(The hot plugging is in fact so good now that I can put the machine in "hibernate" mode, in which everything in RAM plus video RAM is swapped to disk and the machine is powered down, remove or insert a PCMCIA card, and upon awakening from the hibernate the card is recognized, initialized, and its module loaded. This is impressive stuff.)
Impressive, sure, if you haven't used a laptop with MacOS or Windows. I swap PCMCIA cards in and out of those platforms fairly regularly, and I don't even have to power down to do so.
It's only impressive because the PCCard code is so poor on free unixen.
Much as I would like to see informed argument on two sides here, you are not helping your side by saying obviously stupid and incorrect things like this. CO2 emmissions have increased every year for centuries.
Not stupid, and not incorrect: or, it is as equally as correct as your statement, "CO2 emmissions have increased every year for centuries". C02 emissions, of which human activity contributes only a tiny fraction (I've seen between 1% and 3% figures), may be rising, but our efforts to reduce them are irrelevant. You have to get all the volcanoes to stop spewing C02 to make a significant difference.
While there weren't any Greenpeace nitwits around to take measurments in the 1750s, I have seen it estimated that the output of major industrial centers then dwarf our pollution output today. Remember, everything was heated with coal--everything. Your house, my house, the trains, thousands of factories, ships at sea, everything, all spewing billowing clouds of coal smoke, and not a stack scrubber or brick of low sulfer coal in sight.
The pollution was such that everything was coated with soot. Daylight in London was a murky thing through all the smog. We were dirty, dirty people, then. We are much better now.
That's ass-backwards...Despite the inane ramblings..."uninformed idiot spouting nonsense"...What a ridiculous conspiracy theory...How stupid can you get?
Such love... I can barely restrain myself.
I'll just pick out one thing--"Really, I can't imagine why anyone would be so out of touch as to believe that full-time environmental protestors are not a valuable contribution to our society. ?"
Let me guess... you're a full-time environmental protestor?
Here's a simple, simple equation. Simple enough even for you. Which is more valuable, an environmental protestor, or an environmentally-focused engineer? Who will do more good?
You fool. You aren't nearly wild-eyed enough to be taken seriously. Try to wave a Spectre of Death or two next time.
Even though you were reasonable and civil, I'm going to pick a few nits.
sure, the Earth's temperature has fluctuated wildly in the past; sure, not all of the recent increase in average global temperature is due to humans. But that doesn't make us innocent, or safe.
Neither does it make us guilty, or in danger. People have weird perspectives--the totality of the ecosystem of the earth is just so goddamn big, it's hard to wrap a puny human mind around. Those that study the environment tend to specialize; i.e. studying ice shelves, or the African plains, or the suburban countryside. When you study one thing for so long, you get tunnel vision, and you can't see that, perhaps, that melted ice shelf provides a benefit to part of the ecosystem elsewhere.
The ebb and flow of the entire earth is big--damn big, and to think that we humans can cause that much damage is pretty arrogant. The damage we cause is mostly localized, such as LA's smog problem, or nasty polluted rivers.
An Aside: I love to fish. Because of that, I am quite sensitive to the junk industry dumps into the streams and rivers; even though I prefer salt-water fishing, all that junk makes its way out into the Gulf as well.
Oddly enough, because of the environmental laws, it's remarkably difficult to file tort cases against a polluting industry upriver from you. As long as they meet whatever the minimum standards are, they are complying with the law, and you and me can't do anything about it. This is another case where government, in the guise of "looking out for the little people" is really not doing that much for us, and might be working against us.
A previous poster listed these [ornl.gov] graphs [noaa.gov]. A temperature spike and carbon dioxide spike, coinciding with the industrial revolution, are clearly visible. We have contributed to global warming.
Unfortunately, the greatest level of greenhouse gasses and pollution were released during the Industrial Revolution (that's the captial "I" and "R"), which was during the 18th and 19th century. The few dollops of CO2 that we produce now is nothing compared to what was emmitted then. Everything was heated with coal, not just a few power plants here and there.
