"Excuse me but zero jobs should be lost to overseas workers. You know why? Because companies that do this should be taxed to hell and back for doing it. Make it so fucking unattractive that the companies will NEVER even consider a foreign worker cheaper than a US native. I have a feeling that the person currently running the show wouldn't ever think of THAT. Remember he's optimistic about furthering his "base" of the "have mores". "
What right do you or the govt have to tell someone how to run their business, and who they can hire. As well as attacking a fundamental freedom of people, in practice what you suggest will make American businesses less competitve, and therefore instead of only losing jobs to overseas workers, we'll lose whole companies to overseas companies. We need a flat tax system so the government can't shove social policies down our throats by manipulating taxes.
The idea of free journals sounds nice on the surface. However, there are a number of expenses that need to be paid. Web servers are not free. Professional editors cost money. People need to be hired for organization, administration, IT. Etc. Someone needs to pay these expenses. In the IEEE, for example, all journal and conference articles are online. The are not free to the public since it costs a lot of money to operate reputable journals and conferences. Hopefully the web will eliminate the printing costs, but as in the music industry, media costs are only a small fraction of overall expenses.
"They may talk about the value of peer review, but as you point out, none of these reviewers are really paid employees, so they are largely independent of the journals."
Peer review is the single most important feature of a journal. If you read a random paper you find on the internet, you have no idea whther it's true or not. With a reputable journal, you know people considered experts on the topic have looked at it and haven't found any obvious flaws with it.
I've used Windows NT4, Windows98, and WindowsXP. I have not had any significant problems with any of these systems. I have also used Solaris, Linux, and MacOS. Solaris and Linux are a pain in the ass to maintain, particularly when installing software that you need to compile yoursewlf, but otherwise are very reliable. I used MacOS through version 9 and found it extremely pathetic. It didn't support preemptive multitasking, there was no memory protection, and virtually no memory management. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry when informed you had to manually set a maximum memory limit for an application. I assume MacOS X is better, but got out of school before then, and wasn't forced to deal with Macs any more. Of course Windows has all kinds of security problems, but I keep up with patches, and Solaris and Linux have security problems as well. Back when I was at school, our SPARC machines were not behind a firewall, and were hacked on more than one occasion since we weren't careful about keeping up with patches. A friend of mine also had his linux box hacked, and the hacker was running a password sniffer to collect passwords on it. Anyway, before modding me down, remember, you asked the question.
"When and how do you think you'll ever get government regulations that aren't captive of the industries they purport to control? As P.J. O'Rourke summed it up, "When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are regulators.""
Exactly, that's why govt. regulation should be avoided whenever possible. We also need a flat tax system to prevent people from buying tax breaks from congress. Free market does a good job of regulating itself when not restricted.
"What worries me is this could be a foot in the door situation.. It is hard to justify the first ones but then easier for future blocks. P0rn, Warz, Hax all could be disappearing from a website near you!"
The slippery slope argument is a logical fallacy. Real child pornography is illegal. It is not a legitimate expression of free speech because it is a violation of the rights of the child who is being abused.
That makes no sense. The tower you communicate with in WiMAX has a large pipe to get the multiple data streams between the internet and the WiMAX subscribers. A grass roots network using this technology would violate FCC regulations since the broadcast range is on the order of a kilometer. There would be too much interference between networks without a entral tower to control things.
"f it takes a painful failure to remind us of the costs of irresponsible behaviour, perhaps it is worth it to make sure that such a horrible debacle doesn't happen again."
I feel sorry for you if you truly believe innocent and Iraqis and US soldiers should suffer for the mistakes of the Bush administration. In reality, you don't want to see Bush re-elected, and you're willing to to sacrifice the lives of others to achieve that goal. Your rhetoric doesn't cloud the transparency of your real goal, which is the same as Moore's. I'll take success in Iraq, even if it means enduring 4 more years of Bush screwing up the environment, and pushing his agenda of forcing his values down out throats.
