It is concentration of wealth and power that leads to such atrocities. We have a few terms for these concentrations: monopoly and oligopoly. Capitalism lends itself to that, unless carefully policed. The policing must be vigilently done, else the powerful undermine and corrupt it. Ultimately, it is up to the people to rein in the excesses of these power grabbers. Many of us have instead been seduced. Sold a fool's vision of a fantasy free market paradise that cannot exist, and kept hoping for those tantalizing riches that are somehow always just out of reach.
Distrust of power is the very foundation of the United States. The Constitution has all kinds of checks and balances and limitations. And it was not accepted until the addition of the Bill of Rights, a further list of explicit limitations, just in case anyone got any ideas.
MS is still playing their file format games. Just the other day was news that British government agencies are considering open formats for official documentation, to better fulfill their duty to communicate with the public. MS is trying to sucker them into accepting OOXML, which is an open standard in name only that just happens to require much technology from Word file formats, over which MS just happens to have a few patents and copyrights, and which only MS knows the full details of how it's supposed to work. The manner in which MS got OOXML accepted as a standard was underhanded to say the least. They bribed and threatened members of standards committees.
Why does Windows need to be "activated" online? Didn't used to be that way, until Windows XP. This nonsense of Windows Genuine Advantage is obvious propaganda. Stupid to push it and insult all our intelligences, but they're still doing it. No, this WGA check is utterly unnecessary for the users and customers, it is only there because MS thinks that helps protect themselves from piracy. They try to spin it as protecting the user from infringing on their rights and thereby risking a lawsuit, and so to the user's advantage, when it is really the other way around. We don't have to use their software. We are giving them the privilege of using it, not the other way around like they want everyone to think. They need much educating to fully grasp that fact.
Well, I do have some knowledge of industrial history. Just because others did murder in the past is no excuse for MS to steal and cheat now. And they are doing it, right now. No, MS has not gone straight, not turned over a new leaf in the past few years. This is not a matter of let bygones be bygones.
That brutal industrial history is a mark of shame for the entire system of capitalism. Every time one might think the bad old days are gone, we get another reminder. Another coal mine "incident" kills dozens of minors. The BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The most deadly of all, so far, is what Union Carbide did in Bhopal in 1984. How about the story of the Radium Girls? The management knew radium was dangerous, and kept themselves clear, but not their workers.
Maybe communism wouldn't have been so attractive if not for the excesses of the capitalists. What kind of system leads rich tycoons to become so callously indifferent to the lives of "little" people? Then our court system fails to adequately punish and deter this kind of behavior.
If they try that, they will stir up such a hornet's nest they will wish Congress had reined them in hard and early. I fully expect there will be mass dismissals and murder trials of NSA agents, and if there aren't, popular unrest and revenge killings. There would likely be revenge killings in any case, as was the case with Ruby Ridge. That's just the sort of thing that would confirm the worst fears of all the conspiracy nuts and angry, gun-toting, anti-government paranoid citizens the US has everywhere.
What annoys me is that this Slashdot story gives Spencer attention that he has not earned and does not deserve. He's no scientist, he's an intellectually dishonest whining charlatan who should never have been awarded a teaching position. Alabama ought to be ashamed and embarrassed one of their universities employed him. Makes them fit too closely the image of the place where moronic, ignorant, and proud-of-it southern hicks live.
There are many things Linux can't do thanks to political barriers, not technical ones. An example is backing up or just playing a copy protected DVD. CSS and region encoding are easily overcome. It's schemes like ARccOS that cause difficulties. Another example is the mess NVidia and AMD/ATI have made of graphics drivers. Theyve pledged to improve, but they've dragged their feet so much one wonders how serious they are. Maybe no legitimate business will ever again dare to pull stunts like Sony's music CDs with the root kit, and Turbo Tax's fooling around with the zero sector of their customers' hard drives, but they aren't yet scared or enlightened enough to stop trying other crap.
Many software and hardware companies feel they can safely ignore libre OSes. Worse, some still view libre as antithetical to standard business practices, and a death sentence for their business if they so much as use it. To them, libre is hippie pinko Communist. The walled gardens of the likes of Microsoft and Apple are philosophically more comfortable. They don't just accidentally create software that cannot be easily ported, they purposely do that.
How do you get businesses and people to play ball with libre software? I want the attitudes that go with intellectual property and copy protection to die, and the very concepts to be so abhorrent that no self-respecting business will ever again think it an ethical and righteous thing to do. Freedom of speech and religion are accepted and enforced. Freedom of knowledge deserves the same.
The default password, when it is the same default password across all units of the same model or even the same manufacturer, is easy to exploit. Any website can send the user's browser some code that instructs it to attempt to log in via the user's router's web interface with the default password. It works because the user's browser is behind the firewall and therefore "trusted". Once logged in, it's trivial to reconfigure the router to open up all kinds of holes. Harder but still doable is getting the router to host and run malware itself.
