No, I do not agree with the premise that Democrats are really no different, that they're all the same. The War of Choice was the most expensive and fiscally irresponsible action we have taken in a long time, dwarfing the bailout. The war was a Republican effort. The Bush administration made it quite clear to any wavering Republican Congress members that voting against the war would be considered disloyalty to their own party. Iraq will cost us at least $3 trillion by the time it is all over. They lowballed the costs so greatly that the only explanation for getting it so wrong is that they willingly live in a fantasy world. They "sexed up" the information to make Iraq seem more dangerous, another blatant disregard for facts. Iraq never had the Weapons of Mass Destruction we were told they had. And so we spent our future, to head off a danger that never was real.
Unlike Democrats, Republicans continue to push an anti-science agenda. So-called social conservatives are almost all Republican. When you can't be sure of any facts at all, you can make up anything, to justify doing whatever you want. They really behave as if science is just a big propaganda effort for liberals, and see no reason why they can't do their own "science", same as what they perceive the other side does. Let's "teach the controversy", they say, and teach Intelligent Design along with Evolution. Dangerous. There is no controversy, ID is flat wrong. Do you recall the Bush administration official who censored NASA's climate research? And big business has noticed this trend. Far from decrying it, they have gotten themselves and their political servants on board to push their own lies. They feel they must, to "compete". Damned fools. Idiots who buy ID are plums ripe for the picking by these unscrupulous business leaders. As the pioneering folks at Big Tobacco said, "Doubt is our product". So we have Big Oil trying to deny that Global Warming is real. The nuclear power industry routinely covers up problems to make nuclear power seem safer. Big Pharma is eager to beat down the FDA. Big Finance insists they are over regulated even now, after the disaster they caused in 2008. Everywhere, referees and watchdogs are under attack, villified as out of control government bureaucrats tangling up our economy with red tape.
Compared to the sheer chutzpah of these right wing loonies, the Democrats look gutless and ineffectual. But I can't see them swallowing the degree of nonsense the Republicans have, nor recklessly committing the nation to very expensive actions on obvious lies and bull. It has been credibly argued that the stimulus was too small. That the best way forward is to stimulate more, and get that money back in the form of greater tax revenue from a bigger, healthier economy. I don't necessarily agree, but the thinking looks much, much sounder than anything I hear out of the born again fiscal conservative camp.
Where are you getting your "facts"? Or, as they say around here: [citation needed].
I think the root of our current problems is an inability to be honest about basic facts. Never mind any ideological differences. Republicans in particular seem to want to live in a fantasy world. The mainstream sorts of both parties cynically mouth the raw meat lots of people want to hear while they hand over even more of our wealth to the rich. But the Tea Partiers actually believe the nonsense they spout. What's so crazy about the current mess is that austerity hurts the economy, and we weren't in such bad shape that we had to do it anyway. I'm baffled why the deficit was suddenly talked up into a big problem, when it's the economy that's hurting. Balanced Budget Amendment? WTF? These wallowers in unhealthy fantasies would have us believe that fixing the deficit will fix the economy. What's next, another bail out as the stock market tanks? You know, to maintain confidence in the markets? How about even more tax cuts for the wealthy? Because giving away the store to them worked so well at encouraging them to create more jobs, right?
As for the S&P ratings people, who do they think they are? Like they ever get anything important right.
Except for residual heat and radioactive decay in Earth's core, our ultimate energy source is the sun. Not going to run out any time soon. We'll have energy for robots, never fear.
Hard to guess what the future holds, but it's possible we will not be coerced into working as we are today. Today of course we need jobs for the money to live. And we're still picky. Want to live in style. There's a big stigma attached to any "loser" who is not employed, no matter the circumstances. Even now when the economy is bad, unemployment is like leprosy. No one wants to be around an admitted jobless subhuman. Huge status killer, not having a job. Should jobs be taken over by robots, it's hard to guess what we will then use for status. Artistic accomplishment, maybe?
Anything with less than 4G of RAM? Ok, Java isn't that bad, but it's still a pig.
Java has its own little universe of library hell. I suppose that's one of the things that I find the most disappointing about the current state of the art of programming. Libraries are nowhere close to being language independent. We have tons of wrappers and other hacks to interface with the legacy C way of handling libraries. Mostly, they can't be generated, somebody has to create these wrappers. Which provides another place to make mistakes. And to fall behind. There are always libraries that haven't been worked on. Things like SWIG seem to be horribly bloated kludges. Then we have things like Java in which language designers poured an incredible amount of resources into, essentially, library duplication. More bloat. Despite the noise over Java's unprecedented new levels of portability when it was new, they repeated the mistake of not making those libraries language independent. It's as if they didn't want to. Or perhaps OOP confused them, and they thought they were building an ecosystem any OOP language could use. No real way to use a Java library without firing up a big, slow Java interpreter. Still lots of Java that isn't compileable. So much for code reuse.
I'd rather kick the the props out from under the BSA. Change the IP laws so the BSA, patent trolls, and such ilk have no ground to stand on.
