In the grand scheme of things, Windows and Mac machines, as well as mobile devices, spend between most and all of their time operating primarily as thin clients accessing data housed in UNIX and Linux servers. They always have. Almost all software in widespread use today is distributed, and almost all distributed software contains UNIX and/or Linux components. Thus, the attack area of UNIX and Linux is huge. The clients can often serve as attack vectors against the servers (and the converse is true as well). UNIX and Linux simply are designed better . . . not perfectly, for sure, and not even best in their class (OpenBSD has a substantially better record than either), but still much better than Windows, which has always had the burden of needing to be backwards-compatible with software written for its ABI, and which therefore has limited flexibility in terms of its ability to adapt to increasingly sophisticated security challenges that all connected systems must face if they wish to survive.
How much human growth and progress (social, economic, and otherwise) has been held back because Microsoft set back the computing industry for decades if not more? How many people starve in Africa or Asia because of the economic growth that did not occur because they never got to develop a local, indigenous IT services industry? It is harder to quantify the damage caused by Microsoft, than some of the other companies you mentioned. But that does not mean it has not occurred, or does not continue to occur.
As for the GP's question of why we would berate Microsoft even if it takes baby steps in the right direction: I for one would not . . PROVIDED it was in the right direction. The FOSS community has the capacity to forgive, as evidenced by the generally positive feelings it has toward IBM, which in its day was evil in every way Microsoft is now, plus many ways in which it isn't. But IBM's more recent behavior has evidenced a willingness to coexist and cooperate with that community.
Is this truly a step in the right direction for MSFT? For reasons already well explained by others, I don't know that it is. It is unclear whether anything that is actually useful is being opened up. If it is, great, MSFT, and keep up the good work! If not, well, I think they know how to earn the respect and goodwill of our community, and I welcome any genuine attempt on their part to do so.
The greatest miracle would be if God designed a universe where natural selection could result in such wonders. I for one believe that is exactly what happened.
I am happy to compile most of Gentoo as needed (mostly in the background while doing other things) because I can mostly escape dependency hell this way, while preserving the ability to try various pieces of software that aren't in the Portage tree. It has nothing to do with performance, for me at least; I agree that the time spent compiling tends to negate much of the speed advantage, but it's well worth the ability for things I've installed, both inside and outside Portage, to mostly "just work" and for me to be able to upgrade according to my own needs and schedule.
As for it being in Python, to me that is a feature, not a bug. I've spent much of my working life developing and maintaining software, and in my view Python's strengths, such as readability and "batteries included" philosophy, lend themselves to solid software development and lifecycle management practices. I don't often find a need to tweak an ebuild and I've never written one myself, but I'm very confident that if I ever do need to for some reason, I can. I'm confident that any Python code I find I will be able to read and understand, and I can't say that about most of the other languages I've used over the years. And on any project where I have my choice of tools, it is almost always Python + C. I'm not expert in either, and I know many others, but I've rarely encountered a task that could not be done in an efficient and maintainable fashion using some combination of these two.
And I forgot to consider that this was an object of 10 meters or so when it impacted Earth and was thus likely far bigger before entering the atmosphere. An object that was 10 meters before entering the atmosphere would, depending on composition and angle of descent, likely burn away completely before reaching ground. But there might be a midair explosion or fireball sufficient to ignite highly flammable structures.
An impact by an object in this size range [around 10m] would correspond to an impact energy roughly comparable to the Hiroshima bomb, if the object had hit the Earth's surface.
If it hit near the center of a large city it could really suck; however, most of the earth's surface is covered by water, desert, mountains, or rural areas, and thus most asteroid impacts of this size do not cause massive loss of life.
The underlying assumption of your query appears to be that the U.S. has acted more benevolently during its reign as a global superpower than the Soviets or Germans would have. Certainly that is what most people in the U.S. believe, but there are plenty of people in Japan, Vietnam, Central America, Serbia, Iraq and Afghanistan who could provide a more complete perspective. Large, powerful governments rarely act benevolently, and the U.S. is no exception. What actually happened - two opposing blocs each capable of preventing the other from unilaterally dominating the world - was far from the worst possible outcome.
f you prefer, imagine a choice between two doors: behind door A is the job of your dreams, behind door B is the woman of your dreams. There isn't a right answer.
As much as I want to disagree with you, I can't. I'm married to the woman of my dreams. But we're both miserable because (among several other reasons) I can't earn nearly enough to support her financially the way we both realize I should.