You can argue that there is a lag between pollution and effect, but that contradicts the current environmentalist doctrine.
Sure, we can't stop industry, and sure, we don't have effective alternative energy sources. But we can adopt less wasteful methods of doing things, and cleaner manufacturing processes. And if we never start seriously investigating alternative energy sources, we will certainly never make any progress in that realm. So don't dismiss global warming as a liberal joke, or a tool for Greenpeace.
Unfortunately, it is mostly a tool for Greenpeace. I don't know what Greenpeace's financials look like, but rather than fund "education initiatives" or protests, how much of their money is used to fund alternative research?
Radical environmentalists tend to annoy me because--rather than going to school, getting an engineering degree, and working on new energy saving designs or new energy resources--they only complain about things. I'm not impressed with those that simply complain about things.
The fact is, environmentalism is a luxury. The fact that we have the time, energy, and resources to worry about the environment is great support for the success of the Industrial Revolution. If you were grubbing in the dirt to grow a potato, do you think you would give two shits about a big piece of ice melting in the ass-end of nowhere? Or would you think, "Good--maybe all that water will get into the atmosphere and rain here so I can grow my damn potatoes"?
I liken it to American's facination with dogs--it is a sign of our affluency that we spend so much time and money on anthropomorphizing dogs, rather than looking on them as a source of food like a lot of people in the Phillipenes do.
What if the sun goes *ffftt* in ten years? What if a wind turbine farm makes the earth spin faster? What if an alien species makes contact with us, and they are offended by solar power, and they blast us with their ray guns?
You're complicating what I hoped was a simple statement: those that don't value labor tend towards self-annhilation, while those that do tend towards greater success.
"Physical assets" refer to the mills, tools, computers, buildings, fiber optic cable, etc. that a company owns. These have value, if only as scrap, or sold off in pieces. What I refer to, of course, are the "corporate raiders" of the 70s and 80s--_Wall Street_, Gordon Gecko, etc. Those "capitalists" that gave real capitalists such a bad name, and still do so.
That is to say, someone's 'value' as realized from their labour is heavily dependant on their social surroudings (coworkers, environment, rules and policies in working environment, culture, etc) rather than their intrinsic value based on their skill or knowledge set.
I would argue against that. Artisans, for example, tend to work in conditions approaching squalor (at least, most do at first), but few would deny the value of their labor. Tag "by and large" to the end of that, and I might grudgingly agree, but only because by and large, people are lazy and will look to any excuse to avoid working. ("The rules and policies of my working environment affect my ability to remember to run spell-check on this letter. Time to go mingle at the coffee pot")
Even skill isn't necessarily so important--a concientious, dedicated employee, with little skill (or no skills whatsoever), has great value, even if their labor is only to mop the floors.
One's own personality and character have as much as anything else (perhaps more) to do with labor value.
(Oh, and I was just making a crack about Econ 101, not making an earth-shaking revelation. I mean to say that it's easy, intuitive stuff, if looked at objectively)
This is part of the insane attitude that one's workers are one's worst enemies. Letting people do these little things is far from bad for business. It is most likely actually good as it creates an environment where people feel invested and where they have the wild concept that maybe their employer sees them as more than "production units".
Amen, brother.
Aside from the sociological implications, there is great value to unfiltered 'Net access on the intellectual front. Sure, some people will do nothing but surf for sports scores, or fluff in a similar vein, but in my case, it's a rare day that I don't learn something new (and useful) while poking around.
But of course that assumes there's actually value in labor, and that's anathema to the modern capitalist.
Now, I was with you all the way, and right there at the end you pissed me off...
It's a poor, poor capitalist who doesn't account for the value of labor. That's fundamental Econ 101--opportunity costs and whatnot.