Why can't we, the public, just buy out software such as MS Windows? Even better, have its status change automatically upon certain conditions, conditions more varied than "wait 95 years". And of course I don't mean buy a world sized site license, I mean buy all the rights, the source code, everything, and put it all in the public domain.
We've heard of Peak Oil. I wonder if there's Peak Employment? And have we reached it? There are so many SF stories of robots making people obsolete, of that being such a strong and recurring theme in the genre, that they have to be on to something.
I know where you're coming from, but the ad hominum fallacy does not trump all other rational thought. Otherwise, there would be no point to having a reputation. Spencer certainly has a reputation-- a negative one. There's ample justification for refusing to waste any time at all on his thinking. Unless of course you need material for case studies of mental dysfunction.
What Spencer does isn't science, and isn't belief either. It's not that he takes controversial positions. He does anti-science. He makes facts based upon conclusions, not conclusions based on facts. It's worse than being unable to do basic arithmetic. He acts like he can, but he gets it wrong every time. And he's either utterly unwilling to admit it, or unable to see it. Either he's a pathological liar, or he's profoundly incompetent. Why any university keeps a kook like that around, I can only guess with one more ad hominum: this is Alabama we're talking about here.
And then imagine how few 50 mpg cars will cost as little as $16K.
Another person who has swallowed the idea that getting to respectable levels of fuel economy is all cost and no savings. You could not be more wrong.
There are far more 50 mpg cars for $16K than you think. You have evidently never looked at what's available in Europe.
Weight is king. Saving weight does not have to be done by switching to more expensive materials. Make the car smaller. Once the car is down to 2000 pounds, can drop the power steering, as it is not needed on a light enough car. It's a virtuous cycle. Every kg removed means the suspension can be a tiny bit lighter, the engine a little smaller. More savings.
It is a valid argument. Intelligent Design is not purely a belief, it purports to be science. Creationists have conclusions, and they spend all their "scientific" efforts on trying to make data fit those conclusions. Anyone who doesn't understand that this is completely backwards, and is most emphatically not science, is not to be taken seriously as a scientist.
You might as well say that just because a person can't do basic arithmetic is no reason to be dismissive of the likely validity of their mathematical proofs.
Spencer is a crank. And I've found Forbes very uneven. Some Forbes articles are pretty good, and some are okay. But a few are real stinkers, and this is one of them. Forbes is too easily gulled by right wing crackpots, and prints trash embarrassingly often. They do it about every other issue, and I can't recall any other mainstream magazine approaching anything close to that frequency of crap.
Of all the ways to push a position, why has Congress opted for such a destructive one? Your credit card example and what Congress is doing have the same problem: it damages our credit rating. Our interest rates will go up, and this will hurt everyone. Even bankers and the rich will be hurt, though it might appear all this is good for them. Congress could have done so many other things to force a deal on our finances. But they chose a way that ironically will harm our finances in order to "save" them.
And the rich are the other big problem. Maybe Congress is just a bunch of puppets in the hands of rich campaign donors. What does it take to persuade the rich that all this is a really bad idea? And to get a sense of responsibility for their actions? The way they act, it's all money and power, and no responsibility. And what they want is always more, more. They do anything they want, and the consequences and costs are always someone else's problem. This is what government is for --- organizing our collective responses to the big problems, while being held to a modicum of accountability through democracy. Problems too big for anyone else to handle. Too big to fail. Who was it who bailed out the financial scumbags and ingrates in 2008? We all did. No one else could. And then Wall Street does their utmost to undermine and demonize financial regulation. Haven't the Republicans got a fantastic deal already? Why isn't it good enough for them? Should we kill off Frank-Dodd, the SEC, and the Fed too? We have to have policing of the financial markets, like everywhere else. Otherwise, we shall see more retirement and educational and other funds badly mismanaged and lost. Oops. Let the corruption get too bad, and the stock market may lose all credibility. This irresponsibility is what Woodrow Wilson complained about, and he was right. The Roaring '20s ended in a collapse that brought on the Great Depression.
You ought to refresh yourself on the meaning of that word "proof". Science does indeed deal in what you might mean by absolute proof. True statements in systems that can be modeled with formal logic, such as mathematics, cannot be any more absolutely true. They aren't just true in 99.99999% cases, or 99.99999% of the time, or with probability of at least 99.99%, they are 100% true. Perhaps you think that because we have to use axioms, and there is incompleteness, we can't absolutely prove anything? Not so. We can prove things as far as reality lets us. That's all the proof that can be reasonably expected. Demanding more than that isn't being absolute, it's being unreasonable.
Don't be fooled by "we can't ever really know anything for sure" kinds of arguments that creationists love so. Their standard of proof is so high that it is both useless and meaningless. Not that they understand that. They will insist on dragging in the supernatural, and science is most emphatically only about the natural. Obviously, we can't prove anything about supernatural phenomena, which suits them entirely too well. That does not mean we can't prove things, or that science is set on a foundation of air, however much they like to leap to that conclusion. We most certainly can ground science firmly in reality, in order to make falsifiable statements. If what you mean by absolute proof is that we can't prove anything because of the supernatural, then what you're talking about isn't proof, because the supernatural is not science.