In general, a good woman is MUCH harder to find than a good job. But a good woman usually won't be happy with a guy who can't properly support her. Sucks, but that's just the way it is.
Sorry. Creationist here. You'll get no help from me because like most creationists I'm perfectly fine with the idea of natural selection, since it can be observed and repeated. I just don't get how natural selection has to be the only mechanism by which all life came to be the way it is now. Neither do a lot of evolutionists. Furthermore, I don't get why there is no possibility that God was the author of natural selection or of the various other processes by which life came to be the way it is. Again, neither do a lot of evolutionists. I think if you look closely enough you will find that the line between intelligent and educated proponents of evolution and creation is not as fine as most of us have been led to believe.
Serving kiddie porn maybe? (No, I'm serious . . . a Windows system that's slower than when you first bought it has a significant chance of being infected, and at that point, you have no idea what it is actually doing unless you inspect the network traffic from another system that you know not to be compromised itself.)
In my view, imprisonment is violence, of nearly the worst sort. It almost invariably involves prison rape, denial of medical care, and other gross abuses of human rights. I for one would prefer death to even a moderately long prison sentence. I'm not sure I would wish it on anyone, even Darl McBride, scum though he may be.
On the other hand, I'm not sure there is a better way to deter crimes such as his. I do not deny their seriousness. Through outright fraud (lying for criminal gain) he deprived thousands if not millions of people, including me, you and many of the rest of us here, of some part of our livelihood; in some cases, a significant part. Theft on a large scale is basically equivalent to violence - just a slower form of murder. Society cannot endure if it is allowed to go unpunished. But how to punish it without resorting to an essentially equivalent evil, namely the violence of prison, is something that entirely escapes me. I wish I knew a good way, but I don't. Perhaps you or someone else here might.
Didn't ya RTFM??? Just set your ARCH to ~x86 and emerge www-misc/disable-mafia$oft-plugin-crapola-0.4428-r1.ebuild. With all the required deps it should take no more than a week, assuming at least a quad-core machine and that you're using distcc.:)
The bush era has left a bad taste in everyones mouth and it will take a long time to get over.
And it will not improve until/unless people move past partisan politics and realize that any totalitarian policy proposed or carried out by any totalitarian thug is unacceptable, regardless of which party or which level of government is responsible. Politicians almost always act in their own interests, and almost never in those of the people. People need to realize this and then respond accordingly.
religious nut-jobs that seem to breed like rabbits.
OK . . from someone you'd probably consider a "religious nut-job": I agree wholeheartedly that this is a sinking ship, though probably for somewhat different reasons than you, and that it is best for anyone who is able to leave to do so. My family and I are planning to in the not too distant future (I and our children are U.S. citizens; my wife is not).
Our reasons: We believe in personal liberty, limited government, rule of law, and free enterprise. Increasingly our fellow citizens do not, and they tolerate an increasingly collectivist and totalitarian state which very consistently erodes all of the above. Most other societies, while they may give lip service to collectivist and totalitarian ideas, do not actually implement said ideas, at least not to the same extent as here, because their governments do not have sufficient power to do so. Hence, most of them at least in the industrialized world, in spite of being somewhat less wealthy on paper, actually have greater and more sustainable levels of freedom and stability. In addition, most have FAR more sustainable economies, based on production of goods and/or services that have value and can be traded on world markets. Ours simply cannot compete in the long term, unless the corruption and lawlessness of all levels of government is first addressed, and even then, it will take a generation or more to educate our people to the degree that other first-world nations take for granted, and to train them to produce things that can be consumed and/or exported to pay for things we can't produce here. I don't want my children and grandchildren to live in poverty and terror while they wait for society to maybe improve. I prefer for them to grow up in one that actually works now, and stands a reasonable chance to continue to do so in the future.
If you start with sound principles, and proceed with sound logic to a conclusion that sounds "crazy" compared to what you have always thought, isn't it possible that it is what you thought, not the "crazy" but logically supported position, that might be suspect?