Your "modern capitalist" is what real capitalists call "paper tigers"--people who see the value of a company as a sum of its physical assets divided by share value. A lot of those captitalists are happily steering billion-dollar corporations into the ground right now.
The other, real capitalists are hiring, training, and valuing employees; and they make up the majority of capitalists. Those other chuckleheads are just poseurs.
This can be handled, and is handled, by metadata. Most OSes do a limp-wristed version of it every day--"that movie I downloaded a few days ago..."
Natural language grepping through a binary audio file is, no doubt, quite cool, but I believe mostly wasted effort. Well, wasted effort for everybody except IBM, who might sell a few more seats of ViaVoice. I say it's wasted because, most often, it's not the content itself you remember but the circumstances surrounding it. "I saw an article in a magazine, and I read it on the train on the way to Boston--it had something to do with widgets" No ammount of data mining will appropriately pull that info out of a simple text file.
I relate all this in terms of human-interaction, i.e. the computer mining to satisfy the needs of a carbon-based lifeform who regularly purchases Big Macs. Data-mining between computer programs for other computer programs would be a different kettle of fish altogether--and there are a lot of ex-LISP hackers at MIT who would like to know how you got something like that to work, thank you very much.
Sounds like the time nerd friends of mine put a "Clapper" on the monitor of their nerd boss, set so sensitive that when he put down his Dr. Pepper on the desk, *CLICK*.
If I remember correctly, Duckpins and Hampster were done using Hash Animation Master. Hash is a good proggy--I've played with it a bit.
Blender is better in a lot of ways, but Hash is tough to beat for ease of use. Blender is tough to beat for difficulty of use. Until you learn the gestalt of it, you do a lot of guessing ("what does this button do....AAAAAGGGH!").
Humans can usually corrolate orthagonal names to functions--vis, do you think "grep" has much to do with its function?
You will want to freeze names, however--if you use pepper names, banana.domain.com had better remain the mail server forever and chili.domain.com the HTTP server. If you move or replace machines, you can't go renaming stuff. People will pick up the names as fast as they would be able to sort out in their heads what "mo.mis.ht.23" is supposed to stand for.
Maintain a list, easily accessible to reference when you have a question--"bobafett is hosed... what does it do?"--and likely, the names will stick in the subconcious (if they are used often enough). Plus, john.domain.com is easier to type than ms.ja.web.domain.com.
Don't use apple names--there are fewer of them than you think, and Steve Jobs will reach through your Ethernet and throttle you.
Every time there's a DCMA or other absurd US-law story on Slashdot, the Canadian crowd pulls their face out of their back bacon sandwich to cry, "I'm glad I live in Candada, eh! You Yanks are a bunch of hosers to not live in a socialist paradise like Canada!"
Where are the Canucks now? (probably sneaking across the border to buy CD-Rs)
This seems to be a losing proposition, in the end. Begging users for handouts? Will Mandrake move to the public radio-method of fundraising? "Hi, your boot is interrupted this week to ask, 'User, do you enjoy Mandrake enough to pay $10 a month, or $20 a month? Become a member now, and we'll throw in a Signature Logo t-shirt, signed by RMS'"
This is where normal businesses say "what we're doing isn't working--let's try something else". Mandrake (or any Free Software-based business) doesn't have to show massive profits, but it does have to keep the doors open.
Selling the CDs don't work. Too easy to download ISOs, too easy to simply compile new apps. Selling services works, but only to a select few. RedHat may be able to get away with it, but isn't Mandrake a French company? Too far away, conceptually if not literally.
What is Mandrake's raison d'etre? A desktop-friendly Linux, if I'm not mistaken. Mandrake used to be a rip-off of RedHat, before it matured.
If Mandrake can cut costs by returning to that model--a "wrapper" around a RedHat install that caters to the needs of a desktop user. It can leech off RedHat for the hard stuff, and focus it's energies (and money) on keeping the doors open.
