The phenomenon is called "sphere of influence" and it actually helps stabilize areas of the world because it helps ensure that conflicting mindsets and governments do not border each other.
It helps stabilize regions in the same way the mafia helps stabilize neighbourhoods. The "sphere of influence" euphemism is only applied to regions after all governments in a region are obedient and submissive to a oppressive government and somehow ignores the aggressions and subversive campaigns that the oppressive government carries in order to dominate that said region.
Is it? Or is it that nowadays, thanks to the internet (ability to everyone connected to communicate freely and quickly among each other) makes it a whole lot easier to uncover problems, errors and lies in poorly put together stories? Nowadays it's possible to publicly debunk stories as soon as they pop out while in the past if someone happened to know the truth he couldn't possibly communicate that info to a relevant amount of people.
No, it was an attempt by the original poster either to use some buzzword acronym, or perhaps to avoid seeming to be racist by using the word "Chinese". Certainly APAC includes China but it also includes many other countries where patronising its people by giving them a lecture about "how we do business in the USA" would be both unnecessary, inappropriate and offensive. (Of course Chinese would probably also find it insulting, but I'm just speaking as an Australian.)
Now that I see your point I have to say that you are absolutely right. I focused on the topic of this discussion (the company with the 5+ employee office in China) and kept thinking that by "APAC employees" he was referring to those 5+ in the China office. After looking at the big picture then it becomes pretty clear that the comment in fact sound patronising and conveys a bit of the old proverbial colonial attitude.
After browsing the wikipedia article on APAC then it is pretty clear that the OP got it right on the money to begin with. If, among a list of 30+ countries that includes China you can only identify Australia and New Zealand and therefore claim that he is some how wrong then at best it isn't the OP who is demonstrating his ignorance.
I don't believe that concentrating efforts on a single distribution does anyone any good. In fact, I believe that the only thing that it could achieve is concentrating the desktop linux effort in a single point of failure. For example, let's focus on the main distros and ignore the later forks and offshoots.
If that distribution was Debian then the problems that have plagued that project would've hindered all progress that we've benefited in the desktop front in the last 10 years. That's not good.
If that distribution was Red Hat then, as the company is focused on the server then we wouldn't have much of a desktop to begin with. That's not good.
If that distribution was SUSE then... Well, desktop linux would be in the hands of Microsoft. That's not good either.
What other distribution is left? Slackware? Gentoo? Arcane commands and compile everything from source? There's no doubt that those may be very positive selling points for the refined geeks among us but what about mere mortals?
So, as I see it, there may be no ideal distribution but the best desktop options available today are here only because someone saw an itch that needed to be scratched and had the courage to get off his ass to do something about it. The same progress would never exist if that same person had to jump through hurdles imposed by a pre-established project to get his idea up and running. As in nature, diversity is the single most important source of progress and evolution.
I find it strange that until now there isn't a single comment on the open-ness of that platform. Yes, it may run a BSD flavour. Nonetheless, is the platform locked down? Is it possible for any end-user to reinstall the OS without the need of circumvention tools and hard hacks?
That, as I see it, is the single most interesting aspect of this article. After all, if the sidekick platform is locked down then it doesn't really matter it is running a BSD flavour. Moreover, it would once again emphasize the need for the legal constructs added to the GPL in the form of GPLv3.
My head almost spun 360 deg. when I read that. Do you even know what "socialism" and "socialist" even mean? Look the word up in Wikipedia, but a lot of the meaning can be condensed to 2 words: "Not Capitalism."
Not quite. Capitalism is an economic system which is based on the concept of market economy and the right to private property. What you are thinking of is economic liberalism. Socialism is based on capitalism but is fundamentally incompatible with economic liberalism.
Are you perhaps thinking of Social Democrats? I don't think they are really socialists; more like oligarchies.
No, I do mean socialists. The social democrats have a party of their own and do want to support oligarchies, along with dismantling all social programmes like the national health service.
No more than the roads you drive on depend on someone else's wealth.
