Maybe he could, but why should he? Even if you could argue he doesn't deserve that much wealth, why would the people you propose to give it to deserve it any more than he does? He should pay people for having not built Amazon?
When Google starts to fire managers that blacklist employees and backs their policies that espouse diversity with action they will start to regain credibility.
This.
Since I can't mod you up I'll quote you for visibility.
I remember SLS! It was kind of a grubby, dysfunctional distro which always made me think of industrial waste. I never got much working on it, but I learned a lot trying! Slackware was a breath of fresh air in comparison. It's kind of a shame it never gained the mind/market share of some of the later distros. It was a good, solid distro, and it probably still is.
The biggest receivers of benefits from the government tend to be those at the top, not the bottom, the ones with influence, not the ones despised.
What you're leaving out there is that those at the top are at least contributing something back to society, unlike the ones at the bottom. I'm not particularly a fan of General Motors or Goldman Sachs, but at least they create jobs and provide useful goods and services in return for their subsidies. What do the ones at the bottom provide besides a burden to those that are actually doing something useful?
Why don't we make it simple and just eliminate democracy altogether? It's not like there aren't plenty of countries doing nicely without it, and in any event, even where it's implemented, the elites somehow manage to avoid delivering on what they where elected for. All western nations are actually run by huge bureaucracies. All democracy accomplishes is avoiding accountability.
No king has ever done to his country what "democratic" governments have done to theirs. I'd certainly rather be ruled by some random descendant of George Washington's than Barack Obama or Donald Trump.
..unfortunately introducing a new desktop platform at this point is like introducing a new way to manufacture candles. They're fighting the last war. These days the most common use of a desktop is to access your browser, your email and your office suite (and that's assuming you're not already using a web based office suite and email client). Pretty much any desktop will do. (Come to think of it, I haven't used a desktop in over a decade, is there going to be a laptop version?)
The point is, the action isn't on the desktop anymore. It's hard to see how yet another platform can offer a compelling enough advantage to persuade anyone to move off of what they've already got. Especially at the price they're charging. It might have some features that make it practical for some niche market, but if so I'm not seeing what they are.
What I picture is UBI metastasizing drastically, like every other social program has. Keep in mind that while recipients might not work, they will certainly vote, and most likely they'll be voting themselves ever increasing benefits, aided and abetted by "enlightened" souls such as yourself. This, in turn, will encourage the marginal cases to abandon working entirely and become reliant on UBI.
Look at the history of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, welfare, assistance to single mothers, etc. Not a single one has ever decreased in scope, and every one of them has increased it's client base radically. While you may start out providing a tent (as if!), I doubt many election cycles go by before I'm hearing "enlightened" sorts such as yourself whining that "It's criminal that we have people living in tents! Why doesn't the government do something?".
I think there's a point. I don't think California is his sole purpose in developing this technology.
Keep in mind, given the solar radiation the surface of Mars is exposed to, at least initially habitats will need to be located underground. I'm guessing he has more than one objective in mind here.
You have about seventy years of respite from the GGP's view out of millennia, and you declare victory? And that's only counting the western world. Make no mistake, that view is still operative in many parts of the world. I think history may still have a few lessons to teach you. It ain't over quite yet.
That may be true, but at this point it's clear nearly every country on earth tries to fiddle every other country's elections. On top of that you have independent factions in many countries trying to fiddle them too, and sometimes the factions are working at cross purposes. They've been doing it for decades, and it's unlikely to stop any time soon.
It may not be an optimal situation, but at least it's a known quantity. Which is why I find outrage over the situation to be rather selective. Everybody plays, so I'm not really too impressed when the losing team cries "foul!" over it.
In theory, Mars could be terraformed. It practice, we just don't have the technology to do it yet.
I suspect we have the technology to establish a laboratory base there, but the effort and overhead required to just stay alive there would make accomplishing any actual research a side project. And it certainly wouldn't be self-sufficient. The soil is poisonous to any earth crops, the radiation levels are fatal and the atmosphere is so thin that the lack of air pressure would kill you even if it was breathable. True, establishing an artificial magnetic field would address the atmosphere issue, but again, we don't have sufficient technology to do that. We just aren't ready yet.
The more we learn about Mars, the less I'm convinced colonizing it would be practical, at least with our current state of technology. And I suspect there are a lot of things we don't know about ourselves, and about living in the Martian environment, that we're only going to find out the hard way. For example, we didn't know that we're dependent on certain kinds of bacteria living in our intestines to digest our food until fairly recently. What else are we dependent on that we're not yet aware of?
I support the effort, because you don't learn without trying, but I expect we're going to pay a high price for it. Both financially and in terms of lost lives.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe he could, but why should he? Even if you could argue he doesn't deserve that much wealth, why would the people you propose to give it to deserve it any more than he does? He should pay people for having not built Amazon?
Can anyone name a benefit to diversity that's anything close to compensation for all the bullshit we've had to endure achieving it?
I'm sure that'll end well. Just ask Goolag, er, Google.
When Google starts to fire managers that blacklist employees and backs their policies that espouse diversity with action they will start to regain credibility.
