Still, it shows the idiocy of the system. Listen to what they say is revolutionizing warfare. Everyone is praising the benefits of connectivity with the battlefield brought about by all this information technology that they have. That came about due to DARPA funding internet research. An open-ended CS program. It's plain stupid to find the thing that has most greatly benefited you recently and then remove its source.
However: after another thirty years, it will no longer be completely solvent, assuming that population and income projections hold true. Up until that point, all social security payments will be made on time. Thus, that's when it no longer is a working system, as the purpose of the system is to make all the payments, not just a few.
"It's in serious need... They should get to that."
Indeed, it is in serious need. After all, it will only last another 30 years on this system.
Now, how could we get enough money to keep something solvent thirty years from now...hmmm...that seems like a rather long-term goal...hmmm...oh, wait, we could fund something open-ended, as we did with the internet, and start up another economic boom through innovation somewhere down the line, like around ten years from now when the whole system stops resulting in positive returns and begins sliding towards uselessness.
Without even DARPA funding pure research, the US will really be screwed. AT&T, while it was a monopoly, had enough money that it did a lot of rather open ended research. That's gone. XEROX had the PARC for a while. That's gone. We got wonderful benefits from all the research they did for the space program, and now that's nearly gone.
Pure research is what makes for major innovations. It's what keeps a nation on top. The fact the the US invented the internet is one of the major reasons that the US is still so dominant in the IT field. If the US keeps funding some open-ended goals, it might manage to stay on top through these recessions due to inventing something the rest of the world just doesn't have. With the way things are now, the US will have trouble competing against India and China if it sticks to the same jobs that everyone else does.
I've seen those stats several places, so I'm fairly sure there is so truth to them. In general, from what I recall of an NPR interview a couple years back, it's all heavily skewed by a minority of the construction companies, so you could still easily be in construction and not notice. There are a few companies that fire quite a lot of women. Also, there are a couple companies (they mentioned two in the interview, so at least a couple) that are all women construction companies.
In general, although the only source I could find by using "I'm Feeling Lucky" on Google wasn't the most reliable, I do have reason to believe those statistics despite your personal experience to the contrary.
The lack of women in the computer programming field really is one of those oddities. The 2002 survey says 1.1% of FLOSS developers are female. That's less than the portion of women in construction. The construction field definitely has discrimination against women and extremely commonly has a hostile work environment.
By contrast, there's no clear reason why women shouldn't be in CS. The most likely possibility is still that it's a cultural norm, but that doesn't exactly explain why more women would be involved in construction than in CS. It might be a hostile climate, but I would be surprised if the male coders are more aggressive and sexually biased than the average guys on a construction crew. It's really quite a strange situation.
Well, Blackbox is a little different. First off, Blackbox is a window manager. KDE is a DE, hence the DE in the name. KWin doesn't really get all that many bugs. It's had a total of about a thousand in three years, about one a day. And most of those didn't matter.
It is also important to note that I have never had BB crash. Never. I don't use it anymore, I use KDE. However, when I ran BB for about a year, it never crashed. I occasionally got bothered with having to add everything I wanted manually and having trouble configuring it, but there weren't any 'bugs', just wishlist type items. BB really has been stable basically forever because it has always had an extremely precise goal that was well scoped from the start.
And as for this not mattering to many users, BB is one of the landmark WMs, truly. Just look at how many people use the BB forks. It's one of the all-time favorite WMs out there, and even today, after all this time, is the best looking. It definitely is newsworthy when BB gets a new release.
Make that, "Fluxbox and Openbox *were* much better than Blackbox anyways!"
Blackbox just released, and those features they noted as being added really *are* cool. In the lightweight WM market, it really is a penny-ante game: No one can add too much, because that makes them not lightweight. Blackbox caught up a lot of ground in this release and could take back its crown with relatively little trouble.
There's a difference in how far a stalker goes with stuff like that. Stalkers can be real serious trouble. Sometimes, they ruin peoples lives. I know several people who have stalkers. Most of them say they have a stalker, and he's just a kinda creepy guy who hits on them. Most stalkers seem to be like that, just overblown. But real, serious stalkers are a whole different matter. Look into it a bit.
