It's interesting to think that the R&D money put into military concerns hasn't had many significant productivity spin-offs. For that matter, the nuclear arms race drove large segments of supercomputer production for years, with the best systems being military bought.
Did you notice the way that you insult science fiction as a whole while saying you like it? I would have to say that your suppositions are wrong and are based entirely on what literary critics have been pushing forever (or at least a while).
As a student currently working at a writing major, I run into a lot of literary authors that just don't get Sci-Fi/Fantasy. Literary fiction focuses on giving depth to characters and showing rich emotions, usually specifically at the expense of the rest of the piece.
Most literary critics have trouble understanding that having a piece which studies society as a whole, rather than just individuals, is just as valid, and that science fiction, with an alternative future or alternative world, is an incredibly effective way to portray this.
The other genres which are so denigrated, fantasy and sci-fi, are just different, and treating them as less intellectually valid merely because their purpose is different, is a massive failing.
The (hackers), in most cases, cannot avoid the coming "storm."
Quite precisely why the analogy is so good. Neither can animals. All they can to is dig a hole and try to set things up so it doesn't flood. Maybe store up some food, as well.
Most of the people here think of this as a geek device, but I think it would be most useful in some of those deskjobs which require a lot of phone interaction. Combined with a headset, this puts the majority of the system in one place and removes the need to craning of a neck and maintaining awkward positions.
If this can be combined with some new keyboard device, it really gets everything together.
No, 'programmer' refers to someone who programs. The difference between that and 'software engineer' is that 'software engineer' is more of a specification, whereas 'programmer' only refers to a base talent which is a portion of another skillset.
"Tyranny of the majority" is slightly differ from "tyranny". It is has a specific meaning outside of its component words, much as "dirty old man" is usually not interpretted to mean that the man hasn't bathed lately.
And, even besides that, and accepting all of your arguments as true, I disagree with our conclusion.
They're making the classic mistake of thinking that programming is the same as creating software, and are making implications then that programmers are the creators of software, completely ignoring computer scientists and software engineers.
There is a clear difference between writing the code for a program and actually determining what code is needed or making a new, original algorithm. Those fields are the only ones that matter now and are the only ones that have ever really mattered.
Also, there's the field of those doing spot fixes and working in-company for major sites who can afford to have their own support staff--those are really more administrators and systems engineers.
All those fields happen to require knowledge of programming, but it is the least of their prerequisites.
For those who crave analagous examples, consider whether a sculptor is a stone cutter, an architecht is a diagrammer and builder, or a rocket hobbyist is a welder.
The original comment was in the nature of the crime, not the magnitude. Similarly, I can compare shooting someone in the hand to shooting them in the head by stating that both a violent crimes and demonstrate a danger involved in guns without saying that shooting a person in their hand is as bad as shooting them in the head.
So, yes, BPL is an example of tyranny of the majority, just as the manifest destiny philosophy was.
Sigh... When the US tried to stop the use of alcohol early in the 20th century, did that actually stop the use of alcohol? No! And in addition, there was a lot of crime, because people tend to go to great lengths for what they want.
When the US declared the War On Drugs, did that stop the use of drugs? No! And in addition, there was a lot of crime, because people tend to go to great lengths for what they want.
Although I agree with your ending idea that the war on filesharing will not work, your examples simply are not valid.
When alcohol was made illegal, bootleg alcohol replaced it. When drugs were made illegal, bootleg drugs replaced it. The product here is not illegal music, it is music. If music were made illegal, the analogy would stand, but this is not about that.
Since the key product is still readily available, this is not a case that is at all similar to prohibition or the war on drugs.
The purpose is not to give data to be checked, but to find potential problems in an automated manner. The sensor arrays will be used to find a variety of threats which can be determined automatically and to find them while they are still at sea.
In particular, they mentioned a technology which would be able give notice about shipping containers which are likely to contain explosive, allowing the coast guard to stop them before they're in port.
It's less about having more information and more about having that information two-hundred miles from shore.
You are correct. I should have made a distinction between the majority of people and a few people. Labor laws also hurt some people and the removal of them would help some people.
So, labor laws help 'The People', so outsourcing to areas without them hurts 'The People' for the benefit of corporations.
Although my phrasing may have been a little iffy, I think the general refutation of the grandparent still stands.
