You could remove the "To Linux In" and the headline would be more accurate for this teacher:
"When teachers are Obstacles to Education." The guy was probably an economics teacher who believes in Keynesianism, fiat currency, and the Easter Bunny but doesn't believe in free software.
It's tempting to just call this guy a dorky technophobe as at least 70% of the teachers out there fit the profile. But how do we edumacate these people?
Fire and Ice
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
Robert Frost
The biggest flaw I see in autoscaling isn't that it isn't fast enough or might cost too much (in both cases it beats the current "scramble out a new server" or "continuous overcapacity" solutions. The biggest flaw is that it doesn't go far enough. I see it as only the first baby step torwards Transcontinental Demand Load Balancing
"A long-standing rule of thumb for "recession" is that it is defined as contraction in the GDP for at least two consecutive quarters (six months).
That it is, a "rule of thumb", the offical definition of a recession is when the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) business cycle dating committee agrees that there is (was) a recession, and they have now agreed to that. This is the definition which also showed that the Bush1.0 Gulf War 1.0 recession ended more than a year before newly elected Bill Clinton was elected and took credit for the recovery. And the "y2k" recession began before Bush2.0 was elected to take the blame. (That being said, his and the fed's management of that recession and the 9/11 "recession" has certainly created more long-term damage to the economy than either Clinton or the two Bush's could ever do on their own.) NBER's claim that we've been in a recession is akin to your doctor pointing out that you have a hangnail after you've been beheaded. For a look at some real scary statistics, at the St. Louis Fed's Net Free or Borrowed Reserves of Depository Institutions numbers going back to 1950 or Excess Reserve of Depository Institutions going back to 1925. or The Adjusted Monetary Base going back to 1910. Or any of several other monetary statistics that are several black swan SD's away from their multigenerational mean.
Bush's Treasury chairman Paulson and Bernanke have engineered a truly astounding experiment in monetary policy topped only by Robert Mugabe's 10^21% hyperinflationary monetary policies. The economy has enough inertia that we will see 1-5 years of deflation or disinflation as the "imagined" debt money supply virtually disappears, leaving too many goods chasing too few dollars. But the medium/long term effect is inflation, because only currency printing presses and inflation can reduce a debt brought on by a mad government and personal debt fueled spending spree that powered the economy for at least a decade.
P.S. Yes I'm from a small town. That doesn't mean I don't know that Africa is a continent, South Africa is a country and that the earth is millions of years older than Archbishop Ussher thought it was, especially when you account for daylight savings time.
Granted, using "American" to refer to both the people who live within the U.S. and those who live on an American continent is confusing. But there isn't yet an commonly accepted shorthand for "The citizens and other occupants of the United States of America" (One of my elementary school teachers suggested "USonians" but that never caught on.)
What I find less acceptable is the fact that so many people outside of the U.S. refer to the U.S. place as America. There is no excuse for that. There is an acceptable shorthand for the location (U.S. or United States). I even find "The states" acceptable, though the CIS and other groupings of states has made that more ambiguous. I've lived outside of the United States for long enough that now I'm starting misuse the term "America" as often as my European and Asian friends do.
ME:Number 3 "...student loans are even better than subprime and car loans because "the minimum payment" during the 4 years of parties and cheap bear is $0..."AC:"It makes no difference when the repayment period starts. The promissory note takes effect, as a contract, as soon as the borrower signs it. The borrower always must understand the payment schedule up-front."
True, the payment schedule truly makes no difference in the total amount paid, but payment schedules make a huge difference in how easy it is to sell the terms of the contract. (If you don't believe this, wrap up the total amortized cost of a home, car or student loan and try to get ANYONE pay that amount up front, then take the same loan and tell the victim "no payments for 90 years!" and I bet you'll have more takers.
Also, your assumption that 17-19 year-old high-school graduates "always must understand the payment schedule up-front." is about as naive as... most 17-19 year olds. So when I say 0$ for 4 year terms is better, I should say it is better from the standpoint of the loan salesman, not from the victim^H^H^H^H^H^H... erm debtor.
As a previous poster mentioned, accounting and many aspects of law (except court lawyers) is already being outsourced. In fact outsourced accounting and check processing was a huge industry here in Ireland before the property bubble overtook it in importance.
Yes, you're correct. I wasn't sure how to fit Law in, it is a relatively quick payback field and it does very little to help our global competitiveness, but yes it is difficult to outsource.
Reaganites sold the idea of higher education as a short term fiscal investment rather than a long term societal investment.
