The richest ten percent are basically our *parents*.
Right now I make fuck all, and am probably in the bottom 20 or 30 percent. If I make six figures when I hit 50 or 60, I'll be in the top ten percent.
It's only natural: as your skills and your network of contacts make you worth more, your income goes up. And most people aged 18 or so are, economically speaking, worthless. They can't do anything useful, they don't know anyone, they're undisciplined, etc.
And I bring up the age issue because, without any help from the government, a huge transfer of wealth already happens.
Parents, the richest 10%, are always dumping money into children, the poorest 10%, so poor they don't even get measured.
All that wealth transfer happens on a totally voluntary basis.
You have Ann Coulter calling liberals communists, its no different than calling conservatives nazis.
Virtually every Western European country has a Communist party. Not one has a Nazi party, or even a Fascist party.
Most major campuses have intellectuals droning on about how Marx was misunderstood, and that we haven't really given Communism a proper go of it.
There are no credible intellectuals arguing for Nazism or Fascism, period. You've got a few wackos in Idaho and there's the occasional David Duke character, but again, they have no credibility with anyone in the right or anyone else who matters.
So when we call you communists, we can point to an actual platform that big name people believe in right now, in this world.
You can't do the same with Nazism or Fascism. No one studies that, no one cares about it, it's just a swear word.
Of course, that's pretty typical of liberals: they don't think about what they're saying, and they assume no one else does either.
Today nobody cares about advanced philosophy courses for the masses...
That's because people realize that an advanced course without years of introductory courses is either propaganda or a waste of time.
Many of them are quite capable of thinking about the common good and working to achieve that.
I doubt they've thought for a second about the common good, but on the odd chance they did, I hope it would occur to them that having another 40 million die trying to make Communism work _yet_ _again_ is not exactly compatible with the common good.
The only times I print out stuff is when it needs to be portable (like printing driving directions) and I don't want to putz with putting it on a PDA.
I think the point to the paperless office was not to get rid of paper, but not use it for organizing everything.
Email's already killed off the endless memos, and stuff like Notes and TWiki are the biggest advances towards real group collaboration.
Or sometimes, flipping through a document is easier than viewing it on the screen. I wish I had a PDF viewer which was really, really fast. Maybe something that could pre-render pages without gobbling massive amounts of memory...
Mac OS X 10.3, aka Panther, will have accelerated PDF rendering. Even with 10.2, I find it looks nicer than Acrobat, especially if there are any vector graphics because Acrobat is inconsistent in how it smooths vector graphics. (Math formulas often look terrible because you'll have a nicely anti-aliased fonts, but the hats and fraction lines will be blocky and too dark.
But again, I don't think the "paperless" office should eliminate that because it's not really "office" stuff, per se. The stuff that should be eliminated is all the Dilbert crap: memos, reports, yada yada...
Also, as many companies have found, sometimes you really do need to be face to face to work things out. And people can be real shits online... I've *never* gotten into a yelling match arguing politics over a beer, but it happens constantly online.
WTF does your religion have to do with anything on Slashdot? Reminds me of the many cases of homosexuals just out of the blue spouting off that they're gay.
Tell us more about all these homosexuals who spontaneously tell you they're gay. How does that make you feel?
I'm not EVEN going to look at it until YOU put in more exclamation points!!!!!!!!! and BOLD TEXT!!!!!!!!
The RADICAL NAVIGATION BAR is absolutely AMAZING!!!!!!!!! That kind of NATURAL CAMOUFLAGE of VITAL NAVIGATION ELEMENTS is a SUPER-COOL way to design GROOVY WEB SITES!!!!!!!!!
step3) Teach users not to open.pif and.vbs (Here you stop user interaction for virus to be downloaded)
Off the top of my head, that would be.pif,.vbs,.js,.com,.exe,.bat,.cmd and.scr. I'm sure there are plenty of other standard extensions but I haven't sat down in front of a Windows box in months.
Even then... most users can't *see* the extensions! There's some option in Explorer that you have to uncheck in order to be able to see extensions. Otherwise you have these almost identical Windows icons.
This is also why I don't buy the line that Mac users are necessarily less vulnerable, since Mac OS X, by default, hides extensions as well. (Mac OS X is even worse on that score... try naming a folder "foo.jpg.app"!)
Those are user interface issues, though, and should be addressable, if not fixable. The fundamental problem, which Unix boxen still have, is the all-powerful root user. *None* of these exploits are unique to Windows. MS has done a poorer job than they could have, but the underlying security model is the long-term issue that we have to face up to.