So, you could have two extremely hard-working parents who have a kid that's of average intelligence and native academic skills. They know that putting that kid in a really excellent setting (analagous to an Ivy League school) would help the kid make the very most of his averageness. And they're willing to put their hard work (money) on the line. And then you've got another kid of significant IQ, academic potential, etc., whose parents don't have the same hustle or dedication to getting their offspring educated.
I'm sorry, who exactly is applying for college? Is it the parents or the kids? If the kids are the ones applying for college then where exactly would society benefit if it was only possible to provide opportunities to some kid depending on how much money the parents are willing to throw to open doors for him?
You're saying that the two hard working parents should give up on having their kid go to the really good school, and instead write a check to put a different kid - one that someone else decided to have - into that school. That's "social justice?" You're making the average kid's parents slaves to the smart kid.
If you have a hard time commenting what I said then, instead of putting words in my mouth, consider not posting at all. No one besides yourself stated anything similar to "hard working parents should give up on having their kid go to the really good school". All parents, independent of how much they make a year, should participate and invest in their children's education. Yet, the term "investment" does not nor it should mean "injecting capital" exclusively. The end result of an education is not the total bill that the parents ran up since kindergarten but talent, acquired knowledge, mental agility. That is exactly the only thing that matters and relying on money to evaluate academic matters will only corrupt the evaluation.
Oh no, I get it just fine. You want the government to say which kid gets to benefit from a parent's hard work. Your notion of "social justice" isn't that a smart kid should naturally get access to a better school, it's that hard working parents don't have a say in which child - their own, or someone else's - gets the benefit of their hard work. How just of you!
You demonstrated yet again that you don't have the faintest clue about what you are talking about. In any socialist society, which pretty much means all european states, in order to apply to a state school the only thing that matters is the equivalent of the US's SAT score. Back here that score is composed of the score that the candidate gets in a nation-wide series of tests and the equivalent to the high school grade point average. That is as much state interference as the US's SATs.
It's guys like Ayers that use terms like "social justice" to mean "everyone should get the same stuff in life, regardless of what they produce."
For someone who is complaining about indoctrination you sure are demonstrating how well you memorized the main propaganda talking points the US government inflicted upon it's population in the 60s and 70s.
I live in a socialist state where the current governing party is none other than the socialist party. Yet, capitalism is alive and well, people still get different pay checks and still see some people advance in life while others fail to do so well. So where exactly does that "everyone should get the same stuff in life" pops up?
Well, nowhere. The thing is, when socialists talk about the concept of "social justice" they are talking about benefiting from the same starting point without being hindered by some poverty-induced limitations. To put it in other words, "social justice" means that no matter how poor you are, you still get the same chance of advancing as some millionaire offspring.
For example, the access to my country's equivalent to the ivy league schools doesn't depend on your family's wealth, which means that if you are dumb as a door knob and you happen to be the son of a billionaire then you still have to work your ass off in order to be admitted to one of those schools. It also means that if you are terribly smart and talented then you may enrol in those schools, no matter how poor you are. It's raw talent that matters, now raw cash.
That's what social justice means and frankly the US sees too many raw talent going to waste just because the right people happen to be born into a poor family.
And he has spent years overtly advocating for the use of schools as idealogical indoctrination centers aimed specifically at cranking out kids who see the world as one big entitlement engine.
Are you so naive to really believe that the US, including the school system, doesn't try to indoctrinate their population? Oh really? So how come so many people foam from the mouth when faced with anything related to "communism"? Well, pretty much like you have reacted to the word "socialism", although you clearly demonstrated you failed to understand the concept.
Yes, because forcing a child to pass through an education process that values social injustice, favouritism, bias and that it's ok to just screw the entire community if it fits my personal musing is a great way to found a society.
As if no american in the history of job application has ever embellished or stuffed his resume. Ever. Only those dirty foreigners who talk funny have such a fragile integrity to perform such an unethical action.