If you paid more careful attention to those who argue calmly and logically against outsourcing, you would see that they only argue against outsourcing to places without good labor laws. That is, we don't like to see the protections our ancestors fought for being undermined by outsourcing.
If another country has some of those protections, then I'm all for outsourcing. If they don't, then I'm not for it.
However, you forget one of the main complaints with outsourcing issues: Those areas outsourced to do not have the same labor protection situations, hence it is in fact undermining laws and rights citizens on Europe and America fought very hard for.
That is, outsourcing harms those who should be benefitting (the workers) and helps those who are not in fact people (corporations).
File sharing, by contrast, is usually argued as a positive for removing the middlemen and helping redirect profits to the musicians, meaning it helps those who deserve to benefit (the musicians) and harms those who are not people (the corporations).
"This is probably why having a single "dicator" maintaining a distribution is a bad idea: He has very little contact with the community. It's not possible for other's to get involved with the development process either. It would be a trivial task to make someone else maintain the GNOME sources in Slackware."
Oh, yes. Of course having a dictator is bad, which is clearly evidenced by the fact that basically the only distro run by a central dictator is also the longest running distro, one of the most popular distros, and one of the most stable distros, as well as one which tends to stay fairly well on the cutting edge.
I'm sure people will disagree with a lot of that, but that's from my experience. Three times I've had friends try setting up Linux. They all tried Mandrake first, then either SuSE, RedHat, Debian, or Gentoo. Usually Slackware was a later attempt because they wanted something easier. Then, it was the damnedest thing: Slackware worked out-of-the-box, and they got through the installer without handholding.
Slackware works damn reliably for me, and I have no serious complaints. Which is rare, because I can barely stand the bugginess of the other distos I have tried (or the bugginess of almost anything, for that matter).
"For all those screaming about security - this car has been specifically designed to be safe despite it's size; to achieve this, there are certain tricks involved, eg sliding the motor under the chassis in case of a crash. It _has_ been rigourously tested."
Which is apparently why it received a three out of five stars in a British safety test. Which also happens to be about the bare minimum anyone in the US will sell and is below what anyone would advertise.
The problem is that it is a vehicle which at first glance appears to be unsafe (small and light, easily overpowered by anything else on the road in the US) but cannot specifically advertise that its safety through some standard rating in a very good way.
"Doesn't KDE have onerous limitations like you can't use prioritary software on it unless you pay major $$$$?"
Nope. A company can't make proprietary programs which use Qt for KDE unless they fork over a fairly small amount of money. You can use whatever is out there just fine.
You know, the one that has the largest fleet in the world, the largest airforce in the world, and the most advanced equipment in the world? Yeah, that one.
True, but I would imagine that much of the US forces would already be tied up in various places around the world. Even if you could recall them it would take a while for them to arrive. Of course, you would have to leave some behind for homeland defence.
The US would most likely abandon a lot of the foreign bases, but those that would be kept might not be the problem you are implying. Such foreign bases give us a large amount of points from which we can initiate a strike, making any defense of Europe a more complex issue.
My knowledge of the War of 1812 is minimal, but I remember reading somewhere that one of the aims of the US was to annex parts of Canada. If that is the case then they have failed miserably.
The grandparent referred to the US separation war, which would usually refer to our war to separate from Britain, the US Revolutionary War, not the war of 1812 (or the British-American war, as they much more appropriately term it).
As far as the war of 1812 is concerned, the main goal was to make Britain stop walking all over us, which appears to have succeeded. Before the war of 1812, the British navy felt free to impress our seamen into service and treat us generally like shit. Likely, the only reason we actually got a treaty and stopped them from continuing with this is because they were at the same time fighting Napoleon. Whether we won is a close measure, and I would say that both sides lost.
Various studies have shown that the real standard of living in many 'developed' countries has been falling since the 1970s, most of all in the USA. Such measurements take into account 'quality of life' elements like availability of health care and education (NB: this does not depend on public systems; private systems are OK as long as it is affordable and of a decent standard), real income (counting inflation and household debt), pollution, politcal/speech freedom, etc.