Why do we have an entire vocabulary that is considered "offensive", yet any of the words have at least three exact synonyms that are perfectly acceptable in everyday use?
Would you agree that the n-word is offensive?
And you understand why, right? It's been used to fuck with so many people for so long, you can't escape the evil behind it.
So why is it so hard to comprehend that there are thousands of years of history behind words like shit and fuck?
It's more than the words themselves, of course. It's the fact that people established social norms, and saw that people who hadn't established those norms simply died.
It's easy, sheltered by modern society, to forget that it wasn't long ago that smallpox was a terrible killer, that people were worried about not eating than being fat, that instead of artificially aborting 30% of pregnancies, a similar number aborted naturally or were stillborn.
Same thing the world over. Japanese, for example, regard Chinese roots as more intellectual.
I suspect part of the reason is simply that because we don't speak Latin or Greek anymore, and thus don't really understand the syntax.
That gives those roots a linguistic flexibility you just don't get with your mother tongue, so academics feel free to combine those roots to construct new jargon. (Part of it is that some languages are more flexible in how they construct words, whereas English tends to be more flexible in how you construct sentences.)
Also, foreign roots tend to be less pejorative. (The exceptions tend to prove the rule: fascist is an example of an academic term that has lost any semblance of objectivity.)
So, these words get used in an academic context and then people naturally associate them with education and professionalism.
...back to the point...These pay rises are not being payed for by inflation, prices will rise,services will cost more. Graduates will be able to afford the proportional increase, people who didn't go to university won't. Something that was meant to guarantee access for poor people ends up kicking them where it hurts.
I think the biggest problem is this idea that "poor" (in scare quotes because I've never seen it well defined) people just need to get their foot in the door.
What they need is to graduate. They need to pass that sense of achievement on to the next generation. They don't need to get into a top college, especially since in America there's not much difference, in real world terms, between ivy league and Schmoe U.
I mean, honestly, you'll wind up in a less fancy cubicle. BFD.
Instead we get all this aid designed, in theory, to reduce the amount a student has to pay to get into school.
The aid system in America is based on "expected family contribution." So if your family can afford to pay $10K per year and you want to go to a $30K school, the gov't is supposed to chip in $20K in grants and loans.
But what happens is that the university promptly increases tuition since students can afford more.
Then the Feds, responding to complaints from parents, increases the allotment, and so tuition has been gradually creeping up for years.
The worst part is that for many students the bulk of the "aid" is in the form of low-interest loans. (At least the interest rates are low right now...)
Profiting just means having more revenues than expenses at the end of the day. "The right to profit" was his words, not mine, and since it didn't really mean anything logically, rather than be pedantic I was just assuming it meant the closest sensible thing: the right to do work and business.
If technology renders one's previous business model unprofitable, one has no right to legislate that the technology be banned, rationed, or controlled to ensure their continued prosperity.
Now you're just making shit up. Where did I say people have a right to ban technology that threatens their profits?
He wasn't describing communism. Communism is collectivism. He's describing a world where "collecting" (AKA "stealing") would no longer even be worth the effort
Collectivism rejects the realities of scarcity, so you're proving my point and its relevance.
because any physical object could be created at will on demand, a la ST:TNG replicator.
Yeah, they also claim that there's no money, again, rejecting the realities of economics, so you're again proving my point and its relevance.
As someone who makes a living writing peer-to-peer software...
Noone, corporation or individual, has a right to profit.
Yes they do; it's a special case of the right to the pursuit of happiness. Otherwise, how do you rationalize making a living?
Everyone has a NATURAL right to consume and reproduce information. How do I know? Look how we are physically built, for crying out loud!
Not a great analogy since, historically, the way we were physically built involved involved an awful lot of rape. Males, being physically dominant, saw the "information" they wanted and took it.
I don't disagree that you have an inalienable right to read and write, but part of being an adult is the right to voluntarily suspend it.
In the above "idealistic copying world" example above, noone could profit! There would be no object scarcity, therefore (almost) no intrinsic value to *ANYTHING*, let alone "strictly informational things."
Sigh... it's been promised before, it's called communism, and has cost over a hundred million lives, not counting war deaths. It doesn't work and never will.
I think there would only be a few chapters to add, though the pictures for the Finder might all be off, from the screenshots I've seen.
However, the people who buy this book are the types who only upgrade their OS by buying a new machine. They demand to be led through things step by step and aren't interested in tech for tech's sake. That's just their personality and behavior, something to take into account when you design a system.
Hey, even Taco himself was here! Can you top that?
I always figured it might be fun to have a beer or six with some of the/. editors, but you could say that about almost any (beer-drinking) schmoe on the planet.
