"Well either that or you're an idiot who seems to have so much hatred for the US it has removed all your ability to think rationality in such things."
I don't hate the US (hating a gestalt is silly; there are specific people responsible for the policies in the US, and they deserve your dislike), but it's rather ridiculous for the OP to claim that "the very very best... will come to the US for education" without considering the entire set of options these people have to choose from. That'd be like me claiming Canada is the best -- I haven't lived outside of Canada for any period of time long enough for me to honestly say things like that, and it's rather myopic to take that view when there's an entire world full of things that could prove me wrong.
Your comment about networking with top people in their fields makes me laugh, because Dijkstra was from the Netherlands, Turing was from the UK, and Tim Berners-Lee (if you want a name in networking, he's a big one) was also from the UK. If I go over to research at Cambridge or work at CERN, I'm sure to run into people of similar calibre. Honestly, the US does not have a monopoly on intelligence!
Naturally someone who makes a lot of money won't care about social medicine if we assume a person's goal in life is only themselves. However, if I were to have a goal of living within an entire community, based in a region, based in a country -- and I wanted these to have goals similar to me, opportunities similar to me, and the same chance of success as me, then I'd probably want to share my wealth (if I had any) with the other so that they had the chance to sink or swim on their merits, rather than random happenstance. Insurance is about diluting risk, and including everyone in this risk pool dilutes risk the most.
The only thing I don't understand from your post is your claim that banning research into reverse engineering (via the DMCA) and banning research into things like stem cells is a socialist policy. (From Wikipedia): "Socialism refers to a broad array of ideologies and movements which aim to improve society through collective and egalitarian action..." -- I don't see how banning reverse engineering improves society (although it does improve the financial outlook of certain industries), and I don't see how banning stem cell research improves society (although it certainly seems like a "nice thing to do" if you were catering to a particular voter segment).
Before you spout off about pure socialism, I don't think pure forms of any ideologies work particularly well. Collectivism, capitalism, socialism, etc, all seem to fail in pure forms. You need to play their strengths off each other in order to get a better result, but that's just a higher-up level of the idea of capitalism where people who are enlightened and have perfect knowledge can play their economic strengths off each other for a better outcome than previous systems. A lot of US people seem to think that once someone mentions on socialist policy, they must be a person who is backing an entire system (ala the classical cartoons on archive.org that have anti-Soviet propoganda), which is a very silly belief to have. A spade is a spade, and social policies in certain areas are a far better solution than nothing or the free market. Go read "A Journal of the Plague Year" and read about how HF thinks about the social policies put in place in 1666 to deal with the outbreak of plague in London. There are some pretty important lessons in history that seem to be absent from the minds of/.ers.
"Graduate students very very rarely pay a dime in money for school in the US. "
The same is true in Canada, France, etc. People doing research in science do not pay for their degrees with money when they can pay in research and labour. My question to you is whether you'd prefer to live on this 18k a year in a country where you had to pay for medical care or not. A country where you had to directly pay dental or not. A country where you had to directly pay optical or not. A government is formed by the people, and the most logical choice for forming an insurance body such as health care, since it's sure to exclude no-one, and increase the bargaining power vs. the corporate interests.
For undergrads, it's even bigger. In France, were I to study there as a non-French citizen, I'd have to pay something like 800 euro for a year of room and board and food and tuition. That's 1/16th the cost of an undergrad in Canada, and 1/50th the price of if I went to a US school for my BSc. So not only could you get your undergrad before you do your graduate work for less, you'd have a much higher standard of living while doing it.
In terms of undergrad student health plans, I'd rather that the entire insurance cost be averaged vs. the population, so people who are earning a living wage and able to pay taxes are the ones paying premiums, not 18-25s who are unlikely to need the service and also unlikely to wish to work a job in addition to their studies.
I don't think people think about these ramifications; I appreciate and understand that universities do have "low-cost" healthcare for students, but I still believe that this is the wrong place to implement such a policy. Statistically speaking, you'd be foolish to not save up the same "low-costs" for the term you are in University and let it accumulate interest towards your retirement (retirement funds are critical to get established well before you reach the age of 30 if you wish to be financially independent).
"...that one in 10,000 engineer/scientist that will make a huge difference in the world, will come to the US for education."
A very foolish thing to do. A non-US citizen pays a lot for tuition in the US -- more than a non-US citizen in Canada, the UK, France, or many other EU countries. Countries with universities like UBC, Waterloo, Cambridge, Oxford, or Ecole Polytechnique.
What does MIT have over these schools? Higher tuition in a politically backwards country which lacks such modern amenities as socialized health care. The US is a good 200-350 years backwards compared to the rest of the countries mentioned in social policy and foreign policy. So why would a Chinese foreign national go to a place which has hated the People's Republic of China for the majority of the 20th century, and also costs more, with more restrictive laws about research (EG: stem-cells, reverse engineering, etc)?
Oh, right, Hollywood movies. That must be it -- because those are the only places where these giant differences are glossed over for the American public.
"though I'm sure that newer cars have a lot less nasties coming out of the tailpipe due to the emissions systems they have (the weight of which is part of the reason why newer cars are heavier and..."
The 1976-1985 Honda Accords (generation's 1 and 2) used a CVCC engine which required no catalytic converter to meet California emissions circa the late 1990s. I'm not a US citizen and haven't had a chance to find out of these regulations changed, but there you have it. I still have a working 1984 Honda Accord. It's old, carb'd, rusted, and gets 27-29mpg if you drive it right (which means don't jack-rabbit every light, otherwise you get low 20s). It still is the most expensive car I've ever owned, at $900 in purchase price. Beyond a heavy tune up and periodic oil changes, it runs just fine.
I don't see why a lot of people have a fascination with newer cars. They're more expensive and, at least with regards to the domestics, seem a lot more prone to falling apart. My Accords (I have a couple since they're cheap and fun to drive) have a better maintenance record than the Oldsmobile Alero my friend recently rid himself of. I'd love to have higher fuel economy (the Accords only get the mid to high 20s in the city, although they get mid 30s to 40 on the highway), but I'd have to get a CRX or a Festiva to enjoy that. I pulled up Gnumeric and calculated that were I get to get a Honda Insight (which gets 50 mpg-ish in the city), I'd have to own the car for about 64 years, during which I'd have no money to pay for maintenance, nor would I be able to do anything else to it, if I wanted to make back the $20,000+ on its purchase price vs. the gas savings over my old Accords.