So more students were forced to take out loans instead of pay their way through college.
Loans meant universities were able to raise tuition without students noticing (student loans are even better than subprime and car loans because "the minimum payment" during the 4 years of parties and cheap bear is $0, the "balloon payments" start after graduation.
Universities turned themselves into country clubs in order to attract even more endowment money. Which piled even more debt onto student loans.
Sallie Mae helped facilitate the transfer of wealth from students to financial institutions backed (like FME, FMC) by our tax dollars.
More students were forced to focus on degrees with short term payback (Compsci, BA, Accounting, Law)
These "short payback" fields do very little to improve U.S. competitiveness and happen to be the most easily outsourced.
Fewer students major in "Long payback" fields such as basic science.
Our universities begin to decay into glorified trade schools.
IT computre ergo IT sum. Non Gradus Anus Rodentum!
(I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to prove by algebra that Hamlet's grandson is Shakespeare's grandfather and that he himself is the ghost of his own father.)
I agree completely except that changing SEC rules to focus on a longer timescale could certainly help companies focus on longer timescales. The reason the SEC requires quarterly profit reports is to prevent fraud. What have we just had a decade of from Enron to Fannie Mae? Fraud. It doesn't work.
As much as I like Bill Joy and your suggestion of Adam C Powell, my top pick would be William McDonough. He is an optimistic far thinking designer whose engineering is as ahead of his time as Thomas Jefferson was ahead of his. McDonough's "Cradle to Cradle" approach would not have allowed sponsorship of oil and food burning ethanol policies. He might use the Chinese milk additive scandal to draw attention to our own failings in addressing the known health effects of lead, mercury, asbestos, tobacco and coal tar as well as reminding us that we continue down this path with our blinders on with respect to BPA, NOx, particulates and CO2.
It's amazing how narrowly focused even the "community" of slashdotters are. Open/Closed source software, indeed software or even computer technology is just a tiny fragment of the areas of science where, as a nation, we've lost the plot. Bill Joy is a computer visionary, but he also sees outside of the box. See some of his insights here In my opinion, the individual or committee needs to be broadminded enough to see the interrelationships of technologies and education. Here is my wish list:
Restore the technical advisory counsel that Reagan sacked in favor of lobbyists.
Balance the Reaganomic "fiscal" value of education with the real societal value of education so basic research on energy, health, economics... and other areas of science unlikely to help G.E.s stock price in the next 91 days, don't forever sit on the back burner while Europe, India, China and Japan leave us in the technological dark ages.
Fix the SEC rules so they don't punish companies which throw money into research where they payoff is more than 91 days in the future. It's telling that the current market cap value of the R&D heavy company that Bill Joy cofounded (Sun) is far less than the global value of the technology contributed by that company.
Treat universities as a long term societal investment, not a short term fiscal investments. Our great universities are decaying into trade-schools or country clubs... whilst falling behind our foreign counterparts.
Use a six-sigma approach to all aspects of government (including voting). If the quality level of our hospitals was as low as that of our election counting, 800 babies would go home to the wrong parents every day.
Tag all funded research with the funding organization so we can vet the tobacco, coal and other industry studies telling us that toxic waste is good for us.
Focus government funding on areas of science with a longer term societal and fiscal payoff. We shouldn't be spending $1 of our tax money funding something that is only going to make Pfizer stockholders happy next year. Pfizer should be funding that!
We have several equivalents to sputnik right now, global climate change, high oil prices,
Create a technological WPA/CCC to rebuild our infrastructures in a green, sustainable, efficient and cost effective way. The 800 billion going to banks would be much better used to rebuild our infrastructure.
Create an office of public science which explains scientific research and decisions to the public so we can all make more informed decisions about science.
The Problem: In every region of Germany, between 45% and 86.3% of the electricity that flows from the outlets is from nuclear power. Everyone has to use this electricity, regardless of whether he wants to or not. Even nature activists have no choice. Plus the energy lobby keep telling us that electricity is electricity.
The Solution: NucleoSTOP, a compact device, is the answer. Through an innovative process, electricity from nuclear power is recognized and, before it can flow through your appliances, is sent back to the source.
The device can be easily attached to any power outlet -- ideally at the house's main circuit -- and you can immediately use electricity with a clean conscience. And the nuclear lobby doesn't profit from it.
Technical Info: Nuclear fission is the source of electricity from nuclear power. Along with the well known energy discharge from fission, a second discharge occurs, called the tachyon impulse, which, unlike the rest of the released energy, cannot be altered. This tachyon impulse gives all of the energy produced from fission a special signature, which is immutable due to the law of conservation of engergy. Consequently, all electricity from nuclear power is marked with this signature.
