Remember, the cost of everything turns back into man-years of effort.
Wrong. But, it sounds so true, and so fair, and so, so... liberal
Proof: You spend 1 man-year acquiring a shovel and digging a ditch. I spend 364-man days designing, acquiring parts and building a back-hoe, and 1 day digging 100 times as much ditch.
You are claiming that these man-years are identical. They are clearly not, hence your premise is false, by reductio-ad-absurdium.
Marx argued that everyone deserved to own the means of production, equally. Lefties argue mostly the same thing -- that everyone is equal.
Capitalism is not the inverse of this (as most Lefties mis-interpret it). It declares that the capital (and means of production) should (and eventually will) flow to those most capable of using it efficiently; to produce a maximal, non-trivial result.
It may take generations, but this is generally true. My hope is that, finally, some individual or company will use their vast wealth-accumulation capacity to do someting so non-linear, so status-quo-shatteringly huge, that it will re-set the baseline, forever.
Entities such as Bill Gates, Google, Citigroup (and several others) have the capacity to raise a significant fraction of a Trillion dollars of liquid capital. Lets say that one of them actually decided to leverage that, again, to incent another space-race, but this time between free men and women, instead of governments (think Scaled Composites, tSpace, etc.)
Imagine if, in 10 years, they actually had a functional fleet on orbit, and processing facilities on the Lagrange points to begin processing megatons of Nickel/Iron/etc./etc. from the asteroid belt, and to collect and transmit Peta-Watt-Hours of electrical energy, per day, to ground collection stations.
Suddenly, they have transformed that several Billion dollars into orders of magnitude greater results than the same number of man-hours could have produced.
Because they were visionaries.
I propose that this is a fact: Every truly interesting result comes from a Visionary, not just plain old Worker.
The question is: are the founders (and now, the Directors) of Google visionary enough to do something truly remarkable with the wealth-accumulating power that they have very temporarily been blessed?
For low level stuff, Lock-free and Wait-free algorithms are the next hot thing. For massively parallel systems, they provide levels of utilisation and efficiency that are un-reachable by using code involving locks.
... Abortion and the Death Penalty eludes you, then you must truly be a Liberal...
I shudder to think of a future where the innocent (other than just the unborn) fear "termination" by arbitrary individuals and the state, but those proven guilty of raping and murdering the innocent are protected, and guaranteed the "right" to continue raping and murdering the innocent.
Oh, wait -- I forgot. That's where we live, today...
I think you perhaps misunderstand Mr. Graham. Yes, failing at your own business won't hurt as much as being a failure, working at a job.
As someone who invested 6 years, and about $250,000 worth of lost earning potential into a business, I can honestly say that I agree with him, 100%.
I wouldn't trade my experience running that business for that $250,000, if you tried to give me the cash. Now that I am back at a programming "Job", I treat it completely differently than I did before I had a business. I find that I worry much less, too -- once you've come close to living in a gutter, there's not much that is "threatening" about a boss!
He does say that someone with Kids and a Mortgage should think twice. So, all in all, Mr. Graham's article was very even-handed in its comparison of Jobs vs. Start-ups.
That the reason little johnny is a dunce, is because of... outsourcing? So, if we create an (artificial) demand for higher-priced American programmers, suddenly education will improve?
Can you Liberals *hear* yourselves, when you talk?
Remove the artificial barrier to removing incompetent teachers (the all-powerful teacher's unions), and you would improve education.
Remove the artificial barrier to starting competitive K-12 education (the union's rejection of voucher programs, *forcing* people to pay taxes to a union-only make-work program called Public Education), and you would improve education.
I was beaten silly in High School because I was a nerd, in plain sight of wonderful "union" teachers. But, I've been programming since I was 16 (I'm now 37) -- conservatively averaging 50 hours a week in front of a computer for the last 21 years (far, far more while I was in University for 5 years -- 100% borrowed money, which I paid back over a 9 year period; my family was on the rocks at the time, after we lost our farm).
I was out of work for a short time, so I fell back on my ability to work my ass off -- literally cleaning up garbage in a stadium.
There were people far worse off than me -- but I out-worked them. Within one week, half of them had quit. Perhaps if someone had "protected" them, by preventing "Un-American" people like me from working my ass off, then they would have stayed at the job?