Those hacks sound cool but I don't get excited about them, even though I code enough to know how hard some of that stuff is. (Airpong sounds like the toughest one due to the networking.)
I saw the Halflife 2 movie... now that's really amazing. (I'd say Halo 2, but, at some point Bungie has got to realize that people just don't walk around pointing their guns whereever they go. It looks ridiculous.)
Self-regulation has largely failed, so I really don't see why not.
Well, the current email system has failed to self-regulate, but that could be considered a technical failing.
For example, because email is sent cleartext, if intercepted emails were endemic we would, correctly, say that we didn't protect ourselves from spies. In that case, and in the case of spam, the solution seems to be to fix the email system.
A modern email system could incorporate signatures and keys quite transparently. Your email client could painlessly authorize people, and when that was not practical, it could simply request that they prove that they are human. That first message might be a hassle, but not an overwhelming hassle. SPAM would be entirely blocked.
*If* the governments did nothing, I think thi approach would work. Eventually SPAM would rise close enough to 100% of mail that people would be forced to switch.
What I'm afraid of is that they will perpetuate a flawed system, depriving us of huge potential side benefits.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow.
The most inspiring part of this is that they did it on a gay little scooter.
I'd like to add another point to this:
A lot of that mobility happens with age.
The richest ten percent are basically our *parents*.
Right now I make fuck all, and am probably in the bottom 20 or 30 percent. If I make six figures when I hit 50 or 60, I'll be in the top ten percent.
It's only natural: as your skills and your network of contacts make you worth more, your income goes up. And most people aged 18 or so are, economically speaking, worthless. They can't do anything useful, they don't know anyone, they're undisciplined, etc.
And I bring up the age issue because, without any help from the government, a huge transfer of wealth already happens.
Parents, the richest 10%, are always dumping money into children, the poorest 10%, so poor they don't even get measured.
All that wealth transfer happens on a totally voluntary basis.
You have Ann Coulter calling liberals communists, its no different than calling conservatives nazis.
Virtually every Western European country has a Communist party. Not one has a Nazi party, or even a Fascist party.
Most major campuses have intellectuals droning on about how Marx was misunderstood, and that we haven't really given Communism a proper go of it.
There are no credible intellectuals arguing for Nazism or Fascism, period. You've got a few wackos in Idaho and there's the occasional David Duke character, but again, they have no credibility with anyone in the right or anyone else who matters.
So when we call you communists, we can point to an actual platform that big name people believe in right now, in this world.
You can't do the same with Nazism or Fascism. No one studies that, no one cares about it, it's just a swear word.
Of course, that's pretty typical of liberals: they don't think about what they're saying, and they assume no one else does either.
Today nobody cares about advanced philosophy courses for the masses...
That's because people realize that an advanced course without years of introductory courses is either propaganda or a waste of time.
Many of them are quite capable of thinking about the common good and working to achieve that.
I doubt they've thought for a second about the common good, but on the odd chance they did, I hope it would occur to them that having another 40 million die trying to make Communism work _yet_ _again_ is not exactly compatible with the common good.
The only times I print out stuff is when it needs to be portable (like printing driving directions) and I don't want to putz with putting it on a PDA.
I think the point to the paperless office was not to get rid of paper, but not use it for organizing everything.
Email's already killed off the endless memos, and stuff like Notes and TWiki are the biggest advances towards real group collaboration.
Or sometimes, flipping through a document is easier than viewing it on the screen. I wish I had a PDF viewer which was really, really fast. Maybe something that could pre-render pages without gobbling massive amounts of memory...
Mac OS X 10.3, aka Panther, will have accelerated PDF rendering. Even with 10.2, I find it looks nicer than Acrobat, especially if there are any vector graphics because Acrobat is inconsistent in how it smooths vector graphics. (Math formulas often look terrible because you'll have a nicely anti-aliased fonts, but the hats and fraction lines will be blocky and too dark.
But again, I don't think the "paperless" office should eliminate that because it's not really "office" stuff, per se. The stuff that should be eliminated is all the Dilbert crap: memos, reports, yada yada...
Also, as many companies have found, sometimes you really do need to be face to face to work things out. And people can be real shits online... I've *never* gotten into a yelling match arguing politics over a beer, but it happens constantly online.
Meanwhile, the family which once earned $1,000,000 a year suddenly finds everything twice as expensive, lowering their effective income to $500,000.
Your typical millionaire is a dentist, or a lawyer or a small business owner. Someone who makes his money selling goods and services.
So if demand skyrockets, his profits are going to jump up too. So he'll be making twice as much.