Corruption is inherent in that this is a centrally planned and controlled economy, not one based on genuine free enterprise, but rather - depending on your viewpoint - either government-controlled corporations or corporate-controlled governments. Power and violence are used to distort markets, including most importantly the labor market, but also health care, legal services, and most of the professions, for the benefit of some and to the detriment of all others. Since governments and big corporations employ a disproportionate number of workers, most of us end up working for one or the other. These entities produce very little of value, but are able to extort money from those few productive enterprises - mostly smaller businesses - that somehow manage to survive. Since the goal is not to produce products and services that people willingly buy, but rather to destroy competition so people have no choice but to buy theirs, everything that happens is inherently and unalterably corrupt. The only real fix is to restore something resembling freedom, including something resembling free enterprise (regulated to the extent, but only to the extent, necessary to protect life, liberty and property). And since most people are completely ignorant of economics, politics, history, ethics, and law, and derive most of what they think is "knowledge" from institutions controlled by the corrupt corporate-government monolith (e.g,. public "schools," mass media, etc.), very few people even understand the nature of the problem, much less how to solve it. By their ignorance they too become part of this corruption. Frankly, we all do. It is a society-wide problem and I do not honestly see any solution besides the one that is currently under way, namely, that our society is being replaced as the dominant world power by others that are less corrupt, most notably and ironically China.
For my needs, which are nontrivial, Linux makes an outstanding audio workstation platform.
I have an old Allen digital organ from the early 1970s which sounds like crap on its own as it was meant to be played in a church or a hall, not my basement. So I route the sound through JACK, Jack Rack, a few LADSPA plugins for chorus and reverb, an Athlon XP system with 512k RAM, and a $20 Creative Sound Blaster from the 1990s. Today's smartphones have much beefier hardware than this, yet somehow my setup "just works." It would not fool a professional organist, but few others can hear the difference.
I won't claim it's an ideal setup - there are occasional drops (after a few hours of running; probably a memory leak somewhere) and ideally much faster and newer hardware would be preferred. Nonetheless, the setup works very acceptably for my purposes - it's a practice organ so I don't need it to work perfectly, but as long as I stop and restart the JACK daemon every few hours, it pretty much does.
On occasion I will even supplement this setup by plugging a MIDI keyboard through a MIDI->USB adapter, loading some pipe organ soundfonts onto the card, then "capturing" the synth output and routing it through basically the same pipeline as above (LADSPA plugins via JACK and JACK Rack).
Could I have done the same thing on a Mac or Windows PC? Sure, but only with significantly more expensive hardware and software. The Allen organ cost around $800 used; "pro" audio software tends to cost vastly more. All I needed to spend to implement the Linux-based solution was a few dozens of bucks for cables and adapters and maybe $100 for a powered subwoofer.
It is very realistic for parts of the U.S., such as Calfornia, where there is no single ethic or racial group that predominates; a random shot of any group of people is much more likely than not to contain some diversity. On the other hand, there still are parts of the U.S. that are very much less diverse (e.g., the inner core and exurbs of any Rust Belt city which will be nearly all-Black and all-White respectively, or Southwest border towns which are very largely first- and second-generation Mexican). Even in the U.S. it is very hard to generalize about diversity or the lack thereof.
My vote is for the combination of lower- and higher-level languages, rather than attempting to kludge one language into attempting to do both jobs (C++ can, in sufficiently expert hands, but I don't have either one of those). I find I write the most maintainable code that way, and write it the most quickly as well, thus minimizing the usual tradeoff between maintainability and time to market. I believe it is poor tools and practices, more than any other single factor, which force this tradeoff in the business world. There is no theoretical reason why it needs to exist.
The high-level language expresses business logic, and my rule is that it must be readable and understandable by the business people or else I haven't written or commented it adequately. It also expresses anything else that is most easily expressed that way and that does not require the benefits of static typing or machine-level performance. Python is what I like, where possible, due to its highly flexible and multi-paradigm nature coupled with easy readability, but I'm exploring more functional languages and functional ways of using existing languages as well, since side effects, especially when they are hard to define or to predict, make unit testing and exploiting opportunities for concurrence much more difficult.
Closer to the metal, where I need performance inside tight loops or access to raw hardware, of course a lower-level language is needed. Rather than either idiomatic C or C++, I prefer a C-like subset of C++, using STL and/or Boost where appropriate but sparingly, but avoiding pointer and reference manipulation insofar as possible. I'm not entirely happy with it, though, and may well consider something like D, or even a compiled functional language, for future projects.
