I don't think Linus is interested in owning the desktop. Its pretty clear he wants his desktop to be geared towards his workflow as a hard core coder/developer , and that is not the same desktop you would want for ordinary people. That is a key problem with the Linux desktop, the only people that care about it and develop it are hardcore geeks/programmers and the stuff they want is diametrically opposed to what ordinary people want in a desktop. Its seriously got old 10 years ago listening to Linux heads demand the Linux desktop be a few windows with shells in them, or listening to them as they forked and developed 100 different window managers almost none of which gain critical mass and none of which will ordinary people use.
If you want Linux to succeed with the general public my suggestions would be to:
A. Get rid of some of the fragmentation, relgious wars, and wasted time caused by the GNOME vs KDE conflict in particular. I understand why the split happened but its done nothing but damage over the years and its time to stop it or Linux will never succeed on the desktop.
B. You need very well written core API's because everything else flows from those. A good IDE helps too, Eclipse is OK but its not great, Xcode is awesome, DevStudio is pretty good.
C. All apps need to use the same API's so they interoperate and look and feel the same. Constantly writing variations of existing API's. and fragmenting them, is not a wise thing to do on the desktop. A lot of Apple's success can be tied to the fact that Cocoa and Objective C are very well done in a lot of areas, and they make it easy and a joy to develop applications. If its a joy to write apps, more developers will do it and the a quality of the apps for the time spent is consistently higher. Writing apps on Linux by comparison is a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, its painful, inconsistent, there is constant wheel reinventing, everyone does their own thing and it shows in the inconsistent apps that don't interoperate.
D. As much as I hate to say Qt is probably the best API you have but you need to wrest control of it from the people who've been developing it, and stop the major code breaking changes between revisions. The core API's need to develop like Apple develops them, add new things carefully, deprecate old things gradually, and STOP breaking code doing huge somewhat, gratuitous changes. GTK is just not a good API to base a desktop on.
E. Miguel De Icaza needs to be cut out of his position of authority. His track record in recent years, his Microsoft affiliation, his blaming the desktop on Linus recently, has shredded any credibility he had to lead Linux desktop development
F. You have to fix audio and video so they just work like OSX and Windows. This is a steep challenge. The ALSA audio API was a total mistake. An API that contorted, hard to use or write drivers for never should have happened. Linus is partly to blame for that. Getting good audio drivers is a hard problem, everytime a new audio chip comes out you have to start over making drivers for it. Making video work tends to end in a lot issues with patents, proprietary codecs, etc, which isn't easy to solve in open source.
In summary, the chances of Linux happening on the PC desktop are slim. None of these inherent structural flaws are likely to be remedied. Besides which the PC is rapidly starting to fade except for content developers and coders. Everyone else is switching to phones and tablets. Linux is already winning with Android on thosse, and IOS is Unix underneath. Rather than fight a losing battle for Linux on the PC just switch to Android.
Just because it worked that way in the past doesn't mean it will always work that way in the future. It is plausible you will reach a tipping point where technology is sufficiently sophisticated that it will be better at nearly everything than a low skilled human and you will wipe out large swaths of the workforce with no replacement jobs in sight. There will be jobs in creative skills, highly educated skills, but a lot of people aren't going to have the intelligence or inherent abilities to do them.
You could reach a point when large numbers of people are going to be unemployable unless someone is willing to make work for them or is willing to support them on something that is essentially welfare.
Its my understanding that 300,000 miles so far it has been perfect. The AI will probably have holes in it and there will be accidents but I wager they will be recording what happened when the accident occurred and correct the software so it doesn't happen again.
Eventually they are almost inevitably going to end up safer than humans. You can't change the fact that people doze off at the wheel, abuse substances and drive, or just suffer momentary loses of concentration or get distracted.
As compute power and the abilities of the sensors inevitably improve it is certain to get better and better.
Long haul truckers and taxi drivers aren't pillars of safety and responsibility. Robots will be an improvement
True the Chinese are exploiting state capitalism to make these regions extremely attractive. The areas around Hong Kong were intentionally created as free trade zones, with almost no taxes as honey pots to attract Western capital.