I suppose that I was somewhat inaccurate in that comment. To disagree with myself, I'll have to point to Russia as my only example of a first-world nation (I consider the USSR to have been at least close to that point, despite some thought to the contrary) as the only case of a government sinking even close to that far, as Russia is definitely a troubled country at the moment.
However, even that example only happened due to a catastrophic failure in the government. The current backslide in quality of life for modern democracies is definitely occuring, but it is not occuring at the rate which will cause a catastrophic failure, which means that there will be time for reform, as people will become more actively irate as situations worsen, so it seems unlikely that the US will actually sink below first-world status (or that any first-world nation will) without a very massive and sudden occurance.
I'm not saying things won't get bad; they just won't get that bad.
So what do your Carriers against Excocet rockets (frensh Air to Ship and Ship to Ship missiles)?
First, how does Europe get close enough? The new fighters can go out 1000 miles to shoot down enemies. Any carrier will be well-surrounded by destroyers and other military vessels.
If that fails, what about MTHEL? That means Mobile Tactical High Energy Laser, and it was capable of shooting down missiles and artillery shells swiftly and reliably around a year ago. I don't know how well it works now.
How do the Air crafts on your Carriers land after the brake ropes are no longer available (a Thyssen/Krupp products, no american company can provide a simple steel rope to keep your carriers functional).
And we don't have enough with us to last a while? And we can't refit a plant to make them? Remember how quickly the US navy was rebuilt after Pearl Harbor? We didn't have the capability to do that, yet we did it. Funny how a country can shift gears when it needs to.
How does your maren and your air force operate after no oil (bombed by a combined british and frensch nuclear assault) is available?
Well, as the strategic oil reserve has 600 million barrels of crude, I think we can last a bit, and we do get a decent amount of oil locally (if the war really dragged on, we might have to start drilling in our national parks).
The reports about the 9/11 desaster show clearly that the american home defense is DOWN.
The 9/11 terrorist attack clearly shows that we are vulnerable to terrorism, presuming we have at all open borders. In wartime, terrorism of that sort becomes much more difficult.
So your Carriers in front of Europe do meet what? A Europe defense.
The US Navy is enormous. You mention the carriers out there, but what about all the ones that were mothballed but not scrapped? There are a lot of those, you know, and it doesn't take long to get them working again. (We might have to reinstate the draft, I suppose.)
Further, what European defense? The one with rockets it will have trouble getting to our ships? And why are the carriers such an issue? In Afghanistan, we dropped all of our bombs from planes launched from US soil--we wanted to test them out properly.
Fine, lets assume we only have the active carriers and they do matter. Funny how there are eleven supercarriers in active service (capable of launching non-VTOL aircraft) and nine of them are American.
And if we indeed would dare to send troops to the USA, what would we meet there?
Well, that would be a US defense. You know, the one that has the largest fleet in the world, the largest airforce in the world, and the most advanced equipment in the world? Yeah, that one.
Tzzz.... so you lead 5 to 0. Isn't it a bit strange that you call your own seperation war a victory? So which part of US has lost the war then, none?
Well, yeah...none of the US lost that war, Britain lost that war. The goal of the war was: We become independent from Britain. The result of the war was: We became independent from Britain. That's called a victory.
The problem with your post is not that it is dropping all understanding between Europe and the US we ever had, the problem is: it is stupid. And furhter more, it is ignorant. It is an insult. On your (your peoples) and our intelligence.
The problem with your post is that you believe that planning on a theoretical level about the comparable military effectiveness of areas which currently have atrocious relations is a bad idea. Remember how badly Bush fucked up relations? Yeah, that's what starts a lot of wars.
That post was somewhat insulting, but it was not exactly ignorant or stupid. The fact is, a war between the US and Europe would be horribly messy and both sides would suffer, and at-the-moment it appears that the US would win, althou
Are you sure that there is no benefit? Certainly, at the moment we're not threatened. If we hadn't kept on-the-ball with defense, China would be a threat right now. They're not. Russia, no longer the USSR, might still be worrisome despite that change. They're not so much of a problem.
Military threats come and go quite regularly, and there's little evidence they'll stop doing so. Until the threat of attack really just goes away, keeping armed seems pretty smart.