The admin password is the first thing I change on a new router. Manufacturers who still don't individualize the factory set password are responsible for a lot of these problems.
Speaking of indie titles, SpaceChem has been my obsession in recent years. Nice little programming puzzle game. I didn't learn of it until it was in a Humble Bundle, and found I missed the period when it was most popular.
This is bull. What's missing here is all sense of proportion. I'd love to have my former employers who owe me thousands of dollars in back pay thrown in jail. But it will never happen. Can bring a suit, and win it, but it doesn't matter, their companies are broke. Can't do anything more, like have a warrant issued. And there's this minor matter of the statue of limitations. Why wasn't this warrant voided after some appropriate time, like 7 years? Those former employers get off after only 4 years.
It cost us, the taxpayers, far more money than that video tape was worth to process this warrant. Justice is not served when actions taken in the name of justice cause far more damage and expense than they save and deter. Zero tolerance has its place, and this isn't it. That video rental company should never have had the power to sic the police on anyone, not for that. That they could have such power is all the more reason to pirate. And the police need to be reminded who their real bosses are: the public.
The philosophy of modularity. Tools are many and small and simple, do one thing and do it well. But then, the Linux kernel also violates this principle.
There's also this seeming drive to make more tools dependent on systemd. Does udev really need to depend on systemd?
Wayland may be an example of an approach more in line with the UNIX philosophy. X has a lot of baggage that has become useless over the years. Lot of basic graphics functionality has moved into specialized graphics hardware.
Malthus doesn't have to be right either. So far, Malthus is wrong. Yes, of course we can get greedy and overpopulate and exceed the rate at which resources renew, using up our stockpiles, and at last being forced to depopulate through famine or war. Some peoples have done just that. Rwanda in 1994 may be the most recent example. Saudi Arabia may go that way. It was no accident that most of the plotters and perpetrators of 9/11 came from there. Afghanistan is another place where many children that survive to reach adulthood can't find work, and ultimately resort to fighting. But is this universal? No! We have so far avoided falling into a World War 3. Why?
Overpopulate and collapse, like the Moties in The Mote in God's Eye, is not a good strategy for long term survival. After a collapse, the remaining population of any life form, not just humans, is ripe for external invasion. And after collapse is not the only point of excessive vulnerability. When crowding is extreme, the population is also ripe for disease. At both times, the situation is so fragile that an external shock such as an earthquake can be the push that shatters what little balance is holding. Life has evolved many restraints to avoid getting into such situations in the first place. Predation is far from the only restraint. Ecologies function because these restraints are effective. That is what alarmists like Malthus didn't grasp.
One feature of many of the societies facing that peril is domination by men. Women have no say, not even in how many children they wish to have. When women have a say, they opt for fewer children than the men want to have.
Managing needs a fundamental rethink. Lot of managers act like kings or generals, not partners or guides or communicators. And that's doing an injustice to good kings, who understood that they could not be slave-driving dictators. Engineers should have the authority to fire managers. Vote the bad managers out.
The West prides themselves on being fair democracies. Yet corporations are still handled with medieval traditions. Most are even passed on to heirs, under the odd medieval notion that, like entire kingdoms, a company can belong to an individual bloodline.
Definitely have to give E19 a try. The font compression sounds intriguing. Maybe try it on my 1.6 GHz Intel Atom 330 based box, where I'm currently using Crunchbang, and have the hinting and antialiasing off and the font set to Terminus. Too busy to try it this week though.
Thanks for the info. I gave those Adobe proportional fonts a try, and sadly, they look awful without hinting and antialiasing. This is in Lubuntu, which uses LXDE + openbox.
In the case of patents and copyrights, no guns does seem like not just a good solution, but ultimately the only solution. Drop the monopoly protection enforced by government fiat through artificial scarcity, and the trolls won't have those weapons. If there aren't any monopolies, there won't be any fights over them. And there won't be any chilling effects from good people bending over backwards to avoid being in one of those fights.
I agree about greed and selfishness. For nearly all of history, we have been able to freely compete to the max, resort to total war, without putting the environment at risk because we were simply unable to do much damage to it. Scorched earth tactics didn't significantly harm prospects of recovery. Raid the neighboring kingdom, kill all the men, and take all the women, food, and loot. Dr. Strangelove's plan for the survival of humanity had that nasty element of personal gain twisting at what little objectivity, sense, and decency the characters still possessed. The Cold War has to be the start of a new way of fighting. Nor can we afford complacency about peacetime activities, not with our growing power to inadvertently wreck the environment. If it isn't, if it was just an aberration and peacetime activity leads to exhaustion of resources and the next world war, and that war reverts to the tradition of unrestricted warfare because the sides are greedy to win it all, then we're doomed. What should that war be called? The Meltdown War?
