Or they might have shut down the bars because people were using them to express pro-democracy viewpoints on blogs, bypass the Great Firewall, etc., and the whole "save the children" story is a complete fabrication.
Don't take anything China says at face value. This is not a free country we're talking about here. They release only that information which makes them look good to other countries, and if they haven't got any suitable information to release, they will make something up.
I know. As a BSD junkie, I figured the closest to me would be Slackware and I was disappointed not to see it. Also Slack was my first Linux distro, back in, I think, the 3.0 stages.
If I were more clever, I'd produce a FreeBSD description now. But I'm not, so I'll just paraphrase what another poster has already said in reply to your article: "We don't care what's best, pick a goddamn direction and stick with it." It's the single biggest reason I steer clear of Linux now whenever I have a choice. I, too, experience a swelling of pride when the GNU awk is replaced by a less-functional non-GNU version. And I'm the guy who stands up and defends RMS whenever he demands "GNU" be added before all things open source!
While OSS has an advantage that bugs get fixed faster with more people available to work on them, it also has the disadvantage that the bugs are apparent to anyone who takes the time to look. So instead of having to pore through a million lines of assembler code and stack traces, you just look at the parts of the code where a buffer overflow might show up.
The moral of the story: it may take MS a month to roll out a fix, but it may also take a month longer for the bug to be discovered by unscrupulous individuals. MS, meanwhile, has access to the source, so it increases their chances of finding it first.
I'm not saying the closed-source approach is better, just that by the nature of the beast, OSS developers have to be more on the ball when it comes to releasing fixes quickly. That might explain why they usually are.
Just because some bacteria mutates to become immune to our existing drugs doesn't mean we can't find a new drug. After a hundred years of not using any of 2004's best antibiotics, the new bacteria might just be vulnerable to the stuff we've got now, too, even if it's become immune to the next generation of drugs we develop. And as we understand more about the biology of the situation, in particular how bacteria react in the human body and such, it's possible we can develop "contrasting" drugs. So you first treat an infection with Drug A. This drug is designed to force the bacteria to evolve in a particular way, which makes it vulnerable to Drug B. Drug B does the same but for Drug C. And so on until you remove the bacteria's ability to resist Drug A and you start over again. I'm not sure how plausible or near-term that is, but I can imagine it, so it's not a complete load!
I should probably shut up, as I'm obviously no biologist. But I have faith that, for the time being at least, medical science is capable of keeping up with this sort of problem.
There's not a whole lot of significant innovation going on either at AMD or Intel, because that's not what people want. People want incremental improvements, so that's what they're getting. Even 64-bit CPUs have been around for almost a decade.
Most of the innovation going on in the CPU world right now is in the fab and design areas. We aren't getting innovative processors, we're getting innovative manufacturing techniques which allow us to do the same thing we've been doing for 30 years... just at a higher clock speed and with more transistors. And there, Intel is the clear "innovator," mainly because they actually have the money to build all the new-fangled equipment needed.
Well... it's my personal, not-so-humble opinion that we all make our own ethical choices. Yeah, duh, that's obvious, right? But what it means is that while I, personally, have moral issues with killing insects, you may not. I respect your choice and your freedom to make it. Your choices may (or may not) make me think less of you, but the same can be said about any choice you make. It's your freedom to make that choice, just as it's my freedom to judge you one way or the other for it. In the end, perhaps I'll be proven right; perhaps you'll find a cure for cancer or somesuch which proves you right.
Having a background in philosophy, chiefly ethics, makes this a very hard subject for me. One of my professors once said something which really hit me: If we humans had perfect knowledge of our actions and our consequences, there would be almost no moral questions. But since we don't... It turns out that, for the most part, doing the morally right thing turns out to be the pragmatically right thing as well. We as humans have millions of years of experience which have culminated, in large part, in our ethical beliefs. We can't always explain them, but somehow, when we behave ethically, things usually turn out right in the end. That really struck a chord with me, and in my life I've found it to be true. It's been a sort of golden rule for me, I guess you could say. I think it's something worth considering here as well. I can't explain why research which sacrifices human life, albeit in proto-human form, is bad. I just know that my heart tells me it is, and my heart is (pragmatically) right more often than not.