In all probability (heh), the geniuses involved simply assumed that each credit default probability was independent from the next. So they summed the probabilities, packaged them as AAA and sold them.
p1= (probability of joe-nodoc defaulting = 1/2) Sum 2 million Joe-nodocs and the odds become 1 in 4 million as long as none of the joes work in construction, none
%)
One of my schoolteachers suggested this back when most clocks ran on 60Hz synchronous motors. Speed up time during the work day, slow it down at happy hour.
Sorry if this is slightly off topic, but it always seemed strange to me how reliant we've become to sump pumps. The house I grew up in was built in the 1920s and had a basement as did most of the homes in the upper midwest. From 1850 to about 1970, none of these homes had or needed sump pumps. After about 1970 nearly all houses in the same area were built so that sump pumps are absolutely necessary. I suspect it has something to do with city laws regarding separation of storm sewers from sanitary sewers, and the fact that the sprawly post 1970 suburbs don't have any kind of sewers. But isn't it amazing to think of the amount of energy and environmental damage used to pump billions of gallons 8 feet to the surface so it can trickle back down again in about 5 minutes? If you think New Orleans/Netherlands is a bad design, have a look at state-of-art home design in the heart of America after almost a decade long housing bubble.
As for cleaning electronics, I had good success using canned air, the ozone-friendly liquid at the bottom of a can of air, to clean about 8 oz of baby puke out of a new Toshiba flash memory laptop.
For future reference, my parents found out from experience that a car battery powered backup pump won't do squat against a midwestern summer storm (do the math, how watt-hours required to lift a few hundred liters/minute 8 feet.) Gas, propane, gasoline and diesel powered generators and water powered venturi pumps are the best option until we figure out how to build houses so we aren't constantly trying to push water uphill.
Mod parent up. Sun has been using SWaP for several years now. If Space Wattage and Performance aren't a good starting point for IT efficiency measurement, what is? An air-cooled ENIAC in Iceland might have a good PUE but no one in their right mind would think this would make for an efficient modern data center.
Excellent points. One thing I've seen is that if a thin-client deployment doesn't go well, people will still blame the client hardware (Sun Ray/Citrix/Wyse) rather than the system. So if your email server, ldap server, SMB server, webserver, proxy server or network switches aren't well designed or deployed, don't go thin because it gives the technology an undeserved black eye.
If you deploy fat clients and all of this underlying infrastructure is sh**, you can always push for an upgrade to desktop PCs in next year's budget to try to mask the problem.
BOSS:"Gee, email still seems pretty slow even with these new 5Ghz PCs with an 8G memory crossbar."
ITGUY:"Yeah, it's probably the graphics cards, next years you should budget for ATI 8D hyperultraReal with 80 bit color"
BOSS:"O.K."
With a thin client it's more like:
BOSS:"Gee, email still seems pretty slow."
ITGUY:"Upgrade to Sun Ray 5 terminals... er I mean maybe we should replace the tin-can/string network between our ENIAC mailserver and the WAN..."
I mean, come on, upgrading a server? BORRRINGGGG! That's no fun at all.
I felt a disturbance in the force as though thousands of overpaid desktop PC experts suddenly screamed WTF! -- Obidobi
Have you tried Sun Ray? Some Citrix marketing material uses cute statistics such as "average bandwidth used over 24 HOURS" which might make it seem to be a better low bandwidth solution than it is. On the other hand, I find Sun Ray very usable over a WAN even though my home network connection barely exceeds 1Mb. As to the fact that thin clients are useless when the network goes down... so are PCs for all practical purposes.
The fact that Sun Rays uses 1/40th the power of a typical desktop PC would be awesome by itself, but the fact that I can upgrade thousands of desktop clients in the same amount of time it takes to upgrade 1 PC probably saves more money (headcount) in a typical corporate environment.
I don't like what they did, but I agree they had to do something.
I've learned that this kind of "SOMEBODY DO SOMETHING, IT DOESN'T MATTER WHAT, ANYTHING!" thinking is peculiar to the U.S., especially in recent decades. When something bad happens in other times and places, the attitude is "$***" happens or "It's God's will" or "It's a shame but what can we do?"
One only has to look at unintended consequences of reactionary government micro/macromeddling in everything from the economy(e.g. the Quasi-state Fed being able to interest rates below natural {sane} market), our personal lives and world politics to see that there are times when the best option is to do nothing!
