As far as religion exceeding, do a google search for "number of Americans who identify themselves as religious" or s/religion/athiest/, whatever you want to do. You'll see that GenX and GenY self-identify as the least religious generations in history.
Also, you made the false assumption that I'm religious; I assume that comes from the same superiority complex you get from being a Scientist. Congrats.
We're not talking about a few centuries ago because science advances exponentially. If you want to go back that far, then I can make the same argument then as well. Four hundred years ago, the best science had to offer was to protect yourself from the plague by bleeding out with leeches and not bathing, and to drink herbal preparations to abort pregnancies. You have to compare apples to apples. Science and religion have only directly competed, in the way that we're talking about now, for the last 75-100 years. You can use Galileo as a counterexample, but even during Galileo's time, a large number of people could accept a heliocentric model and it didn't have the same fundamental hatred as modern religion does for, say, evolution or quantum mechanics.
But what you're saying is that life is better now because of science, yes? I completely agree. But there's a tremendous downside that's overlooked, and if you mention it you get called a "Luddite" or a "technophobe." Sure, our Science has invented great things....we can watch political speeches on TV from anywhere on earth, instantly. But, we can also watch five different versions of Law & Order. We have unprecedented access to medical information, but an entire field of brand-new of highly questionable mental disorders exists because of it: "cyberchondria", ADD, ADHD...these things didn't exist 50 years ago. Why? Was it because people didn't recognize them and better research has discovered it, or is it because they're not actually the problem that people are making it out to be? ADD, for instance. There's a convincing, and growing, body of evidence that 1) cases of ADD are exaggerated by a factor of 10 to 100, 2) ADD is caused by Science's modern lifestyle and 3) what people used to call "being a kid" is now simply assumed to be a mental disorder.
People, cultures, are spiritually drained. My generation (I'm 26) is almost synonymous with "disaffected". Gen-y is renown for its lack of caring about anything significant other than ourselves. Note that I'm not equating "spiritual" to "religious". This modern cult of Science has taught us that we can find the answers with a better brain scan, a deeper MRI, a broader genetic map. It's given us the ability to extend our body physically to 75, 80, 90 years old....but not our spirit, our human-ness.
The OP was saying that religion was standing in the way of science, implying that pre-screening diseases out of children was good. Is it? That's an argument for another day. In the broadest sense, I agree...it is good, IF we can prove a solely genetic link between disease A and a series of Punnett squares. But lets be honest...genetics is still in its infancy, and it's nothing more than hubris to think that Science has determined enough of the human genome, reliably, to pick a combination more valid than it's own holy grail, evolution.
So is ADD and theoretical genetic susceptibility to disease the same as your left-handed or poor? Have we, as a culture, placed such high value on the Science cult that we now completely overlook what generations before believed/knew? For example, chemical and food science has created the most effective delivery mechanisms for calories and nutrition in the history of mankind, and our food supply is well stocked with it. At the same time, computer, business, and management science has reduced the amount of work people have to do to where "going to work" today is nothing like "going to work" was even 30-40 years ago. Result? An obesity "epidemic" in the western world.
Of course, our great--great grandparents would laugh at us, because they knew 100 years ago what Science is just "discovering" now: if you eat a lot of calories and junk food, your ass has to get outside and work. Eat to live. Oddly enough, that's what the Bible, Quran, and basically every other religious text will tell you: eat to live, don't be a glutton, and value a day's work. So there you go...spirituality would have solved the problem, except that Science got in the way.
Imagine all of the cultural advancements we could make if people would stop praying to the alter of Science....
This isn't a troll, it's an honest response. As Science-the-religion has advanced, and religious adherence receded, the general mental wellbeing of western citizens has declined. Across the board, people report being less happy, less fulfilled, less everything, while they have more stuff, more medicine, more knowledge than ever.
In this case, instead of going through a natural birth and childrearing process, you are now in charge of your children genetic destiny, so to speak. If they get Parkinson's, it's your fault. Fat? Your fault. Stupid? Your fault. We, as a culture, are replacing the evolutionary miracle of genetics and birth with just another calculation. Something else to induce anxiety attacks in a culture increasingly devoid of any spirituality...
And once again, Science gets in the way of humanity.
