What's worse is people who put too much information online, without realizing that the very same information can be used against them. For example, people like to put personal details on their user pages, whether they're on Slashdot, Flickr, MySpace, or Wikipedia. Unthinkingly, that very same information can be dug up by people and used to threaten your job or your personal life. Wikipedia keeps a record of every iteration of your user page, so that anyone can troll through the personal information you (idiotically) put on the internet. If you are editing an article that's also edited by someone with an agenda, they can dig up your personal information and send an email (or worse) to your employer. This is not unique to Wikipedia's history-versioning, as nearly any user page can be dug up through Google caches or the Internet Archive. If you use the same (or similar) username across multiple sites, someone with a malicious agenda can find out a whole lot about you. Just think of all the information and dumb things you've said on Slashdot, your blog, your Flickr page, your Last.fm/Audioscrobbler page, etc. etc.
The problem is that these online communities work because of personal information: dynamically connecting people with similar interest and opinions is what Web 2.0 is all about (inasmuch as a buzzword can be "all about" something). If we can't trust that the information and content we put online can't be used against us, then Web 2.0 will eventually fail, once enough people get burned.
Please. I would like to add my own moonbat speculation with no basis in reality. Cringely cites the cross-licensing agreement as proof that Apple could have an implemented Windows API running in Mac OS X, and that they would have a new kernel to achieve this.
The reality of the situation is that Apple did not only appropriate the Win API, but they also appropriated the Windows NT kernel. They've been stripping out the Windows-specific hacks, grafting on some of their lessons-learned from Darwin x86, and created a new kernel for OS X. That's why the source is now closed: because it contains substantial portions of NT kernel source.
First the move to Intel, now leveraging that move to take advantage of the technically superior NT kernel (unfortunately weighed down by Microsoft bloat normally, it will now be freed to flourish under a lickable interface). XNU was useful for the initial transition, but is being abandoned for performance concerns.
They really ought to give me my own column. I can out-moonbat both Cringely and Dvorak.
How about a much smaller step: bring in 33% of the Federal Reserve Board's voting membership from labor organizations instead of from banks?
This is seriously one of the most bizarre comments I've ever seen on Slashdot. Why would putting labor organizers on the board of a central banking system achieve anything at all? What do union heads know about the fractional researve banking system, international currency flows, exchange rate mechanisms, CPI deflators, etc? Beyond merely questions of qualifications: how would affecting banking decisions directly aid unionized workers? The Fed's not going to get them better hours, better healthcare, better job security, or better pay--that's not within it's area of competency.
Perhaps business should take some responsibility, like everyone else has to.
Business does take responsibility. It's just not responsible to you, or for your personal financial planning. It's responsible to its owners/shareholders, and to its customers.
It's going to happen sooner or later. The U.S. dollar cannot sustain its current value in the face of the foreign debts it has now assumed. The Plaza Accord was brokered in a similar situation with Japan two decades ago--only now the U.S.-Chinese imbalance is significantly larger than the U.S.-Japanese imbalance. The devaluation of the dollar will have to be between 25% and 40%.
The dramatic rise in the strength of the yuan versus the dollar is going to dramatically shock the Chinese economy. Regardless of their embryonic domestic demand, their economy is still export dependent. Once their exports are more expensive, and demand for Chinese manufacturing concomitantly falls, Chinese growth will fall as well.
It's at this point that all those bad loans will become a huge problem. The U.S. Savings and Loan scandal cost about $150 billion. Chinese bad loans are nearly $1 trillion--almost seven times as large. Their crisis will be much larger than ours, and they will face it with a much weaker economy (both in absolute size and structurally), and with far less sophisticated tools of governance (their ability to centralize and effectively promulgate economic decisions is very very weak).
No one seriously wants China to meltdown (expect for a few paranoid hawks). A Chinese meltdown would cause a world recession without fail. It would also kill chances for a peaceful change as the Chinese government would use the PLA to clamp down. The possibility of more Tiananmen-type massacres would be quite high. It's likely that Western governments would try to step in and help alleviate the Chinese crisis, although structurally there's not a lot they can do to help, after a certain point.
...reasonable amounts of beer and wine can do good to most people's health...
I've lived in London, and British people are not "reasonable" drinkers. Their binge drinking is just as bad if not worse than that found in the States. Continental Europeans may be more reasonable, but not the Brits.
The name "torrent" would scare off the few IT managers willing to play with Apple: they wouldn't dare put anything that even suggests P2P on a company system (their VP may not know what a torrent is, but he's heard the name and thinks it's bad.)
You're right about the naming problem. Which is exactly why Apple will choose some fruity (pun intended) French name to rebrand torrents with. You know that Apple's current Zeroconf implementation was named Rendezvous and later Bonjour. If torrents are implemented, look for Apple to come out with Les Torrentes, Le Swarm, or Le vol de la musique.