But the fact is they are just making clever use of the incentive structure of basic Capitalism. You dangle little or no environmental regulation, no work safety and compensation, low wage work force, authoritarian rule to crush worker dissent, low/no taxes and capitalists are going to come running, no matter where it is or how the zone was created. Singapore is a magnet for capital for many of the same reasons.
$350 a month in China isn't a particularly bad wage, its certainly not slave labor so maybe you could tone down the overblown rhetoric. Their cost of living is dramatically lower than the U.S. $350/month also dramatically beats what they can make trying to eek out a living as a farmer which is why large numbers of young people willingly flee rural China for those jobs.
If recent rumours out of Foxconn are true they are probably going to transfer most of the menial assembly line jobs to robots at which point there wont be any jobs at all for anyone, then what will all the Apple haters whine about.
All things considered, whining about Apple building their stuff in China is pointless and misguided. Nearly every western coporation moved their jobs and capital equipment to China. Seeking out cheap labor is what companies in a Capitalist system inherently do. It will reach its ultimate fulfillment when computers and robots are doing everything so there are no more jobs. Google's self driving cars are poised to wipe out long haul truckers, taxi drivers, auto insurance agents, highway patrolmen, and will significantly reduce the number of emergency responders, since car wrecks must be half their business.
As in, its been in the interest of Lockheed, Boeing, Northrop, etc. They've spent the entire period since the end of World War II exaggerating and propagansizing the "danger" of various "threats" because they get rich off it. Lockheed alone will rack up $1 trillion in revenue off the F-35, probably more, if it stays on its current course, plus a bunch of schedule and cost overruns.
The Navy has made no secret lately they consider the F-35 an overpriced lemon exactly like F-22, both built by Lockheed. After the F-22 debacle you would think the Pentagon would have had second thoughts about putting all its eggs in Lockheed's basket again.
I think the Navy just wants an incremental improvement of the F-18 and a lot more carrier qualified long range drones for bombers and recon. I think they would rather give the money to Boeing instead of Lockheed. They view Lockheed as the Air Force's screwed up, pampered, pet contractor and since the two services hate everything about each another they want nothing to do with each others weapons or contractor of choice.
Mark my words, the F-35 is almost certain to be another overpriced, behind schedule, underperforming Lockheed fiasco writ large.
Seriously dude, stop spewing this crap about "Garcetti v. Ceballos" all over this thread. It totally doesn't apply to this issue. That was a free speech issue where a DA complained to a supervisor about a warrant, the supervisor overruled him, DA claimed he was passed over for a promition because of it.
The issue here is Federal managers trying to interfer with employees whiste blowing to Congress which is quite explicitly prohibited by Federal law, has been since at least 1912, some of the protections date back to the Civil war.
I think the laws at issue here are Lloyd - La Follette Act of 1912 and the Treasury and General Government Appropriations Act of 1998.
It is explicitly forbidden for Federal agencies and managers to interfer with whistleblowers trying to contact Congress to report abuses. One caveat is the whistleblower can't usually divulge classified information to people not authorized to recieve it as part of the whistle blowing but I doubt there is any classified information in an FDA dispute.
Garcetti v. Ceballos has nothing to do with whistleblowing to Congress, it wasn't whistleblowing at all really. Its not whistleblowing when you report an issue to your boss. I can see no way it applies to this case. A DA disagreed with and disputed a warrant, Sherrif's office was furious and his boss overruled him and proceeded with the case. DA thought he was passover for a promotion over it.
Manning wasn't whistleblowing to Congress and he was divulging classified information without authorization to people not authroized to receive it so his case has NO relevance to this case either.
Not sure why you are bringing up cases that have no particular bearing on this case and pretending like they do. You kind of sounded impressive there for a second until you acutally parse what you said.
And you vaccine uber alles people are doing what you ALWAYS do. I never even hinted that people shouldn't be vaccinated for communicable diseases that they are likely to encounter, especially where the vaccines are well understood and risks are tolerable.
