All your ranting about monied interests in Washington D.C., and you think that Washington D.C. will solve the problem?
Do you actually believe that the Campaign Finance Reform bill with make one goddamn bit of difference? Why on earth would you think that, seeing as we already operate under previously passed campaign finance reform laws? Or do you think a $1000 limit on individual contributions and the FEC were penciled on the back of the Constitution?
The last bunch of "reform" laws passed gave the two-party system a virtual lock on every election since. You wanna know why Nader/Browne/other third-party candidates don't get any traction? They are forced to operate under the last bunch of "reform" laws that make it hard as hell to get a leg up on the monied major parties (unless you've got an ass full of cash like Perot).
Stop beating this dead horse. You want to *eliminate* corruption at the highest levels? Take the power away from the highest levels. That is the only way. Another layer of "reform" laws will only serve to entrench those in power now.
There is a movement to get it stated EXPLICITLY in the Bill of Rights
That'll be tough... which of the first 10 amendments to the Constitution (which make up the Bill of Rights) will get bumped to second-banana status?
You mean there's a movement to get an amendment to the Constitution added.
The Bill of Rights is important because it enumerated a series of concerns that were left up in the air after the Constitution was adopted, but the other amendments are just as binding and important as the first 10.
Re:Have you been taking your medication?
on
What is .NET?
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· Score: 1
Godwin's Law, you putz. Go finger yourself.
A Blinkered Rant
on
What is .NET?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Sweet jumping savior, how the hell did we get here?
I managed to get two pages into ArsTechnica's explaination of what.NET is, what it isn't, and why it will be used before my brain rebelled: "Great fuck, if people would simply stop schlepping shit around in proprietary binary formats, data could be imported or exported in any damn application that wanted to write the translation".
This would be different if.NET was talking about eliminating the concept of an application (document-centric computing). Hell no, it's a bunch of pointy-head nerds and pointy-haired MBAs adding another goddamn layer of nerd-cruft to everything under creation.
".NET has three packets of information: the IL, the Metadata, and the fuck-this-where-can-i-find-nudie-pics"... please, for the love of Mike (God wouldn't have anything to do with this, it's purely From the Other Side), let's not stop everything and reinvent the wheel. We had the chance to carefully think things through and do it right, back in 1990. We missed the opportunity, we're now stuck with what we've got. Hasn't anybody learned anything from Be? You can't go home again.
If.NET makes any fucking difference before it gets replaced with the Next Big Thing, I'll eat my damned crusty underwear. So far, I could grep for.NET and replace it with "Java", and timewarp my pasty white ass to 1997 when it was going to Save Us from platform-specific languages and Microsoft at the same time. I cut my balls off and drank the poison koolaid, but the fucking UFO hasn't poked it's nose out from behind Hale-Bopp yet, the shy fucking bastard.
Spare me the fucking story. You wanna know what the next great savior is gonna be? Sumbitch, he's already here, and Tim-Berners Lee is his prophet. It's the Church of the Holy Hypertext, and it's vessel is Mozilla. The Web lit up the world because it's simple, it's easy to learn, and it's powerful... and, sin of all sins, it's accessible. Nerds and secretaries are building web pages, because it's easy to do. You think Sally Secretary is gonna benefit from.NET's programming language independance? It's wonky new IDE?
Pfft. Thicker and thicker layers of cruft will not make programming less hard. Thicker and thicker layers of cruft will not change the way we access information. Thicker and thicker layers of cruft will only slow down the spread of knowledge, because everybody's chasing down the next security bug in.fuckingNET instead of sharing what they know.
It won't "pay" for anything. Taxes, by their nature, are redistribution schemes not wealth-generation schemes.
Take $0.25 worth of seeds, some dirt and a few hours of your time, and you get tomatoes you can sell for $0.75/lb. You are generating wealth.
If you take $0.25 of every $1.00 and give it to somebody else (i.e. taxes), you haven't created wealth, but moved it from one place to another. Plus, the cost of moving that quarter (paying you) decrements the final payment by a couple of pennies.
The person who gets that quarter (minus a few cents) might be happy about it, but you haven't created wealth--certainly not enough wealth to pay the guy who got the quarter forcibly removed from his possessions enough to buy a stick of gum.
"projects like this"--i.e., an anonymous entity providing some kind of technology to 10-15 year olds and learning.... something to be defined at a later date.
Name a similar project that changed the world. As far as I know, this is the first of it's kind, and the earlier poster was exclaiming that he thought it was a bunch of hooey that would result in nothing. You say that it would, and, in fact, that it *already has*.