It's a lot cheaper to buy an old Japanese car, replace any broken parts and also maintain it by replacing all the consumables + replacing its fluid, and then keep to a regular maintenance schedule. It's so much cheaper, you can have two just in case one decides to not work!
140F +? 140F is 60 C. Protein denatures at that temperature -- nothing human could survive the exposure long-term.
To further underline how ridiculous your claim is, the record highest temperature ever measured in the U.S was 134 degrees F at Death Valley, CA in July of 1913. The record for the world is 136 F at Al' Aziziyah, Libya in September of 1922.
"My round trip to work is 7.5 KM. A little too far to walk or bike..."
You are absolutely joking, I'm sure. A trip of 3.5-4.5 km should be well within the 10-15 minute range for a person on a bike, which is barely enough to make a me break a sweat (unless it is above 25 C out).
I'm sure with all the money you save by filling up once every month or two (since cars are great for grocery runs), you could get some pitstick to take with you if the odour is that bad. A car that does 13km round trips is great for winter, but useless in summer when it's no problem to bike.
"There has yet to be a dire 'need' for 64 bit processing, much to the similar way that there isn't a dire need for more than 4 GB of ram in a desktop machine. "
1987 called, they want to use more than 64k of RAM. How can they do that without going to 32-bit?
2007 called back, just to let you know that 4gb of RAM was $150. That's right, $150. At that point, a lot of people are starting to wake up to the unpleasant smell of Intel's PAE (that's right, segmenting, but with 32-bits!). We're also living with the limitations of the 32-bit tlb and the paging methods used. I have a machine here with 4gb of RAM, and it's not unusual because of how cheap RAM is. Linux can run it as 4gb of RAM in 64-bit mode no problem, or I can run in 32-bit with 3.6gb of RAM because the PCI bus and other devices all map to that high region (just like everything above 640k was mapped to devices back in the 20-bit addressing days). Windows 32-bit does the same thing.
Now, while Linux 64-bit is stable and mature (having been something I've used for 3 years, after which most of the userspace apps have been cleaned up to work), Windows 64-bit is still not all there. Naturally, the proprietary apps will always live in the land of 32-bit. Supreme Commander, a recent DX10 game, has a lot of 32-bit troubles -- running out of RAM and crashing. One of the things you have to do to play it well is add/3GB to your boot.ini, and patch the EXE to enable larger address spaces for userland applications.
Now, 10 years ago, or even 5 years ago, that would not have been even on the radar screen. Now that you can buy 4gb of RAM for less than $200 (CAD or USD), and now that we have games and applications that need it (beyond the VFS cache; go look at some series SQL applications or scalable web applications), I think you're way off base, and you sound like someone talking about how 64k of RAM (the 16-bit addressing limit) is more than enough for anyone.
If all you're doing is sysadmining mom-and-pop's micro website that runs fine with 1 or 2gb of RAM, you'll never know this. If you're sysadmining a company that relies on this stuff, and has a cluster of machines that need to be up and running with gobs of RAM to buffer slower disks and backplanes, you'll know better. When normal users can get 4gb of RAM for next to nothing, the server machines better have at least 32gb of RAM.
"2000 was the best product I've seen from Microsoft (and the best major release they've done)."
Uh, considering 2000 was just NT 4.0 with the IE 4.0/Explorer shell jammed on and a bit of tweaking under the covers for DirectX, I'm pretty disappointed. NT 4.0 ran reasonably well on a 486 with 24mb of RAM, and even better on a K6 233 with 128mb of RAM. However, without DirectX support newer than 3.0, the only real thing that I use Windows for (since the Wine/Cedega DirectX support lags a bit), I was forced to start using Windows 2000 -- an OS which does not run nearly as well as NT 4.0. NT 4.0 was also hobbled a bit by a lack of USB support. If you were to take a computer from anywhen between 1998 and 2001, and compare its performance under Windows 2000 and NT 4.0, you'd find it was not as close as you might think. By that metric, Windows NT 4.0 appears to be better than Win2k, and thus makes it the best Microsoft release ever.
Windows XP is only a minor revision to Windows 2000 (far more minor than Windows 2000 is over NT 4.0) -- which is why the internal nomenclature for the two is Windows NT 5.1 and Windows NT 5.0, respectively. Activation and a fisher-price interface (which you can disable) are the big differences, although the broken VM (minimizing a window to the taskbar lets it tell the VM to pageout its memory to swap -- even if you have many gb of RAM free!) and some other "tweaks" are also "features" of Windows XP. In any normal setup I've had, the only really bad difference between XP and 2K was that XP was limited to 10 TCP/IP connections at a time OOTB.
You could even argue that Windows Server 2003 is the best Microsoft release ever -- it's definitely the successor to Win2k in terms of no fisher-price UI, and the code tree used inside. Have you tried any of these, or are you making your claim purely on XP vs. 2K? I don't consider your Win9x experience to count, because that's a completely different codetree/build from Microsoft.
Of course, YMMV, since I only run Windows inside virtualization with either MacOS X or Linux as the real host operating systems (no troubles with search or sleep inside MacOS X -- although I disable Spotlight due to its rather large and unwelcome metadata cachces).
"The reason laptops are starting to outsell desktops is simply that the cost premium has all but disappeared."
If I were to sell my MacBook Pro to get the latest model (gaining me an upgrade from an ATI X1600 128mb to an nVidia 8600M 256mb, a newer chipset, a 2.4Ghz CPU from a 2.16Ghz CPU, and an LED backlit display), it would cost more than a recent desktop upgrade I did. This desktop upgrade was roughly $800, and got me a 2.4Ghz AMD X2 CPU (vs. a 2.0Ghz X2), a 256mb nVidia 8600GTS (vs a 128mb 6800), 4gb of RAM (vs 2gb of RAM), and a much better motherboard (an Asus M2N-Sli deluxe).