I seem to remember when InterNIC had sole control before they turned to IANA and the split up registration system that it cost $75/year to register a domain. And I seem to remember this because I still have the faxed receipts and my faxed domain registration submission from 1997. Lest we forget, InterNIC sucked, AND was expensive. It was also a much bigger extortion racket then we have now, where I can get a 2 year registration from Joker for $25.
The problem with making a completely free version available is that there's no point in buying it later. Very few people will buy it later out of guilt.
"provide my entire book for free" is very different from "here's a demo of our first level."
The rule of thumb is, though, don't provide anything electronically unless you want it to get looted, stolen, and otherwise abused.
I care. USENET is still the only viable place to find older software that has fallen from the realm of existance. It's also the fasted download feed I have. I download all my Linux ISOs from a.b.w.linux or a.b.l.iso because I get a little over a meg a second from Giganews to my cable modem. Shoot..it's faster for me to download movies and store them on my machine than it is to rip the physical DVD.
USENET is in a unique position to attack the spam problem if anybody cared. Since everybody sees roughly the same feed, you could set up a global killfile and have people flag spam messages. If a message meets your personal criteria (# of flags, keywords, bayesian filter, etc) then your client hides it. There hasn't been any real innovation in non-theft-oriented newsgroup readers in years.
"The more you earn the more you pay". How, then, is that not an income tax? Isn't that basically the definition of a graduated income tax?
More importantly, if Person A doesn't like their cardio guy, can they get a second opinion or go to a different hospital? Do they ever get a note in the mail saying "We have recently improved our procedures and if you are diagnosed with cancer we promise to get you in to see a specialist within 6 months!" (*actual* note received by some friends I have who used to live in the UK. The same people lived there for 2 years without being able to visit a dentist on the public system because they were never 'assigned' one. They would visit all their doctors when they came back to see family in the states.)
More importantly, are you guys facing a critical doctor shortage yet? Is there any incentive, whatsoever, for any doctor to be more than mediocre? Or even go to medical school? Because you will soon.
It's happening in the US, too, but ours is a product of a plaintiff-has-nothing-to-lose legal system. If the government really wants to improve healthcare in the US, they need to stop being lawyers.
But you have to look at all the aspects of what made them not profitable. Cheap fossil fuels is one aspect, but its the environmental lobby that's largely made it financially infeasible to build.
First, there's the cost of the initial environmental studies. Important, but drastically overblown. This is due to "environmentalists" pressuring Congress.
Then, there's the cost of trying to find a location where the people, municipality, state & local, and federal government don't fight it tooth and nail with anti-nuclear referendums, legislation and massive negative advertising campaigns. This is due to "environmentalists" successfully placing a vivid image of nuclear holocaust in the imagination of enough voters to matter
Assuming they can find a place to put it, there's the cost of buying the land. The problem is that because of what the deal with, they have to worry about security studies for anti-terrorist crap. They have to deal with fallout studies for a series of events that are practically impossible with US reactor designs. This is due to environmental scare tactics working on legislators.
After that, then they have to start paying (for studies and bribing) all sorts of committees and sub-committees. They have to worry about the EPA because it's a "potential" SuperFund site (thanks, environmentalists!) They have to worry about nuclear regulation agencies that are supposed to help them but have been saddled legislatively with hoops to jump through.
They even have to worry, in some cases, about UN regulations that environmentalists have pushed through as treaties. I think that's kind of rare, though. It might depend on the type of reactor, but I'm not sure on this one.
Before they even break ground, the legislative and public perception hoops put in place make "regulatory compliance" is on par with the cost to -actually build the plant-, which typically runs 3-6 billion. (Again, artificially high due to misguided regulations in many cases).
If you think regulation isn't the biggest problem, take the newest reactor in America that was finally licensed for operation in 1996. The initial steps to build the plant started in 1970. -SEVENTY-.
It's not coincidence that the last reactor permit application was in the mid 70s just after the Carter administration's regulatory fiasco, coupled with sustained environmentalist bullshit. Government regulations, spurred by said "environmentalists", are what made nuclear power in the US infeasible.
Without ever offering any viable alternatives and shunning the actual alternatives we have. Standing around and yelling about peak oil and simultaneously rejecting anything other than Magic Energy in the form of wind, biomass, solar, etc is irresponsible. Especially considering that the most headline grabbing anti-petroleum buffoons are, by nature, the ones that push the most outlandish Magic Energy schemes.