Re:I forget if we're supposed to hate them
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Netscape Turns 10
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· Score: 1
This one's easy. When Moz went open source, it became distinct from Netscape/AOL. So it's safe to like it. NS should be regarded with the same sort of vague sadness as a good idea ruined by incompetence. Most Slashdotters choose to blame AOL for NS's demise, even though this makes no sense. The safer course there is just to blame MS. It has some actual basis in reality and, to paraphrase the old saw about buying from IBM, nobody ever got modded down for talking shit about MS.
What's air worth? The same as everything else: whatever people are willing to pay for it. Most people will never have a need to get air any way other than by breathing in, and so most people will never pay a cent for air. But some people, like divers and astronauts, certainly will pay for it, because it's not that simple to breathe underwater or in space.
Don't think of money as having intrinsic value, or objects as having intrinsic price tags. Money is a convenient abstraction which allows us to assign relative worth to objects. I mean, imagine that air is suddenly no longer plentiful. We have to buy it. Now it's still fairly cheap, say $50/month. The end of the month comes around and you've got only enough either to pay your air bill or buy a computer game, but not both. Which do you do? Well, duh; you pay your air bill, since you'd like to continue breathing. That's where the you assign the relative worth. A game costing as much as a month's supply of air does not suggest that the two have equal value.
Why then, do global warmning advocates expend so much time and effort making third world countries try to adhere to restrictions even the US and China don't want to?
Everything is easier when you do it right, or at least better, the first time around. Building an environmentally-friendly factory may cost $2.5 billion. Retrofitting a smog-blasting factory to blast slightly less smog will cost hundreds of millions of dollars... and it still is going to pollute more than a better design.
Even on a small scale this is true. We all know that simple things like shutting off lights, not running the faucet when brushing your teeth, etc. can have a dramatic (and positive) effect on our environment. But in order to work, everyone needs to do it. Well, it's damn hard to get 250 million people to change their wasteful habits. But people in Africa, for example, don't have those habits yet. So why not help them get the right ones, even if they think it's pointless? Really, it is pointless right now, but if suddenly half of Africa becomes heavily industrialized a la China...
Well, as a straight male, I prefer looking at cute girls, so that's usually the character type I create. The only real reason I create male characters at all is a practical one: clumsy come-ons by horny teenage boys. I can only take so much "r u hot 4 reel" before I quit in disgust. Christ, I wouldn't want to spend thirty seconds with a girl that line actually worked on.
It would be far too easy to make a joke about the size of your penis, so instead I'll just make this remark and thereby demonstrate my moral superiority. While still making the joke.
Just as a point of reference, 600k Windows zombies can push, in sum with 100% efficiency, about 17GB/s. That sounds like an awful lot, but the data center where I work can nearly do that. Furthermore, 600k home computers users with broadband is a lot. It can take over 24 hours to nmap 700 computers on a LAN, and you'd have to cast a truly enormous net: to infect 600k computers you'd probably need to scan twice that many; and to get that many actual computers, you'd have to scan - being somewhat optimistic - twice that many IPs. So you'd be conducting an nmap on some 2.5 million IPs. Possibly over a slow trans-Pacific link from China or NK. Even working in parallel, it's take weeks or months, and you've only got one shot. Once you launch the DDoS, at least two thirds of the boxes you hacked are going to be taken offline/patched/etc. Certainly you'll be able to reinfect some of them (and it'll be faster cause you know they're there), but you'd be lucky to keep half.
No, targeted hacking is a much, much bigger concern, because there are many Internet sites which centralize a lot of information on a small number of machines. At a certain scale, it becomes easier to hack a single, well-protected machine than it is to hack a large number of poorly-protected machines. Especially considering the dubious benefit of a one-time massive DDoS, it'd be far more effective to crack Amazon.
If you're voting, you ought to have at least a rough sort of ranking in your head already. Condorcet dosen't require you to rank everyone, so you vote for the candidates you know about and don't vote for the others. One potential weakness is that there's no obvious way to vote against a candidate, but it can still be done (it just requires you to vote for all those fringe parties and not vote for the guy you don't want elected). I suspect the system could also be adapted to support vote-againsts if that turned out to be a really useful thing.
The main problem with Condorcet is the complexity. People struggle enough with the electoral college, which can be explained completely in two or three sentences at most. I think this is why IRV is probably a better idea. It's not as good at Condorcet, but it's better than what we (Americans) have now and it's pretty easy to understand.