I've written tons of both Java and C# as well, but only when those tools were specifically required for the job. They aren't fun to me. I can't "think" in either one; I must do a great deal of work to translate what I want to accomplish in either one, and then hopefully the folks who have to maintain it - often myself - have to try to figure out, maybe years later, what the heck I was trying to do. I can't always do it myself, even though I'm fairly disciplined in terms of designing, commenting, and refactoring as appropriately as I can under the circumstances. I will concede that C# is evolving rapidly and comes much closer to being able to express my thoughts than it once did, and Java's evolution has been an improvement as well; but both languages are becoming more difficult to read and to use as a result of things like LINQ or generics not having been designed into either but bolted on later. Also I don't like the single-non-lawsuit-endangered-source status of C#, nor the single-widely-used-implementation status of Java (a complaint which certainly could be levied against Perl as well - not sure about Python and Ruby). If I had to choose only one of C# or Java, it would be Java since it is now mostly open-source and, at worst, no more patent-encumbered than the (hopefully) free software implementations of C#. Openness to me is an absolute prerequisite to anything I would ever willingly choose to use.
Drugs are a social health problem, not a criminal problem.
I would say they are not even that, unless someone's health actually is impacted, and even then, they are a problem for the USER and possibly those around him or her, not "society." What people choose to consume is not anyone else's business, as long as no one else's rights are being violated.
But, along with the freedom that every person should have to consume whatever the frak they want, inevitably MUST follow the responsibility to not violate the freedoms or rights of others. If you're going to abuse something that's mind-altering, don't drive or operate heavy machinery. If you're going to trip, have someone nearby that can keep you from jumping out a window and landing on an innocent stranger. If you're going to do something potentially addictive like crack (which is a seriously bad idea, more so than for most other drugs), then make sure you can afford the consequences (cost and possible disability) without inflicting any of them on others. Stay away from firearms and other weapons when impaired. Have a designated driver. If people on drugs acted a bit more responsibly, I think they would find society a bit more accepting of their activities, and it might be a bit harder for "governments" to imprison them along with countless innocent others using drugs as their excuse.
I work as a software developer. I have no degree. Most of my colleagues do have degrees but very few are in computer science, math, or any related field. And they demonstrate, to the very last one, near complete ignorance of computer science fundamentals, such as data structures or complexity theory, all of which I've endeavored to learn on my own, and many of which do give me a significant competitive advantage over my peers.
I understand that CS majors generally do get a grounding in all of these subjects, but then the CS majors I know rarely find their way into a programming career, and often are lacking in practical software development experience - they may know a great deal about how relational database engines work internally but can't throw together a simple database-backed PHP Web site without help. So while I do agree that CS and programming don't necessarily make a good match, there does need to be some type of academic path that would lead to programmers that could hit the ground running, and not need extensive on-the-job training. (And yes, it needs to be an academic path. Programming as practiced today is far more art than science; there is a science behind successful software development including all phases, such as requirements gathering, design, implementation, testing, lifecycle management, etc., but generally people are unaware of and do not practice documented, proven best practices in these areas, because most people are not taught them in any kind of academic environment, and learn these practices, if at all, only on their own, or in a highly distorted form from some vendor mainly interested in promoting its own products.)
I agree with most of the above, but massed "human wave" attacks against even moderately developed economies are obsolete. They've never been a great idea in the past century, but now they are downright suicidal. Cluster munitions are designed for exactly this scenario, as are tactical (not strategic) nuclear weapons, as are various unmanned ("drone") weapons some of which are not public knowledge. We can't keep NK from doing damage to SK and JP, and we also can't keep guerilla forces in Iraq, Afghanistan or Pakistan from doing significant harm to our troops there. But if NK forces decided to storm the DMZ, probably not even 10% would make it through alive. I don't believe even Kim Jong Il would be crazy enough to try this, and most people in SK seem to agree . . they seem to feel reasonably confident, more than I would in their shoes but not totally without reason, that NK has no reason to attack, and every reason not to, and the warlike posture of its leadership is mainly for domestic consumption (much like the anti-Israel rantings of various leaders in North Africa that will never be in a position to harm Israel, but can't win elections unless they promise to).
Same for 'green energy.' We know how to do it but it ever coming either because the only method that makes economic sense is politically incorrect.
I tend to agree. Here is what we can do right now, and for all reasonable values of "the foreseeable future":
Produce energy more cleanly, cheaply, and safely than any of the alternatives, through modern nuclear fission reactors.
Make it portable, by using it to convert cheap coal (too dirty to burn, useless for any other purpose) into liquid fuels.
Make it carbon-neutral or even carbon-negative by sequestering CO2 from the air (I don't believe that is truly necessary, but if it were, we could do it.
End wars for domination of energy resources, because uranium and thorium in the quantities required are abundant and cheap, and will remain so for the foreseeable future provided there is at least one large country sufficiently free to allow for the financing of continuing exploration and production.