By the way, your question works in reverse as well. What makes foreign workers more entitled to a job than an American paying for the bailouts?
The answer is very simple: foreign workers aren't more entitled to a job than an american. The are also NOT less entitled to that job. That's because it doesn't make sense to state that someone is more or less entitled to something due to nationality.
If a job application is filed and both non-americans and americans apply then the candidate who demonstrates that he is more competent and more suitable for the job when compared to the competition is the one that should benefit from it, whether he is an american or from somewhere else. That's free market for you.
What I think is that if a company is receiving American tax dollars to stay in business, it's first obligation is to those people whose money it's taking. Got a problem with that?
Are you aware that immigrants like the H1-B some slashdot users like to criticize, also pay taxes? Therefore, they also paid for the bill that those businesses are piling up to stay in business. According to your train of thought why exactly would someone that pays off their taxes should be excluded from the effect of a government tax program simply because the file the government has on them has something funny on the "nationality" field?
And you're off on another issue: much of that cheap foreign talent comes here to get educated, often at the expense of qualified American students.
You would have a point if american schools were all state-run schools which exclusively admitted students due to academic merit alone. That is not the case and the american way of handling access to higher education is through the price of admission. So if the foreign students pay their tuition or get scholarships like americans do then they have as much right to be there as anyone else.
Moreover, if your colleges and universities weren't desperately seeking for foreign talent to enrol in their school program then they wouldn't spend their valuable funds on foreign recruitment programs, such as the recruitment program that MIT and Carnegie Mellon are running on the university I've enrolled, along with other top schools of my country.
Re:The bells and whistles nobody uses...
on
Less Is Moore
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
The article you pointed out is pure nonsense. It claims that bloat isn't important due to the fact that memory cost dropped. Not only that, it tries to base that claim on this idiotic metric of dollar per megabyte and how the fact that software like microsoft's excel bloat from a 15MB install in the 5.0 days to a 146MB install in the 2000 days is somehow a good thing because in the 5.0 days it took "$36 worth of hard drive space" while "Excel 2000 takes up about $1.03 in hard drive space". No need to justify a 100% footprint. We are saving money by installing more crap to do the exact same thing.
In fact, the idiot that wrote that article even had the audacity to state:
In real terms, it's almost like Excel is actually getting smaller!
Up is down, left is right, bloat is actually good for you.
But people still complain. Although it appears that we should be grateful for all that bloat, we are somehow being ungrateful by believing that all that bloat is unnecessary. But fear not, the idiot that wrote the article has a nice accusation for all those bloat haters out there:
I guess those guys just hate Windows.
Yes, that's it. We don't hate orders of magnitude increase in bloat simply to be able to perform exactly what has been easily done with a fraction of resources. We don't hate to be forced to spend money on hardware to be left with a less than adequate solution when compared with the previous generation. We simply hate windows. Good call.
The article is bad and you should feel bad for posting a link to it.
Oh so you can't point out exactly the KDE people explicitly said "don't use this, not for end users" and felt compelled to grasp at straws with that early adopting users nonsense. But hey, keep trolling away if that pleases you.
the new desktop shell Plasma, introduced in KDE 4.0, has matured to the point where it can replace the KDE 3 shell for most casual users
KDE 4.1 aims at being the first release suitable for early adopting users
KDE 4.1 already provides a powerful and feature-rich working environment
That sounds exactly the opposite of what you claimed. Could it be due to my inability to read? In that case, could you point out exactly where the KDE explicitly said "don't use this, not for end users"? Because they sure didn't said it when they released it nor when distributions like kubuntu opted to ship it.
Although KDE 4.1 sucked at multiple levels, I'm finding KDE 4.2 to be a whole lot more polished, responsive and light. It even makes it possible to once again play sauerbraten something I wasn't able to do with KDE 4.1 with it's craptastic sub-20 fps performance. That's refreshing.