Paypal needs independent oversight, not arrangements with MAFIAA and police.
The part I don't get is what's in this for Paypal? TFA says this will show they're serious about fighting copyright infringement. Why so eager to do law enforcement work? We have police for that. What happened, the MAFIAA threatened to sue them and they folded like a wet paper bag? The police are always looking for more power to, uh, do their jobs, maybe that's it? Seems there's even common ground between the police and the MAFIAA. Both hate recording devices being used on them and theirs.
Find out the names of the people behind this. Then, it may be some of them belong to or partner with organizations that actually have ethics. Complain to those organizations about their behavior. It's entirely possible the organizations have no idea there is a problem.
And as others have said, writing to our representatives really can help.
I didn't find the article convincing either. Many assertions, few pieces of evidence. May as well argue that assigning driver license numbers to people can't possibly work unless a single controlling assigner keeps order.
Seems there's a lot of dogma in the thinking of how the Internet should be managed. For instance, we could make another Internet. Instantly double the number of IPv4 addresses, since every address could be used twice. We could find some bit somewhere that we can use to distinguish them, allowing communication between the 2 Internets. Does such a proposition sound like heresy? And if we could do that, why not use a whole byte, and make 256 Internets? Or, as another example, a scheme to provide infinitely many addresses is easy. Sure, IPv6 has a huge space, but it isn't infinite and I expect that we will find so many uses we will run out sooner than anyone believes possible. Wouldn't surprise me if IPv6 doesn't even make it to 2100. A very simple way is the way C handles strings. Reserve '0' to mean the end of an IP address (what a waste reserving that for broadcasting), then we could have 192.168.1.2.3.4.5.1.....0. But we didn't do it because we're so stuck on the notion that packet headers have to be fixed sizes.
We are being sold "address space" as THE reason to move to IPv6, and the other reasons are so seldom mentioned one should be excused for wondering why not just make a simple modification to IPv4? IPv6 allows much larger packets, and has a simpler, more streamlined header. A pity it has such a clunky human interface. I'm really not looking forward to changing from "ping 192.168.1.1" to something like "ping ff80:1::10a0:b1aa:b1aa".
I think SS will be there for us. They're just playing political games, like always. It's not hard to fix the problems, by things like raising the retirement age. You'd better expect that one. Forget 65, and just hope you can retire before 70.
Nevertheless, when I have no info about politicians other than age, I vote for the younger ones. Imagine the political fallout if they even think of wrecking SS. Politicians who look like they might let or make SS fail will quickly be ex-politicians.
How? Not by entering deals that require them to give up the bulk of the profit to unnecessary, controlling, and greedy middlemen! We will pay them directly. Exactly how is debatable. I think a much improved system of patronage is in our future. More diverse, more informed, and far larger and faster than the 18th century system that brought us orchestral music. But there may be other workable ways.
So many people are really stuck on the idea that "no copyright = starving artists" Not true! Copyright is just a means, and one that is looking worse and worse as technology advances and entrenched interests push it to the breaking point in their overreaching, unethical, and illegal moves to wring every last penny out of it.
Technology caught up with their distribution system.
But I don't think much of the long term prospects of the likes of Apple's music business and Amazon either, at least not in its current form. Sure, they're relatively hot and new now. But fundamentally, they're still all about charging customers on a per copy basis. We won't settle for less than the best forever. And I don't think the Netflix model is it either.
Don't say such things so glibly. It's not as easy as you imply. Lots of reasons why.
What of all the innocents who will be harmed by mistaken removals? The systems that will be made less reliable and trustworthy, and the collateral damage that will cause? You think screwing up a public good is a trivial matter? And then to contemplate such a thing for an idea we already know will not work!
Sometimes you can't tell whether it is a case of piracy. The link could be misnamed, broken, out of date. The material could be a parody. Or out of copyright. Or is legitimate because the rights holders gave permission.
And if it really is pirated content? It can't be just removed from the Internet. Copies could be everywhere, encrypted, under different names. Removing links is just security through obscurity. Shouldn't even ask that of us. That's like removing the phone numbers of sex offenders from phone books.
That's good to hear. You know so many details about all this I wonder if you're one of the developers.
I checked the machine with the HD5450, and I am running r600, not r600g. Confusingly, the package info for ati-dri says "Mesa DRI radeon/r200 + Gallium3D r300,r600 drivers". Not easy to install the actual r600g, as it's not yet in Arch Linux's mainline repositories. I mention all this as an example of the difficulties users face, and am not trying to bog this thread down in the details of my specific hardware.
As I don't particularly feel like spending hours thrashing through the details of adding repositories to the distro and running down all the packages and changes needed to compile and install the better driver, looks like more waiting is easiest. Perhaps 1 more month.
Yet good hardware accelerated 3D graphics is still not available in an open source driver for Linux. Phoronix's benchmarks show this quite clearly. The proprietary Catalyst driver is not just a little faster, it's 10 times faster than the best open source driver.