Font hinting and antialiasing seem to take inordinate amounts of CPU time. Won't notice it on a fast system, but low power or old computers are much more responsive with those features turned off. Don't think any GUI environments address this issue. Maybe Wayland will help, but I don't know, haven't tried it.
Of course, the fonts look horrible without hinting and antialiasing. Only monospace font that looks good is Terminus. There isn't a good looking proportional font. I keep hoping someone will make one. Meantime, I manage by forcing everything to monospace on slow computers, and using antialiasing on fast computers.
What a loaded question they asked. They should have asked: Should news be paid for? Why? How?
Of coruse news-- accurate, factual, relevant news-- is valuable. But since when has valuable always meant that it must be paid for? Sunshine and air is valuable too.
What services do experts in news provide? They don't create news, they report it. They investigate and select. Sadly, they also slant the news. For me, an eye-opening experience was to read what reporters made of a story of which I was personally acquainted. They distorted the heck out of the story. They sexed it up, made it more dramatic, played up irrelevant and infantile parts presumably because those were easier to dramatize, and largely ignored the original issue. By taking comments out of context, the media turns a civil discussion between the mayor and a councilman who disagree over some petty small town matter into a dramatic confrontation in which each seemed to threaten the other with violence and bodily harm, and the police were called in. An innocent little dent on the mayor's car he caused himself when he bumped it with a shopping cart can be insinuated as possibly deliberately done by someone with a grudge, maybe, oh I don't know, a certain councilman? And the issue they were discussing? Who knows and who cares. At any rate, that information wasn't even reported! Such distortion lowers the value of the reporting to nothing, or even negative levels.
The way things are going, news experts no longer do much of anything. Slashdot is an example. The readers submit stories, and select them by voting. Editing is infamously absent. What value does Slashdot add? About the only thing Slashdot does any more is host. I wonder if in the near future, news will be generated entirely fthrough such swarm intelligence.
You are assuming that colleges do a good job and it is therefore the students' fault if they fail. Of course there are many students who lack the drive, dedication, and skill to succeed and graduate. But you can't pin it all on them. Most departments have 1 or 2 teachers who aren't only poor at teaching, but are also some amount of tired, bitter, jealous, arrogant, unscrupulous, and unfair. The school manages to function in spite of that, because those sorts of professors are the minority.
However, I have had the misfortune of being in a department in which most of the teachers were terrible, because it was a new department. The administration hurriedly staffed that department by raiding related departments, and those all responded by using the raid as an opportunity to jettison their worst professors. These professors were nightmares. They hated their new subject for being a light discipline unworthy of departmental status, hated that they'd been cast off by their chosen discipline, viewed their students with contempt for being too stupid too see what a worthless major they were pursuing, and hated each other. They took all this out on the students, with the result that the graduation rate was not 20%, oh no, it was 5%. Finally the dean told them to stop flunking everyone, or he'd shut the department down. It is beyond belief that the fault for the 5% graduation rate could lie with the students. If the blame for one department having a 5% graduation rate lies with the faculty, might it not be true of the entire College of Engineering, especially when the other Colleges enjoy considerably better rates of graduation?
Should have called it the Net Equality bill. Then if Republicans dare oppose it, Democrats could roast them for opposing equality. Neutrality doesn't have the same ring to it.
I'd forgotten about multiple monitor set ups. But what I meant about the power supply is that we should dump the bulky, wasteful AT style that provides 3 different voltages (and so is really 3 power supplies in 1), and have one brick that provides 24V DC (or 19V or 12V, don't know what would be best) on 2 or more output cords. Plug one cord into the PC, plug the others into monitors. Can also take a leaf from years ago, when PC power supplies had a plug for the monitor so that the big red switch controlled power to both computer and monitor, but instead of an AC passthru setup, run a small cord carrying the appropriate DC voltage from the PC power supply to the monitor. More on that below.
USB keyboards can also serve as USB hubs. Plug your mouse in there, or plug it directly into the computer. It's not like these devices can saturate the capacity of a USB port and must have exclusive use of one.
Speaking of USB, it has become a defacto standard for DC power. 5V may be a little low, but consumer electronics has been running with it. And now that monitors take so much less power, could carry power and signal in the same cable. HDMI with power, why not? Works for USB.
SFF machines? I'll take a look. Lately, I've been running with the nettop packaging.
Maybe you're just trolling, but I'll bite. Why can't you accept that copying is NOT stealing? Maybe copying is illegal or immoral, but it's definitely not stealing. We do have a few crimes on the books other than theft, crimes like vandalism, speeding, reckless driving, libel and slander, assault and battery, trespassing, and littering. I view copying as a sort of anti-vandalism. Vandalism destroys property for no gain to the destroyer, rather than stealing property for gain. Copying is the opposite. It creates something without depriving the source of any information. But you want to hammer away, and view copying as a form of theft no matter what.