I totally agree with you; petroleum dependency is stupid at this point and we need to get away from it as fast as possible. BUT if the envirosocialists (this is different from environmentalists, who I have many fewer qualms with) would have let us explore nuclear three decades ago when the political gumption was there to do it, we would simply not be in this predicament right now.
Those environmentalists have blood on their hands and they deserve to be lynched in the political arena as a lesson to others.
You have to couple increased electrical output with efficient hydrogen electrolysis which can be used in cheaply converted ICE cars. Then it can all work and we don't have to renew the entire US fleet to see the benefits. Converting gas & diesel engines to use hydrogen boosting can basically start tomorrow if we saw fit.
The problem is abundant electric for home or commercial electrolysis kits. Nuclear plants *would* fix that. Although off-grid solar or wind would be "nicer", it's not realistic.
Blaming people doesn't get anything done, that's correct...but what happens when a "movement" spends decades raising fear about something that would never happen and then rescinds on their proverbial deathbed?
Or, another way, the founder of Greenpeace is now a strong proponent of nuclear energy because it's safer, cleaner, more plentiful, and cheaper (in that order) than any other energy source we have available for the next few decades. Even he has rescinded his view. He has also made the comment that Greenpeace has largely been taken away from true environmentalist and taken over by anti-capitalists that use the environment as a weapon.
So in this case, we can very clearly "blame" environmentalists for shouting loudly and obnoxiously for decades...and being flat-out WRONG. They are -responsible-, directly, for the predicament we're in now. Any moron with a cause can get TV airtime, but everybody has to deal with the fallout.
It's important to place blame, in this case, widely, loudly, and prominently so that, hopefully, future generations won't be suckered in by charlatans with a "cause." If we give previous generations of "environmentalists" a pass on this one, and on "climate change", and on DDT, and on... you start to see the pattern developing here.
I think that's an incorrect analysis. You seem to be assuming that the "Religious Right" (aka, Christians) are the ones chiefly rejecting nuclear power as a viable power source. On the contrary, I've found the RR to be the number one group of people -for- nuclear power. It's the "Environmentalists" that are against nuclear power.
And it's not really even the true environmentalists; the original Green Peace crew is pro-nuclear in addition to hydro/solar/etc. It's the anti-capitalist "environmentalists" (aka, the Religious Left).
haha..You get informative and I get flamebait. I forgot...slashdot.
1) Bush doesn't vote. What you mean is that McCain voted with the Republican party, which happens to coincide with Bush because they're from the same party. That's very different.
2) You don't have to be "Religious Right" to dislike the Roe V. Wade. For instance, me. I'm very, very far from RR. McCain never said anything -to- Hagee, McCain did some distancing after the fact, even. "Activist Judges" is a completely separate topic.
3) Yes, in fact, I have looked into it. Extensively. And I agree basically 100% with McCains take on it.
4) Yes, it does sound like something the US should use if you need to get information from somebody who's withholding it. There's a difference between what we do, solitary for a few days/weeks, and what the Japanese or the Vietnamese did during war. If you can't see the difference between the two things, please don't vote.
Tax cuts disproportionately affect "the rich" because the "the rich" pay a disproportionate amount of taxes. If you do a 1% tax cut, the guy who pays 100k a year in taxes will clearly get more back, in real dollars, than the person who pays zero in taxes (i.e, makes under $30k a year or so).
Corporate taxes, on the other hand, are stupid in a completely different way. Corporate taxes disproportional affect the poor because 100%+ of corporate taxes are passed on to the consumer -by definition-. A poor person and a rich person buying the same basket of goods pay the same real dollar amount in corporate taxes via markup, but the poor person pays a much higher percentage of their real income in "corporate" taxes.
Mass transit in the US is a complete scam and would be an utter failure. Most major cities already have mass transit systems (that are failures) because in the US, as soon as people can afford it they move *out* of cities into the suburbs. Mass transit in the suburbs is not effective and ends up costing more than just buying the cars.
He does -not- support torture of terror suspects. He supports strong interrogation techniques, but John McCain is in a unique position, WHICH YOU ARE NOT IN, to define what torture is. If he believes that certain techniques do not constitute torture, I tend to believe him.
The old GI bill isn't broken and he knows it. The "new" GI bill is a scam by Congress to siphon more money away from taxpayers. If they followed Montgomery and its children -correctly-, it wouldn't be a problem.
Gah..I can't believe Slashdot has reduced me to defending John McCain. Multiple times...