I know an old lady who swallowed a frog to catch the spider to catch the fly, but I don't know why she swallowed that fly... perhaps she'll die.
My only hope is that the voters check for who is voting for this and get rid of them next election.
I hope so too, but the perpetrator (this bill) is known under many aliases including:"Heroes Earnings Assistance and Relief Tax Act of 2007" AKA "Defenders of Freedom Tax Relief Act of 2007" AKA "Paul Wellstone Mental Health and Addiction Equity Act of 2007". So it's difficult to find the text of the final bill and which traitors voted for it. We need a WikiCongress!
I haven't seen a single traditional news media outlet report the voting roster (maybe it would be a violation of that stupid unconstitutional McCain-Feingold bill?), but you can find The house vote here and The Senate vote here. Come election time, lets make sure they know that they still work for us and we aren't happy about being screwed over time and time again for the benefit of their wealthy friends.
BTW, just because Linux can be used on a supercomputer doesn't mean it is the best OS to use for large clustered environments or massive datasets. Traditional "supercomputers" are usually optimized to be superior for CPU bound problems with relatively small datasets. Solaris's traditional sweet spot is massive datasets which are I/O bound. CPU speeds have increased dramatically over the past couple of decades. I/O by comparison is still hideously slow. It isn't a problem you can easily get around with brute force, (the Linux/Google approach) it takes engineering.
One point with google is that the company started when oil was $10/barrel. With oil 1000% more expensive, their massive "throw PCs at it" approach is as anachronistic as the 1964 Pontiac GTOs 100Hp 7 liter V8 engine is now.
Slashdot Mirror
You could remove the "To Linux In" and the headline would be more accurate for this teacher:
"When teachers are Obstacles to Education." The guy was probably an economics teacher who believes in Keynesianism, fiat currency, and the Easter Bunny but doesn't believe in free software.
It's tempting to just call this guy a dorky technophobe as at least 70% of the teachers out there fit the profile. But how do we edumacate these people?
Fire and Ice Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice. From what I've tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire. But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate To say that for destruction ice Is also great And would suffice. Robert Frost
The biggest flaw I see in autoscaling isn't that it isn't fast enough or might cost too much (in both cases it beats the current "scramble out a new server" or "continuous overcapacity" solutions. The biggest flaw is that it doesn't go far enough. I see it as only the first baby step torwards Transcontinental Demand Load Balancing
That it is, a "rule of thumb", the offical definition of a recession is when the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) business cycle dating committee agrees that there is (was) a recession, and they have now agreed to that. This is the definition which also showed that the Bush1.0 Gulf War 1.0 recession ended more than a year before newly elected Bill Clinton was elected and took credit for the recovery. And the "y2k" recession began before Bush2.0 was elected to take the blame. (That being said, his and the fed's management of that recession and the 9/11 "recession" has certainly created more long-term damage to the economy than either Clinton or the two Bush's could ever do on their own.) NBER's claim that we've been in a recession is akin to your doctor pointing out that you have a hangnail after you've been beheaded. For a look at some real scary statistics, at the St. Louis Fed's Net Free or Borrowed Reserves of Depository Institutions numbers going back to 1950 or Excess Reserve of Depository Institutions going back to 1925. or The Adjusted Monetary Base going back to 1910. Or any of several other monetary statistics that are several black swan SD's away from their multigenerational mean.
Bush's Treasury chairman Paulson and Bernanke have engineered a truly astounding experiment in monetary policy topped only by Robert Mugabe's 10^21% hyperinflationary monetary policies. The economy has enough inertia that we will see 1-5 years of deflation or disinflation as the "imagined" debt money supply virtually disappears, leaving too many goods chasing too few dollars. But the medium/long term effect is inflation, because only currency printing presses and inflation can reduce a debt brought on by a mad government and personal debt fueled spending spree that powered the economy for at least a decade.
At the current presidential email growth rate, NTFS isn't gonna cut it for Obama.
P.S. Yes I'm from a small town. That doesn't mean I don't know that Africa is a continent, South Africa is a country and that the earth is millions of years older than Archbishop Ussher thought it was, especially when you account for daylight savings time.
What I find less acceptable is the fact that so many people outside of the U.S. refer to the U.S. place as America. There is no excuse for that. There is an acceptable shorthand for the location (U.S. or United States). I even find "The states" acceptable, though the CIS and other groupings of states has made that more ambiguous. I've lived outside of the United States for long enough that now I'm starting misuse the term "America" as often as my European and Asian friends do.