I looked over their stuff a bit, and they appear to be assuming their own correctness to prove their point. Consider the following:
Consider, for example, the following vote count with three candidates {A,B,C}:
8: A,B
7: C,B
5: B
In this case, B is preferred to A by 12 votes to 8, and B is preferred to C by 13 to 7, hence B is preferred to both A and C. So according to common sense and the Condorcet criteria, B should win. But under IRV, B does not win. According to the rules of IRV, B is ranked first by the fewest voters and is eliminated. Again, an election method that allows such nonsensical anomalies should be rejected. (See The Problem with IRV.)
According to this page, "according to common sense...B should win." I'd argue that this "sense" isn't so "common".
They point out that 12 votes preferred B to A, while only 8 prefered A to B. However, they ignore that only 5 votes had B as their first preference. If we were to interpret this the way it seemed to be meant by the voters, 8 people thought A was right and B was the closest thing to an acceptable second, 7 people thought C was right and B was the closest thing to an acceptable second, while only 5 people thought B was the right choice.
So, condorcet voting will push the choice to that individual which had the least people who wanted them to win.
If you look a little higher in that area, they say that B is the "Ideal Democratic Winner", which discounts a lot of democratic thought.
It still seems that condorcet is the closest thing we have to an acceptable voting system, but that page needs to clean up a few of its arguments.
(Note: I stopped reading shortly after that point, as I already have a fairly good notion of these voting systems. There may be other issues elsewhere, but I do not know of them.)
Slashdot Mirror
It's interesting to think that the R&D money put into military concerns hasn't had many significant productivity spin-offs. For that matter, the nuclear arms race drove large segments of supercomputer production for years, with the best systems being military bought.
Did you notice the way that you insult science fiction as a whole while saying you like it? I would have to say that your suppositions are wrong and are based entirely on what literary critics have been pushing forever (or at least a while).
As a student currently working at a writing major, I run into a lot of literary authors that just don't get Sci-Fi/Fantasy. Literary fiction focuses on giving depth to characters and showing rich emotions, usually specifically at the expense of the rest of the piece.
Most literary critics have trouble understanding that having a piece which studies society as a whole, rather than just individuals, is just as valid, and that science fiction, with an alternative future or alternative world, is an incredibly effective way to portray this.
The other genres which are so denigrated, fantasy and sci-fi, are just different, and treating them as less intellectually valid merely because their purpose is different, is a massive failing.
Quite precisely why the analogy is so good. Neither can animals. All they can to is dig a hole and try to set things up so it doesn't flood. Maybe store up some food, as well.
Most of the people here think of this as a geek device, but I think it would be most useful in some of those deskjobs which require a lot of phone interaction. Combined with a headset, this puts the majority of the system in one place and removes the need to craning of a neck and maintaining awkward positions.
If this can be combined with some new keyboard device, it really gets everything together.
It's monochrome cell-shading with heavy outlining.
The open-source community just discovered cell-shading? I'm ashamed.
No, 'programmer' refers to someone who programs. The difference between that and 'software engineer' is that 'software engineer' is more of a specification, whereas 'programmer' only refers to a base talent which is a portion of another skillset.
"Tyranny of the majority" is slightly differ from "tyranny". It is has a specific meaning outside of its component words, much as "dirty old man" is usually not interpretted to mean that the man hasn't bathed lately.
And, even besides that, and accepting all of your arguments as true, I disagree with our conclusion.
They're making the classic mistake of thinking that programming is the same as creating software, and are making implications then that programmers are the creators of software, completely ignoring computer scientists and software engineers.
There is a clear difference between writing the code for a program and actually determining what code is needed or making a new, original algorithm. Those fields are the only ones that matter now and are the only ones that have ever really mattered.
Also, there's the field of those doing spot fixes and working in-company for major sites who can afford to have their own support staff--those are really more administrators and systems engineers.
All those fields happen to require knowledge of programming, but it is the least of their prerequisites.
For those who crave analagous examples, consider whether a sculptor is a stone cutter, an architecht is a diagrammer and builder, or a rocket hobbyist is a welder.
The original comment was in the nature of the crime, not the magnitude. Similarly, I can compare shooting someone in the hand to shooting them in the head by stating that both a violent crimes and demonstrate a danger involved in guns without saying that shooting a person in their hand is as bad as shooting them in the head.
So, yes, BPL is an example of tyranny of the majority, just as the manifest destiny philosophy was.