John McCain is a member of the Republican party, but it's certainly not the Republicans that left him. He's one of the most left-leaning Republicans in national office at any level. John McCain is a 1950's era, JFK or Reagan Democrat which nows forms the centrist/left wing of the Republican party.
Is that bad? Maybe, maybe not. But McCain is the fringe element in the Republican party, the party didn't leave him. Remember, George Bush was considered the "conservative" candidate in 2000. What does that tell you?
John McCain hasn't changed much at all. The "maverick" thing is just as much BS now as it was then. John McCain is a liberal Republican; that doesn't make him a "maverick", it makes him purple.
But I think, perhaps, you're missing a few key points. For starters, if you agree with somebody most of the time and then suddenly disagree with one or two things, don't naturally assume that you're the one who's right.
1) John McCain was never for small government. I'm not sure where you got that idea, but that part has never changed. It's why I didn't support him in 2000.
2) McCain rarely backs George Bush. Could it be that he supports the war in Iraq because he thinks it's the correct thing to do, and -not- because of Bush? Because from where I sit, McCain and Bush disagree on basically everything. So could it be that John McCain is still the smart, good man you liked in 2000 and happens to be right, regardless of the media spin on Iraq, and you happen to be wrong? Happening to agree with George Bush doesn't automatically make him a shill.
3) McCain never sucks up to the religious right, either. Ask anybody -in- the religious right.
4) McCain was a victim of torture. He has repeatedly drawn distinctions between what happens at Gitmo and -actual- torture. Enough people calling an apple a "car" doesn't make it a car. If anybody has unique insight into what constitutes torture, John McCain does. So maybe you should, again, consider whether you are on the wrong side of this. Note: I believe that he is still against, officially, "torture." The difference is that he's not convinced that solitary confinement for a few weeks or interrogations are neccesarily torture. He has made his beliefs on things like waterboarding and electic shocking clear. Although I suspect he sits around and calls the people complaining about it pansies.
5) At least John McCain understands economics and is against socialized health care. I never "believe" in politicians any more, I just vote for the ones that I think will use my hotbotton issues to claw their way up (McCain) instead of the ones that I think are self-destructive or naive themselves (Obama).
Note: I don't really like John McCain that much, but he's the same liberal Republican he was in 2000.
Slashdot Mirror
That's always in demand, and probably more after the apocalypse. Whiskey and ammunition...
Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Monitor0"
VendorName "Unknown"
ModelName "Unknown"
HorizSync 28.0 - 33.0
VertRefresh 43.0 - 72.0
Option "DPMS"
EndSection
Section "Device"
Identifier "Device0"
Driver "nvidia"
VendorName "NVIDIA Corporation"
Option "SLI" "1"
Option "Coolbits" "4"
EndSection
AH.... thanks for asking. I forgot teh "SLI" part : )
The NVS450 has 4 outputs; I'm using three of them. And they're not in the right order on the desk (according to the card)
I should mention I'm using relatively new drivers from NVidia's site, not the apt-able ones. 313.09, specifically, though after the 310.x series BaseMosaic hasn't broken any more.
I can confirm that BaseMosaic on an NVS450 works under LMDE (Debian Testing) using:
Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen0"
Device "Device0"
Monitor "Monitor0"
DefaultDepth 24
Option "BaseMosaic" "True"
Option "MetaModes" "GPU-1.DFP-0: 1680x1050+0+0, GPU-0.DFP-1: 1680x1050+3360+0, GPU-0.DFP-0: 1680x1050+1680+0; GPU-1.DFP-0: NULL, GPU-0.DFP-1: NULL, GPU-0.DFP-0: 1680x1050"
SubSection "Display"
Depth 24
EndSubSection
EndSection
This is such a ridiculous comment I had to actually reply, and that doesn't happen often. I would have dismissed it as a troll, but I think you're serious. I'm a DBA (mostly MySQL + random stuff like DB2, Mongo, etc) and we're heavily virtualized on real workloads, real 24x7, on a product you've definitely heard of. And we're not incompetent. Doing real virtualization (we use VMWare with VSphere) is fantastic because:
1) Moving VMs between hosts with no downtime.
2) Hardware abstraction layer
2.a) Hardware upgrades with no downtime to any service
2.b) VM failover on the fly
2.c) Move VMs between datacenters
3) Cloned spinup
4) Snapshot backups (with OS integration)
5) On-the-fly storage expansion
6) multi-SAN connectivity
7) Resource pooling
8) Cost effectiveness
9) Resource oversubscribe (production, but typically unimportant machines get things like the memory balloon driver)
10) Rebalance of resources as workloads change.