And who said anything about not compensating someone for their work? Control of copying is not the only way to compensate artists. Monoply control is certainly a bad way to go about it. What's with you people who think that's the only fair way to do it, and who overlook all the waste these attempts at such control has caused? It costs way more to distribute a song via CD than via download. Have you no imagination at all? Just can't believe society can function and produce art and science, without copyright, and despite all the evidence around you demonstrating otherwise?
You speak of giving them justification to be more restrictive. You missed the point that being restrictive is not a choice that they have. They can't stop the people from sharing information, not with technology, not with the law, and not with appeals to morality. Nor should they. Indeed, the immorally is on their part for trying to stamp out sharing, and trying to convince people it's bad, not our part for trying to share. Sharing is part of who we are. Might as well try tell us we can't talk or write to each other any more because it's immoral.
It doesn't have to be that way. You talk like companies must have absolute freedom to hire and fire instantly, for any reason at all, because staying competitive demands it. Even if a massive layoff is the equivalent of hacking off their left arm to lose weight, they deserve and need the option to do that. If a person did that for a reason like that, the rest of us would commit them to a mental institution. But before things reached that point, friends would likely notice that something is very wrong, and try to help.
I don't know whether this move by Dell is the equivalent of liposuction or maiming, but I suspect the latter. They've gone to all the trouble of screening and training these 15,000 people, and now they're going to throw that all away. If this is part of a plan to change their areas of business, why not spin off those sections of the company instead of destroy them? Or are they saying their hiring and planning decisions really were that poor and corrupt, and now they have to clean house? Blame is very likely to be laid at the door of shrinking desktop sales, of course, but that only raises more questions. Why didn't they see this coming? Or, what did they do wrong to cause desktop sales to shrink? I rather think people are finding the classic desktop PC simply too bulky, noisy, and possibly power hungry. Peek inside a case, and you see a large volume of unused and wasted space. Cabling is another mess. Can't some of these cables be consolidated? At the least merge the mouse and keyboard cables, like on MacIntoshes? Power the display and computer from the same power supply, instead of having separate power supplies for PC and monitor? The tower configuration saves on footprint, but that little innovation is over 20 years old. Where are the mini ATX, Nano-ITX and smaller size PCs? Or, why haven't they moved more aggresively into tablets?
Whatever the reason, this rumbling about massive layoffs doesn't inspire confidence from customers. How many people, right here on Slashdot, have already said this move makes them less likely to buy a Dell? I recall at least 2. Dude, you shouldn't have bought from a suicidally shrinking company that's lost its way?
And battery life anxiety is rational too. I can deal with range issues, it's the other 2 that are deal killers. Having to charge up every 100km is annoying, but doable. Having to wait 2 hours to get enough charge to go another 100km makes the car near worthless for road trips, and not much good for local delivery duties either. Way too much down time. Last time I checked, that's about where the Nissan Leaf is at. Then, if the batteries have to be replaced every 5 years or sooner, there go all the savings and environmental friendliness.
Why not provide college education for free, like we do with high school education? Are we so afraid that will breed irresponsibility and entitlement?
One weird thing about the way education works in the US is the transition from high school to college. High school is free to the students, because education is seen as necessary for a democratic society to function somewhat intelligently. But college should be paid for, because education is valuable. High school students are still children in the care of their elders, college students are suddenly now adults, responsible for themselves, and expected to pay their own way and to be grateful for whatever help their parents give them, because parents don't have to help their adult children. The goal of high school is to educate everyone, in public universities, the goal in the first year is to "weed out" the "weak" students. When I was an undergrad, the graduation rate of the College of Engineering was a dismal 20%, and this was thought normal.
What other business could possibly do such a poor job of serving its customers and survive? We even have this whole student loan system designed to enable penniless students to pay the massive costs of education later, with a generous premium to the financiers for taking such heinous risks on people with no credit histories. It amazes me the extent to which this abrupt transition is so meekly accepted. To compund matters, we've been dismantling our support for college education so that public schools have had little choice but to make huge hikes in tuition. We've been exploring alternative ideas such as MOOCs, and this is good, but so far not enough, not yet a serious threat to the traditional lecture class. They've also sought more dubious sources of money. There's the textbook scam, in which publishers have been given way too much power. And then there's college football, the very sort of thing that promotes partying and undermines the main point of school. Whie I find college football mildly interesting, and want there to be opportunities to relax and enjoy life a little, I wouldn't mind in the least if the NCAA shut down and every school in the nation ended their football program, and worked on making math and chess competitions and such cerebral sports more telegenic and popular.
The government budget must be balanced-- on the backs of the poor and the young! Then, after gutting public university funding, they scream that we have a shortage of STEM workers?