I am just opposed to people who try to down play the issues with vaccines, pretend they don't exist, engage in the same scare tactics the anti vaccine people indulge in and maul anyone who suggests vaccinations, especially forced vaccinations, should be approached thoughtfully instead of with blind acceptance.
Like I said, you pro vaccine fanatics are just as bad and just as dangerous as the anti vaccine fanatics. A better path is the middle road to recognize the value of some vaccines, but not blindly accept them all. Some of them, like the chicken pox vaccine are worse than the disease. The polio vaccine has started to reach a point of diminishing returns since its been eradicated in most places. The use of Thimerisol, which has mercury in it, as a preservative in something you inject in children is really questionable even if its hard to prove it either way.
A maker like Merck of a product like Gardasil lobbying politicians in an effort to get laws passed to compel children to get a vaccine for a sexually transmitted disease so Merck can profit is where the boundaries are being crossed. Especially since its a vaccine for a sexually transmitted disease instead of a communicable disease.
Infantry only Karkand in BF2 is the best PvP shooter ever. I'd still be playing it if all the servers hadn't cratered or started sucking, were overrun by hacks and shitty admins, all the good players hadn't been herded in to the stupidity of BF3, etc.
The ridiculously overdone gimmicks and graphics in COD and BF3 add absolutely nothing to the game, they just make them expensive to produce and expensive to buy and cluttered to look at. Unlocks are also a non starter for me, everyone should have the same gear. Dont like air or armor either unless everyone is in armor or air. Parity is the key to good PvP, the people with the better skills should win, not the people with better equipment or who've spent the most hours playing the game, or who buy all the unlocks.
For me the absolute best shooter is one where everyone is evenly matched, there are a lot of players, 64 or more, the maps are big and interesting, you can do some strategy and tactics and the graphics aren't overdone. Absolutely don't like COD furballs where you just die, respawn on the squad and go round and round in never ending kill and be killed circle never really doing much of anything with a point. I'd actually like games focused on more strategy and tactics, goals beyond just capture the flag, longer rounds or persistence, more iron man so you die you start over at the back instead of spawning on a squad leader and medics perform miracles.
I'm thinking Ender's Game as an actual game, done right would be kind of cool.
BF2 had some horrible flaws, if EA had just fixed those and fixed the bugs it would still be a thriving game. (i.e. bug glitching the squads, C4 jumping, aimbotters, glitchers and assorted other easy to fix exploits, rein in the nade spamming a little though it never really bothered me, and worst of all it needed a mechanism to prevent team stacking without randomizing the teams every round)
As in most complex issues the truth is somewhere in the middle. The "anti vaccine" fanatics who are rabidly against all vaccines are probably wrong. So are people like you who are pro vaccine to the point of being blind to the risks.
Injecting vaccines, usually involving complex genetic material, preservatives, etc. in to people who are also composed of complex genetic material, is a not a no risk endeavor. Most of the time the benefits out weigh the risk, BUT. . . the more careless and cavalier the vaccines makers and advocates are the higher the risks become. Especially beware of vaccine makers who have a financial interest in everyone being injected with their vaccine.
When the pro vaccine crowd become completely blind to the risks and start pushing every vaccine under the sun to everyone for everything its just begging for trouble. Vaccines should be used appropriately to deal with real risks. If the risks of the vaccine outweigh or approach the risk of the pathogen, or the risks of exposure to the pathogen are very low, you pro vaccine bigots can do as much harm or even more than the anti vaccine fanatics. Performing science experiments on millions of people isn't a particularly great idea unless you need to deal with a real risk, and have a well understood solution.
To be honest if cable and satellite don't switch to a model close to Netflix and Hulu they are probably doomed.
TV needs to be ala carte paying either by the channel or the show with no commercials. Huge blocks of time on basic cable are nothing but informercials and assorted other garbage now. There is almost nothing on to watch late night or early morning any more. TV advertising is even less effective than Internet advertising and everyone knows it. It is just getting progressively worse with DVR uptake. ABCF running Harry Potter movies that run 4 1/2 hours with 50% commercials is a completely dysfunctional business model.
If people only watch what they pay for and pay for what they watch it will ruthlessly kill all the total crap being aired. People will also spend less time being vegetables and watching stuff just because its on.