Beyond that, it fixed some nasty bugs from KDE 4.1 that were quite shocking and it also packs some features that went missing from KDE 3.5 like auto panel hiding, which is always good. Although it still suffers from nasty bugs, things are looking up. To put it bluntly, it's finally in a decent 4.0 state. It was a shame the KDE team had to drag KDE's brand name through the mud simply because they grossly failed to manage the user's expectations with the version numbering nonsense.
The planet is not infinite. Exponential growth will hit a ceiling, whether you want to believe it or not. Any nerd should know that.
Indeed. That info is a basic concept of demographics which is present even at the most basic level. There is even a very simple mathematical model that models the effects of resource restrictions on a growing population. I find it appalling that there are people up to this day and even in/., a geek den, believing that a population can grow without restrictions.
Because some idiots thinks buses is a good idea? Personally I hate them, less so for long trips though. But within a city or as commute transport they suck balls, slower than a bike or more expensive than a car...
I am an extensive mass transport system user who, every day, benefits from a multi-modal network that involves bus, suburban train and subway system. I use it to not only cover a 40km trip to work each day but also on my off time. In order to gain access to the local mass transport network I need to pay 47 euros for a montly pass. That is 47 euros for unlimited access to multiple modes of transportation. That ends up costing right under 600 euros a year.
Where exactly can you purchase a car for 600 euros a year? Are you able to run a car for a year with 600 euros worth of gasoline/diesel? Can you even maintain a car (insurance, maintenance, etc...) with 600 euros a year? No, you can't.
It appears that you failed to read the thread. If you had followed it you would realize that I was talking about metlin's post and not the 9/80 subject.
If someone needs to work 80 hours a week on average then I would say that their life doesn't have much quality to begin with. Unless by "maintain our quality of living" you mean "paying off the luxury goods and services you've purchased". But then again, as your work load stops you from benefiting from them, I seriously doubt that they do much good.
Materialism and all that keeping up with the joneses is a bitch, isn't it?
Also, is ANYTHING still useful in 80 years? Cars, buildings, roads, all that stuff wears out and becomes obsolete after a long enough time.
You may not be aware but there are quite a lot of roads and bridges that were built by the Romans that are still in use today. So we can safely state that some stuff is still useful in 80 years.
Slashdot Mirror
It helps stabilize regions in the same way the mafia helps stabilize neighbourhoods. The "sphere of influence" euphemism is only applied to regions after all governments in a region are obedient and submissive to a oppressive government and somehow ignores the aggressions and subversive campaigns that the oppressive government carries in order to dominate that said region.
Is it? Or is it that nowadays, thanks to the internet (ability to everyone connected to communicate freely and quickly among each other) makes it a whole lot easier to uncover problems, errors and lies in poorly put together stories? Nowadays it's possible to publicly debunk stories as soon as they pop out while in the past if someone happened to know the truth he couldn't possibly communicate that info to a relevant amount of people.
Not quite. The obvious follow-up to the Wii should be the Z-pup. You know, like in zip up. It's a pun. Laugh, dammit.
No, it was an attempt by the original poster either to use some buzzword acronym, or perhaps to avoid seeming to be racist by using the word "Chinese". Certainly APAC includes China but it also includes many other countries where patronising its people by giving them a lecture about "how we do business in the USA" would be both unnecessary, inappropriate and offensive. (Of course Chinese would probably also find it insulting, but I'm just speaking as an Australian.)
Now that I see your point I have to say that you are absolutely right. I focused on the topic of this discussion (the company with the 5+ employee office in China) and kept thinking that by "APAC employees" he was referring to those 5+ in the China office. After looking at the big picture then it becomes pretty clear that the comment in fact sound patronising and conveys a bit of the old proverbial colonial attitude.
After browsing the wikipedia article on APAC then it is pretty clear that the OP got it right on the money to begin with. If, among a list of 30+ countries that includes China you can only identify Australia and New Zealand and therefore claim that he is some how wrong then at best it isn't the OP who is demonstrating his ignorance.