The thing is, I got to keep all the old parts of my computer as well (allowing me to trickle them down to other machines) -- unlike the laptop situation, where I have to roll along the money by selling the old one to pay the majority of the difference on the new one.
My entire desktop setup, with 24" monitor, 5.1 speakers, and a local storage of 1tb of HD space cost $500 less than my MacBook Pro (which has a much smaller monitor, crappier video card, 1/5th the HD space, slower CPU, less RAM, etc). MacBook Pros, given their specs, are within $200 of similarly equipped Dell and other name-brand laptops. No-name laptops tend to have the kind of parts I wouldn't buy (Via Unichrome chipsets, for example), so aren't in consideration.
The funny thing is that a 17 or 20" laptop has an even larger price premium -- I could easily have a 30" monitor with my setup for the same price as one of those laptops.
Name for me 1 laptop that I could buy for less than $800 CAD that would let me play Oblivion at 1920x1200 45fps with all the settings turned up. My desktop rig can do that.
This price premium you speak of seems alive and well to me!
The reason is pretty simple: chips only cost a little bit more to make larger (in terms of die-surface area), until a certain point. Then the cost goes up exponentially instead of linearly (the knee-bend in the cost-to-area function plot).
When you make 200 silicon chips off of a wafer, you might have 10% of them fail due to salting, and still get 180 perfectly good chips. If you made 1 chip with 200 silicon-chips worth of area, you'd never, ever get a product. If you did, you'd have to cover the cost of all the other silicon wafers that were unable to produce the same giga-chip.
Just imagine how much money it costs to get a 24" surface of transistors, in which all the transistors work. Now make that surface 42" in size. This is why LCD televisions and monitors continue to be relatively expensive, considering they're made out of sand. When you have 1-2 billion transistors, not all of them are going to work;)
It's a lot easier to take the ignition coil wire off of older cars (you don't need a screwdriver). Newer cars, while distributor-less, still have easy-to-remove wires linking the electrical system to the spark plugs.
Personally, I find the best anti-theft method is simply to drive a car from the 1980s.
Right around when they file to have Apple remove Spotlight from OS 10.4+ -- when the US Federal court system rules that Apple (or any of the distribution related companies) have a monopoly, and have been proven guilty of leveraging that monopoly to further their own business ends, to the detriment of the market.
"Netiquette" doesn't bother me so much because it's just a shortening of "Internet Etiquette".
What you meant to say was that netiquette is a portmanteau of "network etiquette." Portmanteaus are cool -- without them, we wouldn't have motel, smog, brunch, or chillax in our lexicon.
This smacks of the stuff they talked about "This Film Is Not Yet Rated" in relation to Hollywood. Self-censorship that ends up growing and becoming a lot worse.
The US MPAA film rating system is setup with R and NC-17. R means that people under 17 need someone to be there (an escort), while NC-17 is supposed to stop anyone under 17 from being in the theatre (which is a joke and useless, since you can just watch it on DVD in the comfort of your own home within 6-8 months). An NC-17 rating no longer allows a movie to be an adult movie for adults; it means you can't be shown on a number of screens, and you won't be allowed to advertise to your potential audience. It's a kiss of death done by the MPAA board to censor what the US people see.
The ESRB M and AO ratings are both like R because any adult can purchase the game for people under 17 and 18, respectively, and be well within the law. Yet here we have console makers saying that while they allow people to have games on their consoles, they don't allow AO games on their consoles. This is outright ludicrous. Microsoft and Nintendo both had some fairly explicit nudity on the Xbox and Gamecube with BMX XXX (the Sony PS2 version was censored and did not have the stripper videos uncensored like the other two versions). There has also been plenty of explicit violence (Manhunt is a good example; you sneak up and brutally murder people!).
To say that they won't carry AO is just a way to start enforcing other people's views on the views of people who are actually interested in purchasing the games mentioned.
A further thought: is it really wise to control so much what children see and do? In the UK, it's very legal for a 16-year-old to drink. France as well. A normal, moderate consumption with a meal is not looked down on. Their percentage of binge drinking of young adults is nothing compared to the US. It seems that by keeping these things unaccessible for a longer period, people don't build up the understanding needed to deal with these situations when they are old enough to be in them. Imagine if the first time you were allowed to play Doom or Duke Nukem 3D was when you were 18 or 19 -- how would that change your outlook on those games?
I seem to recall playing a game called Slave Escape that was very similar to the gameplay of Oregon Trail. You'd roll up a character (with a 1/10 chance of being literate; most of the time you couldn't read, and all the signs would be mapped to random characters).
You would set out to escape to Canada and freedom. Along the way, you would follow the underground railroad as best as you could. You had to learn things like on what side of a tree moss grew (or be fortunate enough to get a compass), you could use pepper to avoid trailing dogs, and you had to navigate some speaking situations. If you succeeded, you became a free person.
I know I played it as much as I played Oregon Trail and Lemonade Stand, but I still haven't been able to find a description of this game or a hint as to where I could get a ROM to relive the experience (the keywords I can think of tend to lead me to black history websites, since the game was fairly historically accurate).
I bought a 12" Powerbook and got a rebate (since I also purchased an iPod with it).
I mailed away the papers, and waited. 5 months later I still had no rebate, so I emailed the only email I could find (since the website for contacting someone about the issue didn't seem to have an email address) -- Steve Jobs.
I was contacted by a support person at Apple Canada who personally worked with me to find out what went wrong (the rebate centre ignored my written address and used an old one that was on the receipt sent in as proof of purchase), and solved my issue. I didn't threaten anyone, I merely explained myself, and I got the best customer service ever.
A similar event happened a few years back when I managed to find a security issue with the Airport base stations. I was actually phoned by an Apple tech who was working to reproduce the issue. The only other company that has taken the time to respond to bug reports with such capability is Danger (the Hiptop/Sidekick people). Again, I wasn't threatening to never purchase that product for a department.