I hate to see them die, but duplicating effort can kill a small company. Unless Mandrake decides to finance the nerds with MandrakePorn. That, I understand, is doing okay.
True, as far as it goes. But due to the nature of a computer game, the number of subtleties is much less than the subtleties of chess (or Go, for that matter).
I don't mean to demean a good SF player, but I just don't see the same level of complexity. By and large, SF ability is based on the twitch-factor. Chess is based on more complex strategy.
I dunno... I'd rather it be whispered about me, "there goes a chess grandmaster", than "there goes the best tiddly-winks player in the world".
FWIW, I don't think the comparison between SF and chess is fair. Sure, the player may be thinking in "real time", but the complexity of moves, compounded by hard-and-fast rules coded into the game means that at the highest levels, it's a test of endurance or reflex response (or both), not game skill.
Whereas in chess, at the highest levels, there can be multiple levels of attack, deception, gamesmanship, and defense.
Let me be clear, though--I find that at the highest levels of almost *anything*, the people there tend to be boorish, whether they be chess grandmasters, SF gods or Ph.Ds in French Realist poetry. The people at the highest levels of whatever dicipline tend to be one-trackers, of which sparkling conversation is not made.
Do not build a strawman. I don't say good government is "zero government". I say that government--constitutional government--has a defined and limited set of powers. The government we have today has far, far exceeded those powers.
Because of government's approbation of tasks which do no belong in federal government's baliwick, there is an incentive to curry favor with the politicians that run the government. The way you curry favor is by contributing to their campaign.
You apparently ignore the history of government, if you believe that government is not evil. I don't believe it is *intentionally* evil, but the results certainly tend to be.
A people's needs are too complex and too varied (especially in this big country) for a central authority to determine what is good or what is right for all people. It just flat out doesn't work. Midwest people are farm-centric, rust belt is auto-centric, the west coast is tech-centric--these different needs are met in different ways. You *cannot* make laws that appese (and appeal) to all of these different constituencies without making the laws so burdensome to bear to make it not worthwhile.
I know you have a Pollyanna-view of government. Possibly, you even work in government, or are connected some way (government contractor)--I've noticed the biggest proponents of government tend to be bought and paid for by government (vis. public school teachers). If that is true, that you pay your bills with former tax dollars, then I don't blame you for standing up for your sugar daddy. But for those of us who work outside of government for a living, the burdens of government do little except to hamper us.
Finally, "campaign finance reform" ignores a major issue--the fact that political speech is protected by the Constitution. Some people disagree that money == speech--however, the current crop of laws will prevent a citizen, or a citizen's group from buying commercial time 60 days before an election. That's not pure money == speech, it's a gag on free expression of political views. I can't believe you think that is okay, but apparently you do.
"Genocide campaign"? Care to prove that? Look up the definition of genocide, first.
Incidentally, the "noble savages" of the Americas were doing quite a good job of eradicating themselves before anybody else came along.
The attempt to paint history in a different light than the truth is getting old. Go accuse white guys of something else for a change--like running over baby ducks. The self-flaggellating guilt-trip is tired.
Oddly enough, for most of the history of America, the people thought almost exactly that: there are only a few, specific proper roles for government, and everything else was handled by people, or perhaps local governments.
I'll just ask you to think about this. The last time "campaign finace reform" was discussed (and legislation was passed) was back in the Nixon era. The laws passed then ($1000 limit, donation reporting, among other things) served only to strangle off nearly all hope for a third-party to make any kind of dent in the public arena. "Campaign fincance reform" was what it was called, but the effect was "solidify the Republican-Democrate duocracy for ever".
Which is why most thinking people call the current crop of "campaign finace reform" laws the "permanent incumbancy protection" laws. The other people (the ones I like to call "stupid"), think (or, perhaps "hope" is a better word) that this time, contrary to past evidence, government will pass a law without unintended (or intended) consequences that act against the advertised intent.