Where virtualization really sucks (at least on VMWare)
1) SMP/multi-core VMs
2) Purple Screen of Death
3) 2TB limit on LUN size on ESX 4.x
You're forgetting another critical thing....a lot of security is Cover Your Ass work, and nothing more. If you think too creatively, it means you've moved outside the scope of "best practices." Best Practices are what will Cover Your Ass when something goes wrong and you end up in court because 10k credit card numbers are in the open. Judges and managers don't want to hear that you found a totally awesome way to secure SQL server transactions by using fiberchannel instead of regular ethernet. They just want to know that you did what everybody else does, by buying brand-name firewalls, turning them on, and not changing anything.
Security is an artform only to people who have the glorious laxity of no legal responsibility. I work at a HIPAA compliant facility; if we lose a bunch of patient data, the federal government wants to know what industry standards we were following, regardless of if they make sense. If we have some weird security paradigm that's fantastic, but doesn't involve the word "Cisco", we might well be in trouble. Because, after all, why have industry standards if they aren't good?
I'm drawing a distinction between "science" (see the little s?), in that you are studying a field in the attempt to better understand cause and effect, and "Science" (see the big S?), which is a following that people follow just as blindly as Christianity or Islam. Perhaps it was too subtle, sorry. However, big-S-Science and big-C-Christianity are equally valid (or invalid, as you see fit) in that true science is a disciplined persuit of knowledge, where as both Science and religion rely on followers to believe in certain precepts. Religion believes in gods, Science believes in hadrons, gravitons, the weak nuclear force. Religion attempts to further their knowledge with study, introspection, and philosophy, and Science attempts to further their knowledge with...the same things!
See my point?
little-s-science is methodology, big-S-Science is are people (are are very rarely scientists) who have -replaced- traditional religion with adherence to popular Science.
As far as religion exceeding, do a google search for "number of Americans who identify themselves as religious" or s/religion/athiest/, whatever you want to do. You'll see that GenX and GenY self-identify as the least religious generations in history.
Also, you made the false assumption that I'm religious; I assume that comes from the same superiority complex you get from being a Scientist. Congrats.
We're not talking about a few centuries ago because science advances exponentially. If you want to go back that far, then I can make the same argument then as well. Four hundred years ago, the best science had to offer was to protect yourself from the plague by bleeding out with leeches and not bathing, and to drink herbal preparations to abort pregnancies. You have to compare apples to apples. Science and religion have only directly competed, in the way that we're talking about now, for the last 75-100 years. You can use Galileo as a counterexample, but even during Galileo's time, a large number of people could accept a heliocentric model and it didn't have the same fundamental hatred as modern religion does for, say, evolution or quantum mechanics.
But what you're saying is that life is better now because of science, yes? I completely agree. But there's a tremendous downside that's overlooked, and if you mention it you get called a "Luddite" or a "technophobe." Sure, our Science has invented great things....we can watch political speeches on TV from anywhere on earth, instantly. But, we can also watch five different versions of Law & Order. We have unprecedented access to medical information, but an entire field of brand-new of highly questionable mental disorders exists because of it: "cyberchondria", ADD, ADHD...these things didn't exist 50 years ago. Why? Was it because people didn't recognize them and better research has discovered it, or is it because they're not actually the problem that people are making it out to be? ADD, for instance. There's a convincing, and growing, body of evidence that 1) cases of ADD are exaggerated by a factor of 10 to 100, 2) ADD is caused by Science's modern lifestyle and 3) what people used to call "being a kid" is now simply assumed to be a mental disorder.
People, cultures, are spiritually drained. My generation (I'm 26) is almost synonymous with "disaffected". Gen-y is renown for its lack of caring about anything significant other than ourselves. Note that I'm not equating "spiritual" to "religious". This modern cult of Science has taught us that we can find the answers with a better brain scan, a deeper MRI, a broader genetic map. It's given us the ability to extend our body physically to 75, 80, 90 years old....but not our spirit, our human-ness.