I have plenty of other experiences with Apple, but they've already proven to me they care about customer service in ways that few companies do.
"Every job has its unpleasant parts, and while a F/OSS coder can skip them a commercial coder can not; if the spec calls for an embedded testing code, for example, or Doxygen comments, you put it in."
The percentage of non-FOSS which is documented and the percentage of FOSS which is documented are pretty similar in my experience. Perhaps you are unaware of the incredible 95% of software which is developed commercially, but which is not sold in a shrink-wrapped box in Circuit City. Many companies have internal IT departments which couldn't code their way out of a paper bag in VB, let alone document it. Go read the daily WTF if you think I'm lying.
"s/he might be wrong but at least the product is consistent, and not designed by a committee as it sometimes happens."
Andrew Morton. That's a name I can think of when I think of someone with vision for a particular FOSS project which are willing to say when things (don't) match their vision. Linus Torvalds also fits this bill. There are similar names in other projects, but I'm most familiar with the kernel.
"These clones haven't been weeded out by the market, and so many of them are not viable - but they are out there,"
The weeding doesn't occur at the store level, it occurs at the reputation level. All FOSS stuff is staked on reputation. If you have a high reputation, you are going to be used more and included in more distributions. If you are a crappy app, you'll never see a real user base. Since the programmer is programming for ego (see the somewhat inaccurate women/baby analogy), the programmer should be motivated to produce better work which becomes more popular. The KDE programmers sure seem to have worked to make sure that KDE is useful. The Gnome programmers have also worked towards some mindshare. Given how people used to choose window managers, but now choose desktop environments, I'd say that these programmers have changed the game wrt GUI interfaces on Linux. That sounds much like a market shift, but with eyeballs and hearts instead of money.
"Effort dispersed, spent on competing projects is ultimately wasted."
Oh, I'm sorry, I guess you're just a troll. Or you simply don't understand what FOSS is.
"Yes, but men have children too. Is that the scapegoat?"
No. It just means that men, up until now, have either not felt empowered to speak out about their own terrible working conditions, or have been unaware of their own inability to be effective fathers because of the working conditions.
What's good for the goose is good for the gander. It's stupid to require parents to be away from their children. Children who aren't raised correctly go bad. How bad? How about gun toting killing sprees at schools?
This is a fairly systemic disease in a lot of first world countries. Japanese people have a word for people who work themselves to death rather than work to build a family. They also have an incredibly high rate of suicide for developed countries, and have other issues (like NEETs and Hikikomoris).
"Seriously, if black people are quitting the IT industry because of discrimination, that's one thing. But leaving because they don't want to be called nappy-headed hos? Tough. Spics have to put up with it. Why shouldn't black people."
Would it help if I used other racial slurs to illustrate the problem with your statement?
These kinds of working conditions should not be acceptable to ANYONE. We're not living in 18th century coal mining towns. Progress is about standards of living. My ultimate legacy will be my biological offspring, and anything I happen to create which is of importance to others. While my creations might be forgotten or destroyed, it's unlikely that my DNA will come to a sad end if I raise my children right.
If you want to work long, shitty hours for someone who'll replace you in a heartbeat, feel free. I'm going to work whatever job lets me live a life. If the job is something I like and believe in, I'll work to support it as fully as I can around that. However, there are boundaries. Work smarter, not harder. I find that works better than the "dig up, stupid" approach of throwing more work at people.
The cost is nothing. I'm typing this on an IBM model M with the keycaps re-arranged to Dvorak. I've had Windows, MacOS X, and Linux all set to use the Dvorak keyboard layout with no troubles.
Now, as for actually having the keycaps set to Dvorak, that's mostly for when you start out. Once you develop your muscle memory so that you can touch type, it's really not an issue. MacOS X even has the DQ (Dvorak-QWERTY) mode for helping people who type like this. When you're typing normal text, the layout is Dvorak; when you press the command button, it shifts back to QWERTY so the shortcuts you're used to (Apple-X, C, V, etc) are all in the same location as before.
The real cost is your personal time. You will not be able to type above 50wpm for a few weeks.
Wikipedia needs to go ahead and block all elementary and most high schools from editing the site.
Why? Most of the vandalism I have to revert comes from US elementary schools. It seems like people below a certain age simply don't have the maturity to handle the power to edit content, without vandalising it in some way. Children old enough to be able to contributed can go ahead and create accounts to edit.
"Consider the following question given the current hardware development needs, and also the claims of the transistor lovers for it being a device that gives one insights of the internal working of a computer. How relevant or useful is it to learn BJT transistors in the current era? "
You don't have to know everything, but you should probably know something.
Because of how "channels" work (how they map to the actual frequencies), the only usable channels (that is, channels far enough away to not suffer interference) are 1, 6, 11.
7 8 9 -- all of those will suffer from the same problems from people on channel 6. 802.11[bg] is not designed to work well and play with others.
Yes, within the last month I've installed Windows XP. With bootcamp, it was a remarkable process. Apple has managed to improve Microsoft's install routine to the point that I didn't have to do anything; it booted into the installer CD, and once that was done, I put in the bootcamp CD as instructed (which it made for me).
Everything works in Windows on the otherwise standard Apple hardware, although not as well as it does under MacOS (the brightness and volume settings seem to have much coarser settings, and there is no Expose-style visual feedback, nor automatic sleeping when the lid is closed, etc).
I think the Ubuntu developers working on the install process should focus on matching that kind of ability. Xorg's config file is the big ball and chain I see, since the design is ill-suited to modern life (where there isn't a feisty guru who sets up the cards, monitors, and other fields manually). Until I can manually change resolution seamlessly and easily in a Linux distro out of the box, we're not to the level of MacOS 7 or Win95. Xorg isn't the only Win3.1-era-usability problem in a standard Linux distro; plenty of other software makes wrong assumptions about its target audience to be considered ready for end-users.
The Ubuntu team is focusing on making the experience good, but they're only so many people. You have to get some serious commitment and drive to get all the software on the same page, audience wise.
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"Well either that or you're an idiot who seems to have so much hatred for the US it has removed all your ability to think rationality in such things."
