Whatever do you mean? What's preventing you from throwing up two windows on the screen right now? I do this all the time in EVERY application where it's useful. The only thing I can guess is that you want an old fashioned MDI interface. But other than saving you the height of two toolbars, what's the advantage of that over two separate windows?
It may be time to switch to a BSD if they can't get their act together.
It may be time. The old odd/even strategy was a bit goofy at times, but it at least had some semblance of stable/development branches. Its main problems were Linus' late branching and the propensity to add new features to the even branches.
But now even that has been blown to the wind. They're doing development work on their stable branch, because they only have one branch. Expect major disruptions if they ever decide to revamp some kernel component like paging or smp.
The ONLY sense I can make of this is that Linus is viewing it all as a single development branch, and it's up to the distros to actually get something stable in front of the users.
And no the most converative of people would really like to figure out a way for little boys to have children without having to see any of the "evil parts".
Linkage?
Seriously, where's your linkage? You ask me for mine, then turn around and utter the silliest of stereotypes. Show me one linkage to evidence that anyone remotely near mainstream conservatism thinks this. Just one valid link.
I don't know where the you were, but I remember where I was. I remember that whole week all the conservatives were saying "holy shit, he just ripped her top open," while all the liberals were saying "so what it's just a breast."
Get off your moral high horse and LOOK at what happened! A man violently exposed a woman on broadcast television, and all you can do is to tell to tell me I'm prudish for objecting? Get real!
We've already experimented with more-or-less unregulated capitalism and it was a disaster.
The US came somewhat close to a free market during the eighteenth century, but the abuses attributed to capitalism during that era were in fact the result of government intervention into the market. To take one example, the railroads, you have an history of governments competing to hand over total monopolies to the railroads. The infamous "octopus" of California could never have occured without the massive feudal-like land grants, including inhabitants, to the railroads.
This was an era of great change, and anytime you have change you have pain. It was the era were immigrants couldn't get here fast enough. It was the era the market invented consumerism. It was the era the market invented sanitariums and retirement homes. It was the era when the American assumption that everyone should be able to own their own home was born.
No, it wasn't a perfect era. No one is claiming it was. But is as hardly the disaster it is sometimes portrayed to be. Don't compare it to the rampant cronyism that is Argentina. That nation has never had anything close to a free market.
Sidenote: you mention 1929. The stock market crash and the great depression were not the fault of a free market. It was caused by government interference in the money supply, and prolonged by Hoover's and Roosevelt's attempts at government solutions.
Have you tried applying your arguments to long distance phone service? Back when the phone company was a government mandated monopoly, there was only one set of phone lines. Now with half a dozen long distance providers in my area, there is still only one set of phone lines. By your arguments this shouldn't work, yet I can get cheaper long distance rates from companies than the one company that happens to own the lines. The reason it works is because no one company owns all the lines, so that they have to trade rights. One compnay offers another the right to its lines in exchange for the rights to use theirs.
Take a look at the internet itself. It makes a good laboratory for the free market. With virtually no government regulation, tens of thousands of nodes manage to interact to route packets along each other's properties. AT&T uses Sprint's backbone, and vice versa. I can set up a node and get my packets sent to your node, without having to negotiate with the owners of each and every node the packet goes through.
You said "your free market talk doesn't work." But in the case of the internet, it does work. Without the benefit of government assistance it manages to perform millions of economic transactions each day.
but I am fed up with the myth that (big) business is lean and mean.
Is that what you read in my post? Because I sure as hell didn't write that in there. But to be fair, replace "(big) business" with "publicly traded corporation", and I will fully agree with you. Lean and mean businesses tend to be private unincorporated firms.
But that said, I do think that when it comes to fat and bloated, no one beats a government bureacracy when it comes to lard tonnage.
...but show a bare breast and the entire country freaks the F out.
Point of clarification. People weren't freaking out over seeing a breast on television. People were freaking out because a man violently disrobed a woman on television. The protests were at the portrayal of grossly inappropriate sexist behavior.
Even the most conservative of people want their little boys to grow up and get married and see their wive's breasts. But not even the most liberal of people want their little boys to grow up into sexist pigs who degrade woman by ripping off their tops in public.