Why don't we do this? Because the powers that be cannot prevent expansion of the economy - and thus eventual dilution of their power, relative to the private sector - unless they control and ration the supply of energy. They can best do this by limiting the one technology that makes all the rest possible: nuclear fission. So they do.
Slashdot Mirror
In the grand scheme of things, Windows and Mac machines, as well as mobile devices, spend between most and all of their time operating primarily as thin clients accessing data housed in UNIX and Linux servers. They always have. Almost all software in widespread use today is distributed, and almost all distributed software contains UNIX and/or Linux components. Thus, the attack area of UNIX and Linux is huge. The clients can often serve as attack vectors against the servers (and the converse is true as well). UNIX and Linux simply are designed better . . . not perfectly, for sure, and not even best in their class (OpenBSD has a substantially better record than either), but still much better than Windows, which has always had the burden of needing to be backwards-compatible with software written for its ABI, and which therefore has limited flexibility in terms of its ability to adapt to increasingly sophisticated security challenges that all connected systems must face if they wish to survive.
How much human growth and progress (social, economic, and otherwise) has been held back because Microsoft set back the computing industry for decades if not more? How many people starve in Africa or Asia because of the economic growth that did not occur because they never got to develop a local, indigenous IT services industry? It is harder to quantify the damage caused by Microsoft, than some of the other companies you mentioned. But that does not mean it has not occurred, or does not continue to occur.
As for the GP's question of why we would berate Microsoft even if it takes baby steps in the right direction: I for one would not . . PROVIDED it was in the right direction. The FOSS community has the capacity to forgive, as evidenced by the generally positive feelings it has toward IBM, which in its day was evil in every way Microsoft is now, plus many ways in which it isn't. But IBM's more recent behavior has evidenced a willingness to coexist and cooperate with that community.
Is this truly a step in the right direction for MSFT? For reasons already well explained by others, I don't know that it is. It is unclear whether anything that is actually useful is being opened up. If it is, great, MSFT, and keep up the good work! If not, well, I think they know how to earn the respect and goodwill of our community, and I welcome any genuine attempt on their part to do so.
The greatest miracle would be if God designed a universe where natural selection could result in such wonders. I for one believe that is exactly what happened.
I am happy to compile most of Gentoo as needed (mostly in the background while doing other things) because I can mostly escape dependency hell this way, while preserving the ability to try various pieces of software that aren't in the Portage tree. It has nothing to do with performance, for me at least; I agree that the time spent compiling tends to negate much of the speed advantage, but it's well worth the ability for things I've installed, both inside and outside Portage, to mostly "just work" and for me to be able to upgrade according to my own needs and schedule.
As for it being in Python, to me that is a feature, not a bug. I've spent much of my working life developing and maintaining software, and in my view Python's strengths, such as readability and "batteries included" philosophy, lend themselves to solid software development and lifecycle management practices. I don't often find a need to tweak an ebuild and I've never written one myself, but I'm very confident that if I ever do need to for some reason, I can. I'm confident that any Python code I find I will be able to read and understand, and I can't say that about most of the other languages I've used over the years. And on any project where I have my choice of tools, it is almost always Python + C. I'm not expert in either, and I know many others, but I've rarely encountered a task that could not be done in an efficient and maintainable fashion using some combination of these two.
And I forgot to consider that this was an object of 10 meters or so when it impacted Earth and was thus likely far bigger before entering the atmosphere. An object that was 10 meters before entering the atmosphere would, depending on composition and angle of descent, likely burn away completely before reaching ground. But there might be a midair explosion or fireball sufficient to ignite highly flammable structures.
From Wikipedia:
If it hit near the center of a large city it could really suck; however, most of the earth's surface is covered by water, desert, mountains, or rural areas, and thus most asteroid impacts of this size do not cause massive loss of life.
The underlying assumption of your query appears to be that the U.S. has acted more benevolently during its reign as a global superpower than the Soviets or Germans would have. Certainly that is what most people in the U.S. believe, but there are plenty of people in Japan, Vietnam, Central America, Serbia, Iraq and Afghanistan who could provide a more complete perspective. Large, powerful governments rarely act benevolently, and the U.S. is no exception. What actually happened - two opposing blocs each capable of preventing the other from unilaterally dominating the world - was far from the worst possible outcome.
f you prefer, imagine a choice between two doors: behind door A is the job of your dreams, behind door B is the woman of your dreams. There isn't a right answer.