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It is concentration of wealth and power that leads to such atrocities. We have a few terms for these concentrations: monopoly and oligopoly. Capitalism lends itself to that, unless carefully policed. The policing must be vigilently done, else the powerful undermine and corrupt it. Ultimately, it is up to the people to rein in the excesses of these power grabbers. Many of us have instead been seduced. Sold a fool's vision of a fantasy free market paradise that cannot exist, and kept hoping for those tantalizing riches that are somehow always just out of reach.
Distrust of power is the very foundation of the United States. The Constitution has all kinds of checks and balances and limitations. And it was not accepted until the addition of the Bill of Rights, a further list of explicit limitations, just in case anyone got any ideas.
MS is still playing their file format games. Just the other day was news that British government agencies are considering open formats for official documentation, to better fulfill their duty to communicate with the public. MS is trying to sucker them into accepting OOXML, which is an open standard in name only that just happens to require much technology from Word file formats, over which MS just happens to have a few patents and copyrights, and which only MS knows the full details of how it's supposed to work. The manner in which MS got OOXML accepted as a standard was underhanded to say the least. They bribed and threatened members of standards committees.
Why does Windows need to be "activated" online? Didn't used to be that way, until Windows XP. This nonsense of Windows Genuine Advantage is obvious propaganda. Stupid to push it and insult all our intelligences, but they're still doing it. No, this WGA check is utterly unnecessary for the users and customers, it is only there because MS thinks that helps protect themselves from piracy. They try to spin it as protecting the user from infringing on their rights and thereby risking a lawsuit, and so to the user's advantage, when it is really the other way around. We don't have to use their software. We are giving them the privilege of using it, not the other way around like they want everyone to think. They need much educating to fully grasp that fact.
Well, I do have some knowledge of industrial history. Just because others did murder in the past is no excuse for MS to steal and cheat now. And they are doing it, right now. No, MS has not gone straight, not turned over a new leaf in the past few years. This is not a matter of let bygones be bygones.
That brutal industrial history is a mark of shame for the entire system of capitalism. Every time one might think the bad old days are gone, we get another reminder. Another coal mine "incident" kills dozens of minors. The BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The most deadly of all, so far, is what Union Carbide did in Bhopal in 1984. How about the story of the Radium Girls? The management knew radium was dangerous, and kept themselves clear, but not their workers.
Maybe communism wouldn't have been so attractive if not for the excesses of the capitalists. What kind of system leads rich tycoons to become so callously indifferent to the lives of "little" people? Then our court system fails to adequately punish and deter this kind of behavior.
Is everyone that scared of the NSA?
If they try that, they will stir up such a hornet's nest they will wish Congress had reined them in hard and early. I fully expect there will be mass dismissals and murder trials of NSA agents, and if there aren't, popular unrest and revenge killings. There would likely be revenge killings in any case, as was the case with Ruby Ridge. That's just the sort of thing that would confirm the worst fears of all the conspiracy nuts and angry, gun-toting, anti-government paranoid citizens the US has everywhere.
What annoys me is that this Slashdot story gives Spencer attention that he has not earned and does not deserve. He's no scientist, he's an intellectually dishonest whining charlatan who should never have been awarded a teaching position. Alabama ought to be ashamed and embarrassed one of their universities employed him. Makes them fit too closely the image of the place where moronic, ignorant, and proud-of-it southern hicks live.
There are many things Linux can't do thanks to political barriers, not technical ones. An example is backing up or just playing a copy protected DVD. CSS and region encoding are easily overcome. It's schemes like ARccOS that cause difficulties. Another example is the mess NVidia and AMD/ATI have made of graphics drivers. Theyve pledged to improve, but they've dragged their feet so much one wonders how serious they are. Maybe no legitimate business will ever again dare to pull stunts like Sony's music CDs with the root kit, and Turbo Tax's fooling around with the zero sector of their customers' hard drives, but they aren't yet scared or enlightened enough to stop trying other crap.
Many software and hardware companies feel they can safely ignore libre OSes. Worse, some still view libre as antithetical to standard business practices, and a death sentence for their business if they so much as use it. To them, libre is hippie pinko Communist. The walled gardens of the likes of Microsoft and Apple are philosophically more comfortable. They don't just accidentally create software that cannot be easily ported, they purposely do that.
How do you get businesses and people to play ball with libre software? I want the attitudes that go with intellectual property and copy protection to die, and the very concepts to be so abhorrent that no self-respecting business will ever again think it an ethical and righteous thing to do. Freedom of speech and religion are accepted and enforced. Freedom of knowledge deserves the same.
The default password, when it is the same default password across all units of the same model or even the same manufacturer, is easy to exploit. Any website can send the user's browser some code that instructs it to attempt to log in via the user's router's web interface with the default password. It works because the user's browser is behind the firewall and therefore "trusted". Once logged in, it's trivial to reconfigure the router to open up all kinds of holes. Harder but still doable is getting the router to host and run malware itself.