"I think due to the redefinition of superpower as "United States as the world's only superpower", it probably refers to the ability to forcefully remove sovereignty and control resources, to conduct human rights abuses of its own with impunity. In other words, they are not answerable to anyone."
" extreme liberalism would be libertarians, communist implies authoriatian."
No libertarianism is only socially liberal, i.e. they don't believe in laws that restrict individual rights. Libertarian's are economically conservative, believing in a small govt. whose only job is to make and enforce laws to protect individual rights. They believe in free trade. They don't believe in welfare, social security, antitrust laws, public utilities, or even public roads or schools.
Communism is a misguided philsophy that believe the welfare of the collective is more important than basic rights of individuals, such as the right to own property.
"Libertarians actually hold very right-wing/conservative views; the only way they get called liberals is because they don't think the government should get in the way of much of anything."
Wrong, liberals believe the govt. should control every aspect of your life. That's why liberals believe in welfare, social security, socialized health care, etc. Libertarians do believe in smaller govt., which is why they oppose the above social programs. Liberals, however, believe in big govt.
" There's a poster below here that makes the comment that "if it ain't on the net, I ain't interested".
Voluntary compliance is the key. Make it so that we want to comply, and stop fighting the consumer drive.
It's been a while since I took Econ, but I will always remember the invisible hand theory. The market will ALWAYS force itself toward equilibrium.
Laws, unions, anything that unnaturally hinders the market breaks equilibrium. Forcing high prices on cds. Suing your customers into submission.
Why not let the market do what it does best, and go to that point of equilibrium where profit is maximized naturally? They're holding onto a cartel-type model and it's just not going to work."
How do you define equilibrium? Theft of a product, for instance, has an influence on the market. Do we stop prosecuting theft, and assume shoplifting is a natural market force in retail? Are you arguing that laws against shoplifting are causing price inflation, since shop owners can charge more because they no longer need to worry about a customer stealing their products because the prices are too high? You're making the same arguement about music. You're basically arguing that the price of a cd needs to be low enough that it isn't even worth the effort to copy it instead of buying it, regardless of the ethics of copying someone elses work without compensation.
to attack freedom this way. Contracts are the basis of civilzation. Govts. imposing restrictions on contracts to give one person undeserved rights at the expense of the other person is an attack on a fundamental freedom, free trade.
"Those that have good parents and want to be educated will be educated.
Do you think some poor kid in an inner-city ghetto is going to have good parents and the drive to succeed? Hell no. Maybe if you weren't so ignorant you would know why most civilized countries, including the US, have mandatory schooling."
Having public schools alone doesn't solve the problem. If parents aren't interested in their kids' education, they don't study or learn anything anyway. You can force a kid to go to school, but you can't force him to learn anything there.
"Do you think a for-profit private school would have wasted their budget money like this?
Yes. If the money was earmarked for buying network equipment, which it was, they might as well get all the network equipment they could possibly want. If I give you 10 million dollars for the sole purpose of upgrading your internet connection, wouldn't you try to spend it all? Possibly on stuff you will never need?"
If a school wants to remain competitive, they won't waste money on equipment 10x more expensive than they need. That's how capitalism works. Inefficient companies fail. Parents don't pay the school 10 million just for networking, they pay them a fee, and the school decides what is most important to spend it on. There is no govt. money coming in under this system to waste.
"As an American I think we'd have a better program if the school system wasn't controlled by the government.
Really? Well, keep in mind that there is already an extensive network of non-public schools that you could go to if you have the money. How exactly does it solve the problem?"
More people could afford to send their kids to private schools of their choice if they didn't have to pay the tax burden that supports the public school system
"As a European I believe you'd better hve such a program run by independant beaurocrats than For Profit commercial interests. And than elect thrustworthy officials to contral the beaurocrats."