ANY art -- programming, music, mechanics, physics -- (not the "crafts" they teach in public school, which are the equivalents of making shit out of egg cartons), requires fanatical dedication. By both the teacher AND the student. These people neither need nor desire your "help" or "protection" from outsourcing!
If you don't want to apply fanatical dedication, and you think "protecting" those who don't from competition (such as outsourcing) will fix the problem, well... I just don't know what to say to you... Perhaps:
...it's a mechanism for organizing "all or nothing" funding for any venture (including funding of Open Source development projects: http://fundable.org
This really is one of the most interesting things I've seen developed on the 'net in a long, long time.
It has, of course, heaps of utility beyond just funding development of pet projects...
I have heard this statement over and over, and it is subtly misleading. The error is typically made by those who don't understand the basic operators of formal logic.
If you ask most people what
"Computer Science is to programming as mechanical engineering is to operating a drill press" means, they might say "Well, it means that Computer Science doesn't teach you to be a masterful Programmer".
What it ACTUALLY means (or what it should mean, if most nascent Computer Scientists didn't misunderstand it) is:
All Computer Scientists are (trivially) Programmers, but not all Programmers are Computer Scientists.
Really, do you expect that anyone who claims to be anything more than a token Mechanical Engineer couldn't easily master the drill press, if he put his or her mind to it?
Or, perhaps more interestingly, if someone was incapable of mastering the drill press, could they really claim to call themselves a Mechanical Engineer? Really? The congnitive skills required to easily comprehend the forces acting upon and within mechanical structures apply directly to deftly and precisely handling a simple device such as a drill press. Long-term incompetence with such a device indicates that the individual should (probably) not call themselves a "Mechanical Engineer"...
An incapacity to deftly manipulate complex logic in the form of a program would (or should) make false any claim of Computer Scientist...
Because they cannot. Not without killing themselves.
When you remove the artificial barriers set up by a pure "middle-man" (such as the *IAA), you remove your ability to add a margin for providing (what has become) no value.
Unfortunately for them, if they actively begin monetizing their catalog of music by selling access to it, then both of their markets (the music producers -- the artists, and the music consumers -- you and I), will ask: "Ummm. Now, tell me again, Mr. *IAA guy... Why can't I just go directly to the Artist/Consumer? Why am I paying you an 1000% markup on this music, for providing precisely zero value?"
Fortunately for us, this in inevitable. Unfortunately for *IAA, the Internet is the "Great Solvent of Unnecessary Structures" (my quote, thank you very much!)
As long as IBM continues to Create, rather than simply Vend, they will be OK. Unfortunately, (as HP discovered), it is very difficult to not lose one's technical edge, when ones corporation is run by a bunch of stuffed shirts...
I saw that selling, in all its forms, has achieved dominion over the world in our time, not only determining the economic spirit of the nation but deeply affecting its social, political, cultural, and moral life. I saw that America has become the land of the salesman, Homo vendens, who is both dangerous and afflicted.
Under the dominion of Homo vendens, we are no longer free to know the world. The salesman now informs us. In the mix of mind and matter that is perception, the information comes not from our senses encountering reality but from the salesman. Thus we have lost the world.
So, every successful athlete (and every last one of their coaches) knows that repetitive mental simulation of a physical act is critical to successful performance.
But, I'm sure this only applies to "Right Wing" athletes; all those free-thinkin', freedom-loving "Left Wing" athletes aren't so mentally weak as to let repetitive mental reinforcement influence their performance...
Or, does this just mean that the "best" prostitute killers will be those that "practice" using video games? Probably, so that's OK... Carry on!
As soon as any bureaucrat in an unnecessary structure begins to get an inkling of what the 'net will do, they get scared and attempt to "control" it.
The good news is, by the time these guys get a clue, it is far, far too late for them to really do anything about it. The RIAA/MPAA. The Chinese. Too little, too late. Should have either A) decided to respect their constituents, and provide real value, or B) cut off all access when they had the chance -- before too many of their people found out how useful this Internet thing was. Now, anyone with a clue realises that there is no way for the "Gubermint" to keep track of every AES-encrypted, Reed-Solomon corrected, Steganographically encoded, SSH-tunnelled conversation in the world. Crap, it looks just like they're downloading family photos from a lousy home-based website! How can the Great Firewall figure out that a list of dissidents is hidden behind that grinning, chubby baby's face in that grainy JPEG image from a $25 cellular telephone?