And, yeah, one photo won't work, with a current camera. With one of those laser based 3D modeling cameras, that might be another matter. Give it another twenty years or so.
The problem is with the redistribution terms in Sun's Java license. It can't be distributed with any competing product, so you have to cut GCJ and any other FOSS Java environment. And, depending on how you look at it, Mono is a competitor as well. Python might even qualify.
Basically, there is no doubt that Mono and GCJ compete with Sun Java, so you really can't include it in a distro too easily.
I'd think the bigger money is when they can get enough info from just a photo. Then, Q Random Stalker can snap a photo of his lucky lady and put her into the movie he's watching.
"You may want to sort your machine out. Illustrator CS has been solid for me, better than 10, which means it probably isn't a fault in Illustrator which is giving you problems."
Sorry, but that only means that you're setup isn't disagreeing with Illustrator. Plenty of bugs only come up certain instances and are still completely the fault of the program. Maybe I use a different portion of the feature-set than you. For example, I often have to import SVGs, which causes the program to crash almost half of the time, once I've edited it for a good bit. I've taken to using other tools to convert the SVGs to PDFs because that's more reliable.
They're doing quite well, and I wouldn't accuse them of anything else. They do a very impressive job at what they do, which is that they make themselves the most comprehensive web portal in existence. However, the grandparent was accusing Google of being uninnovative, of suffering from the same 'already won' feeling that Microsoft did after Netscape died.
Not only is it getting bloated, Illustrator 10 has gotten rather unstable as well. With the earlier versions, it didn't crash for anything. But running 10.0.3, I've lost tons of work to it crashing out.
And, the worst error of all, one of the crashes can't be worked around by saving often. If Illustrator 10.0.3 is saving to a disk that doesn't have sufficient space for what it's saving (when not at home, I'm writing to a network mount with rather limited storage) Illustrator doesn't just fail, it writes as much as it can, then stops, completely corrupting the file, and they it crashes out completely, disallowing you from saving it anywhere else. It's getting really irritating to be in a situation where every time I save a file I need to do it to a zip disk or a CD.
"It's like normal e-mail, but with more space!" isn't really innovative
And if that were what they had done, you might have a shred of an argument. Instead of that, however, they offered:
Full searching of emails
Proper viewing of email threads, at a level that measures up to many desktop clients
Toggleable hiding of quoted text in those threads, which is wonderfully nice
Enough storage that you need never delete an email, making that searching awesome
Easy marking of emails so you can, with almost no effort, keep every email you ever get archived and still have all the ones that matter separated out
In general, gmail is so many lightyears ahead of the competition that the competition barely deserves recognition.
they haven't really bothered fine-tuning, or completely refactoring, their search algorithms since days long ago
If they hadn't done any work with searching, you wouldn't get the occasional relevant images along with a search. And those aren't just their image search images. Run an image search and see what the results are. Hint: they aren't the same.
And I assume that the completely automated googlenews system isn't a change in their searching backend. Afterall, it only searches news sites and automatically sorts their contents into a unified news page, with relevant images and blurbs.
Plus, I'm sure you don't count their improvements to the power of their interface, aside from searching, that they have added. I personally find it quite cool that I can enter '83 kilometers per liter in rods per gallon' and get '83 kilometers per liter = 62 472.9936 rods per US gallon'.
I'm not saying that Google is the greatest company ever. They're pretty good, and I like their tools, but not much more than that. However, when you compare them to Microsoft with IE, I have to argue the point.
I run KDE, as do most people I know, and many of us only run SlackWare. Unlike you most likely are, I am not a pro on the computer. I run Slackware because it just works. Yeah, I have no real package management (I started using Slack before swaret and never bothered to take it up) but that never causes a problem. I can "./configure && make && su -c 'make install'" just fine. All the other major distributions are either behind the times, massive amounts of trouble, or unstable as all heck, which makes the package management issue a moot point.
I've tried Mandrake a few times. Did you know one of their version would fail cataclysmicly if you installed all the packages?