I can think of far more objectionable things to do, and I can think of a lot of classes where I've had to do them all. And you know, all those classes, if I'd had a legitimate problem with doing what I was asked to, I could've spoken with the prof and gotten out of it. There's not a doubt in my mind that this prof would be similarly understanding. I mean, if I can provide a reasoned, well-thought out explanation of why I decline to vote, doesn't that accomplish everything the prof hopes for here? In his place I'd be ecstatic, because I expect half the kids in the class can't tell GWB from JFK.
Note that I didn't RTFA. Maybe he makes a liar out of me by saying he will not, under any circumstances, excuse anyone. I really wish Slashdot wouldn't run NYT stories.
That doesn't logically follow at all. "Main purpose" does not preclude there being other purposes. If there weren't, he'd have no problems with divorce once the first kid is born, and I'm sure he does. Just as most people do.
Furthermore, the intent to have children does not imply an intent to do so immediately. One could get married planning to have children five or however many years down the road. That's still fulfilling the main purpose of marriage by his standard, just not immediately.
Bear in mind that both of these are patently obvious problems with your argument assuming that your premise (i.e. your description of his beliefs) is entirely accurate. Which I very much doubt.
Incidentally, I don't agree with him. But if you're going to argue against his position, you need to (1) argue against his actual position; and (2) make sure your argument isn't as broken as his. I'm not convinced you did either, or in fact made a serious effort to. That suggests that you aren't arguing from reason, but from mindless belief - doubtless one of your purported objections to his beliefs. Consistency is a virtue, though not a perfect one. You should strive to attain it in at least some small measure.
Norton Antivirus, like some other AV systems, tries to detect unknown viruses using common patterns. This results in it occasionally coming up with false positives, especially of programs which share common characteristics with viruses and trojans. For example, it used to spot pretty much any keygen as a virus, though it no longer does.
With all due respect to conspiracy theorists, this may be all that's happening here. What's the first task of a really good virus or trojan? Bypassing defenses, both of the machine and the nearby network. Any program which does those things is inherently suspicious. This is not to say the conspiracy theorists are wrong, mind you, merely that there are other possibilities.
Remember that freedom means giving the people right to make bad decisions if that's what they want to do. Freedom of speech means I can stand up in a public place and make a complete ass of myself and nobody will stop me. (Well, the government won't, anyway.) Free (as in speech) software means that you have to give people the right to make bad choices about how software should be written, designed, and used. While we certainly all hope that stuff like the Linux kernel will encourage more free software and drivers, we have to respect the rights of others to decide differently. To do otherwise is to take away their freedom, and that's contrary to the entire goal of free software.
Just as with free speech, you can't force your ideas on others by restricting their abilities to express their own ideas. You have to trust that, given time, other people will recognize that your way is best and adopt it voluntarily. It's the same way with free software. Yes, a HAL will make the jobs of binary driver authors easier, just as it will for open soruce driver authors. And we'll certainly see more binary-only drivers as a result. But we have to trust that the wisdom of our model will become apparent to others and that, eventually, it will become the dominant model for software development (and distribution).
This is by far the hardest lesson to learn about freedom. It goes against instinct, and morality, to just sit back and watch people make mistakes. We want to help them, which means control them and their decisions, but in doing so we actually hurt them (and ourselves). It sucks, but we just need to have faith and demonstrate our principles through our deeds.
Just as a warning, my entire lengthy post deals with the single paragraph I quoted below.
I don't think this is all that suprising. Conservatives believe what's good for the corporations is good for everyone. Liberals believe that what is good for the people is good for everyone. Strong IP laws favour the big companies - weak IP laws favour the little guy more.
That's way too broad a brush there. There are a lot of different... sects, I guess you could call them. The much-publicized "moderate majority" is pretty socially liberal (welfare, particularly health care) but fiscally conservative (lower taxes, freer market). It goes the other way too, of course. It's more confusing because of the original meanings of the words, where liberal means free; so one will often hear about a "liberal economy," which means a free market economy and aligns more closely with the conservative viewpoint. Believe it or not, in this instance you'd be better off talking about Democrats and Republicans rather than liberals and conservatives. The two parties no longer really align along those two ideologies, or at least not to the extent they did in the semi-recent past.