This.
Since I can't mod you up I'll quote you for visibility.
Old Chinese proverb: Kill a chicken to scare the monkeys.
Time to switch to FreeBSD!
If I hear of a company marketing a supported enterprise distro of FreeBSD, I'm gonna buy stock!
That's why!
Maybe what we need is a law to break up the Democrats.
They don't vote because they no longer believe in democracy. Especially millennials.
I remember SLS! It was kind of a grubby, dysfunctional distro which always made me think of industrial waste. I never got much working on it, but I learned a lot trying! Slackware was a breath of fresh air in comparison. It's kind of a shame it never gained the mind/market share of some of the later distros. It was a good, solid distro, and it probably still is.
I'm waiting for the AMA to declare "Investigating Hillary Clinton" a leading cause of death.
If only it was in Sweden, I'd understand it. Sweden left sanity decades ago. But this happened in Switzerland, which is usually a pretty sane country.
What you're leaving out there is that those at the top are at least contributing something back to society, unlike the ones at the bottom. I'm not particularly a fan of General Motors or Goldman Sachs, but at least they create jobs and provide useful goods and services in return for their subsidies. What do the ones at the bottom provide besides a burden to those that are actually doing something useful?
Why don't we make it simple and just eliminate democracy altogether? It's not like there aren't plenty of countries doing nicely without it, and in any event, even where it's implemented, the elites somehow manage to avoid delivering on what they where elected for. All western nations are actually run by huge bureaucracies. All democracy accomplishes is avoiding accountability.
No king has ever done to his country what "democratic" governments have done to theirs. I'd certainly rather be ruled by some random descendant of George Washington's than Barack Obama or Donald Trump.
Good riddance!
..unfortunately introducing a new desktop platform at this point is like introducing a new way to manufacture candles. They're fighting the last war. These days the most common use of a desktop is to access your browser, your email and your office suite (and that's assuming you're not already using a web based office suite and email client). Pretty much any desktop will do. (Come to think of it, I haven't used a desktop in over a decade, is there going to be a laptop version?)
The point is, the action isn't on the desktop anymore. It's hard to see how yet another platform can offer a compelling enough advantage to persuade anyone to move off of what they've already got. Especially at the price they're charging. It might have some features that make it practical for some niche market, but if so I'm not seeing what they are.
What I picture is UBI metastasizing drastically, like every other social program has. Keep in mind that while recipients might not work, they will certainly vote, and most likely they'll be voting themselves ever increasing benefits, aided and abetted by "enlightened" souls such as yourself. This, in turn, will encourage the marginal cases to abandon working entirely and become reliant on UBI.
Look at the history of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, welfare, assistance to single mothers, etc. Not a single one has ever decreased in scope, and every one of them has increased it's client base radically. While you may start out providing a tent (as if!), I doubt many election cycles go by before I'm hearing "enlightened" sorts such as yourself whining that "It's criminal that we have people living in tents! Why doesn't the government do something?".
No thanks!
I think there's a point. I don't think California is his sole purpose in developing this technology.
Keep in mind, given the solar radiation the surface of Mars is exposed to, at least initially habitats will need to be located underground. I'm guessing he has more than one objective in mind here.
You have about seventy years of respite from the GGP's view out of millennia, and you declare victory? And that's only counting the western world. Make no mistake, that view is still operative in many parts of the world. I think history may still have a few lessons to teach you. It ain't over quite yet.
That may be true, but at this point it's clear nearly every country on earth tries to fiddle every other country's elections. On top of that you have independent factions in many countries trying to fiddle them too, and sometimes the factions are working at cross purposes. They've been doing it for decades, and it's unlikely to stop any time soon.
It may not be an optimal situation, but at least it's a known quantity. Which is why I find outrage over the situation to be rather selective. Everybody plays, so I'm not really too impressed when the losing team cries "foul!" over it.
It was good for... well, pretty much nothing, even by the undemanding standards of the time.
How much you want to bet she's on Google's payroll?
In theory, Mars could be terraformed. It practice, we just don't have the technology to do it yet.
I suspect we have the technology to establish a laboratory base there, but the effort and overhead required to just stay alive there would make accomplishing any actual research a side project. And it certainly wouldn't be self-sufficient. The soil is poisonous to any earth crops, the radiation levels are fatal and the atmosphere is so thin that the lack of air pressure would kill you even if it was breathable. True, establishing an artificial magnetic field would address the atmosphere issue, but again, we don't have sufficient technology to do that. We just aren't ready yet.
The more we learn about Mars, the less I'm convinced colonizing it would be practical, at least with our current state of technology. And I suspect there are a lot of things we don't know about ourselves, and about living in the Martian environment, that we're only going to find out the hard way. For example, we didn't know that we're dependent on certain kinds of bacteria living in our intestines to digest our food until fairly recently. What else are we dependent on that we're not yet aware of?
I support the effort, because you don't learn without trying, but I expect we're going to pay a high price for it. Both financially and in terms of lost lives.
Dead platforms are usually dead for a reason. Best they get left to rest in peace.