SuSE didn't like my system too much. It wanted to run lots of stuff, and my system's 128 megs of RAM didn't. You'd think that Slackware, running the same DE, would use similar RAM, but apparently not.
Gentoo failed to install its bootloader properly. Five times. With all the tips I could find on their forums. It might have even been stable if it ever started.
RedHat is the most atroscious flaming pile of shit I have ever touched. I don't even want to go into how badly it worked.
Fedora was unstable and crash-prone, but just in a general sense. I didn't try it much.
Debian left me a choice between testing, which isn't as stable for me as most people tell me it should be, and stable, which is several years behind the times.
Then there's Slackware, that has never failed an install for me, has never had something I had to turn off because it started it without me wanting it to, has never forced me to use some obtuse configuration system that resembles a drunken monkey's idea of an interface, has never been argumentative because I wanted to install something that wasn't in one of its repositories, has in general never given me a problem of any sort.
"Doesn't that suggest that over two or three generations, incentives for having boys will diminish, since having girls will be more valuable?"
Not if they don't change the fact that men pass on the family name. As it stands, a woman doesn't carry on the legacy in China, and that matters a lot.
And, even if that does happen, that leaves them with 2-3 generations of increased crime and violence, as that's what tends to happen in societies with tons of unmarried men.
Sorry, that was slightly innaccurate. 120/100 was what a fairly reliable source said a while ago for the *birth* rate, which is what I forgot. Now, it's 1.12 men born for every woman and the population discrepancy among those under 15 years of age is 1.13 men for every woman. For all age-groups, it's 1.06 men for every woman. So, among the population that is coming up as the next generation to go through the whole marriage stage, 113/100. Also, those figures are nationwide and urban areas have more balanced populations while rural ones have less.
The problem really might not be due to discrimination of the usually frowned on sort. For example, if daughters are seen as more pleasant to raise, that could swiftly inflate the amount of women in a country. It's discrimination, but few people frown on it.
For a couple more examples of how problems could arise:
- Women might be more popular in urban areas where there is no benefit one way or the other, real or imagined, while men might be more popular in farm communities and industrial communities where physical ability is more valuable. Even with a nation-wide balance, such a localized imbalance could mess things up.
- If the practice of women taking their husband's name doesn't go away, the priority of male children to pass on the line would hold on, which is what caused the problems in China in the first place.
- The well-tested evidence that men are significantly more prone to criminal activities might boost the rate of female births and result in distortion there. (Also, if the crime rate fell in proportion to the shift in sexes, it would heavily increase the discrimination against men, even though crime rates have been falling steadily for years now and it seems unlikely the trend would increase in speed much.)
Those are just a bunch of wild theories, but the point is that it would be really easy for an imbalance between the sexes to arise, and even easier for such an imbalance to cause problems. That doesn't mean that gender selection is flat-out wrong, it means we need to be careful.
Actually, the Chinese are still fairly racist about marriage. Foreign wives are somewhat frowned upon there, so that wouldn't really help.
(My source on this is a friend who is studying Chinese language and culture in her minor and who has spent a few summers there. She looked into how dangerous is was for a woman before going there, because she was a bit worries, and this is one thing she found.)
"if everybody decided to have a boy, then in the next generation it would be obviously convenient to be a woman"
Actually, it seems much more likely it would result in widespread rape and an active slave-trade. Also, if there still wasn't a way to birth children without human involvement, the social pressure to give birth would be frickin' enormous. Of course, if none of those hit you, it would be quite convenient.
A nation-wide imbalance between the sexes can cause some SERIOUS cultural problems. In theory, that's what they should be protecting against by preventing you from selecting the gender of your child.
If you doubt this, watch China with their 120 men for every 100 women and see what problems they get from it.
Of course, that may not be sufficient reason for this, but it at least does need to be considered.
Slashdot Mirror
Still, it shows the idiocy of the system. Listen to what they say is revolutionizing warfare. Everyone is praising the benefits of connectivity with the battlefield brought about by all this information technology that they have. That came about due to DARPA funding internet research. An open-ended CS program. It's plain stupid to find the thing that has most greatly benefited you recently and then remove its source.