An independent beurocrat is no better than a commercial interest. The commercial interest is interested in charging as much as it can get away with, but the independent beaurocrat has no real motivation to get the best/cheapest solution either. As long as he advises a solution that works, we minimizes his work (and avoids losing his job), and doesn't answer to the taxpayers who must pay the bill anyway.
This is an inherent flaw in socialism. There is no good feedback mechanism for state officials to be held accountable for their decisions. In the free market, bad decisions send you to bankruptcy. In govt., taxpayers have no choice but to pay the increased costs resulting from bad decisions by govt. officials.
There is no good solution as long as there are public schools. Only privately run schools who get all their revenue from students' parents has real incentive to choose the best balance of cost cutting and quality education. If they make bad decisions, parents send their kids to competing schools.
Of course, in a private system, children suffer from low income and bad choices of parents, which is the impetus for public education; to give all kids the same opportunity. In the US however, public education is paid for through property tax, so wealthier parents own more expensive houses, pay more taxes, and provide more moeny for better schools anyway. So public education in the US isn't even equal for children anyway. Not surprising since a parent cares more about the education of his own kids than the education of kids in other neighborhoods.
The purpose of disk caching is to give your system more memory than it actually has in RAM. It doesn't improve performance, but instead allows you to run jobs that require more memory than your computer has. In fact, if your job needs to work on large chunks of data at a time that are larger than can fit in main memory, your machine will start thrashing, that is, spend most of its time moving data to and from the disk, and very little time computing anything.
"The Palm goes to quality films like Taxi Driver, Underground, Pelle Erobreren, films that show creativity and changes lives."
And Michael Moore's film will be ranked with these? This was most likely a politcal statement which damages the cridibility of the award you hold in such high regard.
Slashdot Mirror
"Excuse me but zero jobs should be lost to overseas workers. You know why? Because companies that do this should be taxed to hell and back for doing it. Make it so fucking unattractive that the companies will NEVER even consider a foreign worker cheaper than a US native. I have a feeling that the person currently running the show wouldn't ever think of THAT. Remember he's optimistic about furthering his "base" of the "have mores".
"
What right do you or the govt have to tell someone how to run their business, and who they can hire. As well as attacking a fundamental freedom of people, in practice what you suggest will make American businesses less competitve, and therefore instead of only losing jobs to overseas workers, we'll lose whole companies to overseas companies. We need a flat tax system so the government can't shove social policies down our throats by manipulating taxes.
Yss, FVWM2 rocks. It's very bare bones, but very configurable if you like extras.
The idea of free journals sounds nice on the surface. However, there are a number of expenses that need to be paid. Web servers are not free. Professional editors cost money. People need to be hired for organization, administration, IT. Etc. Someone needs to pay these expenses. In the IEEE, for example, all journal and conference articles are online. The are not free to the public since it costs a lot of money to operate reputable journals and conferences. Hopefully the web will eliminate the printing costs, but as in the music industry, media costs are only a small fraction of overall expenses.
"They may talk about the value of peer review, but as you point out, none of these reviewers are really paid employees, so they are largely independent of the journals."
Peer review is the single most important feature of a journal. If you read a random paper you find on the internet, you have no idea whther it's true or not. With a reputable journal, you know people considered experts on the topic have looked at it and haven't found any obvious flaws with it.
I've used Windows NT4, Windows98, and WindowsXP. I have not had any significant problems with any of these systems. I have also used Solaris, Linux, and MacOS. Solaris and Linux are a pain in the ass to maintain, particularly when installing software that you need to compile yoursewlf, but otherwise are very reliable. I used MacOS through version 9 and found it extremely pathetic. It didn't support preemptive multitasking, there was no memory protection, and virtually no memory management. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry when informed you had to manually set a maximum memory limit for an application. I assume MacOS X is better, but got out of school before then, and wasn't forced to deal with Macs any more. Of course Windows has all kinds of security problems, but I keep up with patches, and Solaris and Linux have security problems as well. Back when I was at school, our SPARC machines were not behind a firewall, and were hacked on more than one occasion since we weren't careful about keeping up with patches. A friend of mine also had his linux box hacked, and the hacker was running a password sniffer to collect passwords on it. Anyway, before modding me down, remember, you asked the question.