Firstly, people for whom programming is too complicated should not code at all. We need less programmers building better code, not more programmers adding to the crap heap that the software legacy is as of today.
Absolutely.
Guess what. A concise, logically consistent requirements document is... A PROGRAM!
The reason that managers aren't programmers (in fact, the reason that the vast majority of people aren't programmers, including most people that call themselves programmers) is because formal logic is very, very HARD.
If someone could write an logically correct requirements specification, they could write the program itself -- in English, Swahili, Java or C. It doesn't really matter.
Now, what a stuffed shirt COULD do, is write acceptance tests in English, that automatically generate code. This is a much simpler task. The evolving application would make public its test-harness interfaces, as an allowable set of "Nouns" and "Verbs" that the Manager-type is allowed to use in his acceptance testing document. Or, the programmer would map the Manager's "Nouns" and "Verbs" to his own objects, as he has implemented the application.
Guess what -- something like this has already been done; it's called FitNesse
So... It's really only meant for developing countries with... reliable power?
We run about 100 Geode-based totally solid-state devices in our control system. The first thing we do is remove the battery. Our BIOS is configured to restore itself to a working default configuration, when it detects invalid CMOS checksum. Any device seriously intended for long term operation needs to be configured like this.
The hard drive is likely to fail before the battery does, in third-world conditions (heat, humidity, etc.)
Pull the HDD and put in a 512MB CF card with a compressing filesystem (about the same cost as the drive), and install a small Linux distro (which can easily fit in a fraction of that -- we do it in a 16MB compressed filesystem), and THEN this device will be worth shipping to 3rd world countries.
Ah, yes... The good, old "Broken Window" falacy. The favourite of liberals everywhere.
"If little Bobby broke Mr. Local B. Storeowner's window, it would actually help the local economy, because Ms. Hardware Storeowner would get to sell another window!
Remember: every action that causes Entropy (and everything does!), but does NOT also simultaneously produce a something with a greater economic value is, by definition, a "drain on the economy".
Furthermore, after reviewing this GPL our lawyers advised us that any products compiled with GPL'ed tools - such as gcc - would also have to its source code released. This was simply unacceptable.
Nice troll. This is utter garbage of cause, but it is common misconception so I'll rebut it.
No Kidding! Taken directly from a GNU C++ header file:
// As a special exception, you may use this file as part of a free software // library without restriction. Specifically, if other files instantiate // templates or use macros or inline functions from this file, or you compile // this file and link it with other files to produce an executable, this // file does not by itself cause the resulting executable to be covered by // the GNU General Public License. This exception does not however // invalidate any other reasons why the executable file might be covered by // the GNU General Public License.
So... If they don't understand even the comments in C++ code, then why would I believe their statements regarding the superior quality of the rest of their operating system?
Perhaps you work in "marketing" at a very large copier/network printer company...
Without even talking to your Engineers, the actual method would be some form of Steganography, NOT a "tiny bar-code style serial number".
The serial number would be (at minimum) encrypted (to make it appear to be noise, rather than data), error correction encoded (with Reed-Solomon encoding, for example), and then "added" to the requested image.
The result would be imperceptible. In fact, almost all modern printing (RIP) algorithms (such as Floyd-Steinberg Error Diffusion) already add "random" data to your image during the conversion from N-bit color to 1-bit CMYK pigments, to avoid moire patterns. Instead of using truly random data, this "fingerprint" data could be used...
Using this method, there is also no need to "register" such a printer by keeping a copy of the output around. The serial number could be extracted simply by obtaining a sufficiently large sample of non-white output from the printer.
"The true purpose of schooling, according to Gatto, is to produce an easily manageable workforce to serve employers in a mass-production economy. Actual education is a secondary and even counterproductive result since educated people tend to be more difficult to control."
In Canada, the Teacher's Unions seem to be the only workforce for which the school system exists to serve. It might not actually be so bad, if some Employers could make productive use of the average High School graduate.