12 paragraphs of gobbledy-gook TLAs, obscure commands and oddball subjects makes me glad that somebody doesn't require me to be a hardware engineer just to play Solitaire.
Slashdot Mirror
Impressive, sure, if you haven't used a laptop with MacOS or Windows. I swap PCMCIA cards in and out of those platforms fairly regularly, and I don't even have to power down to do so.
It's only impressive because the PCCard code is so poor on free unixen.
Much as I would like to see informed argument on two sides here, you are not helping your side by saying obviously stupid and incorrect things like this. CO2 emmissions have increased every year for centuries.
Not stupid, and not incorrect: or, it is as equally as correct as your statement, "CO2 emmissions have increased every year for centuries". C02 emissions, of which human activity contributes only a tiny fraction (I've seen between 1% and 3% figures), may be rising, but our efforts to reduce them are irrelevant. You have to get all the volcanoes to stop spewing C02 to make a significant difference.
While there weren't any Greenpeace nitwits around to take measurments in the 1750s, I have seen it estimated that the output of major industrial centers then dwarf our pollution output today. Remember, everything was heated with coal--everything. Your house, my house, the trains, thousands of factories, ships at sea, everything, all spewing billowing clouds of coal smoke, and not a stack scrubber or brick of low sulfer coal in sight.
The pollution was such that everything was coated with soot. Daylight in London was a murky thing through all the smog. We were dirty, dirty people, then. We are much better now.
Such love... I can barely restrain myself.
I'll just pick out one thing--"Really, I can't imagine why anyone would be so out of touch as to believe that full-time environmental protestors are not a valuable contribution to our society. ?"
Let me guess... you're a full-time environmental protestor?
Here's a simple, simple equation. Simple enough even for you. Which is more valuable, an environmental protestor, or an environmentally-focused engineer? Who will do more good?
What If is not, in and of itself, very useful. I thought I illustrated it with my ridiculous statements.
"What if" has to be balanced against real and likely dangers, otherwise it's just mental masturbation.
You fool. You aren't nearly wild-eyed enough to be taken seriously. Try to wave a Spectre of Death or two next time.
Even though you were reasonable and civil, I'm going to pick a few nits.
sure, the Earth's temperature has fluctuated wildly in the past; sure, not all of the recent increase in average global temperature is due to humans. But that doesn't make us innocent, or safe.
Neither does it make us guilty, or in danger. People have weird perspectives--the totality of the ecosystem of the earth is just so goddamn big, it's hard to wrap a puny human mind around. Those that study the environment tend to specialize; i.e. studying ice shelves, or the African plains, or the suburban countryside. When you study one thing for so long, you get tunnel vision, and you can't see that, perhaps, that melted ice shelf provides a benefit to part of the ecosystem elsewhere.
The ebb and flow of the entire earth is big--damn big, and to think that we humans can cause that much damage is pretty arrogant. The damage we cause is mostly localized, such as LA's smog problem, or nasty polluted rivers.
A previous poster listed these [ornl.gov] graphs [noaa.gov]. A temperature spike and carbon dioxide spike, coinciding with the industrial revolution, are clearly visible. We have contributed to global warming.
Unfortunately, the greatest level of greenhouse gasses and pollution were released during the Industrial Revolution (that's the captial "I" and "R"), which was during the 18th and 19th century. The few dollops of CO2 that we produce now is nothing compared to what was emmitted then. Everything was heated with coal, not just a few power plants here and there.
You can argue that there is a lag between pollution and effect, but that contradicts the current environmentalist doctrine.
Sure, we can't stop industry, and sure, we don't have effective alternative energy sources. But we can adopt less wasteful methods of doing things, and cleaner manufacturing processes. And if we never start seriously investigating alternative energy sources, we will certainly never make any progress in that realm. So don't dismiss global warming as a liberal joke, or a tool for Greenpeace.