I don't believe that concentrating efforts on a single distribution does anyone any good. In fact, I believe that the only thing that it could achieve is concentrating the desktop linux effort in a single point of failure. For example, let's focus on the main distros and ignore the later forks and offshoots.
If that distribution was Debian then the problems that have plagued that project would've hindered all progress that we've benefited in the desktop front in the last 10 years. That's not good.
If that distribution was Red Hat then, as the company is focused on the server then we wouldn't have much of a desktop to begin with. That's not good.
If that distribution was SUSE then... Well, desktop linux would be in the hands of Microsoft. That's not good either.
What other distribution is left? Slackware? Gentoo? Arcane commands and compile everything from source? There's no doubt that those may be very positive selling points for the refined geeks among us but what about mere mortals?
So, as I see it, there may be no ideal distribution but the best desktop options available today are here only because someone saw an itch that needed to be scratched and had the courage to get off his ass to do something about it. The same progress would never exist if that same person had to jump through hurdles imposed by a pre-established project to get his idea up and running. As in nature, diversity is the single most important source of progress and evolution.
I find it strange that until now there isn't a single comment on the open-ness of that platform. Yes, it may run a BSD flavour. Nonetheless, is the platform locked down? Is it possible for any end-user to reinstall the OS without the need of circumvention tools and hard hacks?
That, as I see it, is the single most interesting aspect of this article. After all, if the sidekick platform is locked down then it doesn't really matter it is running a BSD flavour. Moreover, it would once again emphasize the need for the legal constructs added to the GPL in the form of GPLv3.
So, is it locked down? Can it run linux?
My head almost spun 360 deg. when I read that. Do you even know what "socialism" and "socialist" even mean? Look the word up in Wikipedia, but a lot of the meaning can be condensed to 2 words: "Not Capitalism."
Not quite. Capitalism is an economic system which is based on the concept of market economy and the right to private property. What you are thinking of is economic liberalism. Socialism is based on capitalism but is fundamentally incompatible with economic liberalism.
Are you perhaps thinking of Social Democrats? I don't think they are really socialists; more like oligarchies.
No, I do mean socialists. The social democrats have a party of their own and do want to support oligarchies, along with dismantling all social programmes like the national health service.
Right. It depends on someone else's wealth.
No more than the roads you drive on depend on someone else's wealth.
So, you could have two extremely hard-working parents who have a kid that's of average intelligence and native academic skills. They know that putting that kid in a really excellent setting (analagous to an Ivy League school) would help the kid make the very most of his averageness. And they're willing to put their hard work (money) on the line. And then you've got another kid of significant IQ, academic potential, etc., whose parents don't have the same hustle or dedication to getting their offspring educated.
I'm sorry, who exactly is applying for college? Is it the parents or the kids? If the kids are the ones applying for college then where exactly would society benefit if it was only possible to provide opportunities to some kid depending on how much money the parents are willing to throw to open doors for him?
You're saying that the two hard working parents should give up on having their kid go to the really good school, and instead write a check to put a different kid - one that someone else decided to have - into that school. That's "social justice?" You're making the average kid's parents slaves to the smart kid.
If you have a hard time commenting what I said then, instead of putting words in my mouth, consider not posting at all. No one besides yourself stated anything similar to "hard working parents should give up on having their kid go to the really good school". All parents, independent of how much they make a year, should participate and invest in their children's education. Yet, the term "investment" does not nor it should mean "injecting capital" exclusively. The end result of an education is not the total bill that the parents ran up since kindergarten but talent, acquired knowledge, mental agility. That is exactly the only thing that matters and relying on money to evaluate academic matters will only corrupt the evaluation.
Oh no, I get it just fine. You want the government to say which kid gets to benefit from a parent's hard work. Your notion of "social justice" isn't that a smart kid should naturally get access to a better school, it's that hard working parents don't have a say in which child - their own, or someone else's - gets the benefit of their hard work. How just of you!