Unfortunately, educating anyone in any non-trivial topic is very demanding work. It is much easier to drug 5 to 15 percent of the learning population; especially the more active (and thus more exhausting) Boys
The Union backlash against anything that would allow the government to fund non-Union schools (vouchers, etc.) is astonishing. Even though home schooling recieves a fraction of the funding that a publicly-schooled child receives, public school enrollment is falling,
with the balance of students going to private or home schooling. Even a huge financial penalty cannot keep students in public schools!
The only "revolution" that is needed, is the ability for parents to send their children to the school of their choice -- not the school chosen for them. The hemorrhaging of students -- and therefore funding -- from the public school system would be instantaneous and dramatic.
The best teachers would remain employed, would be compensated better (less waste on poor teachers and unnecessary infrastructure). Students with parents that don't give a shit would remain uneducated (not much can be done...). Parents who care wouldn't be forced to both A) pay for an education system through their taxes, and B) pay to educate their own children.
The rules of submission require you to state that you experienced a financial loss, due to very specific circumstances. Most PayPal account holders (the vast majority, I think) have experienced no financial losses as a result of any of the claims stated in this class action's resolution.
Therefore, don't get too excited -- the average PayPal account holder gets nothing from this Class Action resolution...
Christians generally don't have a problem with life on mars, or anywhere else for that matter. Belief in the work of the Christ, and theories about exactly how and when things came into being are pretty independent of eachother.
Please don't confuse the term "Luddite Maniac" with "Christian".
I'm using gkrellm to monitor the health of remote servers. It provides a visual indication of all of their vital statistics (disk and netowrk I/O, temperature, memory, swap.
Sometimes, a visual indicator will give you hints about problems or activity patterns that are hard to see in a log file....
That's true, if you don't install a Nuclear Power Plant to assist in the extraction...
Of course, this begs the question -- why not just develop clean nuclear power in the first place, instead of fixating on developing more economical extraction processes? Vitrification of nuclear waste for long term storage is probably superior to suffocation, freezing or frying to death after destroying our environment. Unless you're ecologically minded, evidently...
Could it be that the public has bought into the anti-nuclear fear campaign, and would rather strangle to death on carbon dioxide, monoxide etc., than breath clean air and drink clean water?
Moderators, get a clue. Your job, when moderating something as "Informative", is to promote posts which, when viewed with a reasonably objective eye, actual contain (get ready now...) Information.
Perhaps I'm just not enough of a lib-leftie wing-nut, but "ultra-right wing Jesus freak who actively hates gays, black people, non-Christians,..." doesn't qualify as "Information".
If, to the liberals in the group, this does indeed qualify as "Information", then please accept my humble apology...;)
Remember, boys and girls... "Stupid" is not a synonym for "Conservative".
What these moron(s) are proposing has absolutely, unequivocally nothing to do with being a Conservative, or a Republican... or anything else remotely approximating good sense...
I just purchased some "wearables" from the EFF; their web purchase process was the least painful, most efficient I've ever experienced! I would suggest that anyone thinking that they might want to defend themselves against state control consider supporting the EFF.
Slashdot Mirror
Wrong. But, it sounds so true, and so fair, and so, so... liberal
Proof: You spend 1 man-year acquiring a shovel and digging a ditch. I spend 364-man days designing, acquiring parts and building a back-hoe, and 1 day digging 100 times as much ditch.
You are claiming that these man-years are identical. They are clearly not, hence your premise is false, by reductio-ad-absurdium.
Marx argued that everyone deserved to own the means of production, equally. Lefties argue mostly the same thing -- that everyone is equal.
Capitalism is not the inverse of this (as most Lefties mis-interpret it). It declares that the capital (and means of production) should (and eventually will) flow to those most capable of using it efficiently; to produce a maximal, non-trivial result.
It may take generations, but this is generally true. My hope is that, finally, some individual or company will use their vast wealth-accumulation capacity to do someting so non-linear, so status-quo-shatteringly huge, that it will re-set the baseline, forever.
Entities such as Bill Gates, Google, Citigroup (and several others) have the capacity to raise a significant fraction of a Trillion dollars of liquid capital. Lets say that one of them actually decided to leverage that, again, to incent another space-race, but this time between free men and women, instead of governments (think Scaled Composites, tSpace, etc.)
