You're absolutely right. Corporate welfare is evil. We should stop it. Which party, and which candidates, advocate stopping it? Do you for them, or for their opponents?
This isn't government corruption. It's private enterprise. The idea is that government is fundamentally incompetent. Anything done by a government will not work. So government can't hire employees to work on software projects. Instead, it hires private enterprise to do it. Private enterprise is efficient and effective, and the result is savings.
This way of thinking has brought us multi-billion-dollar FAA upgrades that didn't work, new IRS d-bases that failed utterly, and created a whole industry of government contractors whose sole function in life is to transfer tax money from your pocket to theirs. The sad fact is that five programmers at Lawrence Livermore Labs could have gotten this done in a year for $500k. The outsourcing model doesn't work for us. Tragically, it *does* work for the people to whom the money flows, and so they lobby for it, and we get government contractors instead of government employees doing these projects.
What makes you think that this is going to be expensive? Gene therapy really isn't that expensive, and if it's effective and in demand, it will get cheaper. In the long run, everyone will get it. Of course, if you make it illegal, nobody will get it. Is that a better outcome?
What you *should* be worried about is genetically engineered serfs. Haven't you read A Brave New World?
Right, the fantasy of the extractive industries. Nobody who's interested in clean energy thinks that clean coal is anything other than a fantasy. Unfortunately, they have bigger PR machines than we do.
Burnt? No argument with the rest of what you said, but "burnt?!?" As a geek, I deeply resent this dumbing down of the science.
My main complaint about nuclear power has always been that people weren't willing to spend the money to do it right. This would be a step in the right direction, but there are so many other necessary steps...
They estimate that 'the volume of high-level nuclear waste produced by all of France’s 58 reactors over the past 40 years could fit in one Olympic-size swimming pool.'
Why do the nuclear industry always trot out these cutesy metaphors? They're so easy to pick fun of that even people who are reasonably friendly toward the industry can't resist. I mean, yes, it would all fit into an Olympic swimming pool. For about a millisecond. Then it would go critical, and your swimming pool would be an area the size of texas covered in a very thin layer of radioactive waste, plus a big glass pit in the middle. Or maybe not--I don't actually know if such a pile would go critical, but am I not the only one into whose mind this image sprung the moment we read the metaphor?
Most cars sold in the U.S. are made in the U.S. Granted, they're made in foreign-owned plants, but they're made in the U.S. With globalization, there are really very few products you can point at where every assembly is made in a single country, but nevertheless the U.S. still makes stuff--the claim that all our jobs have moved offshore simply isn't true.
Anybody who expects the democrats to be on the right side of the issue on patent and copyright issues is fooling themselves. I wish it weren't so, but progressives haven't yet figured out that maximal patent and copyright is a really bad thing. OTOH, the Republicans aren't any better. So at least until one or the other party gets a clue, this isn't an issue upon which we can really base our voting choices. If you care, the place to work this out is in the primary races--run against the incumbent yourself, and make copyright/patent balance your issue. You won't win, but you might raise some consciousnesses.
The fact that this got rated "Insightful" is a woeful commentary on the state of rational debate and analysis in the geek world. I thought we were supposed, as a group, to be smart. Apparently not.
In fact, manufacturing in the U.S. is doing very well. Productivity is at an all-time high, and the amount we are producing has not been in decline, as is commonly believed. Of course production is down right now because we're in a recession, but as a percentage of our economy, manufacturing production is pretty stable. What's down is manufacturing jobs, and that's because productivity is up. The better you are at doing something, the less work you have to do to do it.
In a perfect world, more production per unit of labor would mean that we would all have to work less to achieve the same level of prosperity. Unfortunately, that's not the case in the U.S. because our current intellectual property laws allow a relatively few people to take the lion's share of the benefit from the production being done. Rather than this new-found prosperity being spread across the whole population, it reaches only a relatively few peoples' pockets, and of course those people get quite rich.
So in fact draconian intellectual property laws are antithetical to prosperity. Obama's thesis here isn't just irrelevant to the average worker's prosperity. It's antithetical to the average worker's prosperity.
Why hasn't this been modded up to five? Give me a space elevator, and then we can talk about building a base on the moon. Using rockets to get life-support vessels into orbit is like pounding nails with dynamite.