There are already a number of articles floating around from people who have raised there kids solely on commercial free Netflix and Hulu and they absolutely wont watch TV with commercials in it.
Where I live the winters are milder and the growing season is substantially longer than it was a decade or two ago which is a boon to agriculture. Some animal species are thriving since the winters are easier to ride out and their breeding season is starting substantially earlier.
The jury is out on precipitation. Obviously there has been a severe drought this winter and spring but since the monsoon flow started this month its becoming quite wet now.
The one issue I have with the chicken littles are the proclamations of inevitable doom. Yes that might happen, it needs to be allowed for as a possibility and guarded against but they, in fact, don't really have a clue where our climate will be in 10, 20, 100 or a thousand years.
They keep predicting catastrophic droughts where I live but the warming in the ocean could just as easily result in big increases in the monsoon flow and a lusher, more tropical climate.
I'm sorry but I simply don't have any confidence that anyone has succesfully modelled our climate to the point that they can predict the weather a week from now, let alone years from now. They would probably be better served saying the things they know, sharing possible scenarios and maybe even give some odds, but refrain from declaring us doomed if we don't shut down our civilization post haste. It would enhance their credibility, as would never ever pretending climate simulations are anything but an entertaining intellectial exercise.
Im fine with them forcing bundled channels with commercials in to the lineup for free. Not OK with them charging a few billion for their packages which translate in to ever higher monthly subscription fees AND ruining the programs with commercials.
On ABCF for example they run Harry Potter movies fairly often. Many of these movies are up to 4 or 4 1/2 hour runtimes. They are running shows with 50% commercials now. They are completely unwatchable and they wonder why people are using DVR's and switching to Netflix.
Its just a totally dead business model. Everyone needs to have real broadband and just pull the plug on the networks, cable and satellite companies. Of course the jury is still out on whether you can sustain expensive premium content on whatever model follows or if we are doomed to a future of reality TV and sports because they are cheap to produce.
I kind of wish the Kickstarter model would work so people can sustain the Firefly's and first gen Futurama where networks won't.
"People don't have to pay for them as premium channels"
People have to pay for them because they are being charged for them as part of the packages they are being sold. If Viacom succeeds in getting their extra billion a week later our fees will go up another $5 dollars a month. Comprendo.
"But nobody is forcing those channels down your throat"
They are forced down your throat because they are interspersed with the content channels and as I said you have to setup a custom guide to not have to look at them everytime you bring up the guide. They could segregate them all in one area of the guide but they don't because they want to force people to see them. They are like little mini ads embedded in the guide.
"Countries such as Germany, and to some extent China, have been pushing massive and sustained investments in renewables for years"
China has also been pushing massive increases in coal burning power plants for years. At the growth rates they've been running they need energy from every source they can get. It wont be an environmental success story until they shutter all their dirty coal fired power plants. Get back to me when they do that. They've also been exploiting financial repression of their people to fund massive and unsustainable capital intensive stimulus programs which is how they are paying for Three Gorges and all their wind and solar capacity. Its not a sustainable economic strategy and its running out of gas as we speak.
The Germans are able to do their renewable programs on the backs of the rest of Europe and their own workers. They've been driving down real wages for their workers to enhance their competitiveness, and they've beem exploiting the fact that the rest of Europe is locked in to the Euro with them but can't compete with them. It turned them in to an export powerhouse because the euro is at a lower value than it would be if Germany was still on its own with the Deutschemark. Its caused massive trade imbalances which is why Greece, Spain, Portugal and Italy are broke and Germany can afford expensive renewable energy without tanking their economy. It also isn't a sustainable economic model which is why the EU is about to implode. I wager Germany will eventually exit the Euro and have much tougher sledding with the return of an overvalued Deutschmark. I also doubt all those solar panels will prove to be the greatest idea in the long run, and if they actually shutter all the nukes they are going to see some serious energy issues in their economy.