Imagine if, in 10 years, they actually had a functional fleet on orbit, and processing facilities on the Lagrange points to begin processing megatons of Nickel/Iron/etc./etc. from the asteroid belt, and to collect and transmit Peta-Watt-Hours of electrical energy, per day, to ground collection stations.
Suddenly, they have transformed that several Billion dollars into orders of magnitude greater results than the same number of man-hours could have produced.
Because they were visionaries.
I propose that this is a fact: Every truly interesting result comes from a Visionary, not just plain old Worker.
The question is: are the founders (and now, the Directors) of Google visionary enough to do something truly remarkable with the wealth-accumulating power that they have very temporarily been blessed?
http://www.nwcpp.org/Downloads/2005/Lock-Free.pdf
I shudder to think of a future where the innocent (other than just the unborn) fear "termination" by arbitrary individuals and the state, but those proven guilty of raping and murdering the innocent are protected, and guaranteed the "right" to continue raping and murdering the innocent.
Oh, wait -- I forgot. That's where we live, today...
As someone who invested 6 years, and about $250,000 worth of lost earning potential into a business, I can honestly say that I agree with him, 100%.
I wouldn't trade my experience running that business for that $250,000, if you tried to give me the cash. Now that I am back at a programming "Job", I treat it completely differently than I did before I had a business. I find that I worry much less, too -- once you've come close to living in a gutter, there's not much that is "threatening" about a boss!
He does say that someone with Kids and a Mortgage should think twice. So, all in all, Mr. Graham's article was very even-handed in its comparison of Jobs vs. Start-ups.
Can you Liberals *hear* yourselves, when you talk?
Remove the artificial barrier to removing incompetent teachers (the all-powerful teacher's unions), and you would improve education.
Remove the artificial barrier to starting competitive K-12 education (the union's rejection of voucher programs, *forcing* people to pay taxes to a union-only make-work program called Public Education), and you would improve education.
I was beaten silly in High School because I was a nerd, in plain sight of wonderful "union" teachers. But, I've been programming since I was 16 (I'm now 37) -- conservatively averaging 50 hours a week in front of a computer for the last 21 years (far, far more while I was in University for 5 years -- 100% borrowed money, which I paid back over a 9 year period; my family was on the rocks at the time, after we lost our farm).
I was out of work for a short time, so I fell back on my ability to work my ass off -- literally cleaning up garbage in a stadium.
There were people far worse off than me -- but I out-worked them. Within one week, half of them had quit. Perhaps if someone had "protected" them, by preventing "Un-American" people like me from working my ass off, then they would have stayed at the job?
ANY art -- programming, music, mechanics, physics -- (not the "crafts" they teach in public school, which are the equivalents of making shit out of egg cartons), requires fanatical dedication. By both the teacher AND the student. These people neither need nor desire your "help" or "protection" from outsourcing!
If you don't want to apply fanatical dedication, and you think "protecting" those who don't from competition (such as outsourcing) will fix the problem, well... I just don't know what to say to you... Perhaps:
"Welcome To My Planet"?
This really is one of the most interesting things I've seen developed on the 'net in a long, long time.
It has, of course, heaps of utility beyond just funding development of pet projects...
If you ask most people what "Computer Science is to programming as mechanical engineering is to operating a drill press" means, they might say "Well, it means that Computer Science doesn't teach you to be a masterful Programmer".
What it ACTUALLY means (or what it should mean, if most nascent Computer Scientists didn't misunderstand it) is:
All Computer Scientists are (trivially) Programmers, but not all Programmers are Computer Scientists.
Really, do you expect that anyone who claims to be anything more than a token Mechanical Engineer couldn't easily master the drill press, if he put his or her mind to it?
Or, perhaps more interestingly, if someone was incapable of mastering the drill press, could they really claim to call themselves a Mechanical Engineer? Really? The congnitive skills required to easily comprehend the forces acting upon and within mechanical structures apply directly to deftly and precisely handling a simple device such as a drill press. Long-term incompetence with such a device indicates that the individual should (probably) not call themselves a "Mechanical Engineer"...
An incapacity to deftly manipulate complex logic in the form of a program would (or should) make false any claim of Computer Scientist...