Funny. But he was elected by the voters in his precinct, so call him whatever names you want--it's not going to make any difference until the next election.
That's not even the worst of it. The worst of it is that in order for Kaspersky's suite to do anything useful, you'd have to give it full access to the machine. If you give it full access to the machine, suddenly you're *less* secure, because you installed a "security app." So not only do your batteries last a quarter as long, you'll probably get a virus you couldn't have got otherwise.
They don't *have* to sell the stuff to geeks. The reason that they are such heroes is that despite not having to sell the stuff to us, they've decided to do so anyway, even though we will no doubt be a major pain in their collective asses. Because they think that laptops shouldn't be black boxes.
That's correct, the OLPC is built substantially differently from every laptop you've worked with.:')
Seriously, the CPU and the screen are on the same side of the hinge. The only wires that go through the hinge are a connector for the keyboard and the connections for the battery. It's full of win, except for the choice to use OpenFirmware instead of LinuxBIOS.
Naw, all you have to do is tack your comment onto one of the ones that's on top, and it'll get modded +5. Of course, that requires you to say something that people agree with. The good news is that it doesn't have to be particularly insightful...:'}
A firewall is useless, because you want people to be able to log in if they're authorized to do so. A VPN is actually a lot *less* safe than ssh, because it creates a general-purpose network link between the client and the server. Ssh is actually doing the right thing - a million auth failures in a month isn't a lot for a machine, just for a person. Even with good random passwords, as opposed to key authentication (which is a *lot* better), the chances of an attacker cracking an account with only a million logins is vanishingly small.
This is really cool until you find yourself trying to log in from the same access point where somebody with a virus was attached earlier in the day. Better to just use crypto (key-based authentication only) and rate-limiting.
Word. I don't ever allow password-based logins on my servers. Users on my server don't even *have* passwords. Random passwords are probably pretty safe, but why take the chance? Nobody's going to guess a 2048-bit RSA key. This means I can't use sudo, but I'm okay with that - if you need root, you need the root password, and you need to be in the group that's allowed to su. But you almost certainly don't need root.
Flying spaghetti monster, grant me the courage to change what can be changed, the grace to accept what cannot, and the wisdom to know the difference. And can I have romano cheese instead of parmesan?
Anti- or pro- or neutral, if we don't have the information, we can't do a rational risk assessment. When we see evidence of deceit, we can't assume that the person who's shown themselves to be deceitful in some cases is being forthright in other cases. We have to assume that they're being deceitful across the board. That sucks, because they probably are being forthright at least part of the time. But we have no way to tell which part.
To be pro-nuclear doesn't mean that you are pro-anything-nuclear. Ask someone from the nuclear navy how they feel about commercial nuclear power. You probably won't like the answer.
It's sad that you feel so entrenched in your opinion here that you have to assume that anybody who isn't pro-Vermont-Yankee is automatically anti-nuclear. Personally, I'd love to see some safe, well-managed nuclear reactors, preferably based on thorium rather than uranium, and with a sensible, believable plan for the fuel cycle and the plant lifecycle. But we don't have that, and we've never had that.
Nuclear plants should be designed to last forever. I don't mean without maintenance - I mean that the initial design should assume that every part will be replaced over the life of the plant, and should try to use the raw material from the parts as much as possible so that they don't just become a waste stream. This isn't rocket science, and while it's probably a bit more expensive at the start, I would expect it to be a lot less expensive in the long run, because you no longer have to save up for decommissioning, and of course you pay less for your waste stream.
Unfortunately, nobody's even talking about building plants like that.
I think you don't know what "incredulous" means. And the post office doesn't make a profit by selling stamps - it loses a small amount of money on every one, because stamps are used to mail things, and mailing things generally costs more than you paid for the stamp.
That's naive, unfortunately. Concrete cracks. Pipes embedded in concrete can be far worse than pipes that are in soil, because you can't get at them. If they are leaking, the leak will wind up in the soil, and the only way to fix them is to jackhammer out all the concrete, which is contaminated, which means you're operating a jackhammer in a radiation suit. And of course once you're done jackhammering, the concrete is more low-level radioactive waste you have to get rid of.
How do you *know* the plant is not unsafe at this time? If you really know, there's a job opening at the plant you should probably apply for. If you don't, isn't it a bit silly to claim otherwise?