And I'm saying that kids make great testers of technology because they consider it a toy, not a technological toy. Kids accept the world and all that's in it, and will reply with few preconceptions when asked about what they'd like.
Kids do, that's true. They're talking 10-15 year olds. That age range does not simply accept. As the age ranges upward from 10, they will more and more look at what their peer is doing and emulate that, not simply accept without question.
That's assuming, of course, you can get a 15 year old to generate enough interest in anything to get them away from their GameBoy or CD player (currently playing "Love Pootie" by The Seminal Fluids (thanks Dave Barry)).
Well, you've chosen a self-selecting group to base your opinions on. Not exactly a fair sampling technique.
Re: the Young Earth theory: I'm not going there. Based on the arguments I've seen, you can interpret Genesis to allow for any earth age you wish.
Thirdly, you miss my point: when confronted with a) defending deeply held beliefs and philosophy or b) accepting the lable of lunatic or defective, you shouldn't be surprised that some people take the first choice. Better, I believe, to not throw it in the face of creationists (or wallop them upside the head, as some evolutionists do). Buttress your arguments rather than degenerate into ad hominem attacks or use "scare quotes".
Finally, my best friend since the first grade is finishing his PhD in anthropology. I know, through him, more than most about the theory of evolution: and the fact remains that it is a theory. Too many evolutionists present the current popular positions as fact, when they are not. I believe this is just plain-old human nature: of which, the Bible is a pretty good roadmap in learning to deal with your fellow Earth-walkers.
In keeping with my tradition of not getting involved with this argument, you're welcome to the last word.:-)
Well, you could get these kids together and teach them to sing in perfect harmony. Then you could buy them a Coke, and keep them company... *sway*
This is not likely to produce anything meaningful or even useful. It is more likely to be a giant feel-good soirie, where we ask the "future generations" how they think the world could be made a better place.
FWIW, most creationists don't deny evolution per se, they deny that *we* evolved from the same branch as monkeys.
What you've been dealing with is flaming zealots, not the mainstream creationist; who really only wants to be allowed to believe that God exists and that He created us in His image--without being mocked as lunatics and defectives.
I think it's safe to say that we don't want (or need) any more "How to Be An Unleashed Dummy In 21 Days" books.
Rather than Yet Another Computer Book that simply cats the "--help" into a book, I'd like to see a revolution in the computer book template. Oh, sure, a book that explains what each and every function in PHP does is helpful, but I can get that online.
How about a case study book? A series of case study books?
I'd like to see a section in every book titled, "These things will likely shaft you".
Fictionalize a manual. The Adventures of Nerd Man. (okay, this one is reachy)
Best yet, I'd like to read a book that doesn't have this damn phrase in it: "... but that is beyond the scope of this book..." Usually, that's the part that I'm stuck on.
You can probably get a thousand concepts from just reading HOWTOs and grepping for that phrase. Those are the parts where the medium-level people (most of the population) are stuck.
Well, maybe not Tivo-the-company, but the PVR idea will make it.
When the tech reaches the level that it costs $10 to include on a TV, it will be everywhere. The broadcast companies will figure out a way to make money off it, eventually.
The question, vis a vis Tivo, is whether the company is flexible/prepared enough to move when the market shifts. Are they all about hardware? They will fail. Are they all about perfecting the tech through software? They have a chance.
The point isn't flexibility: sure you can be more flexible with a Linux-based cluster. You can tweak and tune a Linux-based cluster to meet your specific needs. This is why Google uses such a cluster.
The point isn't about cost: the real difference between a decent name-brand PC and a Mac is negligible. In the case of these Mac-based clusters, since the clustering software is just another app, a Mac-cluster can be setup and torn down quite readily. You come into the lab on Wednesday to find your workstation has been appropriated for the cluster.
The point is accessibility! If you're a physicist in a small school looking to model some complex interaction, you can rent some computer time from somebody (expensive), build a cluster (very expensive, because you'll have to hire somebody to do it--physicists aren't likely to be Beowulf experts), or use the Mac clustering software (expensive, because you'll have to buy the machines if you don't already have it, but you can do it yourself, quickly, without much bother).
Accessibility! It's what keeps Apple in business. This is another example of it.
I'm pretty disappointed in the posters who knock it, because it strikes me that they are a bit put out that they won't remain the Technical Elite because they've got the spare time to read the 230-page Beowulf manual.