Perhaps you did not catch the sarcasm?
However: after another thirty years, it will no longer be completely solvent, assuming that population and income projections hold true. Up until that point, all social security payments will be made on time. Thus, that's when it no longer is a working system, as the purpose of the system is to make all the payments, not just a few.
"It's in serious need... They should get to that."
Indeed, it is in serious need. After all, it will only last another 30 years on this system.
Now, how could we get enough money to keep something solvent thirty years from now...hmmm...that seems like a rather long-term goal...hmmm...oh, wait, we could fund something open-ended, as we did with the internet, and start up another economic boom through innovation somewhere down the line, like around ten years from now when the whole system stops resulting in positive returns and begins sliding towards uselessness.
Without even DARPA funding pure research, the US will really be screwed. AT&T, while it was a monopoly, had enough money that it did a lot of rather open ended research. That's gone. XEROX had the PARC for a while. That's gone. We got wonderful benefits from all the research they did for the space program, and now that's nearly gone.
Pure research is what makes for major innovations. It's what keeps a nation on top. The fact the the US invented the internet is one of the major reasons that the US is still so dominant in the IT field. If the US keeps funding some open-ended goals, it might manage to stay on top through these recessions due to inventing something the rest of the world just doesn't have. With the way things are now, the US will have trouble competing against India and China if it sticks to the same jobs that everyone else does.
I've seen those stats several places, so I'm fairly sure there is so truth to them. In general, from what I recall of an NPR interview a couple years back, it's all heavily skewed by a minority of the construction companies, so you could still easily be in construction and not notice. There are a few companies that fire quite a lot of women. Also, there are a couple companies (they mentioned two in the interview, so at least a couple) that are all women construction companies.
In general, although the only source I could find by using "I'm Feeling Lucky" on Google wasn't the most reliable, I do have reason to believe those statistics despite your personal experience to the contrary.
The lack of women in the computer programming field really is one of those oddities. The 2002 survey says 1.1% of FLOSS developers are female. That's less than the portion of women in construction. The construction field definitely has discrimination against women and extremely commonly has a hostile work environment.
By contrast, there's no clear reason why women shouldn't be in CS. The most likely possibility is still that it's a cultural norm, but that doesn't exactly explain why more women would be involved in construction than in CS. It might be a hostile climate, but I would be surprised if the male coders are more aggressive and sexually biased than the average guys on a construction crew. It's really quite a strange situation.
- http://www.theallineed.com/women/05031804.htm
"Currently, women workers make up nearly 10 percent of the construction industry or more than 900,000 nationally"
Well, Blackbox is a little different. First off, Blackbox is a window manager. KDE is a DE, hence the DE in the name. KWin doesn't really get all that many bugs. It's had a total of about a thousand in three years, about one a day. And most of those didn't matter.
It is also important to note that I have never had BB crash. Never. I don't use it anymore, I use KDE. However, when I ran BB for about a year, it never crashed. I occasionally got bothered with having to add everything I wanted manually and having trouble configuring it, but there weren't any 'bugs', just wishlist type items. BB really has been stable basically forever because it has always had an extremely precise goal that was well scoped from the start.
And as for this not mattering to many users, BB is one of the landmark WMs, truly. Just look at how many people use the BB forks. It's one of the all-time favorite WMs out there, and even today, after all this time, is the best looking. It definitely is newsworthy when BB gets a new release.
Make that, "Fluxbox and Openbox *were* much better than Blackbox anyways!"
Blackbox just released, and those features they noted as being added really *are* cool. In the lightweight WM market, it really is a penny-ante game: No one can add too much, because that makes them not lightweight. Blackbox caught up a lot of ground in this release and could take back its crown with relatively little trouble.
There's a difference in how far a stalker goes with stuff like that. Stalkers can be real serious trouble. Sometimes, they ruin peoples lives. I know several people who have stalkers. Most of them say they have a stalker, and he's just a kinda creepy guy who hits on them. Most stalkers seem to be like that, just overblown. But real, serious stalkers are a whole different matter. Look into it a bit.