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You're absolutely right. Corporate welfare is evil. We should stop it. Which party, and which candidates, advocate stopping it? Do you for them, or for their opponents?
This isn't government corruption. It's private enterprise. The idea is that government is fundamentally incompetent. Anything done by a government will not work. So government can't hire employees to work on software projects. Instead, it hires private enterprise to do it. Private enterprise is efficient and effective, and the result is savings.
This way of thinking has brought us multi-billion-dollar FAA upgrades that didn't work, new IRS d-bases that failed utterly, and created a whole industry of government contractors whose sole function in life is to transfer tax money from your pocket to theirs. The sad fact is that five programmers at Lawrence Livermore Labs could have gotten this done in a year for $500k. The outsourcing model doesn't work for us. Tragically, it *does* work for the people to whom the money flows, and so they lobby for it, and we get government contractors instead of government employees doing these projects.
What makes you think that this is going to be expensive? Gene therapy really isn't that expensive, and if it's effective and in demand, it will get cheaper. In the long run, everyone will get it. Of course, if you make it illegal, nobody will get it. Is that a better outcome?
What you *should* be worried about is genetically engineered serfs. Haven't you read A Brave New World?
Right, the fantasy of the extractive industries. Nobody who's interested in clean energy thinks that clean coal is anything other than a fantasy. Unfortunately, they have bigger PR machines than we do.
Burnt? No argument with the rest of what you said, but "burnt?!?" As a geek, I deeply resent this dumbing down of the science.
My main complaint about nuclear power has always been that people weren't willing to spend the money to do it right. This would be a step in the right direction, but there are so many other necessary steps...
Why do the nuclear industry always trot out these cutesy metaphors? They're so easy to pick fun of that even people who are reasonably friendly toward the industry can't resist. I mean, yes, it would all fit into an Olympic swimming pool. For about a millisecond. Then it would go critical, and your swimming pool would be an area the size of texas covered in a very thin layer of radioactive waste, plus a big glass pit in the middle. Or maybe not--I don't actually know if such a pile would go critical, but am I not the only one into whose mind this image sprung the moment we read the metaphor?
Most cars sold in the U.S. are made in the U.S. Granted, they're made in foreign-owned plants, but they're made in the U.S. With globalization, there are really very few products you can point at where every assembly is made in a single country, but nevertheless the U.S. still makes stuff--the claim that all our jobs have moved offshore simply isn't true.
Anybody who expects the democrats to be on the right side of the issue on patent and copyright issues is fooling themselves. I wish it weren't so, but progressives haven't yet figured out that maximal patent and copyright is a really bad thing. OTOH, the Republicans aren't any better. So at least until one or the other party gets a clue, this isn't an issue upon which we can really base our voting choices. If you care, the place to work this out is in the primary races--run against the incumbent yourself, and make copyright/patent balance your issue. You won't win, but you might raise some consciousnesses.
It's already been modded "Flamebait" twice. :')
The fact that this got rated "Insightful" is a woeful commentary on the state of rational debate and analysis in the geek world. I thought we were supposed, as a group, to be smart. Apparently not.
In fact, manufacturing in the U.S. is doing very well. Productivity is at an all-time high, and the amount we are producing has not been in decline, as is commonly believed. Of course production is down right now because we're in a recession, but as a percentage of our economy, manufacturing production is pretty stable. What's down is manufacturing jobs, and that's because productivity is up. The better you are at doing something, the less work you have to do to do it.
In a perfect world, more production per unit of labor would mean that we would all have to work less to achieve the same level of prosperity. Unfortunately, that's not the case in the U.S. because our current intellectual property laws allow a relatively few people to take the lion's share of the benefit from the production being done. Rather than this new-found prosperity being spread across the whole population, it reaches only a relatively few peoples' pockets, and of course those people get quite rich.
So in fact draconian intellectual property laws are antithetical to prosperity. Obama's thesis here isn't just irrelevant to the average worker's prosperity. It's antithetical to the average worker's prosperity.
Why hasn't this been modded up to five? Give me a space elevator, and then we can talk about building a base on the moon. Using rockets to get life-support vessels into orbit is like pounding nails with dynamite.
Funny. But he was elected by the voters in his precinct, so call him whatever names you want--it's not going to make any difference until the next election.