When alcohol was made illegal, bootleg alcohol replaced it. When drugs were made illegal, bootleg drugs replaced it. The product here is not illegal music, it is music. If music were made illegal, the analogy would stand, but this is not about that.
Since the key product is still readily available, this is not a case that is at all similar to prohibition or the war on drugs.
Did I miss the point were a law was passed that allowed the justice department to get involved in a civil matter (non-profit filesharing)?
I know there was a bill up, but I didn't think it had gone through. Without such a bill, that portion of their war wouldn't run quite so smoothly.
The purpose is not to give data to be checked, but to find potential problems in an automated manner. The sensor arrays will be used to find a variety of threats which can be determined automatically and to find them while they are still at sea.
In particular, they mentioned a technology which would be able give notice about shipping containers which are likely to contain explosive, allowing the coast guard to stop them before they're in port.
It's less about having more information and more about having that information two-hundred miles from shore.
Cybersquatting is a fair expression of political speech.
You are correct. I should have made a distinction between the majority of people and a few people. Labor laws also hurt some people and the removal of them would help some people.
So, labor laws help 'The People', so outsourcing to areas without them hurts 'The People' for the benefit of corporations.
Although my phrasing may have been a little iffy, I think the general refutation of the grandparent still stands.
If you paid more careful attention to those who argue calmly and logically against outsourcing, you would see that they only argue against outsourcing to places without good labor laws. That is, we don't like to see the protections our ancestors fought for being undermined by outsourcing.
If another country has some of those protections, then I'm all for outsourcing. If they don't, then I'm not for it.
However, you forget one of the main complaints with outsourcing issues: Those areas outsourced to do not have the same labor protection situations, hence it is in fact undermining laws and rights citizens on Europe and America fought very hard for.
That is, outsourcing harms those who should be benefitting (the workers) and helps those who are not in fact people (corporations).
File sharing, by contrast, is usually argued as a positive for removing the middlemen and helping redirect profits to the musicians, meaning it helps those who deserve to benefit (the musicians) and harms those who are not people (the corporations).
"This is probably why having a single "dicator" maintaining a distribution is a bad idea: He has very little contact with the community. It's not possible for other's to get involved with the development process either. It would be a trivial task to make someone else maintain the GNOME sources in Slackware."
Oh, yes. Of course having a dictator is bad, which is clearly evidenced by the fact that basically the only distro run by a central dictator is also the longest running distro, one of the most popular distros, and one of the most stable distros, as well as one which tends to stay fairly well on the cutting edge.
I'm sure people will disagree with a lot of that, but that's from my experience. Three times I've had friends try setting up Linux. They all tried Mandrake first, then either SuSE, RedHat, Debian, or Gentoo. Usually Slackware was a later attempt because they wanted something easier. Then, it was the damnedest thing: Slackware worked out-of-the-box, and they got through the installer without handholding.
Slackware works damn reliably for me, and I have no serious complaints. Which is rare, because I can barely stand the bugginess of the other distos I have tried (or the bugginess of almost anything, for that matter).
"For all those screaming about security - this car has been specifically designed to be safe despite it's size; to achieve this, there are certain tricks involved, eg sliding the motor under the chassis in case of a crash.
It _has_ been rigourously tested."
Which is apparently why it received a three out of five stars in a British safety test. Which also happens to be about the bare minimum anyone in the US will sell and is below what anyone would advertise.
The problem is that it is a vehicle which at first glance appears to be unsafe (small and light, easily overpowered by anything else on the road in the US) but cannot specifically advertise that its safety through some standard rating in a very good way.
"Doesn't KDE have onerous limitations like you can't use prioritary software on it unless you pay major $$$$?"
Nope. A company can't make proprietary programs which use Qt for KDE unless they fork over a fairly small amount of money. You can use whatever is out there just fine.
As far as the war of 1812 is concerned, the main goal was to make Britain stop walking all over us, which appears to have succeeded. Before the war of 1812, the British navy felt free to impress our seamen into service and treat us generally like shit. Likely, the only reason we actually got a treaty and stopped them from continuing with this is because they were at the same time fighting Napoleon. Whether we won is a close measure, and I would say that both sides lost. I suppose that I was somewhat inaccurate in that comment. To disagree with myself, I'll have to point to Russia as my only example of a first-world nation (I consider the USSR to have been at least close to that point, despite some thought to the contrary) as the only case of a government sinking even close to that far, as Russia is definitely a troubled country at the moment.