On the other hand if you choose to completely ignore the economic consequences, you know like keeping people employed and fed you often see revolutions where the powers that be say "Let them eat cake" when there is no bread. This is also key reason civilizations no longer exist, revolutions. You want to take your argument to absurdist extremes we can all go back to being hunter gatherers and see how that works for ya, he who is probably sitting in front of a computer possibly powered by burning coal in a power plant someplace.
As best I remember the Inca and Aztec civilizations no longer exist because the were annihilated by ruthless civilizations willing to exploit technology to its fullest with little regard for the consequences or their karma. There should probably be a lesson in that for the luddites, pacifists and enivonment uber alles crowd.
For example, even if the U.S. signs on to dramatically reduce green house gasses it wont do any good if China and India don't sign and their growth in fossil fuel use cancels out the U.S. reductions. A way easy way to reduce U.S. emissions is just to move all heavy industry to China, remarkably the planet still suffers the same. In this scenario you end up with the U.S. being an economic basket case, China and India rule the world, global warming still happens and the U.S. looks like a bunch of chumps, of course thats kind of already happened. The fact that the U.S. over rotated on environmental regulation while China had none is one reason most of the heavy industry is in China now, their environment is a distater and the U.S. is broke.
Its a pretty well understood component of a anthopology that a successful civilization needs energy, the amount of energy they have available to them and its cost almost directly determines how successful they are and how good their quality of life is.
I'm all for developing cleaner and renewable source of energy, but doing it in a way that devastates your economy isn't a road to success.
Actually mother nature does counterbalance. As I said when CO2 levels are up plant life flourishes which helps scrub CO2. Much of the CO2 we are now releasing from fossil fuels was, at some point in the past, in our atmosphere so mother nature has already scrubbed it and sequestered it at least once. If global temperatures rise and Antartica, Greenland, Siberia and Canada return to be lushing tropical forest or jungle there are big new biospheres to scrub more CO2.
The problem is we've released in a few hundred years CO2 it took mother nature millions of years to sequester.
There is a considerable hypocrisy in DirectTV's CEO looping a video on the down channels complaining about how awful it is that Viacom is forcing them to take all the channels as one package.
I would love it if DirectTV let me buy the few channels they have we still watch ala carte for a small fraction of what they are charging for their packages.
As others have said, Viacom expecting another billion dollars for their especially pathetic channel line up is over the top. Once you get past The Daily Show, South Park and Colbert there is absolutely nothing Viacom is offering that is worth paying for. And since they are all loaded with ads, why do people even have to pay for them like they are premium channels.
I would also greatly appreciate if their boxes were setup to kill all the annoying shopping and religious channels they are carrying with simple switches. You can setup a custom guide without them but since they constantly move their channels around it is annoying to maintain it. Of course I imagine the shopping channels are paying them to force their channels down the throats of their customers so. . .
One of the great mysteries of life to me is why people watch shopping channels or buy the crap they sell keeping them in business. Consumerism has achieved its ultimate goal when people actually sit and watch channels that are nothing but ads. The pinnacle of this phenomenon is I recently saw a shopping channel purportedly selling houses in Florida. Pretty much the last thing anyone should be doing is buying real-estate sight unseen on a shopping channel using an auction that is guaranteed to be rigged.
I'm pretty sure more CO2 in the atmosphere is very beneficial to plant life and will help it flourish in forests and agriculture, not sure about in the ocean(i.e. plankton) since disolved CO2 in water leads to acidity issues. It is possible mother nature could counterbalance increasing CO2 levels by putting CO2 consuming organisms in to overdrive.
Ocean physics, chemistry and biology is so complex I seriously doubt there is any one who can claim they have a accurate holistic understanding, could model changes in it with any accuracy or make any reliable predictions about what it will do.
The one issue I have with the global warming chicken littles is that there is no inherent reason that recent CO2 levels or temperatures are some kind gold standard that must be maintained at all costs. Our planet has been all over the map on both temperatures and atmospheric chemistry, whose to say that some of those other levels weren't actually better overall.
On the other hand the rate at which are changing the atmosphere's composition thanks to industrail scales, and the rate at which we could change global temperatures and sea levels may prove to be very problematic to a lot of species including our own, especially since, as a species we are very fond of building large amounts of infrastructure on the coasts.