It's fairly clear that conservation is an overlooked solution to the 'energy crisis'.
It's not fairly clear. In fact, I think the opposite it true, that conservation is the first solution looked to. It's the solution that's been used for the last thirty years.
How many times have you heard your mother say over the years: "Turn off your lights when you're not using them! Do you think electricity comes from a well or something?"
We could conserve more, but a lot of us don't really know where our energy goes. Do you know how much energy your computer consumes? So why don't you turn it off when you're not using it? I see far too many "environmentally concerned" citizens that keep their computers on all the time. At work I turn off my computer on the weekend and people actually look at me as if I'm nuts for doing it. I've got a friend who's in Earth First, and owns an NVidia card with more fan horsepower than my Hoover vacumn! Where's the sense in that?
Re:anonymous coward lobbyists are out in force her
on
Free Wi-Fi Threatened?
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· Score: 1
I tried the WG511T last year with no luck. It was one of almost a dozen cards I tried and had to return. It actually worked better than the others, in that the driver would actually attach. But unfortunately that's all it did. Maybe FreeBSD supports it better now with 5.3 than it did with 5.2.
I'll give it a shot this weekend. If it doesn't work, expect me back here cussin' up a blue streak like a sailor that got his nut caught in the windlass.
Re:anonymous coward lobbyists are out in force her
on
Free Wi-Fi Threatened?
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· Score: 1
I wasn't calling Linux users socialists, I was callling those who want to get provide wifi to all at taxpayer expense socialists. Sheesh you Linux users have thin skin!
In any case, I spent about two months late last year trying to find a wifi card for my laptop that would work with FreeBSD. There were no such things on the new equipment market. The only ones that I could find were used on eBay. The wifi manufacturers have deliberately closed off Free Software operating systems.
p.s. Oh, I'm sure you could name some cards that work. But after returning a dozen cards to Fry's, I simply gave up. This was after researching every card I bought FIRST. Cards that were supposed to have a particular chipset in them, turned out not to. I even found two cards with absolutely identical model numbers that used two different chipsets (and came with two different driver CDs), but neither used the chipset the Linux Laptop page said they did. Life's too short for that kind of hardware support!
You said "The free market isn't free, in any sense." That is the radical position, not mine. You weren't talking about unavoidable factors limiting the market, you were talking about the market being unfree in any sense!
I am not claiming that the market is completely fair. I am not claiming that it perfectly efficient. It is not. But to reject out of hand because it isn't perfect is irrational. To reject it for A, B and C because it doesn't work so well for D is illogical.
I do know however, that the government isn't completely fair or perfectly efficient either. Maybe I should be calling you the "extremist" for thinking that government can fill all market roles.
Do you really consider those on your list to be equivalent to internet providers? Do you really consider them as essential as police and fire? I don't!
Police: An essential government service. The role of government is to protect the lives and properties of the citizens, and as such the police are necessary. Of course, if you're an anarchist you would disagree, but that's a different topic.
Fire, ambulance, other emergency services: There are economic constraints here that simply do not apply to internet providers. The nature of the service makes a single emergency service provider more efficient than multiple providers. But be that as it may, there are STILL private fire departments today, and they work. They don't let houses burn down just because you're not a member.
Road crews: Most road crews are private firms. At least in my area they are. The state highways get their own government agency to repair them, but the local governments have to contract out the service to private road crews. But why government? As long as roads are government property, the government is the one who gets to figure out how to maintain them.
Tax assessors: This is a wierd one, and I'm not sure why you bring it up. There is NO market purpose for tax assessors, as taxes are not market goods. Even though they do essentially identical work to real estate appraisers, the results of their work are for completely different purposes.
Trash collection: Government trash companies are getting very rare these days, but they still tend to be city/county granted monopolies, so the end result is the same: government destruction of competition. But the only reason it's this way is tradition. There's no economic reason you can't have competing trash companies. I know, because my home town has two competing trash companies, serving the SAME area!
I have no problems with the government putting up an incidental access point. I don't think many private providers do either. But I do have a problem with them setting up a service to explicitly complete with private businesses.