This whole notion of "equalizing wealth" is a nice way of saying "soak the rich." It's a more genteel demagoguery.
No method of soaking the rich every *really* works. It's a scam to keep you on the plantation, poor and stupid, voting Democrat.
There's a certain level at which inflation would occur, but that's only if there's scarcity at the supply end.
Okay, so if everyone has a ton of disposable income, what are they going to do *but* spend it? (Save it? Right.)
That will make aggregate demand shoot through the roof. There's your scarcity of supply.
Yeah, that explains it pretty well.
Now, suppose we have three sets: Integers, Rationals and Reals.
Which of these is true, and why:
a. All three have the same cardinality.
b. Reals has a greater cardinality than Rationals which has a greater cardinality than Integers.
c. Integers and Rationals have the same cardinality, but Reals has a greater cardinality.
d. Rationals and Reals have the same cardinality, which is greater than that of Integers.
Hint: by "A has the same cardinality as B" I mean that if I step through every element in set A, there is a corresponding element in set B.
Think about it before you Google "Cantor Diagonal Method".
WTF does your religion have to do with anything on Slashdot? Reminds me of the many cases of homosexuals just out of the blue spouting off that they're gay.
Tell us more about all these homosexuals who spontaneously tell you they're gay. How does that make you feel?
I'm not EVEN going to look at it until YOU put in more exclamation points!!!!!!!!! and BOLD TEXT!!!!!!!!
The RADICAL NAVIGATION BAR is absolutely AMAZING!!!!!!!!! That kind of NATURAL CAMOUFLAGE of VITAL NAVIGATION ELEMENTS is a SUPER-COOL way to design GROOVY WEB SITES!!!!!!!!!
Didn't mean to post right away...
Anyway, the reason is that people have conceptual issues with infinities.
Trust me, pal 1/3 exactly equals .333...
It's incredible how much resistance there is by people whenever this is mentioned in a math class...it's a solid argument.
It's the same reason why the square root of two was called an "irrational" number.
Kinda like we've been releasing software that "probably" works for the past 40 years?
It's good to see computer engineering is finally catching up with computer science!
step3) Teach users not to open .pif and .vbs (Here you stop user interaction for virus to be downloaded)
.pif, .vbs, .js, .com, .exe, .bat, .cmd and .scr. I'm sure there are plenty of other standard extensions but I haven't sat down in front of a Windows box in months.
Off the top of my head, that would be
Even then... most users can't *see* the extensions! There's some option in Explorer that you have to uncheck in order to be able to see extensions. Otherwise you have these almost identical Windows icons.
This is also why I don't buy the line that Mac users are necessarily less vulnerable, since Mac OS X, by default, hides extensions as well. (Mac OS X is even worse on that score... try naming a folder "foo.jpg.app"!)
Those are user interface issues, though, and should be addressable, if not fixable. The fundamental problem, which Unix boxen still have, is the all-powerful root user. *None* of these exploits are unique to Windows. MS has done a poorer job than they could have, but the underlying security model is the long-term issue that we have to face up to.
Why do we have an entire vocabulary that is considered "offensive", yet any of the words have at least three exact synonyms that are perfectly acceptable in everyday use?
Would you agree that the n-word is offensive?
And you understand why, right? It's been used to fuck with so many people for so long, you can't escape the evil behind it.
So why is it so hard to comprehend that there are thousands of years of history behind words like shit and fuck?
It's more than the words themselves, of course. It's the fact that people established social norms, and saw that people who hadn't established those norms simply died.
It's easy, sheltered by modern society, to forget that it wasn't long ago that smallpox was a terrible killer, that people were worried about not eating than being fat, that instead of artificially aborting 30% of pregnancies, a similar number aborted naturally or were stillborn.
Same thing the world over. Japanese, for example, regard Chinese roots as more intellectual.
I suspect part of the reason is simply that because we don't speak Latin or Greek anymore, and thus don't really understand the syntax.
That gives those roots a linguistic flexibility you just don't get with your mother tongue, so academics feel free to combine those roots to construct new jargon. (Part of it is that some languages are more flexible in how they construct words, whereas English tends to be more flexible in how you construct sentences.)
Also, foreign roots tend to be less pejorative. (The exceptions tend to prove the rule: fascist is an example of an academic term that has lost any semblance of objectivity.)
So, these words get used in an academic context and then people naturally associate them with education and professionalism.
...back to the point...These pay rises are not being payed for by inflation, prices will rise,services will cost more. Graduates will be able to afford the proportional increase, people who didn't go to university won't. Something that was meant to guarantee access for poor people ends up kicking them where it hurts.