The admin password is the first thing I change on a new router. Manufacturers who still don't individualize the factory set password are responsible for a lot of these problems.
Speaking of indie titles, SpaceChem has been my obsession in recent years. Nice little programming puzzle game. I didn't learn of it until it was in a Humble Bundle, and found I missed the period when it was most popular.
This is bull. What's missing here is all sense of proportion. I'd love to have my former employers who owe me thousands of dollars in back pay thrown in jail. But it will never happen. Can bring a suit, and win it, but it doesn't matter, their companies are broke. Can't do anything more, like have a warrant issued. And there's this minor matter of the statue of limitations. Why wasn't this warrant voided after some appropriate time, like 7 years? Those former employers get off after only 4 years.
It cost us, the taxpayers, far more money than that video tape was worth to process this warrant. Justice is not served when actions taken in the name of justice cause far more damage and expense than they save and deter. Zero tolerance has its place, and this isn't it. That video rental company should never have had the power to sic the police on anyone, not for that. That they could have such power is all the more reason to pirate. And the police need to be reminded who their real bosses are: the public.
The philosophy of modularity. Tools are many and small and simple, do one thing and do it well. But then, the Linux kernel also violates this principle.
There's also this seeming drive to make more tools dependent on systemd. Does udev really need to depend on systemd?
Wayland may be an example of an approach more in line with the UNIX philosophy. X has a lot of baggage that has become useless over the years. Lot of basic graphics functionality has moved into specialized graphics hardware.
Malthus doesn't have to be right either. So far, Malthus is wrong. Yes, of course we can get greedy and overpopulate and exceed the rate at which resources renew, using up our stockpiles, and at last being forced to depopulate through famine or war. Some peoples have done just that. Rwanda in 1994 may be the most recent example. Saudi Arabia may go that way. It was no accident that most of the plotters and perpetrators of 9/11 came from there. Afghanistan is another place where many children that survive to reach adulthood can't find work, and ultimately resort to fighting. But is this universal? No! We have so far avoided falling into a World War 3. Why?
Overpopulate and collapse, like the Moties in The Mote in God's Eye, is not a good strategy for long term survival. After a collapse, the remaining population of any life form, not just humans, is ripe for external invasion. And after collapse is not the only point of excessive vulnerability. When crowding is extreme, the population is also ripe for disease. At both times, the situation is so fragile that an external shock such as an earthquake can be the push that shatters what little balance is holding. Life has evolved many restraints to avoid getting into such situations in the first place. Predation is far from the only restraint. Ecologies function because these restraints are effective. That is what alarmists like Malthus didn't grasp.
One feature of many of the societies facing that peril is domination by men. Women have no say, not even in how many children they wish to have. When women have a say, they opt for fewer children than the men want to have.
Managing needs a fundamental rethink. Lot of managers act like kings or generals, not partners or guides or communicators. And that's doing an injustice to good kings, who understood that they could not be slave-driving dictators. Engineers should have the authority to fire managers. Vote the bad managers out.
The West prides themselves on being fair democracies. Yet corporations are still handled with medieval traditions. Most are even passed on to heirs, under the odd medieval notion that, like entire kingdoms, a company can belong to an individual bloodline.
Definitely have to give E19 a try. The font compression sounds intriguing. Maybe try it on my 1.6 GHz Intel Atom 330 based box, where I'm currently using Crunchbang, and have the hinting and antialiasing off and the font set to Terminus. Too busy to try it this week though.
Thanks for the info. I gave those Adobe proportional fonts a try, and sadly, they look awful without hinting and antialiasing. This is in Lubuntu, which uses LXDE + openbox.
In the case of patents and copyrights, no guns does seem like not just a good solution, but ultimately the only solution. Drop the monopoly protection enforced by government fiat through artificial scarcity, and the trolls won't have those weapons. If there aren't any monopolies, there won't be any fights over them. And there won't be any chilling effects from good people bending over backwards to avoid being in one of those fights.
I agree about greed and selfishness. For nearly all of history, we have been able to freely compete to the max, resort to total war, without putting the environment at risk because we were simply unable to do much damage to it. Scorched earth tactics didn't significantly harm prospects of recovery. Raid the neighboring kingdom, kill all the men, and take all the women, food, and loot. Dr. Strangelove's plan for the survival of humanity had that nasty element of personal gain twisting at what little objectivity, sense, and decency the characters still possessed. The Cold War has to be the start of a new way of fighting. Nor can we afford complacency about peacetime activities, not with our growing power to inadvertently wreck the environment. If it isn't, if it was just an aberration and peacetime activity leads to exhaustion of resources and the next world war, and that war reverts to the tradition of unrestricted warfare because the sides are greedy to win it all, then we're doomed. What should that war be called? The Meltdown War?