Being an actual provider is what is going to cost money. Putting up enough access points to allow everyone to connect without having to drive downtown and stand in a crowd in front of city hall is what is going to cost money. Hiring someone qualified to administer this free network is what is going to cost money. And if you don't want to be acused of being mean to the poor, you're also going to have to pay for support personnel.
p.s. Frankly, if the government is not paying for free phone service to the poor, why is there this pressing need to provide wifi to the poor?
I think you're missing my point. Go read the grandparent post I am responding to again. I am not in favor of having the taxpayer foot the bill for internet access, but I am even LESS in favor of having the government directly compete with businesses in the internet access market.
To me it's like milk for the poor children. If society says we absolutely positively have to have it, then at least let's not destroy the market in the process.
Actually most people have long term contracts (you get a discount that way). So it would cost me for example $200 to get out of my contract.
Those contract terms are for six or twelve months. So unless you're saying that everyone is going to be on their first twelve months of use for the rest of their lives, it not a very good argument.
Besides, if you own your own DSL/cable modem you can quite often avoid that restriction, because it's only there to offset the "free" equipment they give you. I specifically avoided these term contracts in a couple of providers over the years.
Re:anonymous coward lobbyists are out in force her
on
Free Wi-Fi Threatened?
·
· Score: 1
As soon as my metro area goes muni wifi, I am gonna cut off my DSL AND my landline. Buh-Bye Big Telco....
Good luck using a Free Software operating system on that muni network. Unless you're content with shitty NDIS drivers, you're not going to be able to connect to your socialist utopia without using an evil capitalist operating system from Redmond...
When the government provides free milk to poor children, it doesn't set up government run dairies, but instead allows the poor to get free milk. That's the principle to be followed.
Why can't the government provide vouchers or somesuch for the poor to get internet access, instead of setting up competing tax-funded services guaranteed to put marginal providers out of business? Hell, wouldn't it be CHEAPER?
Only the government has the *power* to censor (at least in this society). I just looked up "censor" in the dictionary, and discovered quite a few disparate meanings. But the sense of the word as used in the story blurb (the sense that it is an immoral thing to do) is defined only in terms of government or government power.
In my area there are seven (at last count). Only one cable provider though, because it's a government mandated monopoly, but there are several DSL providers (backends, not merely resellers of the government mandated monopolists telco's services), and a couple of wireless providers. Of course, I live in an urban area. But a friend of mine who lives in ruraldom still has three broadband providers.
But even in your two-provider area, what's wrong with only two providers? Why do you insist that the market has failed if it only provides you with two choices instead of fifty? Why the heck do you think a single state-offered provider is going to offer you more choice/freedom/service than your current two market-offered providers? What makes you think that political lobbying is a more effective means of directing the economy than market forces?
Your free market talk doesn't work.
But it DOES work! It may not be perfection, but that doesn't mean it's utterly and completely broken. Utopia is not an option for ANY economic system. You are not going to get perfection. EVEN WITH THE GOVERNMENT.
I know that the free market works because I can walk into the neighborhood grocery store and find it completely stocked with food from around the world, all without the benefit of the government. It's only through market signals that the food gets ultimiately delivered to my grocery store. While there are certainly bureaucrats regulating some of the contents of the grocery store, there are no bureaucrats ensuring that the specific foods I desire are being grown and processed, and no bureaucrats ensuring that they are delivered in a timely manner to the specific grocery store I shop it. That's all the result of the market.
If Qwest told you that you could not use a Mac or linux in order to use their service, and that you had to use a Windows PC, would you sit there and take it?
No, I wouldn't take it. This in fact happened to me, and my ISP wouldn't support FreeBSD (or Linux). I wouldn't take it. But instead of crying to the federal government about censorship, I simply switched to a different provider. Quick, simple, effective.
But it wasn't convenient. I think too many people in the modern society are confusing convenience for some sort of unalienable natural right requiring government intervention everytime they don't get their way.
Actually, a better analogy would be insurance companies telling you how you may or may not drive on roads they do not own. What right do they have to tell you how to drive on the roads?
I realize that the liberal/progressive mind has no room in it for the concept of right and wrong, but that's only a delusion created to hide the unpleasant moral truth that the ends do not justify the means. A wrong is a wrong even if helps promote a right. If your cause cannot be promoted without lying then it does not deserve to prevail. Period.