You demonstrated yet again that you don't have the faintest clue about what you are talking about. In any socialist society, which pretty much means all european states, in order to apply to a state school the only thing that matters is the equivalent of the US's SAT score. Back here that score is composed of the score that the candidate gets in a nation-wide series of tests and the equivalent to the high school grade point average. That is as much state interference as the US's SATs.
It's guys like Ayers that use terms like "social justice" to mean "everyone should get the same stuff in life, regardless of what they produce."
For someone who is complaining about indoctrination you sure are demonstrating how well you memorized the main propaganda talking points the US government inflicted upon it's population in the 60s and 70s.
I live in a socialist state where the current governing party is none other than the socialist party. Yet, capitalism is alive and well, people still get different pay checks and still see some people advance in life while others fail to do so well. So where exactly does that "everyone should get the same stuff in life" pops up?
Well, nowhere. The thing is, when socialists talk about the concept of "social justice" they are talking about benefiting from the same starting point without being hindered by some poverty-induced limitations. To put it in other words, "social justice" means that no matter how poor you are, you still get the same chance of advancing as some millionaire offspring.
For example, the access to my country's equivalent to the ivy league schools doesn't depend on your family's wealth, which means that if you are dumb as a door knob and you happen to be the son of a billionaire then you still have to work your ass off in order to be admitted to one of those schools. It also means that if you are terribly smart and talented then you may enrol in those schools, no matter how poor you are. It's raw talent that matters, now raw cash.
That's what social justice means and frankly the US sees too many raw talent going to waste just because the right people happen to be born into a poor family.
And he has spent years overtly advocating for the use of schools as idealogical indoctrination centers aimed specifically at cranking out kids who see the world as one big entitlement engine.
Are you so naive to really believe that the US, including the school system, doesn't try to indoctrinate their population? Oh really? So how come so many people foam from the mouth when faced with anything related to "communism"? Well, pretty much like you have reacted to the word "socialism", although you clearly demonstrated you failed to understand the concept.
Yes, because forcing a child to pass through an education process that values social injustice, favouritism, bias and that it's ok to just screw the entire community if it fits my personal musing is a great way to found a society.
As if no american in the history of job application has ever embellished or stuffed his resume. Ever. Only those dirty foreigners who talk funny have such a fragile integrity to perform such an unethical action.
By the way, your question works in reverse as well. What makes foreign workers more entitled to a job than an American paying for the bailouts?
The answer is very simple: foreign workers aren't more entitled to a job than an american. The are also NOT less entitled to that job. That's because it doesn't make sense to state that someone is more or less entitled to something due to nationality.
If a job application is filed and both non-americans and americans apply then the candidate who demonstrates that he is more competent and more suitable for the job when compared to the competition is the one that should benefit from it, whether he is an american or from somewhere else. That's free market for you.
What I think is that if a company is receiving American tax dollars to stay in business, it's first obligation is to those people whose money it's taking. Got a problem with that?
Are you aware that immigrants like the H1-B some slashdot users like to criticize, also pay taxes? Therefore, they also paid for the bill that those businesses are piling up to stay in business. According to your train of thought why exactly would someone that pays off their taxes should be excluded from the effect of a government tax program simply because the file the government has on them has something funny on the "nationality" field?
You would have a point if american schools were all state-run schools which exclusively admitted students due to academic merit alone. That is not the case and the american way of handling access to higher education is through the price of admission. So if the foreign students pay their tuition or get scholarships like americans do then they have as much right to be there as anyone else.
Moreover, if your colleges and universities weren't desperately seeking for foreign talent to enrol in their school program then they wouldn't spend their valuable funds on foreign recruitment programs, such as the recruitment program that MIT and Carnegie Mellon are running on the university I've enrolled, along with other top schools of my country.
The article you pointed out is pure nonsense. It claims that bloat isn't important due to the fact that memory cost dropped. Not only that, it tries to base that claim on this idiotic metric of dollar per megabyte and how the fact that software like microsoft's excel bloat from a 15MB install in the 5.0 days to a 146MB install in the 2000 days is somehow a good thing because in the 5.0 days it took "$36 worth of hard drive space" while "Excel 2000 takes up about $1.03 in hard drive space". No need to justify a 100% footprint. We are saving money by installing more crap to do the exact same thing.