I have 2 computers with Radeon cards, an X1500, and an HD5450. I have a couple of simple OpenGL programs I wrote, and while they run on those, they're extremely slow. Probably the open source drivers are emulating the 3D with software. Those programs are much, much faster on the Nvidia card with the proprietary driver. I've tried games, and they are unplayably slow on the Radeons. Some run acceptably if I set an environment variable, LIBGL_ALWAYS_INDIRECT=1.
If it's just a matter of giving the devs time, then surely the X1500 is old enough now? I run Arch Linux in part to get the most recent kernels and X servers.
I'm disappointed that it's been years, and we still don't have fully capable open source drivers. When I heard ATI had seen the light, I was ready to drop Nvidia on the spot. Frustrating. Maybe the best hope is that some new graphics hardware company comes along and kicks both their rears with next generation hardware (massively parallel ray tracing, anyone?) and open drivers for Linux. And virtualization. I'd love to be able to dump the dual boot setup for Xen, but not at the expense of losing the graphics acceleration.
Doesn't matter how fast it is if the driver can't use it. Where are the Linux drivers? I thought back when they were still ATI that they'd pledged to open up their hardware. As far as I know, in Linux we can get 2D acceleration only in a good open driver, or we can get 3D acceleration in a closed driver that is otherwise not so good.
They want more than that. They're totally unreasonable. They want to kill off the entire Internet. They want to turn the clock back for us to circa 1985 when the Internet was unknown to the general public, hard drives were far too small to hold 80 minutes of music, the mp3 format and the CD-R didn't exist, and they had a rock hard monopoly on distribution. They themselves would like to benefit from newer technology, as long as the rest of us can't.
Then you've been in saner work environments, which in my experience and from asking around, are a minority. I see that you carefully did not implicitly assign blame to anyone including the employee, which is good. I've seen people fired for good cause. I agree that people trying to build their own little kingdom for which only they hold the keys is bad, and if I couldn't put a stop to that, if it really was completely unjustified, I would ease them out at the next opportunity. No I have not managed people, but I have taught and there is considerable similarity there. It was hard not to regard a failure on a student's part as a failure on my part. I did all that I could legitimately do to help, but I would not just give them a pass, I insisted that they learn, and I would and have flunked students. Would that more bosses felt that way! There is an excellent STNG episode, "Hollow Pursuits", in which the officers give a new crew member, Barclay, a bad report. Rather than get rid of Barclay as requested, Picard tells them to try harder. But more often I've seen bosses who not only can't be bothered, but are actively playing cheap political games or indulging their pet and very wrong prejudices, and good people fired, or even better, "quitted", for all sorts of dubious reasons. Of course the official reason is always something plausible sounding. And I've seen far too many people elevated to management for the simple reasons that they were loudmouths and sycophants, and this was mistaken for being proactive and like-minded. More often than not, they turn out to be terrible managers.
The real reason could be as simple as the boss having a power trip and just glorying in firing someone, like The Donald. (In the one instance that I saw, a couple of 20 year plus veterans with good track records were abruptly dismissed, and the company was successfully sued for wrongful termination. The company responded by firing that manager, but that of course was far too late for all his earlier damage and victims.) Or it's to save money by replacing the employee with a younger, cheaper hire. It can also be an object lesson to the survivors. Yes, it hurt the company, but the boss seemed to think that the gains from the lower pay and at the same time scaring everyone else into working harder and more carefully towing the line were worth the losses. The chosen victim is often the most independent employee, someone who is deemed the biggest "flight risk" because they aren't in dire financial straits with a big car payment, crushing mortgage, and a new baby. Or the victim is the scape goat, and the higher ups buy the excuse, perhaps out of a weird sense of solidarity with fellow managers. Or it was out of personal dislike, usually jealousy that the employee was not just good, but better than the boss at something. This kind of idiocy imperils projects, and I've seen them crash and burn thanks to that. Seen companies fail too, though poor handling of employees was not the driving cause but a symptom of larger problems. When the business model is not working, management starts reaching for excuses like that it's all the employees' fault for not working hard enough, or not being smart enough, as if the employees are suddenly supposed to be able to call the shots as well as management could, despite being largely kept in the dark and treated like children. And as if they could do such things without being accused of insubordination and fired.
Now in an environment like that, it is not going to be surprising that some employees are tempted to cross the line. They are after all only following the fine example they've been set.
tens of thousands of dollars to train
I have not seen this. This is a cost that companies have had rather too much success at externalizing. They constantly complain that schools don't prepare students for the real world, which is usually code for the gripe tha
Color, tint, and coat everything white. Have white walls and roofs, white pavement, and maybe even white tires so the pavement won't be darkened as fast. Have self cleaning coatings of titanium dioxide.