I think the biggest problem is this idea that "poor" (in scare quotes because I've never seen it well defined) people just need to get their foot in the door.
What they need is to graduate. They need to pass that sense of achievement on to the next generation. They don't need to get into a top college, especially since in America there's not much difference, in real world terms, between ivy league and Schmoe U.
I mean, honestly, you'll wind up in a less fancy cubicle. BFD.
Instead we get all this aid designed, in theory, to reduce the amount a student has to pay to get into school.
The aid system in America is based on "expected family contribution." So if your family can afford to pay $10K per year and you want to go to a $30K school, the gov't is supposed to chip in $20K in grants and loans.
But what happens is that the university promptly increases tuition since students can afford more.
Then the Feds, responding to complaints from parents, increases the allotment, and so tuition has been gradually creeping up for years.
The worst part is that for many students the bulk of the "aid" is in the form of low-interest loans. (At least the interest rates are low right now...)
There may, perhaps, be a right to pursue profit,
Is there or isn't there?
but right to profit in itself? No way.
Profiting just means having more revenues than expenses at the end of the day. "The right to profit" was his words, not mine, and since it didn't really mean anything logically, rather than be pedantic I was just assuming it meant the closest sensible thing: the right to do work and business.
If technology renders one's previous business model unprofitable, one has no right to legislate that the technology be banned, rationed, or controlled to ensure their continued prosperity.
Now you're just making shit up. Where did I say people have a right to ban technology that threatens their profits?
He wasn't describing communism. Communism is collectivism. He's describing a world where "collecting" (AKA "stealing") would no longer even be worth the effort
Collectivism rejects the realities of scarcity, so you're proving my point and its relevance.
because any physical object could be created at will on demand, a la ST:TNG replicator.
Yeah, they also claim that there's no money, again, rejecting the realities of economics, so you're again proving my point and its relevance.
How can you all afford to go to university?!?
In the UK, tuition is ~ 1k/year, wherever you go.
Ah, so I suppose you think it actually only costs a thousand bucks a year?
That's how they get you hooked on OPM...
As someone who makes a living writing peer-to-peer software...
Noone, corporation or individual, has a right to profit.
Yes they do; it's a special case of the right to the pursuit of happiness. Otherwise, how do you rationalize making a living?
Everyone has a NATURAL right to consume and reproduce information. How do I know? Look how we are physically built, for crying out loud!
Not a great analogy since, historically, the way we were physically built involved involved an awful lot of rape. Males, being physically dominant, saw the "information" they wanted and took it.
I don't disagree that you have an inalienable right to read and write, but part of being an adult is the right to voluntarily suspend it.
In the above "idealistic copying world" example above, noone could profit! There would be no object scarcity, therefore (almost) no intrinsic value to *ANYTHING*, let alone "strictly informational things."
Sigh... it's been promised before, it's called communism, and has cost over a hundred million lives, not counting war deaths. It doesn't work and never will.
Thanks for checking in with us!
I think there would only be a few chapters to add, though the pictures for the Finder might all be off, from the screenshots I've seen.
However, the people who buy this book are the types who only upgrade their OS by buying a new machine. They demand to be led through things step by step and aren't interested in tech for tech's sake. That's just their personality and behavior, something to take into account when you design a system.
Uh, 'man' is a manual.
Hey, even Taco himself was here! Can you top that?
/. editors, but you could say that about almost any (beer-drinking) schmoe on the planet.
I always figured it might be fun to have a beer or six with some of the
Those hacks sound cool but I don't get excited about them, even though I code enough to know how hard some of that stuff is. (Airpong sounds like the toughest one due to the networking.)
I saw the Halflife 2 movie... now that's really amazing. (I'd say Halo 2, but, at some point Bungie has got to realize that people just don't walk around pointing their guns whereever they go. It looks ridiculous.)
Self-regulation has largely failed, so I really don't see why not.
Well, the current email system has failed to self-regulate, but that could be considered a technical failing.
For example, because email is sent cleartext, if intercepted emails were endemic we would, correctly, say that we didn't protect ourselves from spies. In that case, and in the case of spam, the solution seems to be to fix the email system.
A modern email system could incorporate signatures and keys quite transparently. Your email client could painlessly authorize people, and when that was not practical, it could simply request that they prove that they are human. That first message might be a hassle, but not an overwhelming hassle. SPAM would be entirely blocked.
*If* the governments did nothing, I think thi approach would work. Eventually SPAM would rise close enough to 100% of mail that people would be forced to switch.
What I'm afraid of is that they will perpetuate a flawed system, depriving us of huge potential side benefits.