Font hinting and antialiasing seem to take inordinate amounts of CPU time. Won't notice it on a fast system, but low power or old computers are much more responsive with those features turned off. Don't think any GUI environments address this issue. Maybe Wayland will help, but I don't know, haven't tried it.
Of course, the fonts look horrible without hinting and antialiasing. Only monospace font that looks good is Terminus. There isn't a good looking proportional font. I keep hoping someone will make one. Meantime, I manage by forcing everything to monospace on slow computers, and using antialiasing on fast computers.
And go where?
I've been here a long time as well.
What a loaded question they asked. They should have asked: Should news be paid for? Why? How?
Of coruse news-- accurate, factual, relevant news-- is valuable. But since when has valuable always meant that it must be paid for? Sunshine and air is valuable too.
What services do experts in news provide? They don't create news, they report it. They investigate and select. Sadly, they also slant the news. For me, an eye-opening experience was to read what reporters made of a story of which I was personally acquainted. They distorted the heck out of the story. They sexed it up, made it more dramatic, played up irrelevant and infantile parts presumably because those were easier to dramatize, and largely ignored the original issue. By taking comments out of context, the media turns a civil discussion between the mayor and a councilman who disagree over some petty small town matter into a dramatic confrontation in which each seemed to threaten the other with violence and bodily harm, and the police were called in. An innocent little dent on the mayor's car he caused himself when he bumped it with a shopping cart can be insinuated as possibly deliberately done by someone with a grudge, maybe, oh I don't know, a certain councilman? And the issue they were discussing? Who knows and who cares. At any rate, that information wasn't even reported! Such distortion lowers the value of the reporting to nothing, or even negative levels.
The way things are going, news experts no longer do much of anything. Slashdot is an example. The readers submit stories, and select them by voting. Editing is infamously absent. What value does Slashdot add? About the only thing Slashdot does any more is host. I wonder if in the near future, news will be generated entirely fthrough such swarm intelligence.
You are assuming that colleges do a good job and it is therefore the students' fault if they fail. Of course there are many students who lack the drive, dedication, and skill to succeed and graduate. But you can't pin it all on them. Most departments have 1 or 2 teachers who aren't only poor at teaching, but are also some amount of tired, bitter, jealous, arrogant, unscrupulous, and unfair. The school manages to function in spite of that, because those sorts of professors are the minority.
However, I have had the misfortune of being in a department in which most of the teachers were terrible, because it was a new department. The administration hurriedly staffed that department by raiding related departments, and those all responded by using the raid as an opportunity to jettison their worst professors. These professors were nightmares. They hated their new subject for being a light discipline unworthy of departmental status, hated that they'd been cast off by their chosen discipline, viewed their students with contempt for being too stupid too see what a worthless major they were pursuing, and hated each other. They took all this out on the students, with the result that the graduation rate was not 20%, oh no, it was 5%. Finally the dean told them to stop flunking everyone, or he'd shut the department down. It is beyond belief that the fault for the 5% graduation rate could lie with the students. If the blame for one department having a 5% graduation rate lies with the faculty, might it not be true of the entire College of Engineering, especially when the other Colleges enjoy considerably better rates of graduation?
Should have called it the Net Equality bill. Then if Republicans dare oppose it, Democrats could roast them for opposing equality. Neutrality doesn't have the same ring to it.
I'd forgotten about multiple monitor set ups. But what I meant about the power supply is that we should dump the bulky, wasteful AT style that provides 3 different voltages (and so is really 3 power supplies in 1), and have one brick that provides 24V DC (or 19V or 12V, don't know what would be best) on 2 or more output cords. Plug one cord into the PC, plug the others into monitors. Can also take a leaf from years ago, when PC power supplies had a plug for the monitor so that the big red switch controlled power to both computer and monitor, but instead of an AC passthru setup, run a small cord carrying the appropriate DC voltage from the PC power supply to the monitor. More on that below.
USB keyboards can also serve as USB hubs. Plug your mouse in there, or plug it directly into the computer. It's not like these devices can saturate the capacity of a USB port and must have exclusive use of one.
Speaking of USB, it has become a defacto standard for DC power. 5V may be a little low, but consumer electronics has been running with it. And now that monitors take so much less power, could carry power and signal in the same cable. HDMI with power, why not? Works for USB.
SFF machines? I'll take a look. Lately, I've been running with the nettop packaging.
Maybe you're just trolling, but I'll bite. Why can't you accept that copying is NOT stealing? Maybe copying is illegal or immoral, but it's definitely not stealing. We do have a few crimes on the books other than theft, crimes like vandalism, speeding, reckless driving, libel and slander, assault and battery, trespassing, and littering. I view copying as a sort of anti-vandalism. Vandalism destroys property for no gain to the destroyer, rather than stealing property for gain. Copying is the opposite. It creates something without depriving the source of any information. But you want to hammer away, and view copying as a form of theft no matter what.