Slashdot Mirror
Whatever do you mean? What's preventing you from throwing up two windows on the screen right now? I do this all the time in EVERY application where it's useful. The only thing I can guess is that you want an old fashioned MDI interface. But other than saving you the height of two toolbars, what's the advantage of that over two separate windows?
It may be time to switch to a BSD if they can't get their act together.
It may be time. The old odd/even strategy was a bit goofy at times, but it at least had some semblance of stable/development branches. Its main problems were Linus' late branching and the propensity to add new features to the even branches.
But now even that has been blown to the wind. They're doing development work on their stable branch, because they only have one branch. Expect major disruptions if they ever decide to revamp some kernel component like paging or smp.
The ONLY sense I can make of this is that Linus is viewing it all as a single development branch, and it's up to the distros to actually get something stable in front of the users.
And no the most converative of people would really like to figure out a way for little boys to have children without having to see any of the "evil parts".
Linkage?
Seriously, where's your linkage? You ask me for mine, then turn around and utter the silliest of stereotypes. Show me one linkage to evidence that anyone remotely near mainstream conservatism thinks this. Just one valid link.
I don't know where the you were, but I remember where I was. I remember that whole week all the conservatives were saying "holy shit, he just ripped her top open," while all the liberals were saying "so what it's just a breast."
Get off your moral high horse and LOOK at what happened! A man violently exposed a woman on broadcast television, and all you can do is to tell to tell me I'm prudish for objecting? Get real!
We've already experimented with more-or-less unregulated capitalism and it was a disaster.
The US came somewhat close to a free market during the eighteenth century, but the abuses attributed to capitalism during that era were in fact the result of government intervention into the market. To take one example, the railroads, you have an history of governments competing to hand over total monopolies to the railroads. The infamous "octopus" of California could never have occured without the massive feudal-like land grants, including inhabitants, to the railroads.
This was an era of great change, and anytime you have change you have pain. It was the era were immigrants couldn't get here fast enough. It was the era the market invented consumerism. It was the era the market invented sanitariums and retirement homes. It was the era when the American assumption that everyone should be able to own their own home was born.
No, it wasn't a perfect era. No one is claiming it was. But is as hardly the disaster it is sometimes portrayed to be. Don't compare it to the rampant cronyism that is Argentina. That nation has never had anything close to a free market.
Sidenote: you mention 1929. The stock market crash and the great depression were not the fault of a free market. It was caused by government interference in the money supply, and prolonged by Hoover's and Roosevelt's attempts at government solutions.
Have you tried applying your arguments to long distance phone service? Back when the phone company was a government mandated monopoly, there was only one set of phone lines. Now with half a dozen long distance providers in my area, there is still only one set of phone lines. By your arguments this shouldn't work, yet I can get cheaper long distance rates from companies than the one company that happens to own the lines. The reason it works is because no one company owns all the lines, so that they have to trade rights. One compnay offers another the right to its lines in exchange for the rights to use theirs.
Take a look at the internet itself. It makes a good laboratory for the free market. With virtually no government regulation, tens of thousands of nodes manage to interact to route packets along each other's properties. AT&T uses Sprint's backbone, and vice versa. I can set up a node and get my packets sent to your node, without having to negotiate with the owners of each and every node the packet goes through.
You said "your free market talk doesn't work." But in the case of the internet, it does work. Without the benefit of government assistance it manages to perform millions of economic transactions each day.
but I am fed up with the myth that (big) business is lean and mean.
Is that what you read in my post? Because I sure as hell didn't write that in there. But to be fair, replace "(big) business" with "publicly traded corporation", and I will fully agree with you. Lean and mean businesses tend to be private unincorporated firms.
But that said, I do think that when it comes to fat and bloated, no one beats a government bureacracy when it comes to lard tonnage.
...but show a bare breast and the entire country freaks the F out.
Point of clarification. People weren't freaking out over seeing a breast on television. People were freaking out because a man violently disrobed a woman on television. The protests were at the portrayal of grossly inappropriate sexist behavior.
Even the most conservative of people want their little boys to grow up and get married and see their wive's breasts. But not even the most liberal of people want their little boys to grow up into sexist pigs who degrade woman by ripping off their tops in public.