I would rephrase your statement to say that free-market politicians believe that what's good for the economy is good for everyone, and that strong IP laws generally are good for the economy. The first premise seems obviously true, or at least most Americans certainly believe it to be the case: an improving economy may not benefit all equally, but it benefits all to some extent. The second premise is what we should be discussing here.
It seems that most opposition to free markets centers on economic inequity, which is not - and I think the aforementioned opponents will agree with me - a necessary consequence of free markets per se. It is, rather, a consequence of the way we're doing it. (If my understanding is incorrect I'm sure someone will step in and explain it better, as the anti-globalization crowd has a pretty good representation here on Slashdot.)
So you'll note that both sides on this particular debate seem to agree with the underlying premise, which is that free markets, done properly, will improve the lot of everyone. The only real question is how best to do them, and how close to the ideal we can, or should, reach.
The importance to this is that there is no longer a significant difference between the economic viewpoints of Democrats and Republicans on this topic. In this particular area I think this reflects the views of America as a whole, or at least as a pretty good majority.
So what does this all have to do with your point? Simply put, there is an irritating tendency on Slashdot to say "A good, B bad (or evil)." In this case, and in many others, the reality is that A and B both believe the same thing except for some insignificant details. You are creating a tremendous false dichotomy by suggesting that the Democrats and Republicans occupy polar opposites on this issue and are doing Slashdot's readers and intellectual disservice by doing so.
Instead of bashing one party or the other, wouldn't it be better to discuss this issue on the merits? Instead of assuming that IP is bad because Republicans back it and Democrats don't (which is categorically false anyway) maybe we should hold an honest discussion about what reasons there might be to support IP. I have no interest in discussions which merely support the point of view I already hold. I am very interested in discussions which challenge my opinions and force me to rethink my position. And while Slashdot usually doesn't give much of that, it's the times that it does which keep me coming back.
Forgive the lengthy rant. I should just save myself some stomach lining and stop reading anything which involves the standard Slashdot hot button topics, but apparently I can't.
Re:Reiserfs, storage and why do you want this?
on
Database File System
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· Score: 4, Interesting
OK, let's consider an example other than documents. Joe is a big music fan with a couple hundred CDs. He likes having instant access to any one song when he wants it and has a lot of hard drive space, so he's MP3-ized (or ogg-ized or flac-ized or whatever) his entire collection, plus all the MP3s he's acquired via other means.
Joe is pretty good about organization, so he names every MP3 properly with the group, album, and track names, plus the track number. (Something like The Beatles/White Album/01-Back in the USSR.mp3.) This way if he knows, for example, the track name but not what album it's on, he can find it pretty quickly using a method like yours.
The problem is if he wants to do something like put all the country music he has, for example, in a playlist. How does he do that? It can be done, certainly, but if he has a collection with several thousand MP3s it's so tedious and difficult as to be effectively impossible. What if he wants to listen to 60s rock? What if he wants to find a particular song he has, but all he knows is it's between 3 and 5 minutes long, came out between 2002 and 2003, and is probably categorized as either "pop" or "alternative?" What if he just wants a list of all the songs he never listens to because he's sick of what he's been playing lately? Or maybe he needs to free up disk space and wants to find out what he'll miss the least.
All these things are impossible to do in an efficient and timely manner using our current system. He can certainly use a command-line ID3 tagger to strip out the things he cares about, something like
but that's painfully slow: a second or two per file means a big connection will take 15 minutes or longer to scan, and if you typed "Gerne" by mistake you have to do it all over.
Now if you had a filesystem-like object which could be smart and store ID3 metadata in the filesystem, then it would be much faster: the main overhead to using the find/xargs/id3tag/grep approach described above comes from having to seek through the MP3 file to get at the metadata. The reason this needs to be a "core OS component," perhaps even part of the kernel, is that MP3 tags can change at whim and the filesystem needs to know about it or its metadata can get out of sync. It's possible, but impractical, to update this on a periodic basis, like the locatedb; it makes much more sense to have the kernel inform some plugin "Hey, this file just changed, do you care?" And if the plugin does care, it can look at the changes, see if it's affected, and possibly update the metadata to match. It could also go the other way, where Joe updates the filesystem metadata and the OS knows to update the MP3's ID3 tags too.
What I meant by "encouraged" is that many people are driven to work overtime because they want to buy things they couldn't afford otherwise. Sometimes they'll work overtime to buy a new TV, sometimes to buy a car or a house. None of those things are really needs, since you can live with a cheap used car and an apartment, and you don't need a TV at all. Hence my use of the word.