They've been doing it for a while now. The Editors have said before that they don't care what the source of the article is as long as the submission is well-formed and the article is relevant. So the WSJ folks take advantage of that (I know I would if I were them) and submit their stories for the arbitrary decision process of Taco and his band of retarded monkeys.
You're right. I ran a Nexis search, and the earliest mention of Longhorn (July 30, 2001) has Microsoft saying late 2002 (if everything goes right) or early 2003 otherwise.
During the Cold War, my grandparents were host to several Taiwanese students studying in the U.S. After getting his medical degree from a university in Philadelphia, one went back and became the Surgeon General of Taiwan.
His point is that we Americans elect our president. If Indians elected the U.S. president, they'd probably see fit to put some PhD in office here as well. But Americans tried putting a PhD in the presidency, Woodrow Wilson, and that didn't turn out swimmingly. So we've sworn it off until PhDs are safer to elect.
Secondly, we were responsible for Taliban being in power.
Do you remember the Afghan conflict? The one we sent Stinger missiles and butt loads of money and CIA advisors to Afghanistan? Did we help them rebuild after the Soviets left? No we left them to rot and didn't lift a finger leaving a power vacuum that lets the Taliban take over.
This is a tremendous mischaracterization. We are more responsible for Al Qaeda than we are the Taliban. The Taliban was created, trained, and propped-up by the Pakistani Inter-Service Intelligence agency. Pakistan had a strategic need to keep Afghanistan friendly, because their other border was with hostile India. Pakistan could not afford a strategic situation in which both borders were hostile--Pakistan is too unstable, and already too consumed with their conflict with massive India.
The United States, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and China provided money, training, and materiel for the Afghans in their fight against the Soviet invasion. Believing that we could have influenced Afghan politics to create a moderate government after the first international jihadist victory in centuries (and against one of the two superpowers to boot) is pure fantasy. It's almost as silly as believing that our current efforts to produce a stable, moderate government in Afghanistan are going to succeed. Pakistan trained and funded a group of extremists who were willing and capable of taking power and holding it by force. Even Pakistan, through the Taliban, couldn't pacify all of Afghanistan, and spent then next ten years fighting the Soviet- and French-sponsored Northern Alliance.
In sum, the U.S. did not create the Taliban, and we are no more responsible for the Taliban than Russia, France, Pakistan, China, Saudi Arabia, and the Afghans themselves are.
Slashdot Mirror
What's worse is people who put too much information online, without realizing that the very same information can be used against them. For example, people like to put personal details on their user pages, whether they're on Slashdot, Flickr, MySpace, or Wikipedia. Unthinkingly, that very same information can be dug up by people and used to threaten your job or your personal life. Wikipedia keeps a record of every iteration of your user page, so that anyone can troll through the personal information you (idiotically) put on the internet. If you are editing an article that's also edited by someone with an agenda, they can dig up your personal information and send an email (or worse) to your employer. This is not unique to Wikipedia's history-versioning, as nearly any user page can be dug up through Google caches or the Internet Archive. If you use the same (or similar) username across multiple sites, someone with a malicious agenda can find out a whole lot about you. Just think of all the information and dumb things you've said on Slashdot, your blog, your Flickr page, your Last.fm/Audioscrobbler page, etc. etc.
The problem is that these online communities work because of personal information: dynamically connecting people with similar interest and opinions is what Web 2.0 is all about (inasmuch as a buzzword can be "all about" something). If we can't trust that the information and content we put online can't be used against us, then Web 2.0 will eventually fail, once enough people get burned.
Yeah. "Redundant" is nearly useless as well. Maybe we can bug Taco to update the mods after the skin-change is rolled out.
Sigged the parent:
When Apple released a Unix variant. Obvi.
Actually it has two, and the second is to be anthropomorphized in sensationalized terms by clueless posters on internet forums.
Yeah, but SP1 was released in September 2002, so practically Windows XP proper was released in 2002.
The reality of the situation is that Apple did not only appropriate the Win API, but they also appropriated the Windows NT kernel. They've been stripping out the Windows-specific hacks, grafting on some of their lessons-learned from Darwin x86, and created a new kernel for OS X. That's why the source is now closed: because it contains substantial portions of NT kernel source.
First the move to Intel, now leveraging that move to take advantage of the technically superior NT kernel (unfortunately weighed down by Microsoft bloat normally, it will now be freed to flourish under a lickable interface). XNU was useful for the initial transition, but is being abandoned for performance concerns.
They really ought to give me my own column. I can out-moonbat both Cringely and Dvorak.