This whole thread could be a case study for the article in question. Sheesh.
It's fairly clear that conservation is an overlooked solution to the 'energy crisis'.
It's not fairly clear. In fact, I think the opposite it true, that conservation is the first solution looked to. It's the solution that's been used for the last thirty years.
How many times have you heard your mother say over the years: "Turn off your lights when you're not using them! Do you think electricity comes from a well or something?"
We could conserve more, but a lot of us don't really know where our energy goes. Do you know how much energy your computer consumes? So why don't you turn it off when you're not using it? I see far too many "environmentally concerned" citizens that keep their computers on all the time. At work I turn off my computer on the weekend and people actually look at me as if I'm nuts for doing it. I've got a friend who's in Earth First, and owns an NVidia card with more fan horsepower than my Hoover vacumn! Where's the sense in that?
I tried the WG511T last year with no luck. It was one of almost a dozen cards I tried and had to return. It actually worked better than the others, in that the driver would actually attach. But unfortunately that's all it did. Maybe FreeBSD supports it better now with 5.3 than it did with 5.2.
I'll give it a shot this weekend. If it doesn't work, expect me back here cussin' up a blue streak like a sailor that got his nut caught in the windlass.
I wasn't calling Linux users socialists, I was callling those who want to get provide wifi to all at taxpayer expense socialists. Sheesh you Linux users have thin skin!
In any case, I spent about two months late last year trying to find a wifi card for my laptop that would work with FreeBSD. There were no such things on the new equipment market. The only ones that I could find were used on eBay. The wifi manufacturers have deliberately closed off Free Software operating systems.
p.s. Oh, I'm sure you could name some cards that work. But after returning a dozen cards to Fry's, I simply gave up. This was after researching every card I bought FIRST. Cards that were supposed to have a particular chipset in them, turned out not to. I even found two cards with absolutely identical model numbers that used two different chipsets (and came with two different driver CDs), but neither used the chipset the Linux Laptop page said they did. Life's too short for that kind of hardware support!
You said "The free market isn't free, in any sense." That is the radical position, not mine. You weren't talking about unavoidable factors limiting the market, you were talking about the market being unfree in any sense!
I am not claiming that the market is completely fair. I am not claiming that it perfectly efficient. It is not. But to reject out of hand because it isn't perfect is irrational. To reject it for A, B and C because it doesn't work so well for D is illogical.
I do know however, that the government isn't completely fair or perfectly efficient either. Maybe I should be calling you the "extremist" for thinking that government can fill all market roles.
Do you really consider those on your list to be equivalent to internet providers? Do you really consider them as essential as police and fire? I don't!
Police: An essential government service. The role of government is to protect the lives and properties of the citizens, and as such the police are necessary. Of course, if you're an anarchist you would disagree, but that's a different topic.
Fire, ambulance, other emergency services: There are economic constraints here that simply do not apply to internet providers. The nature of the service makes a single emergency service provider more efficient than multiple providers. But be that as it may, there are STILL private fire departments today, and they work. They don't let houses burn down just because you're not a member.
Road crews: Most road crews are private firms. At least in my area they are. The state highways get their own government agency to repair them, but the local governments have to contract out the service to private road crews. But why government? As long as roads are government property, the government is the one who gets to figure out how to maintain them.
Tax assessors: This is a wierd one, and I'm not sure why you bring it up. There is NO market purpose for tax assessors, as taxes are not market goods. Even though they do essentially identical work to real estate appraisers, the results of their work are for completely different purposes.
Trash collection: Government trash companies are getting very rare these days, but they still tend to be city/county granted monopolies, so the end result is the same: government destruction of competition. But the only reason it's this way is tradition. There's no economic reason you can't have competing trash companies. I know, because my home town has two competing trash companies, serving the SAME area!
I have no problems with the government putting up an incidental access point. I don't think many private providers do either. But I do have a problem with them setting up a service to explicitly complete with private businesses.
Being an actual provider is what is going to cost money. Putting up enough access points to allow everyone to connect without having to drive downtown and stand in a crowd in front of city hall is what is going to cost money. Hiring someone qualified to administer this free network is what is going to cost money. And if you don't want to be acused of being mean to the poor, you're also going to have to pay for support personnel.
p.s. Frankly, if the government is not paying for free phone service to the poor, why is there this pressing need to provide wifi to the poor?