... will come to the US for education" without considering the entire set of options these people have to choose from. That'd be like me claiming Canada is the best -- I haven't lived outside of Canada for any period of time long enough for me to honestly say things like that, and it's rather myopic to take that view when there's an entire world full of things that could prove me wrong.
/.ers.
I don't hate the US (hating a gestalt is silly; there are specific people responsible for the policies in the US, and they deserve your dislike), but it's rather ridiculous for the OP to claim that "the very very best
Your comment about networking with top people in their fields makes me laugh, because Dijkstra was from the Netherlands, Turing was from the UK, and Tim Berners-Lee (if you want a name in networking, he's a big one) was also from the UK. If I go over to research at Cambridge or work at CERN, I'm sure to run into people of similar calibre. Honestly, the US does not have a monopoly on intelligence!
Naturally someone who makes a lot of money won't care about social medicine if we assume a person's goal in life is only themselves. However, if I were to have a goal of living within an entire community, based in a region, based in a country -- and I wanted these to have goals similar to me, opportunities similar to me, and the same chance of success as me, then I'd probably want to share my wealth (if I had any) with the other so that they had the chance to sink or swim on their merits, rather than random happenstance. Insurance is about diluting risk, and including everyone in this risk pool dilutes risk the most.
The only thing I don't understand from your post is your claim that banning research into reverse engineering (via the DMCA) and banning research into things like stem cells is a socialist policy. (From Wikipedia): "Socialism refers to a broad array of ideologies and movements which aim to improve society through collective and egalitarian action..." -- I don't see how banning reverse engineering improves society (although it does improve the financial outlook of certain industries), and I don't see how banning stem cell research improves society (although it certainly seems like a "nice thing to do" if you were catering to a particular voter segment).
Before you spout off about pure socialism, I don't think pure forms of any ideologies work particularly well. Collectivism, capitalism, socialism, etc, all seem to fail in pure forms. You need to play their strengths off each other in order to get a better result, but that's just a higher-up level of the idea of capitalism where people who are enlightened and have perfect knowledge can play their economic strengths off each other for a better outcome than previous systems. A lot of US people seem to think that once someone mentions on socialist policy, they must be a person who is backing an entire system (ala the classical cartoons on archive.org that have anti-Soviet propoganda), which is a very silly belief to have. A spade is a spade, and social policies in certain areas are a far better solution than nothing or the free market. Go read "A Journal of the Plague Year" and read about how HF thinks about the social policies put in place in 1666 to deal with the outbreak of plague in London. There are some pretty important lessons in history that seem to be absent from the minds of
"Graduate students very very rarely pay a dime in money for school in the US. "
The same is true in Canada, France, etc. People doing research in science do not pay for their degrees with money when they can pay in research and labour. My question to you is whether you'd prefer to live on this 18k a year in a country where you had to pay for medical care or not. A country where you had to directly pay dental or not. A country where you had to directly pay optical or not. A government is formed by the people, and the most logical choice for forming an insurance body such as health care, since it's sure to exclude no-one, and increase the bargaining power vs. the corporate interests.
For undergrads, it's even bigger. In France, were I to study there as a non-French citizen, I'd have to pay something like 800 euro for a year of room and board and food and tuition. That's 1/16th the cost of an undergrad in Canada, and 1/50th the price of if I went to a US school for my BSc. So not only could you get your undergrad before you do your graduate work for less, you'd have a much higher standard of living while doing it.
In terms of undergrad student health plans, I'd rather that the entire insurance cost be averaged vs. the population, so people who are earning a living wage and able to pay taxes are the ones paying premiums, not 18-25s who are unlikely to need the service and also unlikely to wish to work a job in addition to their studies.
I don't think people think about these ramifications; I appreciate and understand that universities do have "low-cost" healthcare for students, but I still believe that this is the wrong place to implement such a policy. Statistically speaking, you'd be foolish to not save up the same "low-costs" for the term you are in University and let it accumulate interest towards your retirement (retirement funds are critical to get established well before you reach the age of 30 if you wish to be financially independent).
"...that one in 10,000 engineer/scientist that will make a huge difference in the world, will come to the US for education."
A very foolish thing to do. A non-US citizen pays a lot for tuition in the US -- more than a non-US citizen in Canada, the UK, France, or many other EU countries. Countries with universities like UBC, Waterloo, Cambridge, Oxford, or Ecole Polytechnique.
What does MIT have over these schools? Higher tuition in a politically backwards country which lacks such modern amenities as socialized health care. The US is a good 200-350 years backwards compared to the rest of the countries mentioned in social policy and foreign policy. So why would a Chinese foreign national go to a place which has hated the People's Republic of China for the majority of the 20th century, and also costs more, with more restrictive laws about research (EG: stem-cells, reverse engineering, etc)?
Oh, right, Hollywood movies. That must be it -- because those are the only places where these giant differences are glossed over for the American public.
"though I'm sure that newer cars have a lot less nasties coming out of the tailpipe due to the emissions systems they have (the weight of which is part of the reason why newer cars are heavier and..."
The 1976-1985 Honda Accords (generation's 1 and 2) used a CVCC engine which required no catalytic converter to meet California emissions circa the late 1990s. I'm not a US citizen and haven't had a chance to find out of these regulations changed, but there you have it. I still have a working 1984 Honda Accord. It's old, carb'd, rusted, and gets 27-29mpg if you drive it right (which means don't jack-rabbit every light, otherwise you get low 20s). It still is the most expensive car I've ever owned, at $900 in purchase price. Beyond a heavy tune up and periodic oil changes, it runs just fine.
I don't see why a lot of people have a fascination with newer cars. They're more expensive and, at least with regards to the domestics, seem a lot more prone to falling apart. My Accords (I have a couple since they're cheap and fun to drive) have a better maintenance record than the Oldsmobile Alero my friend recently rid himself of. I'd love to have higher fuel economy (the Accords only get the mid to high 20s in the city, although they get mid 30s to 40 on the highway), but I'd have to get a CRX or a Festiva to enjoy that. I pulled up Gnumeric and calculated that were I get to get a Honda Insight (which gets 50 mpg-ish in the city), I'd have to own the car for about 64 years, during which I'd have no money to pay for maintenance, nor would I be able to do anything else to it, if I wanted to make back the $20,000+ on its purchase price vs. the gas savings over my old Accords.