Now as for the scare-quotes, there's no denying that businesses conflate the sorts of things I listed above with a better lifestyle. (And in many cases they're fair to do so. It's way nicer to have a new car than a beat-up old used one.) So while people make their own choices to work, or not work, overtime, they aren't entirely free from influence, and so it's misleading to imply that it's an entirely individual decision.
As for the rest of your "argument" (the scare-quotes are there this time because I'm being extremely generous and want you to know it), well, I've already made my quota for flamebait this week.
It's more than that depending on where you look. Parts of Europe, like France, have mandated 35-hour work weeks, whereas in the US most fulltime jobs are 40-45 hours a week. The motivation for shorter work weeks there is reducing unemployment. The theory is that you can have 7 hours working 40 hours a week or 8 working 35, so the latter is preferable because it employs more people. The problem is that if you pay the employees the same amount per hour, those 8 employees each make 12.5% less per year; and if you pay them the same amount per week (i.e. more per hour), those 8 employees cost the employer 14.2% more per year. Which is why all these short work week initiatives aren't doing much to control unemployment in the parts of Europe which feature them: the unions force employers to reduce hours but not benefits or pay, which increases costs and decreases employers' ability to employ workers. Thus the 7 35-hour employees in Europe would cost about as much as 7 40-hour employees in the US, and there goes the supposed motivation for hiring an extra worker.
Now I'm not trying to claim that Europeans don't work hard enuogh, or that American's don't work too hard. As it happens I do think that most Americans are being... "encouraged," let's say, to work too hard. I just want to illustrate that this is not a simple problem, and that even small changes, made for the best reasons, can have negative consequences. This is something we need to think very carefully about or we run the risk of ruining our economy - and probably the entire world's along with it.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't take anything China says at face value. This is not a free country we're talking about here. They release only that information which makes them look good to other countries, and if they haven't got any suitable information to release, they will make something up.
If I were more clever, I'd produce a FreeBSD description now. But I'm not, so I'll just paraphrase what another poster has already said in reply to your article: "We don't care what's best, pick a goddamn direction and stick with it." It's the single biggest reason I steer clear of Linux now whenever I have a choice. I, too, experience a swelling of pride when the GNU awk is replaced by a less-functional non-GNU version. And I'm the guy who stands up and defends RMS whenever he demands "GNU" be added before all things open source!
The moral of the story: it may take MS a month to roll out a fix, but it may also take a month longer for the bug to be discovered by unscrupulous individuals. MS, meanwhile, has access to the source, so it increases their chances of finding it first.
I'm not saying the closed-source approach is better, just that by the nature of the beast, OSS developers have to be more on the ball when it comes to releasing fixes quickly. That might explain why they usually are.
I should probably shut up, as I'm obviously no biologist. But I have faith that, for the time being at least, medical science is capable of keeping up with this sort of problem.
...What?
Most of the innovation going on in the CPU world right now is in the fab and design areas. We aren't getting innovative processors, we're getting innovative manufacturing techniques which allow us to do the same thing we've been doing for 30 years... just at a higher clock speed and with more transistors. And there, Intel is the clear "innovator," mainly because they actually have the money to build all the new-fangled equipment needed.
Having a background in philosophy, chiefly ethics, makes this a very hard subject for me. One of my professors once said something which really hit me: If we humans had perfect knowledge of our actions and our consequences, there would be almost no moral questions. But since we don't... It turns out that, for the most part, doing the morally right thing turns out to be the pragmatically right thing as well. We as humans have millions of years of experience which have culminated, in large part, in our ethical beliefs. We can't always explain them, but somehow, when we behave ethically, things usually turn out right in the end. That really struck a chord with me, and in my life I've found it to be true. It's been a sort of golden rule for me, I guess you could say. I think it's something worth considering here as well. I can't explain why research which sacrifices human life, albeit in proto-human form, is bad. I just know that my heart tells me it is, and my heart is (pragmatically) right more often than not.
We look forward to your return to the Collective.