"When and how do you think you'll ever get government regulations that aren't captive of the industries they purport to control? As P.J. O'Rourke summed it up, "When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are regulators.""
Exactly, that's why govt. regulation should be avoided whenever possible. We also need a flat tax system to prevent people from buying tax breaks from congress. Free market does a good job of regulating itself when not restricted.
"What worries me is this could be a foot in the door situation.. It is hard to justify the first ones but then easier for future blocks. P0rn, Warz, Hax all could be disappearing from a website near you!"
The slippery slope argument is a logical fallacy. Real child pornography is illegal. It is not a legitimate expression of free speech because it is a violation of the rights of the child who is being abused.
"Apple, in contrast, has embraced Open Source and is delivering a better consumer experience."
Yes, MacOS can even interface with alien technologies and introduce a virus into the alien technologies to save the Earth!
yes. WiMAX is an alternative to DSL or Cable.
That makes no sense. The tower you communicate with in WiMAX has a large pipe to get the multiple data streams between the internet and the WiMAX subscribers. A grass roots network using this technology would violate FCC regulations since the broadcast range is on the order of a kilometer. There would be too much interference between networks without a entral tower to control things.
"f it takes a painful failure to remind us of the costs of irresponsible behaviour, perhaps it is worth it to make sure that such a horrible debacle doesn't happen again."
I feel sorry for you if you truly believe innocent and Iraqis and US soldiers should suffer for the mistakes of the Bush administration. In reality, you don't want to see Bush re-elected, and you're willing to to sacrifice the lives of others to achieve that goal. Your rhetoric doesn't cloud the transparency of your real goal, which is the same as Moore's. I'll take success in Iraq, even if it means enduring 4 more years of Bush screwing up the environment, and pushing his agenda of forcing his values down out throats.
"I think due to the redefinition of superpower as "United States as the world's only superpower", it probably refers to the ability to forcefully remove sovereignty and control resources, to conduct human rights abuses of its own with impunity. In other words, they are not answerable to anyone."
except US voters
" extreme liberalism would be libertarians, communist implies authoriatian."
No libertarianism is only socially liberal, i.e. they don't believe in laws that restrict individual rights. Libertarian's are economically conservative, believing in a small govt. whose only job is to make and enforce laws to protect individual rights. They believe in free trade. They don't believe in welfare, social security, antitrust laws, public utilities, or even public roads or schools.
Communism is a misguided philsophy that believe the welfare of the collective is more important than basic rights of individuals, such as the right to own property.
"Libertarians actually hold very right-wing/conservative views; the only way they get called liberals is because they don't think the government should get in the way of much of anything."
Wrong, liberals believe the govt. should control every aspect of your life. That's why liberals believe in welfare, social security, socialized health care, etc. Libertarians do believe in smaller govt., which is why they oppose the above social programs. Liberals, however, believe in big govt.
" There's a poster below here that makes the comment that "if it ain't on the net, I ain't interested".
Voluntary compliance is the key. Make it so that we want to comply, and stop fighting the consumer drive.
It's been a while since I took Econ, but I will always remember the invisible hand theory. The market will ALWAYS force itself toward equilibrium.
Laws, unions, anything that unnaturally hinders the market breaks equilibrium. Forcing high prices on cds. Suing your customers into submission.
Why not let the market do what it does best, and go to that point of equilibrium where profit is maximized naturally? They're holding onto a cartel-type model and it's just not going to work."