If you need a high-performance computing environment, you need a batch-process mainframe and an elite band of nerds to run it. You plebs can just wait patiently outside the machine room.
If you want a toy, go get one of those piddling PCs.
I just love ridiculous condescesion!
Re:Manual length and Macs vs. PC
on
Macintosh Clustering
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· Score: 3, Insightful
This it patently absurd.
Apple's documentation was thin because it could be thin. PC makers shipping thin documentation in an attempt to be "like Apple" and failing to provide adequate information (because they couldn't get away with a thin manual due to PCs complexity and Windows' complexity) is solely the PC manufacturers fault.
There's plenty of things to hate Apple for: you don't have to go looking for stupid and pointless things.
Please define "smart government". Depending on who you ask, you get different answers for "smart government".
It's a nice slogan, but it means nothing. According to Enron, "smart government" means "give us everything we want, do stuff for us".
It's beside the point anyway. There is a list of things that the federal government is allowed to do. Anything beyond that is not Constitutional. We can argue whether deficit spending, coddling corporations, welfare, social security is "smart" or not, but the truth of the matter is that it's not the federal government's business.
Re:electrocution? I don't think so.
on
A Beautiful Mind
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· Score: 1
I'd recommend giving a few hundred megs to a partition for FreeBSD. Since you're using your computer as a workstation, you won't see that much of a difference. It's not noticeably faster or more stable.
KDE, et. al. are just Unix programs. They work fine on BSD. The real difference is how you install it. Wait until you give the/usr/ports tree a try. The coolest way ever to install software.
*BSD is somewhat different from the Linuxes, especially RedHat. My last experience with RH was back at 6.2, but I got frustrated with its habit of tossing thing hither and thither all over the filesystem, and after my RH server was comprimised (buggy wu-ftp), I switched all my machines to Free and OpenBSD.
I, personally, prefer the BSD way of configuration, and I've been very happy since.
Well, as a Libertarian, I do believe in patents. Libertarians (big "L") want to limit the Federal gov't to it's Constitutional limits. That includes patents.
As a libertarian, I dunno. I don't think patents are a libertarian bugaboo. I think you're just digging for something silly to argue against (e.g. patents), because you can't argue the main point (i.e. less government is better).
Re:electrocution? I don't think so.
on
A Beautiful Mind
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· Score: 1
Sure enough. And, under the right circumstances, a bunny rabbit can kill you as well.
Slashdot Mirror
All your ranting about monied interests in Washington D.C., and you think that Washington D.C. will solve the problem?
Do you actually believe that the Campaign Finance Reform bill with make one goddamn bit of difference? Why on earth would you think that, seeing as we already operate under previously passed campaign finance reform laws? Or do you think a $1000 limit on individual contributions and the FEC were penciled on the back of the Constitution?
The last bunch of "reform" laws passed gave the two-party system a virtual lock on every election since. You wanna know why Nader/Browne/other third-party candidates don't get any traction? They are forced to operate under the last bunch of "reform" laws that make it hard as hell to get a leg up on the monied major parties (unless you've got an ass full of cash like Perot).
Stop beating this dead horse. You want to *eliminate* corruption at the highest levels? Take the power away from the highest levels. That is the only way. Another layer of "reform" laws will only serve to entrench those in power now.
You "reformists" crack me up...
That'll be tough... which of the first 10 amendments to the Constitution (which make up the Bill of Rights) will get bumped to second-banana status?
You mean there's a movement to get an amendment to the Constitution added.
The Bill of Rights is important because it enumerated a series of concerns that were left up in the air after the Constitution was adopted, but the other amendments are just as binding and important as the first 10.
Godwin's Law, you putz. Go finger yourself.
Sweet jumping savior, how the hell did we get here?
I managed to get two pages into ArsTechnica's explaination of what .NET is, what it isn't, and why it will be used before my brain rebelled: "Great fuck, if people would simply stop schlepping shit around in proprietary binary formats, data could be imported or exported in any damn application that wanted to write the translation".
This would be different if .NET was talking about eliminating the concept of an application (document-centric computing). Hell no, it's a bunch of pointy-head nerds and pointy-haired MBAs adding another goddamn layer of nerd-cruft to everything under creation.
".NET has three packets of information: the IL, the Metadata, and the fuck-this-where-can-i-find-nudie-pics"... please, for the love of Mike (God wouldn't have anything to do with this, it's purely From the Other Side), let's not stop everything and reinvent the wheel. We had the chance to carefully think things through and do it right, back in 1990. We missed the opportunity, we're now stuck with what we've got. Hasn't anybody learned anything from Be? You can't go home again.