And, yeah, one photo won't work, with a current camera. With one of those laser based 3D modeling cameras, that might be another matter. Give it another twenty years or so.
The problem is with the redistribution terms in Sun's Java license. It can't be distributed with any competing product, so you have to cut GCJ and any other FOSS Java environment. And, depending on how you look at it, Mono is a competitor as well. Python might even qualify.
Basically, there is no doubt that Mono and GCJ compete with Sun Java, so you really can't include it in a distro too easily.
I'd think the bigger money is when they can get enough info from just a photo. Then, Q Random Stalker can snap a photo of his lucky lady and put her into the movie he's watching.
"You may want to sort your machine out. Illustrator CS has been solid for me, better than 10, which means it probably isn't a fault in Illustrator which is giving you problems."
Sorry, but that only means that you're setup isn't disagreeing with Illustrator. Plenty of bugs only come up certain instances and are still completely the fault of the program. Maybe I use a different portion of the feature-set than you. For example, I often have to import SVGs, which causes the program to crash almost half of the time, once I've edited it for a good bit. I've taken to using other tools to convert the SVGs to PDFs because that's more reliable.
They're doing quite well, and I wouldn't accuse them of anything else. They do a very impressive job at what they do, which is that they make themselves the most comprehensive web portal in existence. However, the grandparent was accusing Google of being uninnovative, of suffering from the same 'already won' feeling that Microsoft did after Netscape died.
Not only is it getting bloated, Illustrator 10 has gotten rather unstable as well. With the earlier versions, it didn't crash for anything. But running 10.0.3, I've lost tons of work to it crashing out.
And, the worst error of all, one of the crashes can't be worked around by saving often. If Illustrator 10.0.3 is saving to a disk that doesn't have sufficient space for what it's saving (when not at home, I'm writing to a network mount with rather limited storage) Illustrator doesn't just fail, it writes as much as it can, then stops, completely corrupting the file, and they it crashes out completely, disallowing you from saving it anywhere else. It's getting really irritating to be in a situation where every time I save a file I need to do it to a zip disk or a CD.
"It's like normal e-mail, but with more space!" isn't really innovative
And if that were what they had done, you might have a shred of an argument. Instead of that, however, they offered:
- Full searching of emails
- Proper viewing of email threads, at a level that measures up to many desktop clients
- Toggleable hiding of quoted text in those threads, which is wonderfully nice
- Enough storage that you need never delete an email, making that searching awesome
- Easy marking of emails so you can, with almost no effort, keep every email you ever get archived and still have all the ones that matter separated out
In general, gmail is so many lightyears ahead of the competition that the competition barely deserves recognition.they haven't really bothered fine-tuning, or completely refactoring, their search algorithms since days long ago
If they hadn't done any work with searching, you wouldn't get the occasional relevant images along with a search. And those aren't just their image search images. Run an image search and see what the results are. Hint: they aren't the same.
And I assume that the completely automated googlenews system isn't a change in their searching backend. Afterall, it only searches news sites and automatically sorts their contents into a unified news page, with relevant images and blurbs.
Plus, I'm sure you don't count their improvements to the power of their interface, aside from searching, that they have added. I personally find it quite cool that I can enter '83 kilometers per liter in rods per gallon' and get '83 kilometers per liter = 62 472.9936 rods per US gallon'.
I'm not saying that Google is the greatest company ever. They're pretty good, and I like their tools, but not much more than that. However, when you compare them to Microsoft with IE, I have to argue the point.
I run KDE, as do most people I know, and many of us only run SlackWare. Unlike you most likely are, I am not a pro on the computer. I run Slackware because it just works. Yeah, I have no real package management (I started using Slack before swaret and never bothered to take it up) but that never causes a problem. I can "./configure && make && su -c 'make install'" just fine. All the other major distributions are either behind the times, massive amounts of trouble, or unstable as all heck, which makes the package management issue a moot point.
I've tried Mandrake a few times. Did you know one of their version would fail cataclysmicly if you installed all the packages?