However, even that example only happened due to a catastrophic failure in the government. The current backslide in quality of life for modern democracies is definitely occuring, but it is not occuring at the rate which will cause a catastrophic failure, which means that there will be time for reform, as people will become more actively irate as situations worsen, so it seems unlikely that the US will actually sink below first-world status (or that any first-world nation will) without a very massive and sudden occurance.
I'm not saying things won't get bad; they just won't get that bad.
First, how does Europe get close enough? The new fighters can go out 1000 miles to shoot down enemies. Any carrier will be well-surrounded by destroyers and other military vessels.
If that fails, what about MTHEL? That means Mobile Tactical High Energy Laser, and it was capable of shooting down missiles and artillery shells swiftly and reliably around a year ago. I don't know how well it works now.
And we don't have enough with us to last a while? And we can't refit a plant to make them? Remember how quickly the US navy was rebuilt after Pearl Harbor? We didn't have the capability to do that, yet we did it. Funny how a country can shift gears when it needs to.
Well, as the strategic oil reserve has 600 million barrels of crude, I think we can last a bit, and we do get a decent amount of oil locally (if the war really dragged on, we might have to start drilling in our national parks).
The 9/11 terrorist attack clearly shows that we are vulnerable to terrorism, presuming we have at all open borders. In wartime, terrorism of that sort becomes much more difficult.
The US Navy is enormous. You mention the carriers out there, but what about all the ones that were mothballed but not scrapped? There are a lot of those, you know, and it doesn't take long to get them working again. (We might have to reinstate the draft, I suppose.)
Further, what European defense? The one with rockets it will have trouble getting to our ships? And why are the carriers such an issue? In Afghanistan, we dropped all of our bombs from planes launched from US soil--we wanted to test them out properly.
Fine, lets assume we only have the active carriers and they do matter. Funny how there are eleven supercarriers in active service (capable of launching non-VTOL aircraft) and nine of them are American.
Well, that would be a US defense. You know, the one that has the largest fleet in the world, the largest airforce in the world, and the most advanced equipment in the world? Yeah, that one.
Well, yeah...none of the US lost that war, Britain lost that war. The goal of the war was: We become independent from Britain. The result of the war was: We became independent from Britain. That's called a victory.
The problem with your post is that you believe that planning on a theoretical level about the comparable military effectiveness of areas which currently have atrocious relations is a bad idea. Remember how badly Bush fucked up relations? Yeah, that's what starts a lot of wars.
That post was somewhat insulting, but it was not exactly ignorant or stupid. The fact is, a war between the US and Europe would be horribly messy and both sides would suffer, and at-the-moment it appears that the US would win, althou
Are you sure that there is no benefit? Certainly, at the moment we're not threatened. If we hadn't kept on-the-ball with defense, China would be a threat right now. They're not. Russia, no longer the USSR, might still be worrisome despite that change. They're not so much of a problem.
Military threats come and go quite regularly, and there's little evidence they'll stop doing so. Until the threat of attack really just goes away, keeping armed seems pretty smart.
Has there been a ruling on that, or is that just the way that it is obviously meant to be?
According to law in the USA, that's obviously the way it is meant to be, but look where we are now.
According to this page, "according to common sense...B should win." I'd argue that this "sense" isn't so "common".
They point out that 12 votes preferred B to A, while only 8 prefered A to B. However, they ignore that only 5 votes had B as their first preference. If we were to interpret this the way it seemed to be meant by the voters, 8 people thought A was right and B was the closest thing to an acceptable second, 7 people thought C was right and B was the closest thing to an acceptable second, while only 5 people thought B was the right choice.
So, condorcet voting will push the choice to that individual which had the least people who wanted them to win.
If you look a little higher in that area, they say that B is the "Ideal Democratic Winner", which discounts a lot of democratic thought.
It still seems that condorcet is the closest thing we have to an acceptable voting system, but that page needs to clean up a few of its arguments.
(Note: I stopped reading shortly after that point, as I already have a fairly good notion of these voting systems. There may be other issues elsewhere, but I do not know of them.)