It's a lot cheaper to buy an old Japanese car, replace any broken parts and also maintain it by replacing all the consumables + replacing its fluid, and then keep to a regular maintenance schedule. It's so much cheaper, you can have two just in case one decides to not work!
140F +? 140F is 60 C. Protein denatures at that temperature -- nothing human could survive the exposure long-term.
To further underline how ridiculous your claim is, the record highest temperature ever measured in the U.S was 134 degrees F at Death Valley, CA in July of 1913. The record for the world is 136 F at Al' Aziziyah, Libya in September of 1922.
"My round trip to work is 7.5 KM. A little too far to walk or bike..."
You are absolutely joking, I'm sure. A trip of 3.5-4.5 km should be well within the 10-15 minute range for a person on a bike, which is barely enough to make a me break a sweat (unless it is above 25 C out).
I'm sure with all the money you save by filling up once every month or two (since cars are great for grocery runs), you could get some pitstick to take with you if the odour is that bad. A car that does 13km round trips is great for winter, but useless in summer when it's no problem to bike.
"There has yet to be a dire 'need' for 64 bit processing, much to the similar way that there isn't a dire need for more than 4 GB of ram in a desktop machine. "
/3GB to your boot.ini, and patch the EXE to enable larger address spaces for userland applications.
1987 called, they want to use more than 64k of RAM. How can they do that without going to 32-bit?
2007 called back, just to let you know that 4gb of RAM was $150. That's right, $150. At that point, a lot of people are starting to wake up to the unpleasant smell of Intel's PAE (that's right, segmenting, but with 32-bits!). We're also living with the limitations of the 32-bit tlb and the paging methods used. I have a machine here with 4gb of RAM, and it's not unusual because of how cheap RAM is. Linux can run it as 4gb of RAM in 64-bit mode no problem, or I can run in 32-bit with 3.6gb of RAM because the PCI bus and other devices all map to that high region (just like everything above 640k was mapped to devices back in the 20-bit addressing days). Windows 32-bit does the same thing.
Now, while Linux 64-bit is stable and mature (having been something I've used for 3 years, after which most of the userspace apps have been cleaned up to work), Windows 64-bit is still not all there. Naturally, the proprietary apps will always live in the land of 32-bit. Supreme Commander, a recent DX10 game, has a lot of 32-bit troubles -- running out of RAM and crashing. One of the things you have to do to play it well is add
Now, 10 years ago, or even 5 years ago, that would not have been even on the radar screen. Now that you can buy 4gb of RAM for less than $200 (CAD or USD), and now that we have games and applications that need it (beyond the VFS cache; go look at some series SQL applications or scalable web applications), I think you're way off base, and you sound like someone talking about how 64k of RAM (the 16-bit addressing limit) is more than enough for anyone.
If all you're doing is sysadmining mom-and-pop's micro website that runs fine with 1 or 2gb of RAM, you'll never know this. If you're sysadmining a company that relies on this stuff, and has a cluster of machines that need to be up and running with gobs of RAM to buffer slower disks and backplanes, you'll know better. When normal users can get 4gb of RAM for next to nothing, the server machines better have at least 32gb of RAM.
"2000 was the best product I've seen from Microsoft (and the best major release they've done)."
Uh, considering 2000 was just NT 4.0 with the IE 4.0/Explorer shell jammed on and a bit of tweaking under the covers for DirectX, I'm pretty disappointed. NT 4.0 ran reasonably well on a 486 with 24mb of RAM, and even better on a K6 233 with 128mb of RAM. However, without DirectX support newer than 3.0, the only real thing that I use Windows for (since the Wine/Cedega DirectX support lags a bit), I was forced to start using Windows 2000 -- an OS which does not run nearly as well as NT 4.0. NT 4.0 was also hobbled a bit by a lack of USB support. If you were to take a computer from anywhen between 1998 and 2001, and compare its performance under Windows 2000 and NT 4.0, you'd find it was not as close as you might think. By that metric, Windows NT 4.0 appears to be better than Win2k, and thus makes it the best Microsoft release ever.
Windows XP is only a minor revision to Windows 2000 (far more minor than Windows 2000 is over NT 4.0) -- which is why the internal nomenclature for the two is Windows NT 5.1 and Windows NT 5.0, respectively. Activation and a fisher-price interface (which you can disable) are the big differences, although the broken VM (minimizing a window to the taskbar lets it tell the VM to pageout its memory to swap -- even if you have many gb of RAM free!) and some other "tweaks" are also "features" of Windows XP. In any normal setup I've had, the only really bad difference between XP and 2K was that XP was limited to 10 TCP/IP connections at a time OOTB.
You could even argue that Windows Server 2003 is the best Microsoft release ever -- it's definitely the successor to Win2k in terms of no fisher-price UI, and the code tree used inside. Have you tried any of these, or are you making your claim purely on XP vs. 2K? I don't consider your Win9x experience to count, because that's a completely different codetree/build from Microsoft.
Of course, YMMV, since I only run Windows inside virtualization with either MacOS X or Linux as the real host operating systems (no troubles with search or sleep inside MacOS X -- although I disable Spotlight due to its rather large and unwelcome metadata cachces).
"The reason laptops are starting to outsell desktops is simply that the cost premium has all but disappeared."
If I were to sell my MacBook Pro to get the latest model (gaining me an upgrade from an ATI X1600 128mb to an nVidia 8600M 256mb, a newer chipset, a 2.4Ghz CPU from a 2.16Ghz CPU, and an LED backlit display), it would cost more than a recent desktop upgrade I did. This desktop upgrade was roughly $800, and got me a 2.4Ghz AMD X2 CPU (vs. a 2.0Ghz X2), a 256mb nVidia 8600GTS (vs a 128mb 6800), 4gb of RAM (vs 2gb of RAM), and a much better motherboard (an Asus M2N-Sli deluxe).