I think you're missing my point. Go read the grandparent post I am responding to again. I am not in favor of having the taxpayer foot the bill for internet access, but I am even LESS in favor of having the government directly compete with businesses in the internet access market.
To me it's like milk for the poor children. If society says we absolutely positively have to have it, then at least let's not destroy the market in the process.
Actually most people have long term contracts (you get a discount that way). So it would cost me for example $200 to get out of my contract.
Those contract terms are for six or twelve months. So unless you're saying that everyone is going to be on their first twelve months of use for the rest of their lives, it not a very good argument.
Besides, if you own your own DSL/cable modem you can quite often avoid that restriction, because it's only there to offset the "free" equipment they give you. I specifically avoided these term contracts in a couple of providers over the years.
As soon as my metro area goes muni wifi, I am gonna cut off my DSL AND my landline. Buh-Bye Big Telco....
Good luck using a Free Software operating system on that muni network. Unless you're content with shitty NDIS drivers, you're not going to be able to connect to your socialist utopia without using an evil capitalist operating system from Redmond...
When the government provides free milk to poor children, it doesn't set up government run dairies, but instead allows the poor to get free milk. That's the principle to be followed.
Why can't the government provide vouchers or somesuch for the poor to get internet access, instead of setting up competing tax-funded services guaranteed to put marginal providers out of business? Hell, wouldn't it be CHEAPER?
Only the government has the *power* to censor (at least in this society). I just looked up "censor" in the dictionary, and discovered quite a few disparate meanings. But the sense of the word as used in the story blurb (the sense that it is an immoral thing to do) is defined only in terms of government or government power.
How many broadband providers service your area?
In my area there are seven (at last count). Only one cable provider though, because it's a government mandated monopoly, but there are several DSL providers (backends, not merely resellers of the government mandated monopolists telco's services), and a couple of wireless providers. Of course, I live in an urban area. But a friend of mine who lives in ruraldom still has three broadband providers.
But even in your two-provider area, what's wrong with only two providers? Why do you insist that the market has failed if it only provides you with two choices instead of fifty? Why the heck do you think a single state-offered provider is going to offer you more choice/freedom/service than your current two market-offered providers? What makes you think that political lobbying is a more effective means of directing the economy than market forces?
Your free market talk doesn't work.
But it DOES work! It may not be perfection, but that doesn't mean it's utterly and completely broken. Utopia is not an option for ANY economic system. You are not going to get perfection. EVEN WITH THE GOVERNMENT.
I know that the free market works because I can walk into the neighborhood grocery store and find it completely stocked with food from around the world, all without the benefit of the government. It's only through market signals that the food gets ultimiately delivered to my grocery store. While there are certainly bureaucrats regulating some of the contents of the grocery store, there are no bureaucrats ensuring that the specific foods I desire are being grown and processed, and no bureaucrats ensuring that they are delivered in a timely manner to the specific grocery store I shop it. That's all the result of the market.
If Qwest told you that you could not use a Mac or linux in order to use their service, and that you had to use a Windows PC, would you sit there and take it?
No, I wouldn't take it. This in fact happened to me, and my ISP wouldn't support FreeBSD (or Linux). I wouldn't take it. But instead of crying to the federal government about censorship, I simply switched to a different provider. Quick, simple, effective.
But it wasn't convenient. I think too many people in the modern society are confusing convenience for some sort of unalienable natural right requiring government intervention everytime they don't get their way.
I think that ISPs that don't provide complete access to all usenet groups should be prevented from using the word "internet" in their advertising.
Actually, a better analogy would be insurance companies telling you how you may or may not drive on roads they do not own. What right do they have to tell you how to drive on the roads?
And you try to diffuse that reaction? Why?
I realize that the liberal/progressive mind has no room in it for the concept of right and wrong, but that's only a delusion created to hide the unpleasant moral truth that the ends do not justify the means. A wrong is a wrong even if helps promote a right. If your cause cannot be promoted without lying then it does not deserve to prevail. Period.