Unfortunately, it is mostly a tool for Greenpeace. I don't know what Greenpeace's financials look like, but rather than fund "education initiatives" or protests, how much of their money is used to fund alternative research?
Radical environmentalists tend to annoy me because--rather than going to school, getting an engineering degree, and working on new energy saving designs or new energy resources--they only complain about things. I'm not impressed with those that simply complain about things.
The fact is, environmentalism is a luxury. The fact that we have the time, energy, and resources to worry about the environment is great support for the success of the Industrial Revolution. If you were grubbing in the dirt to grow a potato, do you think you would give two shits about a big piece of ice melting in the ass-end of nowhere? Or would you think, "Good--maybe all that water will get into the atmosphere and rain here so I can grow my damn potatoes"?
I liken it to American's facination with dogs--it is a sign of our affluency that we spend so much time and money on anthropomorphizing dogs, rather than looking on them as a source of food like a lot of people in the Phillipenes do.
What if the sun goes *ffftt* in ten years? What if a wind turbine farm makes the earth spin faster? What if an alien species makes contact with us, and they are offended by solar power, and they blast us with their ray guns?
"What if" isn't an argument.
You're complicating what I hoped was a simple statement: those that don't value labor tend towards self-annhilation, while those that do tend towards greater success.
"Physical assets" refer to the mills, tools, computers, buildings, fiber optic cable, etc. that a company owns. These have value, if only as scrap, or sold off in pieces. What I refer to, of course, are the "corporate raiders" of the 70s and 80s--_Wall Street_, Gordon Gecko, etc. Those "capitalists" that gave real capitalists such a bad name, and still do so.
That is to say, someone's 'value' as realized from their labour is heavily dependant on their social surroudings (coworkers, environment, rules and policies in working environment, culture, etc) rather than their intrinsic value based on their skill or knowledge set.
I would argue against that. Artisans, for example, tend to work in conditions approaching squalor (at least, most do at first), but few would deny the value of their labor. Tag "by and large" to the end of that, and I might grudgingly agree, but only because by and large, people are lazy and will look to any excuse to avoid working. ("The rules and policies of my working environment affect my ability to remember to run spell-check on this letter. Time to go mingle at the coffee pot")
Even skill isn't necessarily so important--a concientious, dedicated employee, with little skill (or no skills whatsoever), has great value, even if their labor is only to mop the floors.
One's own personality and character have as much as anything else (perhaps more) to do with labor value.
(Oh, and I was just making a crack about Econ 101, not making an earth-shaking revelation. I mean to say that it's easy, intuitive stuff, if looked at objectively)
Amen, brother.
Aside from the sociological implications, there is great value to unfiltered 'Net access on the intellectual front. Sure, some people will do nothing but surf for sports scores, or fluff in a similar vein, but in my case, it's a rare day that I don't learn something new (and useful) while poking around.
Hell, I learn gobs from Slashdot, which is why I want it to be better.
But of course that assumes there's actually value in labor, and that's anathema to the modern capitalist.
Now, I was with you all the way, and right there at the end you pissed me off...
It's a poor, poor capitalist who doesn't account for the value of labor. That's fundamental Econ 101--opportunity costs and whatnot.
Your "modern capitalist" is what real capitalists call "paper tigers"--people who see the value of a company as a sum of its physical assets divided by share value. A lot of those captitalists are happily steering billion-dollar corporations into the ground right now.
The other, real capitalists are hiring, training, and valuing employees; and they make up the majority of capitalists. Those other chuckleheads are just poseurs.
This can be handled, and is handled, by metadata. Most OSes do a limp-wristed version of it every day--"that movie I downloaded a few days ago..."
Natural language grepping through a binary audio file is, no doubt, quite cool, but I believe mostly wasted effort. Well, wasted effort for everybody except IBM, who might sell a few more seats of ViaVoice. I say it's wasted because, most often, it's not the content itself you remember but the circumstances surrounding it. "I saw an article in a magazine, and I read it on the train on the way to Boston--it had something to do with widgets" No ammount of data mining will appropriately pull that info out of a simple text file.