True, the payment schedule truly makes no difference in the total amount paid, but payment schedules make a huge difference in how easy it is to sell the terms of the contract. (If you don't believe this, wrap up the total amortized cost of a home, car or student loan and try to get ANYONE pay that amount up front, then take the same loan and tell the victim "no payments for 90 years!" and I bet you'll have more takers.
Also, your assumption that 17-19 year-old high-school graduates "always must understand the payment schedule up-front." is about as naive as... most 17-19 year olds. So when I say 0$ for 4 year terms is better, I should say it is better from the standpoint of the loan salesman, not from the victim^H^H^H^H^H^H... erm debtor.
As a previous poster mentioned, accounting and many aspects of law (except court lawyers) is already being outsourced. In fact outsourced accounting and check processing was a huge industry here in Ireland before the property bubble overtook it in importance.
Slightly off topic in a parallel bubble, I think the best use of that fish out of water image is in this poster for 100% mortgages in Ireland
Yes, you're correct. I wasn't sure how to fit Law in, it is a relatively quick payback field and it does very little to help our global competitiveness, but yes it is difficult to outsource.
IT computre ergo IT sum. Non Gradus Anus Rodentum!
(I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to prove by algebra that Hamlet's grandson is Shakespeare's grandfather and that he himself is the ghost of his own father.)
I agree completely except that changing SEC rules to focus on a longer timescale could certainly help companies focus on longer timescales. The reason the SEC requires quarterly profit reports is to prevent fraud. What have we just had a decade of from Enron to Fannie Mae? Fraud. It doesn't work.
As much as I like Bill Joy and your suggestion of Adam C Powell, my top pick would be William McDonough. He is an optimistic far thinking designer whose engineering is as ahead of his time as Thomas Jefferson was ahead of his. McDonough's "Cradle to Cradle" approach would not have allowed sponsorship of oil and food burning ethanol policies. He might use the Chinese milk additive scandal to draw attention to our own failings in addressing the known health effects of lead, mercury, asbestos, tobacco and coal tar as well as reminding us that we continue down this path with our blinders on with respect to BPA, NOx, particulates and CO2.
The Problem: In every region of Germany, between 45% and 86.3% of the electricity that flows from the outlets is from nuclear power. Everyone has to use this electricity, regardless of whether he wants to or not. Even nature activists have no choice. Plus the energy lobby keep telling us that electricity is electricity.
The Solution: NucleoSTOP, a compact device, is the answer. Through an innovative process, electricity from nuclear power is recognized and, before it can flow through your appliances, is sent back to the source.
The device can be easily attached to any power outlet -- ideally at the house's main circuit -- and you can immediately use electricity with a clean conscience. And the nuclear lobby doesn't profit from it.
Technical Info: Nuclear fission is the source of electricity from nuclear power. Along with the well known energy discharge from fission, a second discharge occurs, called the tachyon impulse, which, unlike the rest of the released energy, cannot be altered. This tachyon impulse gives all of the energy produced from fission a special signature, which is immutable due to the law of conservation of engergy. Consequently, all electricity from nuclear power is marked with this signature.
In all probability (heh), the geniuses involved simply assumed that each credit default probability was independent from the next. So they summed the probabilities, packaged them as AAA and sold them.
p1= (probability of joe-nodoc defaulting = 1/2) Sum 2 million Joe-nodocs and the odds become 1 in 4 million as long as none of the joes work in construction, none %)
One of my schoolteachers suggested this back when most clocks ran on 60Hz synchronous motors. Speed up time during the work day, slow it down at happy hour.
Sorry if this is slightly off topic, but it always seemed strange to me how reliant we've become to sump pumps. The house I grew up in was built in the 1920s and had a basement as did most of the homes in the upper midwest. From 1850 to about 1970, none of these homes had or needed sump pumps. After about 1970 nearly all houses in the same area were built so that sump pumps are absolutely necessary. I suspect it has something to do with city laws regarding separation of storm sewers from sanitary sewers, and the fact that the sprawly post 1970 suburbs don't have any kind of sewers. But isn't it amazing to think of the amount of energy and environmental damage used to pump billions of gallons 8 feet to the surface so it can trickle back down again in about 5 minutes? If you think New Orleans/Netherlands is a bad design, have a look at state-of-art home design in the heart of America after almost a decade long housing bubble.
As for cleaning electronics, I had good success using canned air, the ozone-friendly liquid at the bottom of a can of air, to clean about 8 oz of baby puke out of a new Toshiba flash memory laptop.