Don't think of money as having intrinsic value, or objects as having intrinsic price tags. Money is a convenient abstraction which allows us to assign relative worth to objects. I mean, imagine that air is suddenly no longer plentiful. We have to buy it. Now it's still fairly cheap, say $50/month. The end of the month comes around and you've got only enough either to pay your air bill or buy a computer game, but not both. Which do you do? Well, duh; you pay your air bill, since you'd like to continue breathing. That's where the you assign the relative worth. A game costing as much as a month's supply of air does not suggest that the two have equal value.
Even on a small scale this is true. We all know that simple things like shutting off lights, not running the faucet when brushing your teeth, etc. can have a dramatic (and positive) effect on our environment. But in order to work, everyone needs to do it. Well, it's damn hard to get 250 million people to change their wasteful habits. But people in Africa, for example, don't have those habits yet. So why not help them get the right ones, even if they think it's pointless? Really, it is pointless right now, but if suddenly half of Africa becomes heavily industrialized a la China...
Well, as a straight male, I prefer looking at cute girls, so that's usually the character type I create. The only real reason I create male characters at all is a practical one: clumsy come-ons by horny teenage boys. I can only take so much "r u hot 4 reel" before I quit in disgust. Christ, I wouldn't want to spend thirty seconds with a girl that line actually worked on.
It would be far too easy to make a joke about the size of your penis, so instead I'll just make this remark and thereby demonstrate my moral superiority. While still making the joke.
I think you may be doing it wrong.
No, targeted hacking is a much, much bigger concern, because there are many Internet sites which centralize a lot of information on a small number of machines. At a certain scale, it becomes easier to hack a single, well-protected machine than it is to hack a large number of poorly-protected machines. Especially considering the dubious benefit of a one-time massive DDoS, it'd be far more effective to crack Amazon.
The main problem with Condorcet is the complexity. People struggle enough with the electoral college, which can be explained completely in two or three sentences at most. I think this is why IRV is probably a better idea. It's not as good at Condorcet, but it's better than what we (Americans) have now and it's pretty easy to understand.
"I think I finally understand this game! The score is three blogs to four antiblogs and the infield blog rule is in effect."
Note that I didn't RTFA. Maybe he makes a liar out of me by saying he will not, under any circumstances, excuse anyone. I really wish Slashdot wouldn't run NYT stories.
Furthermore, the intent to have children does not imply an intent to do so immediately. One could get married planning to have children five or however many years down the road. That's still fulfilling the main purpose of marriage by his standard, just not immediately.
Bear in mind that both of these are patently obvious problems with your argument assuming that your premise (i.e. your description of his beliefs) is entirely accurate. Which I very much doubt.
Incidentally, I don't agree with him. But if you're going to argue against his position, you need to (1) argue against his actual position; and (2) make sure your argument isn't as broken as his. I'm not convinced you did either, or in fact made a serious effort to. That suggests that you aren't arguing from reason, but from mindless belief - doubtless one of your purported objections to his beliefs. Consistency is a virtue, though not a perfect one. You should strive to attain it in at least some small measure.
I was a little worried myself, but I have mod points so I figured I'd do my civic duty and make sure it was safe.
With all due respect to conspiracy theorists, this may be all that's happening here. What's the first task of a really good virus or trojan? Bypassing defenses, both of the machine and the nearby network. Any program which does those things is inherently suspicious. This is not to say the conspiracy theorists are wrong, mind you, merely that there are other possibilities.
Just as with free speech, you can't force your ideas on others by restricting their abilities to express their own ideas. You have to trust that, given time, other people will recognize that your way is best and adopt it voluntarily. It's the same way with free software. Yes, a HAL will make the jobs of binary driver authors easier, just as it will for open soruce driver authors. And we'll certainly see more binary-only drivers as a result. But we have to trust that the wisdom of our model will become apparent to others and that, eventually, it will become the dominant model for software development (and distribution).
This is by far the hardest lesson to learn about freedom. It goes against instinct, and morality, to just sit back and watch people make mistakes. We want to help them, which means control them and their decisions, but in doing so we actually hurt them (and ourselves). It sucks, but we just need to have faith and demonstrate our principles through our deeds.
I would rephrase your statement to say that free-market politicians believe that what's good for the economy is good for everyone, and that strong IP laws generally are good for the economy. The first premise seems obviously true, or at least most Americans certainly believe it to be the case: an improving economy may not benefit all equally, but it benefits all to some extent. The second premise is what we should be discussing here.