As much as I want to disagree with you, I can't. I'm married to the woman of my dreams. But we're both miserable because (among several other reasons) I can't earn nearly enough to support her financially the way we both realize I should.
In general, a good woman is MUCH harder to find than a good job. But a good woman usually won't be happy with a guy who can't properly support her. Sucks, but that's just the way it is.
Sorry. Creationist here. You'll get no help from me because like most creationists I'm perfectly fine with the idea of natural selection, since it can be observed and repeated. I just don't get how natural selection has to be the only mechanism by which all life came to be the way it is now. Neither do a lot of evolutionists. Furthermore, I don't get why there is no possibility that God was the author of natural selection or of the various other processes by which life came to be the way it is. Again, neither do a lot of evolutionists. I think if you look closely enough you will find that the line between intelligent and educated proponents of evolution and creation is not as fine as most of us have been led to believe.
Serving kiddie porn maybe? (No, I'm serious . . . a Windows system that's slower than when you first bought it has a significant chance of being infected, and at that point, you have no idea what it is actually doing unless you inspect the network traffic from another system that you know not to be compromised itself.)
In my view, imprisonment is violence, of nearly the worst sort. It almost invariably involves prison rape, denial of medical care, and other gross abuses of human rights. I for one would prefer death to even a moderately long prison sentence. I'm not sure I would wish it on anyone, even Darl McBride, scum though he may be.
On the other hand, I'm not sure there is a better way to deter crimes such as his. I do not deny their seriousness. Through outright fraud (lying for criminal gain) he deprived thousands if not millions of people, including me, you and many of the rest of us here, of some part of our livelihood; in some cases, a significant part. Theft on a large scale is basically equivalent to violence - just a slower form of murder. Society cannot endure if it is allowed to go unpunished. But how to punish it without resorting to an essentially equivalent evil, namely the violence of prison, is something that entirely escapes me. I wish I knew a good way, but I don't. Perhaps you or someone else here might.
Didn't ya RTFM??? Just set your ARCH to ~x86 and emerge www-misc/disable-mafia$oft-plugin-crapola-0.4428-r1.ebuild. With all the required deps it should take no more than a week, assuming at least a quad-core machine and that you're using distcc. :)
The bush era has left a bad taste in everyones mouth and it will take a long time to get over.
And it will not improve until/unless people move past partisan politics and realize that any totalitarian policy proposed or carried out by any totalitarian thug is unacceptable, regardless of which party or which level of government is responsible. Politicians almost always act in their own interests, and almost never in those of the people. People need to realize this and then respond accordingly.
religious nut-jobs that seem to breed like rabbits.
OK . . from someone you'd probably consider a "religious nut-job": I agree wholeheartedly that this is a sinking ship, though probably for somewhat different reasons than you, and that it is best for anyone who is able to leave to do so. My family and I are planning to in the not too distant future (I and our children are U.S. citizens; my wife is not).
Our reasons: We believe in personal liberty, limited government, rule of law, and free enterprise. Increasingly our fellow citizens do not, and they tolerate an increasingly collectivist and totalitarian state which very consistently erodes all of the above. Most other societies, while they may give lip service to collectivist and totalitarian ideas, do not actually implement said ideas, at least not to the same extent as here, because their governments do not have sufficient power to do so. Hence, most of them at least in the industrialized world, in spite of being somewhat less wealthy on paper, actually have greater and more sustainable levels of freedom and stability. In addition, most have FAR more sustainable economies, based on production of goods and/or services that have value and can be traded on world markets. Ours simply cannot compete in the long term, unless the corruption and lawlessness of all levels of government is first addressed, and even then, it will take a generation or more to educate our people to the degree that other first-world nations take for granted, and to train them to produce things that can be consumed and/or exported to pay for things we can't produce here. I don't want my children and grandchildren to live in poverty and terror while they wait for society to maybe improve. I prefer for them to grow up in one that actually works now, and stands a reasonable chance to continue to do so in the future.
If you start with sound principles, and proceed with sound logic to a conclusion that sounds "crazy" compared to what you have always thought, isn't it possible that it is what you thought, not the "crazy" but logically supported position, that might be suspect?
There was a system malfunction in 1983 that showed IBMs were heading toward the Soviet Union
Could have been worse . . what if they had been MSFTs????