That's not even the worst of it. The worst of it is that in order for Kaspersky's suite to do anything useful, you'd have to give it full access to the machine. If you give it full access to the machine, suddenly you're *less* secure, because you installed a "security app." So not only do your batteries last a quarter as long, you'll probably get a virus you couldn't have got otherwise.
They don't *have* to sell the stuff to geeks. The reason that they are such heroes is that despite not having to sell the stuff to us, they've decided to do so anyway, even though we will no doubt be a major pain in their collective asses. Because they think that laptops shouldn't be black boxes.
That's correct, the OLPC is built substantially differently from every laptop you've worked with. :')
Seriously, the CPU and the screen are on the same side of the hinge. The only wires that go through the hinge are a connector for the keyboard and the connections for the battery. It's full of win, except for the choice to use OpenFirmware instead of LinuxBIOS.
Naw, all you have to do is tack your comment onto one of the ones that's on top, and it'll get modded +5. Of course, that requires you to say something that people agree with. The good news is that it doesn't have to be particularly insightful... :'}
A firewall is useless, because you want people to be able to log in if they're authorized to do so. A VPN is actually a lot *less* safe than ssh, because it creates a general-purpose network link between the client and the server. Ssh is actually doing the right thing - a million auth failures in a month isn't a lot for a machine, just for a person. Even with good random passwords, as opposed to key authentication (which is a *lot* better), the chances of an attacker cracking an account with only a million logins is vanishingly small.
This is really cool until you find yourself trying to log in from the same access point where somebody with a virus was attached earlier in the day. Better to just use crypto (key-based authentication only) and rate-limiting.
Word. I don't ever allow password-based logins on my servers. Users on my server don't even *have* passwords. Random passwords are probably pretty safe, but why take the chance? Nobody's going to guess a 2048-bit RSA key. This means I can't use sudo, but I'm okay with that - if you need root, you need the root password, and you need to be in the group that's allowed to su. But you almost certainly don't need root.
Flying spaghetti monster, grant me the courage to change what can be changed, the grace to accept what cannot, and the wisdom to know the difference. And can I have romano cheese instead of parmesan?
"I had read somewhere that...?" Dude! Never say stuff like that. Where did you read it, in the New York Post?
Anti- or pro- or neutral, if we don't have the information, we can't do a rational risk assessment. When we see evidence of deceit, we can't assume that the person who's shown themselves to be deceitful in some cases is being forthright in other cases. We have to assume that they're being deceitful across the board. That sucks, because they probably are being forthright at least part of the time. But we have no way to tell which part.
To be pro-nuclear doesn't mean that you are pro-anything-nuclear. Ask someone from the nuclear navy how they feel about commercial nuclear power. You probably won't like the answer.
It's sad that you feel so entrenched in your opinion here that you have to assume that anybody who isn't pro-Vermont-Yankee is automatically anti-nuclear. Personally, I'd love to see some safe, well-managed nuclear reactors, preferably based on thorium rather than uranium, and with a sensible, believable plan for the fuel cycle and the plant lifecycle. But we don't have that, and we've never had that.
Nuclear plants should be designed to last forever. I don't mean without maintenance - I mean that the initial design should assume that every part will be replaced over the life of the plant, and should try to use the raw material from the parts as much as possible so that they don't just become a waste stream. This isn't rocket science, and while it's probably a bit more expensive at the start, I would expect it to be a lot less expensive in the long run, because you no longer have to save up for decommissioning, and of course you pay less for your waste stream.
Unfortunately, nobody's even talking about building plants like that.
I think you don't know what "incredulous" means. And the post office doesn't make a profit by selling stamps - it loses a small amount of money on every one, because stamps are used to mail things, and mailing things generally costs more than you paid for the stamp.
That's naive, unfortunately. Concrete cracks. Pipes embedded in concrete can be far worse than pipes that are in soil, because you can't get at them. If they are leaking, the leak will wind up in the soil, and the only way to fix them is to jackhammer out all the concrete, which is contaminated, which means you're operating a jackhammer in a radiation suit. And of course once you're done jackhammering, the concrete is more low-level radioactive waste you have to get rid of.
How do you *know* the plant is not unsafe at this time? If you really know, there's a job opening at the plant you should probably apply for. If you don't, isn't it a bit silly to claim otherwise?