In fact, the idiot that wrote that article even had the audacity to state:
Up is down, left is right, bloat is actually good for you.
But people still complain. Although it appears that we should be grateful for all that bloat, we are somehow being ungrateful by believing that all that bloat is unnecessary. But fear not, the idiot that wrote the article has a nice accusation for all those bloat haters out there:
Yes, that's it. We don't hate orders of magnitude increase in bloat simply to be able to perform exactly what has been easily done with a fraction of resources. We don't hate to be forced to spend money on hardware to be left with a less than adequate solution when compared with the previous generation. We simply hate windows. Good call.
The article is bad and you should feel bad for posting a link to it.
Oh so you can't point out exactly the KDE people explicitly said "don't use this, not for end users" and felt compelled to grasp at straws with that early adopting users nonsense. But hey, keep trolling away if that pleases you.
You seem to be confused. From the KDE 4.1 release announcement:
That sounds exactly the opposite of what you claimed. Could it be due to my inability to read? In that case, could you point out exactly where the KDE explicitly said "don't use this, not for end users"? Because they sure didn't said it when they released it nor when distributions like kubuntu opted to ship it.
Although KDE 4.1 sucked at multiple levels, I'm finding KDE 4.2 to be a whole lot more polished, responsive and light. It even makes it possible to once again play sauerbraten something I wasn't able to do with KDE 4.1 with it's craptastic sub-20 fps performance. That's refreshing.
Beyond that, it fixed some nasty bugs from KDE 4.1 that were quite shocking and it also packs some features that went missing from KDE 3.5 like auto panel hiding, which is always good. Although it still suffers from nasty bugs, things are looking up. To put it bluntly, it's finally in a decent 4.0 state. It was a shame the KDE team had to drag KDE's brand name through the mud simply because they grossly failed to manage the user's expectations with the version numbering nonsense.
The planet is not infinite. Exponential growth will hit a ceiling, whether you want to believe it or not. Any nerd should know that.
Indeed. That info is a basic concept of demographics which is present even at the most basic level. There is even a very simple mathematical model that models the effects of resource restrictions on a growing population. I find it appalling that there are people up to this day and even in /., a geek den, believing that a population can grow without restrictions.
Because some idiots thinks buses is a good idea? Personally I hate them, less so for long trips though. But within a city or as commute transport they suck balls, slower than a bike or more expensive than a car...
I am an extensive mass transport system user who, every day, benefits from a multi-modal network that involves bus, suburban train and subway system. I use it to not only cover a 40km trip to work each day but also on my off time. In order to gain access to the local mass transport network I need to pay 47 euros for a montly pass. That is 47 euros for unlimited access to multiple modes of transportation. That ends up costing right under 600 euros a year.
Where exactly can you purchase a car for 600 euros a year? Are you able to run a car for a year with 600 euros worth of gasoline/diesel? Can you even maintain a car (insurance, maintenance, etc...) with 600 euros a year? No, you can't.
It appears that you failed to read the thread. If you had followed it you would realize that I was talking about metlin's post and not the 9/80 subject.
If someone needs to work 80 hours a week on average then I would say that their life doesn't have much quality to begin with. Unless by "maintain our quality of living" you mean "paying off the luxury goods and services you've purchased". But then again, as your work load stops you from benefiting from them, I seriously doubt that they do much good.
Materialism and all that keeping up with the joneses is a bitch, isn't it?
And they said slavery was abolished.
Also, is ANYTHING still useful in 80 years? Cars, buildings, roads, all that stuff wears out and becomes obsolete after a long enough time.
You may not be aware but there are quite a lot of roads and bridges that were built by the Romans that are still in use today. So we can safely state that some stuff is still useful in 80 years.