Slashdot Mirror
No, I do not agree with the premise that Democrats are really no different, that they're all the same. The War of Choice was the most expensive and fiscally irresponsible action we have taken in a long time, dwarfing the bailout. The war was a Republican effort. The Bush administration made it quite clear to any wavering Republican Congress members that voting against the war would be considered disloyalty to their own party. Iraq will cost us at least $3 trillion by the time it is all over. They lowballed the costs so greatly that the only explanation for getting it so wrong is that they willingly live in a fantasy world. They "sexed up" the information to make Iraq seem more dangerous, another blatant disregard for facts. Iraq never had the Weapons of Mass Destruction we were told they had. And so we spent our future, to head off a danger that never was real.
Unlike Democrats, Republicans continue to push an anti-science agenda. So-called social conservatives are almost all Republican. When you can't be sure of any facts at all, you can make up anything, to justify doing whatever you want. They really behave as if science is just a big propaganda effort for liberals, and see no reason why they can't do their own "science", same as what they perceive the other side does. Let's "teach the controversy", they say, and teach Intelligent Design along with Evolution. Dangerous. There is no controversy, ID is flat wrong. Do you recall the Bush administration official who censored NASA's climate research? And big business has noticed this trend. Far from decrying it, they have gotten themselves and their political servants on board to push their own lies. They feel they must, to "compete". Damned fools. Idiots who buy ID are plums ripe for the picking by these unscrupulous business leaders. As the pioneering folks at Big Tobacco said, "Doubt is our product". So we have Big Oil trying to deny that Global Warming is real. The nuclear power industry routinely covers up problems to make nuclear power seem safer. Big Pharma is eager to beat down the FDA. Big Finance insists they are over regulated even now, after the disaster they caused in 2008. Everywhere, referees and watchdogs are under attack, villified as out of control government bureaucrats tangling up our economy with red tape.
Compared to the sheer chutzpah of these right wing loonies, the Democrats look gutless and ineffectual. But I can't see them swallowing the degree of nonsense the Republicans have, nor recklessly committing the nation to very expensive actions on obvious lies and bull. It has been credibly argued that the stimulus was too small. That the best way forward is to stimulate more, and get that money back in the form of greater tax revenue from a bigger, healthier economy. I don't necessarily agree, but the thinking looks much, much sounder than anything I hear out of the born again fiscal conservative camp.
Where are you getting your "facts"? Or, as they say around here: [citation needed].
I think the root of our current problems is an inability to be honest about basic facts. Never mind any ideological differences. Republicans in particular seem to want to live in a fantasy world. The mainstream sorts of both parties cynically mouth the raw meat lots of people want to hear while they hand over even more of our wealth to the rich. But the Tea Partiers actually believe the nonsense they spout. What's so crazy about the current mess is that austerity hurts the economy, and we weren't in such bad shape that we had to do it anyway. I'm baffled why the deficit was suddenly talked up into a big problem, when it's the economy that's hurting. Balanced Budget Amendment? WTF? These wallowers in unhealthy fantasies would have us believe that fixing the deficit will fix the economy. What's next, another bail out as the stock market tanks? You know, to maintain confidence in the markets? How about even more tax cuts for the wealthy? Because giving away the store to them worked so well at encouraging them to create more jobs, right?
As for the S&P ratings people, who do they think they are? Like they ever get anything important right.
Except for residual heat and radioactive decay in Earth's core, our ultimate energy source is the sun. Not going to run out any time soon. We'll have energy for robots, never fear.
Hard to guess what the future holds, but it's possible we will not be coerced into working as we are today. Today of course we need jobs for the money to live. And we're still picky. Want to live in style. There's a big stigma attached to any "loser" who is not employed, no matter the circumstances. Even now when the economy is bad, unemployment is like leprosy. No one wants to be around an admitted jobless subhuman. Huge status killer, not having a job. Should jobs be taken over by robots, it's hard to guess what we will then use for status. Artistic accomplishment, maybe?
What things won't Java run on?
Anything with less than 4G of RAM? Ok, Java isn't that bad, but it's still a pig.
Java has its own little universe of library hell. I suppose that's one of the things that I find the most disappointing about the current state of the art of programming. Libraries are nowhere close to being language independent. We have tons of wrappers and other hacks to interface with the legacy C way of handling libraries. Mostly, they can't be generated, somebody has to create these wrappers. Which provides another place to make mistakes. And to fall behind. There are always libraries that haven't been worked on. Things like SWIG seem to be horribly bloated kludges. Then we have things like Java in which language designers poured an incredible amount of resources into, essentially, library duplication. More bloat. Despite the noise over Java's unprecedented new levels of portability when it was new, they repeated the mistake of not making those libraries language independent. It's as if they didn't want to. Or perhaps OOP confused them, and they thought they were building an ecosystem any OOP language could use. No real way to use a Java library without firing up a big, slow Java interpreter. Still lots of Java that isn't compileable. So much for code reuse.
I'd rather kick the the props out from under the BSA. Change the IP laws so the BSA, patent trolls, and such ilk have no ground to stand on.