I relate all this in terms of human-interaction, i.e. the computer mining to satisfy the needs of a carbon-based lifeform who regularly purchases Big Macs. Data-mining between computer programs for other computer programs would be a different kettle of fish altogether--and there are a lot of ex-LISP hackers at MIT who would like to know how you got something like that to work, thank you very much.
Oh, and Apple called--they'd like their Knowledge Navigator back, please.
Sounds like the time nerd friends of mine put a "Clapper" on the monitor of their nerd boss, set so sensitive that when he put down his Dr. Pepper on the desk, *CLICK*.
If I remember correctly, Duckpins and Hampster were done using Hash Animation Master. Hash is a good proggy--I've played with it a bit.
Blender is better in a lot of ways, but Hash is tough to beat for ease of use. Blender is tough to beat for difficulty of use. Until you learn the gestalt of it, you do a lot of guessing ("what does this button do....AAAAAGGGH!").
Definition of cute:
A kitten in a tangle, playing with a ball of string.
Definition of funny:
The kitten strangles.
Humans can usually corrolate orthagonal names to functions--vis, do you think "grep" has much to do with its function?
You will want to freeze names, however--if you use pepper names, banana.domain.com had better remain the mail server forever and chili.domain.com the HTTP server. If you move or replace machines, you can't go renaming stuff. People will pick up the names as fast as they would be able to sort out in their heads what "mo.mis.ht.23" is supposed to stand for.
Maintain a list, easily accessible to reference when you have a question--"bobafett is hosed... what does it do?"--and likely, the names will stick in the subconcious (if they are used often enough). Plus, john.domain.com is easier to type than ms.ja.web.domain.com.
Don't use apple names--there are fewer of them than you think, and Steve Jobs will reach through your Ethernet and throttle you.
I'm not trading in 10 million miles for a spin on the Vomit Comet. What do they serve for refreshments, a kick in the groin?
Every time there's a DCMA or other absurd US-law story on Slashdot, the Canadian crowd pulls their face out of their back bacon sandwich to cry, "I'm glad I live in Candada, eh! You Yanks are a bunch of hosers to not live in a socialist paradise like Canada!"
Where are the Canucks now? (probably sneaking across the border to buy CD-Rs)
You think your purchasing a CD will save the company? You are an idiot.
This seems to be a losing proposition, in the end. Begging users for handouts? Will Mandrake move to the public radio-method of fundraising? "Hi, your boot is interrupted this week to ask, 'User, do you enjoy Mandrake enough to pay $10 a month, or $20 a month? Become a member now, and we'll throw in a Signature Logo t-shirt, signed by RMS'"
This is where normal businesses say "what we're doing isn't working--let's try something else". Mandrake (or any Free Software-based business) doesn't have to show massive profits, but it does have to keep the doors open.
Selling the CDs don't work. Too easy to download ISOs, too easy to simply compile new apps. Selling services works, but only to a select few. RedHat may be able to get away with it, but isn't Mandrake a French company? Too far away, conceptually if not literally.
What is Mandrake's raison d'etre? A desktop-friendly Linux, if I'm not mistaken. Mandrake used to be a rip-off of RedHat, before it matured.
If Mandrake can cut costs by returning to that model--a "wrapper" around a RedHat install that caters to the needs of a desktop user. It can leech off RedHat for the hard stuff, and focus it's energies (and money) on keeping the doors open.
I hate to see them die, but duplicating effort can kill a small company. Unless Mandrake decides to finance the nerds with MandrakePorn. That, I understand, is doing okay.
True, as far as it goes. But due to the nature of a computer game, the number of subtleties is much less than the subtleties of chess (or Go, for that matter).
I don't mean to demean a good SF player, but I just don't see the same level of complexity. By and large, SF ability is based on the twitch-factor. Chess is based on more complex strategy.