We could have a runaway climatic catastrophe, we could muddle along, or mother nature could eventually counterbalance our mistakes. Absolutely no one knows, anyone who claims to know with certainty is not being particularly truthful, anyone who claims to have an accurate computer model of our climate is really being untruthful.
It is safe to say burning fossil fuels at our current rate probably isn't a particularly great idea. It obviously does pose a greenhouse gas risk, no one knows how much, and equally important we are going to eventually run out of them so we really should be working hard to find alternatives. Pretty much the last thing the U.S. government should be doing is subsidizing fossil fuels with things like huge tax breaks for oil companies but good luck getting rid of those.
On the other hand taxing fossil fuels in to the ground to force the switch to alternatives isn't exactly a great idea either. It hammers your economy and it really hammers lower income people who spend a lot of their income on energy.
"Its not like you can'tget the TB treatement at any hospital, you can."
The chances a privately owned hospital is going to house dozens of homeless black men, many with mental issues, for six months for a TB regimen are vanishingly small, unless the government makes them and the government picks up the staggering tab they will generate.
You pretty much need a charity hospital or a state run hospital, which is why closing down the state run hospital that was housing the probably homeless people quarantined by court order probably caused a problem. The fact is the state run hospital probably did run up some huge bills for this kind of treatment which is why the Republican legislature and the Republican governor decided closing it was a convenient way to balance their budget. Hopefully there are other state run or charity hospitals that would pick up the slack, but since they started putting the homeless in to motels to try to force them to take the antibiotics with regular nurse visits, there is an implication that maybe the hospital facilities might not be there any more in Florida.
Having a TB epidemic spiraling out of control is REALLY expensive, especially if you are a state that is heavily dependent on tourism.
Just a guess but if anyone was trying to intentionally cover up this outbreak it was probably because they were worried what damage it would do their tourism industry if word got out, which it apparently just did.
Seems kind of like a classic case of being penny wise and pound foolish. You probably should spend whatever it takes to control a TB outbreak, and catch it early, because the consequences of it spreading, and the damage it can do to your economy once it spreads, and the news of it spreads, is enormous.
Uh, this article indicates 11 people were quarantined in Florida under court order last year to treat TB. If the people involved are willing to self quarantine at home and take the meds its preferred to not quarantine because its very expensive and punishing to people who are victims, not perpetrators of anything. In this case the outbreak was a worst case scenario because it was among homeless people, the first case being a schizophrenic, who can't self quarantine, can't get good health care, and about whom most people could care less.
A problem seems to be the Republicans who control Florida closed the hospital where TB cases were quarantined. They've apparently been putting the infected homeless in motels as an alternative which isn't the greatest idea since they will come in contact with a lot of people, but it is less bad than homeless shelters and wandering the streets. They are trying to send nurses around to make them take the antibiotics, so it helps they are in a fixed location, but still.
Duval County is historically Republican, though its pretty evenly divided now. Florida has been under Republican governors since 1999, The legislature has been Republican dominated since the mid 90's.
Its incredibly pointless sit here and play our stupid partisan game on this issue, but if any party is to blame it would probably be the Republicans.
To be honest/. discourse in particular, and in America in general, is getting so sickening its getting hard to read, and the posts tonight just reaffirms. A very sad and disturbing crisis turns in to another round of shrill partisan trolling and you, jmorris, always seem to be the right wing ring leader kicking it off. There are some left wing ring leader that don't particularly help but they pale in comparison to you.
It would probably be better if we all stopped being Democrats and Republicans, and started being Americans, and start working on ways to fix our inceasingly screwed up country. In particular our government is going broke at all levels, large numbers of our fellow citizens are going broke, we can't seem to provide even basic services that most would take for granted in the world's supposedly richest and most powerful country, a very small number people are getting fabulously wealthy and most of them apparently could care less if their country is unraveling around them as long as life in the gated communities is still good.
" But make no mistake: when US policy makers of any political stripe make the decision to go to war, the thinking isn't, "Hey, this can line the pockets of my corporate buddies!! Lulz!"