When you remove the artificial barriers set up by a pure "middle-man" (such as the *IAA), you remove your ability to add a margin for providing (what has become) no value.
Unfortunately for them, if they actively begin monetizing their catalog of music by selling access to it, then both of their markets (the music producers -- the artists, and the music consumers -- you and I), will ask: "Ummm. Now, tell me again, Mr. *IAA guy... Why can't I just go directly to the Artist/Consumer? Why am I paying you an 1000% markup on this music, for providing precisely zero value?"
Fortunately for us, this in inevitable. Unfortunately for *IAA, the Internet is the "Great Solvent of Unnecessary Structures" (my quote, thank you very much!)
An excerpt from A Nation of Salesmen, by Earl Shorris:
I saw that selling, in all its forms, has achieved dominion over the world in our time, not only determining the economic spirit of the nation but deeply affecting its social, political, cultural, and moral life. I saw that America has become the land of the salesman, Homo vendens, who is both dangerous and afflicted.
Under the dominion of Homo vendens, we are no longer free to know the world. The salesman now informs us. In the mix of mind and matter that is perception, the information comes not from our senses encountering reality but from the salesman. Thus we have lost the world.
But, I'm sure this only applies to "Right Wing" athletes; all those free-thinkin', freedom-loving "Left Wing" athletes aren't so mentally weak as to let repetitive mental reinforcement influence their performance...
Or, does this just mean that the "best" prostitute killers will be those that "practice" using video games? Probably, so that's OK... Carry on!
The good news is, by the time these guys get a clue, it is far, far too late for them to really do anything about it. The RIAA/MPAA. The Chinese. Too little, too late. Should have either A) decided to respect their constituents, and provide real value, or B) cut off all access when they had the chance -- before too many of their people found out how useful this Internet thing was. Now, anyone with a clue realises that there is no way for the "Gubermint" to keep track of every AES-encrypted, Reed-Solomon corrected, Steganographically encoded, SSH-tunnelled conversation in the world. Crap, it looks just like they're downloading family photos from a lousy home-based website! How can the Great Firewall figure out that a list of dissidents is hidden behind that grinning, chubby baby's face in that grainy JPEG image from a $25 cellular telephone?
Absolutely.
Guess what. A concise, logically consistent requirements document is... A PROGRAM!
The reason that managers aren't programmers (in fact, the reason that the vast majority of people aren't programmers, including most people that call themselves programmers) is because formal logic is very, very HARD .
If someone could write an logically correct requirements specification, they could write the program itself -- in English, Swahili, Java or C. It doesn't really matter.
Now, what a stuffed shirt COULD do, is write acceptance tests in English, that automatically generate code. This is a much simpler task. The evolving application would make public its test-harness interfaces, as an allowable set of "Nouns" and "Verbs" that the Manager-type is allowed to use in his acceptance testing document. Or, the programmer would map the Manager's "Nouns" and "Verbs" to his own objects, as he has implemented the application.
Guess what -- something like this has already been done; it's called FitNesse
We run about 100 Geode-based totally solid-state devices in our control system. The first thing we do is remove the battery. Our BIOS is configured to restore itself to a working default configuration, when it detects invalid CMOS checksum. Any device seriously intended for long term operation needs to be configured like this.
The hard drive is likely to fail before the battery does, in third-world conditions (heat, humidity, etc.)
Pull the HDD and put in a 512MB CF card with a compressing filesystem (about the same cost as the drive), and install a small Linux distro (which can easily fit in a fraction of that -- we do it in a 16MB compressed filesystem), and THEN this device will be worth shipping to 3rd world countries.
"If little Bobby broke Mr. Local B. Storeowner's window, it would actually help the local economy, because Ms. Hardware Storeowner would get to sell another window!
Remember: every action that causes Entropy (and everything does!), but does NOT also simultaneously produce a something with a greater economic value is, by definition, a "drain on the economy".
No Kidding! Taken directly from a GNU C++ header file:
So... If they don't understand even the comments in C++ code, then why would I believe their statements regarding the superior quality of the rest of their operating system?
Perhaps you work in "marketing" at a very large copier/network printer company...
Without even talking to your Engineers, the actual method would be some form of Steganography, NOT a "tiny bar-code style serial number".