Why can't we, the public, just buy out software such as MS Windows? Even better, have its status change automatically upon certain conditions, conditions more varied than "wait 95 years". And of course I don't mean buy a world sized site license, I mean buy all the rights, the source code, everything, and put it all in the public domain.
We've heard of Peak Oil. I wonder if there's Peak Employment? And have we reached it? There are so many SF stories of robots making people obsolete, of that being such a strong and recurring theme in the genre, that they have to be on to something.
I know where you're coming from, but the ad hominum fallacy does not trump all other rational thought. Otherwise, there would be no point to having a reputation. Spencer certainly has a reputation-- a negative one. There's ample justification for refusing to waste any time at all on his thinking. Unless of course you need material for case studies of mental dysfunction.
What Spencer does isn't science, and isn't belief either. It's not that he takes controversial positions. He does anti-science. He makes facts based upon conclusions, not conclusions based on facts. It's worse than being unable to do basic arithmetic. He acts like he can, but he gets it wrong every time. And he's either utterly unwilling to admit it, or unable to see it. Either he's a pathological liar, or he's profoundly incompetent. Why any university keeps a kook like that around, I can only guess with one more ad hominum: this is Alabama we're talking about here.
And then imagine how few 50 mpg cars will cost as little as $16K.
Another person who has swallowed the idea that getting to respectable levels of fuel economy is all cost and no savings. You could not be more wrong.
There are far more 50 mpg cars for $16K than you think. You have evidently never looked at what's available in Europe.
Weight is king. Saving weight does not have to be done by switching to more expensive materials. Make the car smaller. Once the car is down to 2000 pounds, can drop the power steering, as it is not needed on a light enough car. It's a virtuous cycle. Every kg removed means the suspension can be a tiny bit lighter, the engine a little smaller. More savings.
It is a valid argument. Intelligent Design is not purely a belief, it purports to be science. Creationists have conclusions, and they spend all their "scientific" efforts on trying to make data fit those conclusions. Anyone who doesn't understand that this is completely backwards, and is most emphatically not science, is not to be taken seriously as a scientist.
You might as well say that just because a person can't do basic arithmetic is no reason to be dismissive of the likely validity of their mathematical proofs.
Spencer is a crank. And I've found Forbes very uneven. Some Forbes articles are pretty good, and some are okay. But a few are real stinkers, and this is one of them. Forbes is too easily gulled by right wing crackpots, and prints trash embarrassingly often. They do it about every other issue, and I can't recall any other mainstream magazine approaching anything close to that frequency of crap.
Of all the ways to push a position, why has Congress opted for such a destructive one? Your credit card example and what Congress is doing have the same problem: it damages our credit rating. Our interest rates will go up, and this will hurt everyone. Even bankers and the rich will be hurt, though it might appear all this is good for them. Congress could have done so many other things to force a deal on our finances. But they chose a way that ironically will harm our finances in order to "save" them.
And the rich are the other big problem. Maybe Congress is just a bunch of puppets in the hands of rich campaign donors. What does it take to persuade the rich that all this is a really bad idea? And to get a sense of responsibility for their actions? The way they act, it's all money and power, and no responsibility. And what they want is always more, more. They do anything they want, and the consequences and costs are always someone else's problem. This is what government is for --- organizing our collective responses to the big problems, while being held to a modicum of accountability through democracy. Problems too big for anyone else to handle. Too big to fail. Who was it who bailed out the financial scumbags and ingrates in 2008? We all did. No one else could. And then Wall Street does their utmost to undermine and demonize financial regulation. Haven't the Republicans got a fantastic deal already? Why isn't it good enough for them? Should we kill off Frank-Dodd, the SEC, and the Fed too? We have to have policing of the financial markets, like everywhere else. Otherwise, we shall see more retirement and educational and other funds badly mismanaged and lost. Oops. Let the corruption get too bad, and the stock market may lose all credibility. This irresponsibility is what Woodrow Wilson complained about, and he was right. The Roaring '20s ended in a collapse that brought on the Great Depression.
You ought to refresh yourself on the meaning of that word "proof". Science does indeed deal in what you might mean by absolute proof. True statements in systems that can be modeled with formal logic, such as mathematics, cannot be any more absolutely true. They aren't just true in 99.99999% cases, or 99.99999% of the time, or with probability of at least 99.99%, they are 100% true. Perhaps you think that because we have to use axioms, and there is incompleteness, we can't absolutely prove anything? Not so. We can prove things as far as reality lets us. That's all the proof that can be reasonably expected. Demanding more than that isn't being absolute, it's being unreasonable.
Don't be fooled by "we can't ever really know anything for sure" kinds of arguments that creationists love so. Their standard of proof is so high that it is both useless and meaningless. Not that they understand that. They will insist on dragging in the supernatural, and science is most emphatically only about the natural. Obviously, we can't prove anything about supernatural phenomena, which suits them entirely too well. That does not mean we can't prove things, or that science is set on a foundation of air, however much they like to leap to that conclusion. We most certainly can ground science firmly in reality, in order to make falsifiable statements. If what you mean by absolute proof is that we can't prove anything because of the supernatural, then what you're talking about isn't proof, because the supernatural is not science.