If .NET makes any fucking difference before it gets replaced with the Next Big Thing, I'll eat my damned crusty underwear. So far, I could grep for .NET and replace it with "Java", and timewarp my pasty white ass to 1997 when it was going to Save Us from platform-specific languages and Microsoft at the same time. I cut my balls off and drank the poison koolaid, but the fucking UFO hasn't poked it's nose out from behind Hale-Bopp yet, the shy fucking bastard.
Spare me the fucking story. You wanna know what the next great savior is gonna be? Sumbitch, he's already here, and Tim-Berners Lee is his prophet. It's the Church of the Holy Hypertext, and it's vessel is Mozilla. The Web lit up the world because it's simple, it's easy to learn, and it's powerful... and, sin of all sins, it's accessible. Nerds and secretaries are building web pages, because it's easy to do. You think Sally Secretary is gonna benefit from .NET's programming language independance? It's wonky new IDE?
Pfft. Thicker and thicker layers of cruft will not make programming less hard. Thicker and thicker layers of cruft will not change the way we access information. Thicker and thicker layers of cruft will only slow down the spread of knowledge, because everybody's chasing down the next security bug in .fuckingNET instead of sharing what they know.
It won't "pay" for anything. Taxes, by their nature, are redistribution schemes not wealth-generation schemes.
Take $0.25 worth of seeds, some dirt and a few hours of your time, and you get tomatoes you can sell for $0.75/lb. You are generating wealth.
If you take $0.25 of every $1.00 and give it to somebody else (i.e. taxes), you haven't created wealth, but moved it from one place to another. Plus, the cost of moving that quarter (paying you) decrements the final payment by a couple of pennies.
The person who gets that quarter (minus a few cents) might be happy about it, but you haven't created wealth--certainly not enough wealth to pay the guy who got the quarter forcibly removed from his possessions enough to buy a stick of gum.
Clarify what? They're your words.
"projects like this"--i.e., an anonymous entity providing some kind of technology to 10-15 year olds and learning.... something to be defined at a later date.
Name a similar project that changed the world. As far as I know, this is the first of it's kind, and the earlier poster was exclaiming that he thought it was a bunch of hooey that would result in nothing. You say that it would, and, in fact, that it *already has*.
Clear enough?
Kids do, that's true. They're talking 10-15 year olds. That age range does not simply accept. As the age ranges upward from 10, they will more and more look at what their peer is doing and emulate that, not simply accept without question.
That's assuming, of course, you can get a 15 year old to generate enough interest in anything to get them away from their GameBoy or CD player (currently playing "Love Pootie" by The Seminal Fluids (thanks Dave Barry)).
That's interesting. Could you give examples of similar projects and what benefits they provided?
Well, you've chosen a self-selecting group to base your opinions on. Not exactly a fair sampling technique.
Re: the Young Earth theory: I'm not going there. Based on the arguments I've seen, you can interpret Genesis to allow for any earth age you wish.
Thirdly, you miss my point: when confronted with a) defending deeply held beliefs and philosophy or b) accepting the lable of lunatic or defective, you shouldn't be surprised that some people take the first choice. Better, I believe, to not throw it in the face of creationists (or wallop them upside the head, as some evolutionists do). Buttress your arguments rather than degenerate into ad hominem attacks or use "scare quotes".
Finally, my best friend since the first grade is finishing his PhD in anthropology. I know, through him, more than most about the theory of evolution: and the fact remains that it is a theory. Too many evolutionists present the current popular positions as fact, when they are not. I believe this is just plain-old human nature: of which, the Bible is a pretty good roadmap in learning to deal with your fellow Earth-walkers.
In keeping with my tradition of not getting involved with this argument, you're welcome to the last word. :-)
Well, you could get these kids together and teach them to sing in perfect harmony. Then you could buy them a Coke, and keep them company... *sway*
This is not likely to produce anything meaningful or even useful. It is more likely to be a giant feel-good soirie, where we ask the "future generations" how they think the world could be made a better place.
Bah.
Free ice cream shops on every corner, a built-in circus, and a ultra-ray gun to shoot down invading aliens.
FWIW, most creationists don't deny evolution per se, they deny that *we* evolved from the same branch as monkeys.
What you've been dealing with is flaming zealots, not the mainstream creationist; who really only wants to be allowed to believe that God exists and that He created us in His image--without being mocked as lunatics and defectives.
I think it's safe to say that we don't want (or need) any more "How to Be An Unleashed Dummy In 21 Days" books.