The thing is, I got to keep all the old parts of my computer as well (allowing me to trickle them down to other machines) -- unlike the laptop situation, where I have to roll along the money by selling the old one to pay the majority of the difference on the new one.
My entire desktop setup, with 24" monitor, 5.1 speakers, and a local storage of 1tb of HD space cost $500 less than my MacBook Pro (which has a much smaller monitor, crappier video card, 1/5th the HD space, slower CPU, less RAM, etc). MacBook Pros, given their specs, are within $200 of similarly equipped Dell and other name-brand laptops. No-name laptops tend to have the kind of parts I wouldn't buy (Via Unichrome chipsets, for example), so aren't in consideration.
The funny thing is that a 17 or 20" laptop has an even larger price premium -- I could easily have a 30" monitor with my setup for the same price as one of those laptops.
Name for me 1 laptop that I could buy for less than $800 CAD that would let me play Oblivion at 1920x1200 45fps with all the settings turned up. My desktop rig can do that.
This price premium you speak of seems alive and well to me!
The reason is pretty simple: chips only cost a little bit more to make larger (in terms of die-surface area), until a certain point. Then the cost goes up exponentially instead of linearly (the knee-bend in the cost-to-area function plot).
;)
When you make 200 silicon chips off of a wafer, you might have 10% of them fail due to salting, and still get 180 perfectly good chips. If you made 1 chip with 200 silicon-chips worth of area, you'd never, ever get a product. If you did, you'd have to cover the cost of all the other silicon wafers that were unable to produce the same giga-chip.
Just imagine how much money it costs to get a 24" surface of transistors, in which all the transistors work. Now make that surface 42" in size. This is why LCD televisions and monitors continue to be relatively expensive, considering they're made out of sand. When you have 1-2 billion transistors, not all of them are going to work
It's a lot easier to take the ignition coil wire off of older cars (you don't need a screwdriver). Newer cars, while distributor-less, still have easy-to-remove wires linking the electrical system to the spark plugs.
Personally, I find the best anti-theft method is simply to drive a car from the 1980s.
Right around when they file to have Apple remove Spotlight from OS 10.4+ -- when the US Federal court system rules that Apple (or any of the distribution related companies) have a monopoly, and have been proven guilty of leveraging that monopoly to further their own business ends, to the detriment of the market.
Basically never, you troll.
The United States' Space Arsenal.
It really makes no sense for one state to be united.
"Netiquette" doesn't bother me so much because it's just a shortening of "Internet Etiquette".
What you meant to say was that netiquette is a portmanteau of "network etiquette." Portmanteaus are cool -- without them, we wouldn't have motel, smog, brunch, or chillax in our lexicon.
This smacks of the stuff they talked about "This Film Is Not Yet Rated" in relation to Hollywood. Self-censorship that ends up growing and becoming a lot worse.
The US MPAA film rating system is setup with R and NC-17. R means that people under 17 need someone to be there (an escort), while NC-17 is supposed to stop anyone under 17 from being in the theatre (which is a joke and useless, since you can just watch it on DVD in the comfort of your own home within 6-8 months). An NC-17 rating no longer allows a movie to be an adult movie for adults; it means you can't be shown on a number of screens, and you won't be allowed to advertise to your potential audience. It's a kiss of death done by the MPAA board to censor what the US people see.
The ESRB M and AO ratings are both like R because any adult can purchase the game for people under 17 and 18, respectively, and be well within the law. Yet here we have console makers saying that while they allow people to have games on their consoles, they don't allow AO games on their consoles. This is outright ludicrous. Microsoft and Nintendo both had some fairly explicit nudity on the Xbox and Gamecube with BMX XXX (the Sony PS2 version was censored and did not have the stripper videos uncensored like the other two versions). There has also been plenty of explicit violence (Manhunt is a good example; you sneak up and brutally murder people!).
To say that they won't carry AO is just a way to start enforcing other people's views on the views of people who are actually interested in purchasing the games mentioned.
A further thought: is it really wise to control so much what children see and do? In the UK, it's very legal for a 16-year-old to drink. France as well. A normal, moderate consumption with a meal is not looked down on. Their percentage of binge drinking of young adults is nothing compared to the US. It seems that by keeping these things unaccessible for a longer period, people don't build up the understanding needed to deal with these situations when they are old enough to be in them. Imagine if the first time you were allowed to play Doom or Duke Nukem 3D was when you were 18 or 19 -- how would that change your outlook on those games?
I seem to recall playing a game called Slave Escape that was very similar to the gameplay of Oregon Trail. You'd roll up a character (with a 1/10 chance of being literate; most of the time you couldn't read, and all the signs would be mapped to random characters).
You would set out to escape to Canada and freedom. Along the way, you would follow the underground railroad as best as you could. You had to learn things like on what side of a tree moss grew (or be fortunate enough to get a compass), you could use pepper to avoid trailing dogs, and you had to navigate some speaking situations. If you succeeded, you became a free person.
I know I played it as much as I played Oregon Trail and Lemonade Stand, but I still haven't been able to find a description of this game or a hint as to where I could get a ROM to relive the experience (the keywords I can think of tend to lead me to black history websites, since the game was fairly historically accurate).
I bought a 12" Powerbook and got a rebate (since I also purchased an iPod with it).
I mailed away the papers, and waited. 5 months later I still had no rebate, so I emailed the only email I could find (since the website for contacting someone about the issue didn't seem to have an email address) -- Steve Jobs.
I was contacted by a support person at Apple Canada who personally worked with me to find out what went wrong (the rebate centre ignored my written address and used an old one that was on the receipt sent in as proof of purchase), and solved my issue. I didn't threaten anyone, I merely explained myself, and I got the best customer service ever.
A similar event happened a few years back when I managed to find a security issue with the Airport base stations. I was actually phoned by an Apple tech who was working to reproduce the issue. The only other company that has taken the time to respond to bug reports with such capability is Danger (the Hiptop/Sidekick people). Again, I wasn't threatening to never purchase that product for a department.