Corruption is inherent in that this is a centrally planned and controlled economy, not one based on genuine free enterprise, but rather - depending on your viewpoint - either government-controlled corporations or corporate-controlled governments. Power and violence are used to distort markets, including most importantly the labor market, but also health care, legal services, and most of the professions, for the benefit of some and to the detriment of all others. Since governments and big corporations employ a disproportionate number of workers, most of us end up working for one or the other. These entities produce very little of value, but are able to extort money from those few productive enterprises - mostly smaller businesses - that somehow manage to survive. Since the goal is not to produce products and services that people willingly buy, but rather to destroy competition so people have no choice but to buy theirs, everything that happens is inherently and unalterably corrupt. The only real fix is to restore something resembling freedom, including something resembling free enterprise (regulated to the extent, but only to the extent, necessary to protect life, liberty and property). And since most people are completely ignorant of economics, politics, history, ethics, and law, and derive most of what they think is "knowledge" from institutions controlled by the corrupt corporate-government monolith (e.g,. public "schools," mass media, etc.), very few people even understand the nature of the problem, much less how to solve it. By their ignorance they too become part of this corruption. Frankly, we all do. It is a society-wide problem and I do not honestly see any solution besides the one that is currently under way, namely, that our society is being replaced as the dominant world power by others that are less corrupt, most notably and ironically China.
I suspect that this has already happened in domestic cockroaches and other common pests. Probably in the federal government too.
For my needs, which are nontrivial, Linux makes an outstanding audio workstation platform.
I have an old Allen digital organ from the early 1970s which sounds like crap on its own as it was meant to be played in a church or a hall, not my basement. So I route the sound through JACK, Jack Rack, a few LADSPA plugins for chorus and reverb, an Athlon XP system with 512k RAM, and a $20 Creative Sound Blaster from the 1990s. Today's smartphones have much beefier hardware than this, yet somehow my setup "just works." It would not fool a professional organist, but few others can hear the difference.
I won't claim it's an ideal setup - there are occasional drops (after a few hours of running; probably a memory leak somewhere) and ideally much faster and newer hardware would be preferred. Nonetheless, the setup works very acceptably for my purposes - it's a practice organ so I don't need it to work perfectly, but as long as I stop and restart the JACK daemon every few hours, it pretty much does.
On occasion I will even supplement this setup by plugging a MIDI keyboard through a MIDI->USB adapter, loading some pipe organ soundfonts onto the card, then "capturing" the synth output and routing it through basically the same pipeline as above (LADSPA plugins via JACK and JACK Rack).
Could I have done the same thing on a Mac or Windows PC? Sure, but only with significantly more expensive hardware and software. The Allen organ cost around $800 used; "pro" audio software tends to cost vastly more. All I needed to spend to implement the Linux-based solution was a few dozens of bucks for cables and adapters and maybe $100 for a powered subwoofer.
It is very realistic for parts of the U.S., such as Calfornia, where there is no single ethic or racial group that predominates; a random shot of any group of people is much more likely than not to contain some diversity. On the other hand, there still are parts of the U.S. that are very much less diverse (e.g., the inner core and exurbs of any Rust Belt city which will be nearly all-Black and all-White respectively, or Southwest border towns which are very largely first- and second-generation Mexican). Even in the U.S. it is very hard to generalize about diversity or the lack thereof.
My vote is for the combination of lower- and higher-level languages, rather than attempting to kludge one language into attempting to do both jobs (C++ can, in sufficiently expert hands, but I don't have either one of those). I find I write the most maintainable code that way, and write it the most quickly as well, thus minimizing the usual tradeoff between maintainability and time to market. I believe it is poor tools and practices, more than any other single factor, which force this tradeoff in the business world. There is no theoretical reason why it needs to exist.
The high-level language expresses business logic, and my rule is that it must be readable and understandable by the business people or else I haven't written or commented it adequately. It also expresses anything else that is most easily expressed that way and that does not require the benefits of static typing or machine-level performance. Python is what I like, where possible, due to its highly flexible and multi-paradigm nature coupled with easy readability, but I'm exploring more functional languages and functional ways of using existing languages as well, since side effects, especially when they are hard to define or to predict, make unit testing and exploiting opportunities for concurrence much more difficult.
Closer to the metal, where I need performance inside tight loops or access to raw hardware, of course a lower-level language is needed. Rather than either idiomatic C or C++, I prefer a C-like subset of C++, using STL and/or Boost where appropriate but sparingly, but avoiding pointer and reference manipulation insofar as possible. I'm not entirely happy with it, though, and may well consider something like D, or even a compiled functional language, for future projects.