The OP was saying that religion was standing in the way of science, implying that pre-screening diseases out of children was good. Is it? That's an argument for another day. In the broadest sense, I agree...it is good, IF we can prove a solely genetic link between disease A and a series of Punnett squares. But lets be honest...genetics is still in its infancy, and it's nothing more than hubris to think that Science has determined enough of the human genome, reliably, to pick a combination more valid than it's own holy grail, evolution.
So is ADD and theoretical genetic susceptibility to disease the same as your left-handed or poor? Have we, as a culture, placed such high value on the Science cult that we now completely overlook what generations before believed/knew? For example, chemical and food science has created the most effective delivery mechanisms for calories and nutrition in the history of mankind, and our food supply is well stocked with it. At the same time, computer, business, and management science has reduced the amount of work people have to do to where "going to work" today is nothing like "going to work" was even 30-40 years ago. Result? An obesity "epidemic" in the western world.
Of course, our great--great grandparents would laugh at us, because they knew 100 years ago what Science is just "discovering" now: if you eat a lot of calories and junk food, your ass has to get outside and work. Eat to live. Oddly enough, that's what the Bible, Quran, and basically every other religious text will tell you: eat to live, don't be a glutton, and value a day's work. So there you go...spirituality would have solved the problem, except that Science got in the way.
Imagine all of the cultural advancements we could make if people would stop praying to the alter of Science....
This isn't a troll, it's an honest response. As Science-the-religion has advanced, and religious adherence receded, the general mental wellbeing of western citizens has declined. Across the board, people report being less happy, less fulfilled, less everything, while they have more stuff, more medicine, more knowledge than ever.
In this case, instead of going through a natural birth and childrearing process, you are now in charge of your children genetic destiny, so to speak. If they get Parkinson's, it's your fault. Fat? Your fault. Stupid? Your fault. We, as a culture, are replacing the evolutionary miracle of genetics and birth with just another calculation. Something else to induce anxiety attacks in a culture increasingly devoid of any spirituality...
And once again, Science gets in the way of humanity.
Also, he was from UC Berkeley, that notorious bastion of right-wing extremism...
I seem to remember when InterNIC had sole control before they turned to IANA and the split up registration system that it cost $75/year to register a domain. And I seem to remember this because I still have the faxed receipts and my faxed domain registration submission from 1997. Lest we forget, InterNIC sucked, AND was expensive. It was also a much bigger extortion racket then we have now, where I can get a 2 year registration from Joker for $25.
The problem with making a completely free version available is that there's no point in buying it later. Very few people will buy it later out of guilt.
"provide my entire book for free" is very different from "here's a demo of our first level."
The rule of thumb is, though, don't provide anything electronically unless you want it to get looted, stolen, and otherwise abused.
Clearly you've suffered enough : )
I care. USENET is still the only viable place to find older software that has fallen from the realm of existance. It's also the fasted download feed I have. I download all my Linux ISOs from a.b.w.linux or a.b.l.iso because I get a little over a meg a second from Giganews to my cable modem. Shoot..it's faster for me to download movies and store them on my machine than it is to rip the physical DVD.
USENET is in a unique position to attack the spam problem if anybody cared. Since everybody sees roughly the same feed, you could set up a global killfile and have people flag spam messages. If a message meets your personal criteria (# of flags, keywords, bayesian filter, etc) then your client hides it. There hasn't been any real innovation in non-theft-oriented newsgroup readers in years.
"The more you earn the more you pay". How, then, is that not an income tax? Isn't that basically the definition of a graduated income tax?
More importantly, if Person A doesn't like their cardio guy, can they get a second opinion or go to a different hospital? Do they ever get a note in the mail saying "We have recently improved our procedures and if you are diagnosed with cancer we promise to get you in to see a specialist within 6 months!" (*actual* note received by some friends I have who used to live in the UK. The same people lived there for 2 years without being able to visit a dentist on the public system because they were never 'assigned' one. They would visit all their doctors when they came back to see family in the states.)
More importantly, are you guys facing a critical doctor shortage yet? Is there any incentive, whatsoever, for any doctor to be more than mediocre? Or even go to medical school? Because you will soon.
It's happening in the US, too, but ours is a product of a plaintiff-has-nothing-to-lose legal system. If the government really wants to improve healthcare in the US, they need to stop being lawyers.
But you have to look at all the aspects of what made them not profitable. Cheap fossil fuels is one aspect, but its the environmental lobby that's largely made it financially infeasible to build.
First, there's the cost of the initial environmental studies. Important, but drastically overblown. This is due to "environmentalists" pressuring Congress.