I have plenty of other experiences with Apple, but they've already proven to me they care about customer service in ways that few companies do.
"Every job has its unpleasant parts, and while a F/OSS coder can skip them a commercial coder can not; if the spec calls for an embedded testing code, for example, or Doxygen comments, you put it in."
The percentage of non-FOSS which is documented and the percentage of FOSS which is documented are pretty similar in my experience. Perhaps you are unaware of the incredible 95% of software which is developed commercially, but which is not sold in a shrink-wrapped box in Circuit City. Many companies have internal IT departments which couldn't code their way out of a paper bag in VB, let alone document it. Go read the daily WTF if you think I'm lying.
"s/he might be wrong but at least the product is consistent, and not designed by a committee as it sometimes happens."
Andrew Morton. That's a name I can think of when I think of someone with vision for a particular FOSS project which are willing to say when things (don't) match their vision. Linus Torvalds also fits this bill. There are similar names in other projects, but I'm most familiar with the kernel.
"These clones haven't been weeded out by the market, and so many of them are not viable - but they are out there,"
The weeding doesn't occur at the store level, it occurs at the reputation level. All FOSS stuff is staked on reputation. If you have a high reputation, you are going to be used more and included in more distributions. If you are a crappy app, you'll never see a real user base. Since the programmer is programming for ego (see the somewhat inaccurate women/baby analogy), the programmer should be motivated to produce better work which becomes more popular. The KDE programmers sure seem to have worked to make sure that KDE is useful. The Gnome programmers have also worked towards some mindshare. Given how people used to choose window managers, but now choose desktop environments, I'd say that these programmers have changed the game wrt GUI interfaces on Linux. That sounds much like a market shift, but with eyeballs and hearts instead of money.
"Effort dispersed, spent on competing projects is ultimately wasted."
Oh, I'm sorry, I guess you're just a troll. Or you simply don't understand what FOSS is.
"Yes, but men have children too. Is that the scapegoat?"
No. It just means that men, up until now, have either not felt empowered to speak out about their own terrible working conditions, or have been unaware of their own inability to be effective fathers because of the working conditions.
What's good for the goose is good for the gander. It's stupid to require parents to be away from their children. Children who aren't raised correctly go bad. How bad? How about gun toting killing sprees at schools?
This is a fairly systemic disease in a lot of first world countries. Japanese people have a word for people who work themselves to death rather than work to build a family. They also have an incredibly high rate of suicide for developed countries, and have other issues (like NEETs and Hikikomoris).
Do you want that? I don't.
You are so blind to your own oppression.
"Seriously, if black people are quitting the IT industry because of discrimination, that's one thing. But leaving because they don't want to be called nappy-headed hos? Tough. Spics have to put up with it. Why shouldn't black people."
Would it help if I used other racial slurs to illustrate the problem with your statement?
These kinds of working conditions should not be acceptable to ANYONE. We're not living in 18th century coal mining towns. Progress is about standards of living. My ultimate legacy will be my biological offspring, and anything I happen to create which is of importance to others. While my creations might be forgotten or destroyed, it's unlikely that my DNA will come to a sad end if I raise my children right.
If you want to work long, shitty hours for someone who'll replace you in a heartbeat, feel free. I'm going to work whatever job lets me live a life. If the job is something I like and believe in, I'll work to support it as fully as I can around that. However, there are boundaries. Work smarter, not harder. I find that works better than the "dig up, stupid" approach of throwing more work at people.
The cost is nothing. I'm typing this on an IBM model M with the keycaps re-arranged to Dvorak. I've had Windows, MacOS X, and Linux all set to use the Dvorak keyboard layout with no troubles.
Now, as for actually having the keycaps set to Dvorak, that's mostly for when you start out. Once you develop your muscle memory so that you can touch type, it's really not an issue. MacOS X even has the DQ (Dvorak-QWERTY) mode for helping people who type like this. When you're typing normal text, the layout is Dvorak; when you press the command button, it shifts back to QWERTY so the shortcuts you're used to (Apple-X, C, V, etc) are all in the same location as before.
The real cost is your personal time. You will not be able to type above 50wpm for a few weeks.
Wikipedia needs to go ahead and block all elementary and most high schools from editing the site.
Why? Most of the vandalism I have to revert comes from US elementary schools. It seems like people below a certain age simply don't have the maturity to handle the power to edit content, without vandalising it in some way. Children old enough to be able to contributed can go ahead and create accounts to edit.
"Consider the following question given the current hardware development needs, and also the claims of the transistor lovers for it being a device that gives one insights of the internal working of a computer. How relevant or useful is it to learn BJT transistors in the current era? "
You don't have to know everything, but you should probably know something.
Because of how "channels" work (how they map to the actual frequencies), the only usable channels (that is, channels far enough away to not suffer interference) are 1, 6, 11.
7 8 9 -- all of those will suffer from the same problems from people on channel 6. 802.11[bg] is not designed to work well and play with others.
Yes, within the last month I've installed Windows XP. With bootcamp, it was a remarkable process. Apple has managed to improve Microsoft's install routine to the point that I didn't have to do anything; it booted into the installer CD, and once that was done, I put in the bootcamp CD as instructed (which it made for me).
Everything works in Windows on the otherwise standard Apple hardware, although not as well as it does under MacOS (the brightness and volume settings seem to have much coarser settings, and there is no Expose-style visual feedback, nor automatic sleeping when the lid is closed, etc).
I think the Ubuntu developers working on the install process should focus on matching that kind of ability. Xorg's config file is the big ball and chain I see, since the design is ill-suited to modern life (where there isn't a feisty guru who sets up the cards, monitors, and other fields manually). Until I can manually change resolution seamlessly and easily in a Linux distro out of the box, we're not to the level of MacOS 7 or Win95. Xorg isn't the only Win3.1-era-usability problem in a standard Linux distro; plenty of other software makes wrong assumptions about its target audience to be considered ready for end-users.
The Ubuntu team is focusing on making the experience good, but they're only so many people. You have to get some serious commitment and drive to get all the software on the same page, audience wise.