Paypal needs independent oversight, not arrangements with MAFIAA and police.
The part I don't get is what's in this for Paypal? TFA says this will show they're serious about fighting copyright infringement. Why so eager to do law enforcement work? We have police for that. What happened, the MAFIAA threatened to sue them and they folded like a wet paper bag? The police are always looking for more power to, uh, do their jobs, maybe that's it? Seems there's even common ground between the police and the MAFIAA. Both hate recording devices being used on them and theirs.
We can stop this. We can go on the offensive.
Find out the names of the people behind this. Then, it may be some of them belong to or partner with organizations that actually have ethics. Complain to those organizations about their behavior. It's entirely possible the organizations have no idea there is a problem.
And as others have said, writing to our representatives really can help.
I didn't find the article convincing either. Many assertions, few pieces of evidence. May as well argue that assigning driver license numbers to people can't possibly work unless a single controlling assigner keeps order.
Seems there's a lot of dogma in the thinking of how the Internet should be managed. For instance, we could make another Internet. Instantly double the number of IPv4 addresses, since every address could be used twice. We could find some bit somewhere that we can use to distinguish them, allowing communication between the 2 Internets. Does such a proposition sound like heresy? And if we could do that, why not use a whole byte, and make 256 Internets? Or, as another example, a scheme to provide infinitely many addresses is easy. Sure, IPv6 has a huge space, but it isn't infinite and I expect that we will find so many uses we will run out sooner than anyone believes possible. Wouldn't surprise me if IPv6 doesn't even make it to 2100. A very simple way is the way C handles strings. Reserve '0' to mean the end of an IP address (what a waste reserving that for broadcasting), then we could have 192.168.1.2.3.4.5.1. ... .0. But we didn't do it because we're so stuck on the notion that packet headers have to be fixed sizes.
We are being sold "address space" as THE reason to move to IPv6, and the other reasons are so seldom mentioned one should be excused for wondering why not just make a simple modification to IPv4? IPv6 allows much larger packets, and has a simpler, more streamlined header. A pity it has such a clunky human interface. I'm really not looking forward to changing from "ping 192.168.1.1" to something like "ping ff80:1::10a0:b1aa:b1aa".
I think SS will be there for us. They're just playing political games, like always. It's not hard to fix the problems, by things like raising the retirement age. You'd better expect that one. Forget 65, and just hope you can retire before 70.
Nevertheless, when I have no info about politicians other than age, I vote for the younger ones. Imagine the political fallout if they even think of wrecking SS. Politicians who look like they might let or make SS fail will quickly be ex-politicians.
How? Not by entering deals that require them to give up the bulk of the profit to unnecessary, controlling, and greedy middlemen! We will pay them directly. Exactly how is debatable. I think a much improved system of patronage is in our future. More diverse, more informed, and far larger and faster than the 18th century system that brought us orchestral music. But there may be other workable ways.
So many people are really stuck on the idea that "no copyright = starving artists" Not true! Copyright is just a means, and one that is looking worse and worse as technology advances and entrenched interests push it to the breaking point in their overreaching, unethical, and illegal moves to wring every last penny out of it.
Technology caught up with their distribution system.
But I don't think much of the long term prospects of the likes of Apple's music business and Amazon either, at least not in its current form. Sure, they're relatively hot and new now. But fundamentally, they're still all about charging customers on a per copy basis. We won't settle for less than the best forever. And I don't think the Netflix model is it either.
I think the future is the digital public library.
Don't say such things so glibly. It's not as easy as you imply. Lots of reasons why.
What of all the innocents who will be harmed by mistaken removals? The systems that will be made less reliable and trustworthy, and the collateral damage that will cause? You think screwing up a public good is a trivial matter? And then to contemplate such a thing for an idea we already know will not work!
Sometimes you can't tell whether it is a case of piracy. The link could be misnamed, broken, out of date. The material could be a parody. Or out of copyright. Or is legitimate because the rights holders gave permission.
And if it really is pirated content? It can't be just removed from the Internet. Copies could be everywhere, encrypted, under different names. Removing links is just security through obscurity. Shouldn't even ask that of us. That's like removing the phone numbers of sex offenders from phone books.
That's good to hear. You know so many details about all this I wonder if you're one of the developers.
I checked the machine with the HD5450, and I am running r600, not r600g. Confusingly, the package info for ati-dri says "Mesa DRI radeon/r200 + Gallium3D r300,r600 drivers". Not easy to install the actual r600g, as it's not yet in Arch Linux's mainline repositories. I mention all this as an example of the difficulties users face, and am not trying to bog this thread down in the details of my specific hardware.
As I don't particularly feel like spending hours thrashing through the details of adding repositories to the distro and running down all the packages and changes needed to compile and install the better driver, looks like more waiting is easiest. Perhaps 1 more month.
No rental fee for the phone, but AT&T still dings us $0.18 every month for touch tone.
Personally, I do not like any sort of wireless. Been looking at VoIP, but Internet is just not as reliable. So I hang on to the land line.