Then, there's the cost of trying to find a location where the people, municipality, state & local, and federal government don't fight it tooth and nail with anti-nuclear referendums, legislation and massive negative advertising campaigns. This is due to "environmentalists" successfully placing a vivid image of nuclear holocaust in the imagination of enough voters to matter
Assuming they can find a place to put it, there's the cost of buying the land. The problem is that because of what the deal with, they have to worry about security studies for anti-terrorist crap. They have to deal with fallout studies for a series of events that are practically impossible with US reactor designs. This is due to environmental scare tactics working on legislators.
After that, then they have to start paying (for studies and bribing) all sorts of committees and sub-committees. They have to worry about the EPA because it's a "potential" SuperFund site (thanks, environmentalists!) They have to worry about nuclear regulation agencies that are supposed to help them but have been saddled legislatively with hoops to jump through.
They even have to worry, in some cases, about UN regulations that environmentalists have pushed through as treaties. I think that's kind of rare, though. It might depend on the type of reactor, but I'm not sure on this one.
Before they even break ground, the legislative and public perception hoops put in place make "regulatory compliance" is on par with the cost to -actually build the plant-, which typically runs 3-6 billion. (Again, artificially high due to misguided regulations in many cases).
If you think regulation isn't the biggest problem, take the newest reactor in America that was finally licensed for operation in 1996. The initial steps to build the plant started in 1970. -SEVENTY-.
It's not coincidence that the last reactor permit application was in the mid 70s just after the Carter administration's regulatory fiasco, coupled with sustained environmentalist bullshit. Government regulations, spurred by said "environmentalists", are what made nuclear power in the US infeasible.
Without ever offering any viable alternatives and shunning the actual alternatives we have. Standing around and yelling about peak oil and simultaneously rejecting anything other than Magic Energy in the form of wind, biomass, solar, etc is irresponsible. Especially considering that the most headline grabbing anti-petroleum buffoons are, by nature, the ones that push the most outlandish Magic Energy schemes.
I totally agree with you; petroleum dependency is stupid at this point and we need to get away from it as fast as possible. BUT if the envirosocialists (this is different from environmentalists, who I have many fewer qualms with) would have let us explore nuclear three decades ago when the political gumption was there to do it, we would simply not be in this predicament right now.
Those environmentalists have blood on their hands and they deserve to be lynched in the political arena as a lesson to others.
You have to couple increased electrical output with efficient hydrogen electrolysis which can be used in cheaply converted ICE cars. Then it can all work and we don't have to renew the entire US fleet to see the benefits. Converting gas & diesel engines to use hydrogen boosting can basically start tomorrow if we saw fit.
The problem is abundant electric for home or commercial electrolysis kits. Nuclear plants *would* fix that. Although off-grid solar or wind would be "nicer", it's not realistic.
Blaming people doesn't get anything done, that's correct...but what happens when a "movement" spends decades raising fear about something that would never happen and then rescinds on their proverbial deathbed?
Or, another way, the founder of Greenpeace is now a strong proponent of nuclear energy because it's safer, cleaner, more plentiful, and cheaper (in that order) than any other energy source we have available for the next few decades. Even he has rescinded his view. He has also made the comment that Greenpeace has largely been taken away from true environmentalist and taken over by anti-capitalists that use the environment as a weapon.
So in this case, we can very clearly "blame" environmentalists for shouting loudly and obnoxiously for decades...and being flat-out WRONG. They are -responsible-, directly, for the predicament we're in now. Any moron with a cause can get TV airtime, but everybody has to deal with the fallout.
It's important to place blame, in this case, widely, loudly, and prominently so that, hopefully, future generations won't be suckered in by charlatans with a "cause." If we give previous generations of "environmentalists" a pass on this one, and on "climate change", and on DDT, and on... you start to see the pattern developing here.
I think that's an incorrect analysis. You seem to be assuming that the "Religious Right" (aka, Christians) are the ones chiefly rejecting nuclear power as a viable power source. On the contrary, I've found the RR to be the number one group of people -for- nuclear power. It's the "Environmentalists" that are against nuclear power.
And it's not really even the true environmentalists; the original Green Peace crew is pro-nuclear in addition to hydro/solar/etc. It's the anti-capitalist "environmentalists" (aka, the Religious Left).
haha..You get informative and I get flamebait. I forgot...slashdot.