SuSE didn't like my system too much. It wanted to run lots of stuff, and my system's 128 megs of RAM didn't. You'd think that Slackware, running the same DE, would use similar RAM, but apparently not.
Gentoo failed to install its bootloader properly. Five times. With all the tips I could find on their forums. It might have even been stable if it ever started.
RedHat is the most atroscious flaming pile of shit I have ever touched. I don't even want to go into how badly it worked.
Fedora was unstable and crash-prone, but just in a general sense. I didn't try it much.
Debian left me a choice between testing, which isn't as stable for me as most people tell me it should be, and stable, which is several years behind the times.
Then there's Slackware, that has never failed an install for me, has never had something I had to turn off because it started it without me wanting it to, has never forced me to use some obtuse configuration system that resembles a drunken monkey's idea of an interface, has never been argumentative because I wanted to install something that wasn't in one of its repositories, has in general never given me a problem of any sort.
"Doesn't that suggest that over two or three generations, incentives for having boys will diminish, since having girls will be more valuable?"
Not if they don't change the fact that men pass on the family name. As it stands, a woman doesn't carry on the legacy in China, and that matters a lot.
And, even if that does happen, that leaves them with 2-3 generations of increased crime and violence, as that's what tends to happen in societies with tons of unmarried men.
Yes, but the same result applies, as the male name is passed on.
Sorry, that was slightly innaccurate. 120/100 was what a fairly reliable source said a while ago for the *birth* rate, which is what I forgot. Now, it's 1.12 men born for every woman and the population discrepancy among those under 15 years of age is 1.13 men for every woman. For all age-groups, it's 1.06 men for every woman. So, among the population that is coming up as the next generation to go through the whole marriage stage, 113/100. Also, those figures are nationwide and urban areas have more balanced populations while rural ones have less.
The problem really might not be due to discrimination of the usually frowned on sort. For example, if daughters are seen as more pleasant to raise, that could swiftly inflate the amount of women in a country. It's discrimination, but few people frown on it.
For a couple more examples of how problems could arise:
- Women might be more popular in urban areas where there is no benefit one way or the other, real or imagined, while men might be more popular in farm communities and industrial communities where physical ability is more valuable. Even with a nation-wide balance, such a localized imbalance could mess things up.
- If the practice of women taking their husband's name doesn't go away, the priority of male children to pass on the line would hold on, which is what caused the problems in China in the first place.
- The well-tested evidence that men are significantly more prone to criminal activities might boost the rate of female births and result in distortion there. (Also, if the crime rate fell in proportion to the shift in sexes, it would heavily increase the discrimination against men, even though crime rates have been falling steadily for years now and it seems unlikely the trend would increase in speed much.)
Those are just a bunch of wild theories, but the point is that it would be really easy for an imbalance between the sexes to arise, and even easier for such an imbalance to cause problems. That doesn't mean that gender selection is flat-out wrong, it means we need to be careful.
Actually, the Chinese are still fairly racist about marriage. Foreign wives are somewhat frowned upon there, so that wouldn't really help.
(My source on this is a friend who is studying Chinese language and culture in her minor and who has spent a few summers there. She looked into how dangerous is was for a woman before going there, because she was a bit worries, and this is one thing she found.)
"if everybody decided to have a boy, then in the next generation it would be obviously convenient to be a woman"
Actually, it seems much more likely it would result in widespread rape and an active slave-trade. Also, if there still wasn't a way to birth children without human involvement, the social pressure to give birth would be frickin' enormous. Of course, if none of those hit you, it would be quite convenient.
A nation-wide imbalance between the sexes can cause some SERIOUS cultural problems. In theory, that's what they should be protecting against by preventing you from selecting the gender of your child.
If you doubt this, watch China with their 120 men for every 100 women and see what problems they get from it.
Of course, that may not be sufficient reason for this, but it at least does need to be considered.
"Think the dating scene is bad now. Think about how it would be if there were one girl to every three guys or vice versa."
I'm liking this vice-versa thing of yours. Let's put together a commitee and see if we can make something out of it.
The opponents to this actually directly mentioned "Brave New World".