For future reference, my parents found out from experience that a car battery powered backup pump won't do squat against a midwestern summer storm (do the math, how watt-hours required to lift a few hundred liters/minute 8 feet.) Gas, propane, gasoline and diesel powered generators and water powered venturi pumps are the best option until we figure out how to build houses so we aren't constantly trying to push water uphill.
Mod parent up. Sun has been using SWaP for several years now. If Space Wattage and Performance aren't a good starting point for IT efficiency measurement, what is? An air-cooled ENIAC in Iceland might have a good PUE but no one in their right mind would think this would make for an efficient modern data center.
Excellent points. One thing I've seen is that if a thin-client deployment doesn't go well, people will still blame the client hardware (Sun Ray/Citrix/Wyse) rather than the system. So if your email server, ldap server, SMB server, webserver, proxy server or network switches aren't well designed or deployed, don't go thin because it gives the technology an undeserved black eye. If you deploy fat clients and all of this underlying infrastructure is sh**, you can always push for an upgrade to desktop PCs in next year's budget to try to mask the problem. BOSS:"Gee, email still seems pretty slow even with these new 5Ghz PCs with an 8G memory crossbar." ITGUY:"Yeah, it's probably the graphics cards, next years you should budget for ATI 8D hyperultraReal with 80 bit color" BOSS:"O.K." With a thin client it's more like: BOSS:"Gee, email still seems pretty slow." ITGUY:"Upgrade to Sun Ray 5 terminals... er I mean maybe we should replace the tin-can/string network between our ENIAC mailserver and the WAN..." I mean, come on, upgrading a server? BORRRINGGGG! That's no fun at all. I felt a disturbance in the force as though thousands of overpaid desktop PC experts suddenly screamed WTF! -- Obidobi
Have you tried Sun Ray? Some Citrix marketing material uses cute statistics such as "average bandwidth used over 24 HOURS" which might make it seem to be a better low bandwidth solution than it is. On the other hand, I find Sun Ray very usable over a WAN even though my home network connection barely exceeds 1Mb. As to the fact that thin clients are useless when the network goes down... so are PCs for all practical purposes. The fact that Sun Rays uses 1/40th the power of a typical desktop PC would be awesome by itself, but the fact that I can upgrade thousands of desktop clients in the same amount of time it takes to upgrade 1 PC probably saves more money (headcount) in a typical corporate environment.
I don't like what they did, but I agree they had to do something.
I've learned that this kind of "SOMEBODY DO SOMETHING, IT DOESN'T MATTER WHAT, ANYTHING!" thinking is peculiar to the U.S., especially in recent decades. When something bad happens in other times and places, the attitude is "$***" happens or "It's God's will" or "It's a shame but what can we do?" One only has to look at unintended consequences of reactionary government micro/macromeddling in everything from the economy(e.g. the Quasi-state Fed being able to interest rates below natural {sane} market), our personal lives and world politics to see that there are times when the best option is to do nothing!
I know an old lady who swallowed a frog to catch the spider to catch the fly, but I don't know why she swallowed that fly... perhaps she'll die.
I hope so too, but the perpetrator (this bill) is known under many aliases including:"Heroes Earnings Assistance and Relief Tax Act of 2007" AKA "Defenders of Freedom Tax Relief Act of 2007" AKA "Paul Wellstone Mental Health and Addiction Equity Act of 2007". So it's difficult to find the text of the final bill and which traitors voted for it. We need a WikiCongress!
I haven't seen a single traditional news media outlet report the voting roster (maybe it would be a violation of that stupid unconstitutional McCain-Feingold bill?), but you can find The house vote here and The Senate vote here. Come election time, lets make sure they know that they still work for us and we aren't happy about being screwed over time and time again for the benefit of their wealthy friends.
I stand corrected, I guess Linux can be used for large loads
BTW, just because Linux can be used on a supercomputer doesn't mean it is the best OS to use for large clustered environments or massive datasets. Traditional "supercomputers" are usually optimized to be superior for CPU bound problems with relatively small datasets. Solaris's traditional sweet spot is massive datasets which are I/O bound. CPU speeds have increased dramatically over the past couple of decades. I/O by comparison is still hideously slow. It isn't a problem you can easily get around with brute force, (the Linux/Google approach) it takes engineering.
One point with google is that the company started when oil was $10/barrel. With oil 1000% more expensive, their massive "throw PCs at it" approach is as anachronistic as the 1964 Pontiac GTOs 100Hp 7 liter V8 engine is now.