I dunno... I'd rather it be whispered about me, "there goes a chess grandmaster", than "there goes the best tiddly-winks player in the world".
FWIW, I don't think the comparison between SF and chess is fair. Sure, the player may be thinking in "real time", but the complexity of moves, compounded by hard-and-fast rules coded into the game means that at the highest levels, it's a test of endurance or reflex response (or both), not game skill.
Whereas in chess, at the highest levels, there can be multiple levels of attack, deception, gamesmanship, and defense.
Let me be clear, though--I find that at the highest levels of almost *anything*, the people there tend to be boorish, whether they be chess grandmasters, SF gods or Ph.Ds in French Realist poetry. The people at the highest levels of whatever dicipline tend to be one-trackers, of which sparkling conversation is not made.
Do not build a strawman. I don't say good government is "zero government". I say that government--constitutional government--has a defined and limited set of powers. The government we have today has far, far exceeded those powers.
Because of government's approbation of tasks which do no belong in federal government's baliwick, there is an incentive to curry favor with the politicians that run the government. The way you curry favor is by contributing to their campaign.
You apparently ignore the history of government, if you believe that government is not evil. I don't believe it is *intentionally* evil, but the results certainly tend to be.
A people's needs are too complex and too varied (especially in this big country) for a central authority to determine what is good or what is right for all people. It just flat out doesn't work. Midwest people are farm-centric, rust belt is auto-centric, the west coast is tech-centric--these different needs are met in different ways. You *cannot* make laws that appese (and appeal) to all of these different constituencies without making the laws so burdensome to bear to make it not worthwhile.
I know you have a Pollyanna-view of government. Possibly, you even work in government, or are connected some way (government contractor)--I've noticed the biggest proponents of government tend to be bought and paid for by government (vis. public school teachers). If that is true, that you pay your bills with former tax dollars, then I don't blame you for standing up for your sugar daddy. But for those of us who work outside of government for a living, the burdens of government do little except to hamper us.
Finally, "campaign finance reform" ignores a major issue--the fact that political speech is protected by the Constitution. Some people disagree that money == speech--however, the current crop of laws will prevent a citizen, or a citizen's group from buying commercial time 60 days before an election. That's not pure money == speech, it's a gag on free expression of political views. I can't believe you think that is okay, but apparently you do.
"Genocide campaign"? Care to prove that? Look up the definition of genocide, first.
Incidentally, the "noble savages" of the Americas were doing quite a good job of eradicating themselves before anybody else came along.
The attempt to paint history in a different light than the truth is getting old. Go accuse white guys of something else for a change--like running over baby ducks. The self-flaggellating guilt-trip is tired.
Oddly enough, for most of the history of America, the people thought almost exactly that: there are only a few, specific proper roles for government, and everything else was handled by people, or perhaps local governments.
I'll just ask you to think about this. The last time "campaign finace reform" was discussed (and legislation was passed) was back in the Nixon era. The laws passed then ($1000 limit, donation reporting, among other things) served only to strangle off nearly all hope for a third-party to make any kind of dent in the public arena. "Campaign fincance reform" was what it was called, but the effect was "solidify the Republican-Democrate duocracy for ever".
Which is why most thinking people call the current crop of "campaign finace reform" laws the "permanent incumbancy protection" laws. The other people (the ones I like to call "stupid"), think (or, perhaps "hope" is a better word) that this time, contrary to past evidence, government will pass a law without unintended (or intended) consequences that act against the advertised intent.
So, by your thinking, bad government is controlled by more government?
Explain, please, how this works?
12 paragraphs of gobbledy-gook TLAs, obscure commands and oddball subjects makes me glad that somebody doesn't require me to be a hardware engineer just to play Solitaire.
In case you haven't heard, Fritz Hollings is opposed to "cash-and-carry" government. What are you worried about? This has to be in your interest, otherwise, he wouldn't be bringing it up.