The serial number would be (at minimum) encrypted (to make it appear to be noise, rather than data), error correction encoded (with Reed-Solomon encoding, for example), and then "added" to the requested image.
The result would be imperceptible. In fact, almost all modern printing (RIP) algorithms (such as Floyd-Steinberg Error Diffusion) already add "random" data to your image during the conversion from N-bit color to 1-bit CMYK pigments, to avoid moire patterns. Instead of using truly random data, this "fingerprint" data could be used...
Using this method, there is also no need to "register" such a printer by keeping a copy of the output around. The serial number could be extracted simply by obtaining a sufficiently large sample of non-white output from the printer.
"The true purpose of schooling, according to Gatto, is to produce an easily manageable workforce to serve employers in a mass-production economy. Actual education is a secondary and even counterproductive result since educated people tend to be more difficult to control."
In Canada, the Teacher's Unions seem to be the only workforce for which the school system exists to serve. It might not actually be so bad, if some Employers could make productive use of the average High School graduate.
Unfortunately, educating anyone in any non-trivial topic is very demanding work. It is much easier to drug 5 to 15 percent of the learning population; especially the more active (and thus more exhausting) Boys
The Union backlash against anything that would allow the government to fund non-Union schools (vouchers, etc.) is astonishing. Even though home schooling recieves a fraction of the funding that a publicly-schooled child receives, public school enrollment is falling, with the balance of students going to private or home schooling. Even a huge financial penalty cannot keep students in public schools!
The only "revolution" that is needed, is the ability for parents to send their children to the school of their choice -- not the school chosen for them. The hemorrhaging of students -- and therefore funding -- from the public school system would be instantaneous and dramatic.
The best teachers would remain employed, would be compensated better (less waste on poor teachers and unnecessary infrastructure). Students with parents that don't give a shit would remain uneducated (not much can be done...). Parents who care wouldn't be forced to both A) pay for an education system through their taxes, and B) pay to educate their own children.
apt-get update apt-get -t unstable install kdebase
The rules of submission require you to state that you experienced a financial loss, due to very specific circumstances. Most PayPal account holders (the vast majority, I think) have experienced no financial losses as a result of any of the claims stated in this class action's resolution.
Therefore, don't get too excited -- the average PayPal account holder gets nothing from this Class Action resolution...
Christians generally don't have a problem with life on mars, or anywhere else for that matter. Belief in the work of the Christ, and theories about exactly how and when things came into being are pretty independent of eachother.
Please don't confuse the term "Luddite Maniac" with "Christian".
I'm using gkrellm to monitor the health of remote servers. It provides a visual indication of all of their vital statistics (disk and netowrk I/O, temperature, memory, swap.
Sometimes, a visual indicator will give you hints about problems or activity patterns that are hard to see in a log file....
That's true, if you don't install a Nuclear Power Plant to assist in the extraction...
Of course, this begs the question -- why not just develop clean nuclear power in the first place, instead of fixating on developing more economical extraction processes? Vitrification of nuclear waste for long term storage is probably superior to suffocation, freezing or frying to death after destroying our environment. Unless you're ecologically minded, evidently...
Could it be that the public has bought into the anti-nuclear fear campaign, and would rather strangle to death on carbon dioxide, monoxide etc., than breath clean air and drink clean water?
No, sir. Not a terrorist.
..." doesn't qualify as "Information".
;)
Simply not "+5, Informative"
Moderators, get a clue. Your job, when moderating something as "Informative", is to promote posts which, when viewed with a reasonably objective eye, actual contain (get ready now...) Information.
Perhaps I'm just not enough of a lib-leftie wing-nut, but "ultra-right wing Jesus freak who actively hates gays, black people, non-Christians,
If, to the liberals in the group, this does indeed qualify as "Information", then please accept my humble apology...
Remember, boys and girls... "Stupid" is not a synonym for "Conservative".
What these moron(s) are proposing has absolutely, unequivocally nothing to do with being a Conservative, or a Republican... or anything else remotely approximating good sense...
I just purchased some "wearables" from the EFF; their web purchase process was the least painful, most efficient I've ever experienced! I would suggest that anyone thinking that they might want to defend themselves against state control consider supporting the EFF.
That is the sound of inevitability...