Yet good hardware accelerated 3D graphics is still not available in an open source driver for Linux. Phoronix's benchmarks show this quite clearly. The proprietary Catalyst driver is not just a little faster, it's 10 times faster than the best open source driver.
I have 2 computers with Radeon cards, an X1500, and an HD5450. I have a couple of simple OpenGL programs I wrote, and while they run on those, they're extremely slow. Probably the open source drivers are emulating the 3D with software. Those programs are much, much faster on the Nvidia card with the proprietary driver. I've tried games, and they are unplayably slow on the Radeons. Some run acceptably if I set an environment variable, LIBGL_ALWAYS_INDIRECT=1.
If it's just a matter of giving the devs time, then surely the X1500 is old enough now? I run Arch Linux in part to get the most recent kernels and X servers.
I'm disappointed that it's been years, and we still don't have fully capable open source drivers. When I heard ATI had seen the light, I was ready to drop Nvidia on the spot. Frustrating. Maybe the best hope is that some new graphics hardware company comes along and kicks both their rears with next generation hardware (massively parallel ray tracing, anyone?) and open drivers for Linux. And virtualization. I'd love to be able to dump the dual boot setup for Xen, but not at the expense of losing the graphics acceleration.
Doesn't matter how fast it is if the driver can't use it. Where are the Linux drivers? I thought back when they were still ATI that they'd pledged to open up their hardware. As far as I know, in Linux we can get 2D acceleration only in a good open driver, or we can get 3D acceleration in a closed driver that is otherwise not so good.
They want more than that. They're totally unreasonable. They want to kill off the entire Internet. They want to turn the clock back for us to circa 1985 when the Internet was unknown to the general public, hard drives were far too small to hold 80 minutes of music, the mp3 format and the CD-R didn't exist, and they had a rock hard monopoly on distribution. They themselves would like to benefit from newer technology, as long as the rest of us can't.
Firing someone means something went wrong.
Then you've been in saner work environments, which in my experience and from asking around, are a minority. I see that you carefully did not implicitly assign blame to anyone including the employee, which is good. I've seen people fired for good cause. I agree that people trying to build their own little kingdom for which only they hold the keys is bad, and if I couldn't put a stop to that, if it really was completely unjustified, I would ease them out at the next opportunity. No I have not managed people, but I have taught and there is considerable similarity there. It was hard not to regard a failure on a student's part as a failure on my part. I did all that I could legitimately do to help, but I would not just give them a pass, I insisted that they learn, and I would and have flunked students. Would that more bosses felt that way! There is an excellent STNG episode, "Hollow Pursuits", in which the officers give a new crew member, Barclay, a bad report. Rather than get rid of Barclay as requested, Picard tells them to try harder. But more often I've seen bosses who not only can't be bothered, but are actively playing cheap political games or indulging their pet and very wrong prejudices, and good people fired, or even better, "quitted", for all sorts of dubious reasons. Of course the official reason is always something plausible sounding. And I've seen far too many people elevated to management for the simple reasons that they were loudmouths and sycophants, and this was mistaken for being proactive and like-minded. More often than not, they turn out to be terrible managers.
The real reason could be as simple as the boss having a power trip and just glorying in firing someone, like The Donald. (In the one instance that I saw, a couple of 20 year plus veterans with good track records were abruptly dismissed, and the company was successfully sued for wrongful termination. The company responded by firing that manager, but that of course was far too late for all his earlier damage and victims.) Or it's to save money by replacing the employee with a younger, cheaper hire. It can also be an object lesson to the survivors. Yes, it hurt the company, but the boss seemed to think that the gains from the lower pay and at the same time scaring everyone else into working harder and more carefully towing the line were worth the losses. The chosen victim is often the most independent employee, someone who is deemed the biggest "flight risk" because they aren't in dire financial straits with a big car payment, crushing mortgage, and a new baby. Or the victim is the scape goat, and the higher ups buy the excuse, perhaps out of a weird sense of solidarity with fellow managers. Or it was out of personal dislike, usually jealousy that the employee was not just good, but better than the boss at something. This kind of idiocy imperils projects, and I've seen them crash and burn thanks to that. Seen companies fail too, though poor handling of employees was not the driving cause but a symptom of larger problems. When the business model is not working, management starts reaching for excuses like that it's all the employees' fault for not working hard enough, or not being smart enough, as if the employees are suddenly supposed to be able to call the shots as well as management could, despite being largely kept in the dark and treated like children. And as if they could do such things without being accused of insubordination and fired.
Now in an environment like that, it is not going to be surprising that some employees are tempted to cross the line. They are after all only following the fine example they've been set.
tens of thousands of dollars to train
I have not seen this. This is a cost that companies have had rather too much success at externalizing. They constantly complain that schools don't prepare students for the real world, which is usually code for the gripe tha
Color, tint, and coat everything white. Have white walls and roofs, white pavement, and maybe even white tires so the pavement won't be darkened as fast. Have self cleaning coatings of titanium dioxide.