1) Bush doesn't vote. What you mean is that McCain voted with the Republican party, which happens to coincide with Bush because they're from the same party. That's very different.
2) You don't have to be "Religious Right" to dislike the Roe V. Wade. For instance, me. I'm very, very far from RR. McCain never said anything -to- Hagee, McCain did some distancing after the fact, even. "Activist Judges" is a completely separate topic.
3) Yes, in fact, I have looked into it. Extensively. And I agree basically 100% with McCains take on it.
4) Yes, it does sound like something the US should use if you need to get information from somebody who's withholding it. There's a difference between what we do, solitary for a few days/weeks, and what the Japanese or the Vietnamese did during war. If you can't see the difference between the two things, please don't vote.
Tax cuts disproportionately affect "the rich" because the "the rich" pay a disproportionate amount of taxes. If you do a 1% tax cut, the guy who pays 100k a year in taxes will clearly get more back, in real dollars, than the person who pays zero in taxes (i.e, makes under $30k a year or so).
Corporate taxes, on the other hand, are stupid in a completely different way. Corporate taxes disproportional affect the poor because 100%+ of corporate taxes are passed on to the consumer -by definition-. A poor person and a rich person buying the same basket of goods pay the same real dollar amount in corporate taxes via markup, but the poor person pays a much higher percentage of their real income in "corporate" taxes.
Mass transit in the US is a complete scam and would be an utter failure. Most major cities already have mass transit systems (that are failures) because in the US, as soon as people can afford it they move *out* of cities into the suburbs. Mass transit in the suburbs is not effective and ends up costing more than just buying the cars.
He does -not- support torture of terror suspects. He supports strong interrogation techniques, but John McCain is in a unique position, WHICH YOU ARE NOT IN, to define what torture is. If he believes that certain techniques do not constitute torture, I tend to believe him.
The old GI bill isn't broken and he knows it. The "new" GI bill is a scam by Congress to siphon more money away from taxpayers. If they followed Montgomery and its children -correctly-, it wouldn't be a problem.
Gah..I can't believe Slashdot has reduced me to defending John McCain. Multiple times...
John McCain is a member of the Republican party, but it's certainly not the Republicans that left him. He's one of the most left-leaning Republicans in national office at any level. John McCain is a 1950's era, JFK or Reagan Democrat which nows forms the centrist/left wing of the Republican party.
Is that bad? Maybe, maybe not. But McCain is the fringe element in the Republican party, the party didn't leave him. Remember, George Bush was considered the "conservative" candidate in 2000. What does that tell you?
John McCain hasn't changed much at all. The "maverick" thing is just as much BS now as it was then. John McCain is a liberal Republican; that doesn't make him a "maverick", it makes him purple.
But I think, perhaps, you're missing a few key points. For starters, if you agree with somebody most of the time and then suddenly disagree with one or two things, don't naturally assume that you're the one who's right.
1) John McCain was never for small government. I'm not sure where you got that idea, but that part has never changed. It's why I didn't support him in 2000.
2) McCain rarely backs George Bush. Could it be that he supports the war in Iraq because he thinks it's the correct thing to do, and -not- because of Bush? Because from where I sit, McCain and Bush disagree on basically everything. So could it be that John McCain is still the smart, good man you liked in 2000 and happens to be right, regardless of the media spin on Iraq, and you happen to be wrong? Happening to agree with George Bush doesn't automatically make him a shill.
3) McCain never sucks up to the religious right, either. Ask anybody -in- the religious right.
4) McCain was a victim of torture. He has repeatedly drawn distinctions between what happens at Gitmo and -actual- torture. Enough people calling an apple a "car" doesn't make it a car. If anybody has unique insight into what constitutes torture, John McCain does. So maybe you should, again, consider whether you are on the wrong side of this. Note: I believe that he is still against, officially, "torture." The difference is that he's not convinced that solitary confinement for a few weeks or interrogations are neccesarily torture. He has made his beliefs on things like waterboarding and electic shocking clear. Although I suspect he sits around and calls the people complaining about it pansies.
5) At least John McCain understands economics and is against socialized health care. I never "believe" in politicians any more, I just vote for the ones that I think will use my hotbotton issues to claw their way up (McCain) instead of the ones that I think are self-destructive or naive themselves (Obama).
Note: I don't really like John McCain that much, but he's the same liberal Republican he was in 2000.
He's learning from Robert Jordan :(