It seems that most opposition to free markets centers on economic inequity, which is not - and I think the aforementioned opponents will agree with me - a necessary consequence of free markets per se. It is, rather, a consequence of the way we're doing it. (If my understanding is incorrect I'm sure someone will step in and explain it better, as the anti-globalization crowd has a pretty good representation here on Slashdot.)
So you'll note that both sides on this particular debate seem to agree with the underlying premise, which is that free markets, done properly, will improve the lot of everyone. The only real question is how best to do them, and how close to the ideal we can, or should, reach.
The importance to this is that there is no longer a significant difference between the economic viewpoints of Democrats and Republicans on this topic. In this particular area I think this reflects the views of America as a whole, or at least as a pretty good majority.
So what does this all have to do with your point? Simply put, there is an irritating tendency on Slashdot to say "A good, B bad (or evil)." In this case, and in many others, the reality is that A and B both believe the same thing except for some insignificant details. You are creating a tremendous false dichotomy by suggesting that the Democrats and Republicans occupy polar opposites on this issue and are doing Slashdot's readers and intellectual disservice by doing so.
Instead of bashing one party or the other, wouldn't it be better to discuss this issue on the merits? Instead of assuming that IP is bad because Republicans back it and Democrats don't (which is categorically false anyway) maybe we should hold an honest discussion about what reasons there might be to support IP. I have no interest in discussions which merely support the point of view I already hold. I am very interested in discussions which challenge my opinions and force me to rethink my position. And while Slashdot usually doesn't give much of that, it's the times that it does which keep me coming back.
Forgive the lengthy rant. I should just save myself some stomach lining and stop reading anything which involves the standard Slashdot hot button topics, but apparently I can't.
Joe is pretty good about organization, so he names every MP3 properly with the group, album, and track names, plus the track number. (Something like The Beatles/White Album/01-Back in the USSR.mp3.) This way if he knows, for example, the track name but not what album it's on, he can find it pretty quickly using a method like yours.
The problem is if he wants to do something like put all the country music he has, for example, in a playlist. How does he do that? It can be done, certainly, but if he has a collection with several thousand MP3s it's so tedious and difficult as to be effectively impossible. What if he wants to listen to 60s rock? What if he wants to find a particular song he has, but all he knows is it's between 3 and 5 minutes long, came out between 2002 and 2003, and is probably categorized as either "pop" or "alternative?" What if he just wants a list of all the songs he never listens to because he's sick of what he's been playing lately? Or maybe he needs to free up disk space and wants to find out what he'll miss the least.
All these things are impossible to do in an efficient and timely manner using our current system. He can certainly use a command-line ID3 tagger to strip out the things he cares about, something like
but that's painfully slow: a second or two per file means a big connection will take 15 minutes or longer to scan, and if you typed "Gerne" by mistake you have to do it all over.Now if you had a filesystem-like object which could be smart and store ID3 metadata in the filesystem, then it would be much faster: the main overhead to using the find/xargs/id3tag/grep approach described above comes from having to seek through the MP3 file to get at the metadata. The reason this needs to be a "core OS component," perhaps even part of the kernel, is that MP3 tags can change at whim and the filesystem needs to know about it or its metadata can get out of sync. It's possible, but impractical, to update this on a periodic basis, like the locatedb; it makes much more sense to have the kernel inform some plugin "Hey, this file just changed, do you care?" And if the plugin does care, it can look at the changes, see if it's affected, and possibly update the metadata to match. It could also go the other way, where Joe updates the filesystem metadata and the OS knows to update the MP3's ID3 tags too.
Now as for the scare-quotes, there's no denying that businesses conflate the sorts of things I listed above with a better lifestyle. (And in many cases they're fair to do so. It's way nicer to have a new car than a beat-up old used one.) So while people make their own choices to work, or not work, overtime, they aren't entirely free from influence, and so it's misleading to imply that it's an entirely individual decision.
As for the rest of your "argument" (the scare-quotes are there this time because I'm being extremely generous and want you to know it), well, I've already made my quota for flamebait this week.
Now I'm not trying to claim that Europeans don't work hard enuogh, or that American's don't work too hard. As it happens I do think that most Americans are being... "encouraged," let's say, to work too hard. I just want to illustrate that this is not a simple problem, and that even small changes, made for the best reasons, can have negative consequences. This is something we need to think very carefully about or we run the risk of ruining our economy - and probably the entire world's along with it.