Rather than Yet Another Computer Book that simply cats the "--help" into a book, I'd like to see a revolution in the computer book template. Oh, sure, a book that explains what each and every function in PHP does is helpful, but I can get that online.
How about a case study book? A series of case study books?
I'd like to see a section in every book titled, "These things will likely shaft you".
Fictionalize a manual. The Adventures of Nerd Man. (okay, this one is reachy)
Best yet, I'd like to read a book that doesn't have this damn phrase in it: "... but that is beyond the scope of this book..." Usually, that's the part that I'm stuck on.
You can probably get a thousand concepts from just reading HOWTOs and grepping for that phrase. Those are the parts where the medium-level people (most of the population) are stuck.
/* you are not expected to understand this */
Hordes of teenage fanatics frothing at the mouth.
Well, maybe not Tivo-the-company, but the PVR idea will make it.
When the tech reaches the level that it costs $10 to include on a TV, it will be everywhere. The broadcast companies will figure out a way to make money off it, eventually.
The question, vis a vis Tivo, is whether the company is flexible/prepared enough to move when the market shifts. Are they all about hardware? They will fail. Are they all about perfecting the tech through software? They have a chance.
The point isn't flexibility: sure you can be more flexible with a Linux-based cluster. You can tweak and tune a Linux-based cluster to meet your specific needs. This is why Google uses such a cluster.
The point isn't about cost: the real difference between a decent name-brand PC and a Mac is negligible. In the case of these Mac-based clusters, since the clustering software is just another app, a Mac-cluster can be setup and torn down quite readily. You come into the lab on Wednesday to find your workstation has been appropriated for the cluster.
The point is accessibility! If you're a physicist in a small school looking to model some complex interaction, you can rent some computer time from somebody (expensive), build a cluster (very expensive, because you'll have to hire somebody to do it--physicists aren't likely to be Beowulf experts), or use the Mac clustering software (expensive, because you'll have to buy the machines if you don't already have it, but you can do it yourself, quickly, without much bother).
Accessibility! It's what keeps Apple in business. This is another example of it.
I'm pretty disappointed in the posters who knock it, because it strikes me that they are a bit put out that they won't remain the Technical Elite because they've got the spare time to read the 230-page Beowulf manual.
If you need a high-performance computing environment, you need a batch-process mainframe and an elite band of nerds to run it. You plebs can just wait patiently outside the machine room.
If you want a toy, go get one of those piddling PCs.
I just love ridiculous condescesion!
This it patently absurd.
Apple's documentation was thin because it could be thin. PC makers shipping thin documentation in an attempt to be "like Apple" and failing to provide adequate information (because they couldn't get away with a thin manual due to PCs complexity and Windows' complexity) is solely the PC manufacturers fault.
There's plenty of things to hate Apple for: you don't have to go looking for stupid and pointless things.
I'm more interested in that terrabyte of NZ sheep porn, myself...
Please define "smart government". Depending on who you ask, you get different answers for "smart government".
It's a nice slogan, but it means nothing. According to Enron, "smart government" means "give us everything we want, do stuff for us".
It's beside the point anyway. There is a list of things that the federal government is allowed to do. Anything beyond that is not Constitutional. We can argue whether deficit spending, coddling corporations, welfare, social security is "smart" or not, but the truth of the matter is that it's not the federal government's business.
"with nasty, sharp pointed teeth!!!"
I'd recommend giving a few hundred megs to a partition for FreeBSD. Since you're using your computer as a workstation, you won't see that much of a difference. It's not noticeably faster or more stable.
KDE, et. al. are just Unix programs. They work fine on BSD. The real difference is how you install it. Wait until you give the /usr/ports tree a try. The coolest way ever to install software.
*BSD is somewhat different from the Linuxes, especially RedHat. My last experience with RH was back at 6.2, but I got frustrated with its habit of tossing thing hither and thither all over the filesystem, and after my RH server was comprimised (buggy wu-ftp), I switched all my machines to Free and OpenBSD.
I, personally, prefer the BSD way of configuration, and I've been very happy since.
Well, as a Libertarian, I do believe in patents. Libertarians (big "L") want to limit the Federal gov't to it's Constitutional limits. That includes patents.
As a libertarian, I dunno. I don't think patents are a libertarian bugaboo. I think you're just digging for something silly to argue against (e.g. patents), because you can't argue the main point (i.e. less government is better).
Sure enough. And, under the right circumstances, a bunny rabbit can kill you as well.