I've written tons of both Java and C# as well, but only when those tools were specifically required for the job. They aren't fun to me. I can't "think" in either one; I must do a great deal of work to translate what I want to accomplish in either one, and then hopefully the folks who have to maintain it - often myself - have to try to figure out, maybe years later, what the heck I was trying to do. I can't always do it myself, even though I'm fairly disciplined in terms of designing, commenting, and refactoring as appropriately as I can under the circumstances. I will concede that C# is evolving rapidly and comes much closer to being able to express my thoughts than it once did, and Java's evolution has been an improvement as well; but both languages are becoming more difficult to read and to use as a result of things like LINQ or generics not having been designed into either but bolted on later. Also I don't like the single-non-lawsuit-endangered-source status of C#, nor the single-widely-used-implementation status of Java (a complaint which certainly could be levied against Perl as well - not sure about Python and Ruby). If I had to choose only one of C# or Java, it would be Java since it is now mostly open-source and, at worst, no more patent-encumbered than the (hopefully) free software implementations of C#. Openness to me is an absolute prerequisite to anything I would ever willingly choose to use.
Drugs are a social health problem, not a criminal problem.
I would say they are not even that, unless someone's health actually is impacted, and even then, they are a problem for the USER and possibly those around him or her, not "society." What people choose to consume is not anyone else's business, as long as no one else's rights are being violated.
But, along with the freedom that every person should have to consume whatever the frak they want, inevitably MUST follow the responsibility to not violate the freedoms or rights of others. If you're going to abuse something that's mind-altering, don't drive or operate heavy machinery. If you're going to trip, have someone nearby that can keep you from jumping out a window and landing on an innocent stranger. If you're going to do something potentially addictive like crack (which is a seriously bad idea, more so than for most other drugs), then make sure you can afford the consequences (cost and possible disability) without inflicting any of them on others. Stay away from firearms and other weapons when impaired. Have a designated driver. If people on drugs acted a bit more responsibly, I think they would find society a bit more accepting of their activities, and it might be a bit harder for "governments" to imprison them along with countless innocent others using drugs as their excuse.
I work as a software developer. I have no degree. Most of my colleagues do have degrees but very few are in computer science, math, or any related field. And they demonstrate, to the very last one, near complete ignorance of computer science fundamentals, such as data structures or complexity theory, all of which I've endeavored to learn on my own, and many of which do give me a significant competitive advantage over my peers.
I understand that CS majors generally do get a grounding in all of these subjects, but then the CS majors I know rarely find their way into a programming career, and often are lacking in practical software development experience - they may know a great deal about how relational database engines work internally but can't throw together a simple database-backed PHP Web site without help. So while I do agree that CS and programming don't necessarily make a good match, there does need to be some type of academic path that would lead to programmers that could hit the ground running, and not need extensive on-the-job training. (And yes, it needs to be an academic path. Programming as practiced today is far more art than science; there is a science behind successful software development including all phases, such as requirements gathering, design, implementation, testing, lifecycle management, etc., but generally people are unaware of and do not practice documented, proven best practices in these areas, because most people are not taught them in any kind of academic environment, and learn these practices, if at all, only on their own, or in a highly distorted form from some vendor mainly interested in promoting its own products.)
I agree with most of the above, but massed "human wave" attacks against even moderately developed economies are obsolete. They've never been a great idea in the past century, but now they are downright suicidal. Cluster munitions are designed for exactly this scenario, as are tactical (not strategic) nuclear weapons, as are various unmanned ("drone") weapons some of which are not public knowledge. We can't keep NK from doing damage to SK and JP, and we also can't keep guerilla forces in Iraq, Afghanistan or Pakistan from doing significant harm to our troops there. But if NK forces decided to storm the DMZ, probably not even 10% would make it through alive. I don't believe even Kim Jong Il would be crazy enough to try this, and most people in SK seem to agree . . they seem to feel reasonably confident, more than I would in their shoes but not totally without reason, that NK has no reason to attack, and every reason not to, and the warlike posture of its leadership is mainly for domestic consumption (much like the anti-Israel rantings of various leaders in North Africa that will never be in a position to harm Israel, but can't win elections unless they promise to).
Same for 'green energy.' We know how to do it but it ever coming either because the only method that makes economic sense is politically incorrect.
I tend to agree. Here is what we can do right now, and for all reasonable values of "the foreseeable future":
Why don't we do this? Because the powers that be cannot prevent expansion of the economy - and thus eventual dilution of their power, relative to the private sector - unless they control and ration the supply of energy. They can best do this by limiting the one technology that makes all the rest possible: nuclear fission. So they do.