How do you define equilibrium? Theft of a product, for instance, has an influence on the market. Do we stop prosecuting theft, and assume shoplifting is a natural market force in retail? Are you arguing that laws against shoplifting are causing price inflation, since shop owners can charge more because they no longer need to worry about a customer stealing their products because the prices are too high? You're making the same arguement about music. You're basically arguing that the price of a cd needs to be low enough that it isn't even worth the effort to copy it instead of buying it, regardless of the ethics of copying someone elses work without compensation.
GNUOL - GNUOL's not Unix or Linux
to attack freedom this way. Contracts are the basis of civilzation. Govts. imposing restrictions on contracts to give one person undeserved rights at the expense of the other person is an attack on a fundamental freedom, free trade.
I've seen to teach someone structured programming. C is a bit confusing to someone who doesn't understand how computers actually work.
"Those that have good parents and want to be educated will be educated.
Do you think some poor kid in an inner-city ghetto is going to have good parents and the drive to succeed? Hell no. Maybe if you weren't so ignorant you would know why most civilized countries, including the US, have mandatory schooling."
Having public schools alone doesn't solve the problem. If parents aren't interested in their kids' education, they don't study or learn anything anyway. You can force a kid to go to school, but you can't force him to learn anything there.
"Do you think a for-profit private school would have wasted their budget money like this?
Yes. If the money was earmarked for buying network equipment, which it was, they might as well get all the network equipment they could possibly want. If I give you 10 million dollars for the sole purpose of upgrading your internet connection, wouldn't you try to spend it all? Possibly on stuff you will never need?"
If a school wants to remain competitive, they won't waste money on equipment 10x more expensive than they need. That's how capitalism works. Inefficient companies fail. Parents don't pay the school 10 million just for networking, they pay them a fee, and the school decides what is most important to spend it on. There is no govt. money coming in under this system to waste.
"As an American I think we'd have a better program if the school system wasn't controlled by the government.
Really? Well, keep in mind that there is already an extensive network of non-public schools that you could go to if you have the money. How exactly does it solve the problem?"
More people could afford to send their kids to private schools of their choice if they didn't have to pay the tax burden that supports the public school system
"As a European I believe you'd better hve such a program run by independant beaurocrats than For Profit commercial interests.
And than elect thrustworthy officials to contral the beaurocrats."
An independent beurocrat is no better than a commercial interest. The commercial interest is interested in charging as much as it can get away with, but the independent beaurocrat has no real motivation to get the best/cheapest solution either. As long as he advises a solution that works, we minimizes his work (and avoids losing his job), and doesn't answer to the taxpayers who must pay the bill anyway.
This is an inherent flaw in socialism. There is no good feedback mechanism for state officials to be held accountable for their decisions. In the free market, bad decisions send you to bankruptcy. In govt., taxpayers have no choice but to pay the increased costs resulting from bad decisions by govt. officials.
There is no good solution as long as there are public schools. Only privately run schools who get all their revenue from students' parents has real incentive to choose the best balance of cost cutting and quality education. If they make bad decisions, parents send their kids to competing schools.
Of course, in a private system, children suffer from low income and bad choices of parents, which is the impetus for public education; to give all kids the same opportunity. In the US however, public education is paid for through property tax, so wealthier parents own more expensive houses, pay more taxes, and provide more moeny for better schools anyway. So public education in the US isn't even equal for children anyway. Not surprising since a parent cares more about the education of his own kids than the education of kids in other neighborhoods.
The purpose of disk caching is to give your system more memory than it actually has in RAM. It doesn't improve performance, but instead allows you to run jobs that require more memory than your computer has. In fact, if your job needs to work on large chunks of data at a time that are larger than can fit in main memory, your machine will start thrashing, that is, spend most of its time moving data to and from the disk, and very little time computing anything.
"The Palm goes to quality films like Taxi Driver, Underground, Pelle Erobreren, films that show creativity and changes lives."
And Michael Moore's film will be ranked with these? This was most likely a politcal statement which damages the cridibility of the award you hold in such high regard.