And who said anything about not compensating someone for their work? Control of copying is not the only way to compensate artists. Monoply control is certainly a bad way to go about it. What's with you people who think that's the only fair way to do it, and who overlook all the waste these attempts at such control has caused? It costs way more to distribute a song via CD than via download. Have you no imagination at all? Just can't believe society can function and produce art and science, without copyright, and despite all the evidence around you demonstrating otherwise?
You speak of giving them justification to be more restrictive. You missed the point that being restrictive is not a choice that they have. They can't stop the people from sharing information, not with technology, not with the law, and not with appeals to morality. Nor should they. Indeed, the immorally is on their part for trying to stamp out sharing, and trying to convince people it's bad, not our part for trying to share. Sharing is part of who we are. Might as well try tell us we can't talk or write to each other any more because it's immoral.
It doesn't have to be that way. You talk like companies must have absolute freedom to hire and fire instantly, for any reason at all, because staying competitive demands it. Even if a massive layoff is the equivalent of hacking off their left arm to lose weight, they deserve and need the option to do that. If a person did that for a reason like that, the rest of us would commit them to a mental institution. But before things reached that point, friends would likely notice that something is very wrong, and try to help.
I don't know whether this move by Dell is the equivalent of liposuction or maiming, but I suspect the latter. They've gone to all the trouble of screening and training these 15,000 people, and now they're going to throw that all away. If this is part of a plan to change their areas of business, why not spin off those sections of the company instead of destroy them? Or are they saying their hiring and planning decisions really were that poor and corrupt, and now they have to clean house? Blame is very likely to be laid at the door of shrinking desktop sales, of course, but that only raises more questions. Why didn't they see this coming? Or, what did they do wrong to cause desktop sales to shrink? I rather think people are finding the classic desktop PC simply too bulky, noisy, and possibly power hungry. Peek inside a case, and you see a large volume of unused and wasted space. Cabling is another mess. Can't some of these cables be consolidated? At the least merge the mouse and keyboard cables, like on MacIntoshes? Power the display and computer from the same power supply, instead of having separate power supplies for PC and monitor? The tower configuration saves on footprint, but that little innovation is over 20 years old. Where are the mini ATX, Nano-ITX and smaller size PCs? Or, why haven't they moved more aggresively into tablets?
Whatever the reason, this rumbling about massive layoffs doesn't inspire confidence from customers. How many people, right here on Slashdot, have already said this move makes them less likely to buy a Dell? I recall at least 2. Dude, you shouldn't have bought from a suicidally shrinking company that's lost its way?
And battery life anxiety is rational too. I can deal with range issues, it's the other 2 that are deal killers. Having to charge up every 100km is annoying, but doable. Having to wait 2 hours to get enough charge to go another 100km makes the car near worthless for road trips, and not much good for local delivery duties either. Way too much down time. Last time I checked, that's about where the Nissan Leaf is at. Then, if the batteries have to be replaced every 5 years or sooner, there go all the savings and environmental friendliness.
Why not provide college education for free, like we do with high school education? Are we so afraid that will breed irresponsibility and entitlement?
One weird thing about the way education works in the US is the transition from high school to college. High school is free to the students, because education is seen as necessary for a democratic society to function somewhat intelligently. But college should be paid for, because education is valuable. High school students are still children in the care of their elders, college students are suddenly now adults, responsible for themselves, and expected to pay their own way and to be grateful for whatever help their parents give them, because parents don't have to help their adult children. The goal of high school is to educate everyone, in public universities, the goal in the first year is to "weed out" the "weak" students. When I was an undergrad, the graduation rate of the College of Engineering was a dismal 20%, and this was thought normal.
What other business could possibly do such a poor job of serving its customers and survive? We even have this whole student loan system designed to enable penniless students to pay the massive costs of education later, with a generous premium to the financiers for taking such heinous risks on people with no credit histories. It amazes me the extent to which this abrupt transition is so meekly accepted. To compund matters, we've been dismantling our support for college education so that public schools have had little choice but to make huge hikes in tuition. We've been exploring alternative ideas such as MOOCs, and this is good, but so far not enough, not yet a serious threat to the traditional lecture class. They've also sought more dubious sources of money. There's the textbook scam, in which publishers have been given way too much power. And then there's college football, the very sort of thing that promotes partying and undermines the main point of school. Whie I find college football mildly interesting, and want there to be opportunities to relax and enjoy life a little, I wouldn't mind in the least if the NCAA shut down and every school in the nation ended their football program, and worked on making math and chess competitions and such cerebral sports more telegenic and popular.
The government budget must be balanced-- on the backs of the poor and the young! Then, after gutting public university funding, they scream that we have a shortage of STEM workers?