This is seriously one of the most bizarre comments I've ever seen on Slashdot. Why would putting labor organizers on the board of a central banking system achieve anything at all? What do union heads know about the fractional researve banking system, international currency flows, exchange rate mechanisms, CPI deflators, etc? Beyond merely questions of qualifications: how would affecting banking decisions directly aid unionized workers? The Fed's not going to get them better hours, better healthcare, better job security, or better pay--that's not within it's area of competency.
Bizarre, just bizarre.
You don't need a union proper to do that. All you need is a lobby/PAC, with a bunch of members and donators.
Business does take responsibility. It's just not responsible to you, or for your personal financial planning. It's responsible to its owners/shareholders, and to its customers.
One word: corruption.
The dramatic rise in the strength of the yuan versus the dollar is going to dramatically shock the Chinese economy. Regardless of their embryonic domestic demand, their economy is still export dependent. Once their exports are more expensive, and demand for Chinese manufacturing concomitantly falls, Chinese growth will fall as well.
It's at this point that all those bad loans will become a huge problem. The U.S. Savings and Loan scandal cost about $150 billion. Chinese bad loans are nearly $1 trillion--almost seven times as large. Their crisis will be much larger than ours, and they will face it with a much weaker economy (both in absolute size and structurally), and with far less sophisticated tools of governance (their ability to centralize and effectively promulgate economic decisions is very very weak).
No one seriously wants China to meltdown (expect for a few paranoid hawks). A Chinese meltdown would cause a world recession without fail. It would also kill chances for a peaceful change as the Chinese government would use the PLA to clamp down. The possibility of more Tiananmen-type massacres would be quite high. It's likely that Western governments would try to step in and help alleviate the Chinese crisis, although structurally there's not a lot they can do to help, after a certain point.
I've lived in London, and British people are not "reasonable" drinkers. Their binge drinking is just as bad if not worse than that found in the States. Continental Europeans may be more reasonable, but not the Brits.
I know everyone hates the developer and finds the versioning absurd, but Acquisition is a great client for Mac, supporting Gnutella and Bittorrent.
You're right about the naming problem. Which is exactly why Apple will choose some fruity (pun intended) French name to rebrand torrents with. You know that Apple's current Zeroconf implementation was named Rendezvous and later Bonjour. If torrents are implemented, look for Apple to come out with Les Torrentes, Le Swarm, or Le vol de la musique.
They've been doing it for a while now. The Editors have said before that they don't care what the source of the article is as long as the submission is well-formed and the article is relevant. So the WSJ folks take advantage of that (I know I would if I were them) and submit their stories for the arbitrary decision process of Taco and his band of retarded monkeys.
The PDF of that decision shows the one-act on pages 23 through 28. It's pretty sweet.
Not only that, but how will we light our cigars? Plastic just doesn't burn the same way a Benjamin does.
How about: iFinite Loop; Mobius Strip; 2 Infinite Loop; Infinity + 1; Infinite ForLoop; Infinite GoTo...
I've had the City Council liquidated. They were insolent.
You're right. I ran a Nexis search, and the earliest mention of Longhorn (July 30, 2001) has Microsoft saying late 2002 (if everything goes right) or early 2003 otherwise.
During the Cold War, my grandparents were host to several Taiwanese students studying in the U.S. After getting his medical degree from a university in Philadelphia, one went back and became the Surgeon General of Taiwan.
His point is that we Americans elect our president. If Indians elected the U.S. president, they'd probably see fit to put some PhD in office here as well. But Americans tried putting a PhD in the presidency, Woodrow Wilson, and that didn't turn out swimmingly. So we've sworn it off until PhDs are safer to elect.
I somewhow doubt that you were ever a proper Randian. I'm not one myself, but even I know that they're called "Objectivists" not "Objectionists."
This is a tremendous mischaracterization. We are more responsible for Al Qaeda than we are the Taliban. The Taliban was created, trained, and propped-up by the Pakistani Inter-Service Intelligence agency. Pakistan had a strategic need to keep Afghanistan friendly, because their other border was with hostile India. Pakistan could not afford a strategic situation in which both borders were hostile--Pakistan is too unstable, and already too consumed with their conflict with massive India.
The United States, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and China provided money, training, and materiel for the Afghans in their fight against the Soviet invasion. Believing that we could have influenced Afghan politics to create a moderate government after the first international jihadist victory in centuries (and against one of the two superpowers to boot) is pure fantasy. It's almost as silly as believing that our current efforts to produce a stable, moderate government in Afghanistan are going to succeed. Pakistan trained and funded a group of extremists who were willing and capable of taking power and holding it by force. Even Pakistan, through the Taliban, couldn't pacify all of Afghanistan, and spent then next ten years fighting the Soviet- and French-sponsored Northern Alliance.
In sum, the U.S. did not create the Taliban, and we are no more responsible for the Taliban than Russia, France, Pakistan, China, Saudi Arabia, and the Afghans themselves are.