Well actually there was LBJ, he was a pretty successful war profiteer on Bell helicopter, General Dynamics fighters and his buddy ran Brown and Root. Brown and Root did very profitable general contracting for the military in Vietnam.
Brown and Root became Kellog Brown and Root and ended up owned by Halliburton which Dick Cheney used to war profiteer in Iraq 30 years later. The second Iraq war turned in to one massive exercise in war profiteering for people well connected with the Republican party. The U.S. would fly in plane loads of 100 dollar bills and they would be made to disappear. How else do you explain the Bush administrations overwhelming urge to invade Iraq. There was no actual rational reason for it that wasn't a lie.
War profiteering is as old as war, Dave. Are you actually that naive or do you not even believe the stuff you're writing anymore.
Profiteering may not be the prime reason for a war but it sure is a huge fringe benefit for the well connected.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think Linus is interested in owning the desktop. Its pretty clear he wants his desktop to be geared towards his workflow as a hard core coder/developer , and that is not the same desktop you would want for ordinary people. That is a key problem with the Linux desktop, the only people that care about it and develop it are hardcore geeks/programmers and the stuff they want is diametrically opposed to what ordinary people want in a desktop. Its seriously got old 10 years ago listening to Linux heads demand the Linux desktop be a few windows with shells in them, or listening to them as they forked and developed 100 different window managers almost none of which gain critical mass and none of which will ordinary people use.
If you want Linux to succeed with the general public my suggestions would be to:
A. Get rid of some of the fragmentation, relgious wars, and wasted time caused by the GNOME vs KDE conflict in particular. I understand why the split happened but its done nothing but damage over the years and its time to stop it or Linux will never succeed on the desktop.
B. You need very well written core API's because everything else flows from those. A good IDE helps too, Eclipse is OK but its not great, Xcode is awesome, DevStudio is pretty good.
C. All apps need to use the same API's so they interoperate and look and feel the same. Constantly writing variations of existing API's. and fragmenting them, is not a wise thing to do on the desktop. A lot of Apple's success can be tied to the fact that Cocoa and Objective C are very well done in a lot of areas, and they make it easy and a joy to develop applications. If its a joy to write apps, more developers will do it and the a quality of the apps for the time spent is consistently higher. Writing apps on Linux by comparison is a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, its painful, inconsistent, there is constant wheel reinventing, everyone does their own thing and it shows in the inconsistent apps that don't interoperate.
D. As much as I hate to say Qt is probably the best API you have but you need to wrest control of it from the people who've been developing it, and stop the major code breaking changes between revisions. The core API's need to develop like Apple develops them, add new things carefully, deprecate old things gradually, and STOP breaking code doing huge somewhat, gratuitous changes. GTK is just not a good API to base a desktop on.
E. Miguel De Icaza needs to be cut out of his position of authority. His track record in recent years, his Microsoft affiliation, his blaming the desktop on Linus recently, has shredded any credibility he had to lead Linux desktop development
F. You have to fix audio and video so they just work like OSX and Windows. This is a steep challenge. The ALSA audio API was a total mistake. An API that contorted, hard to use or write drivers for never should have happened. Linus is partly to blame for that. Getting good audio drivers is a hard problem, everytime a new audio chip comes out you have to start over making drivers for it. Making video work tends to end in a lot issues with patents, proprietary codecs, etc, which isn't easy to solve in open source.
In summary, the chances of Linux happening on the PC desktop are slim. None of these inherent structural flaws are likely to be remedied. Besides which the PC is rapidly starting to fade except for content developers and coders. Everyone else is switching to phones and tablets. Linux is already winning with Android on thosse, and IOS is Unix underneath. Rather than fight a losing battle for Linux on the PC just switch to Android.
Just because it worked that way in the past doesn't mean it will always work that way in the future. It is plausible you will reach a tipping point where technology is sufficiently sophisticated that it will be better at nearly everything than a low skilled human and you will wipe out large swaths of the workforce with no replacement jobs in sight. There will be jobs in creative skills, highly educated skills, but a lot of people aren't going to have the intelligence or inherent abilities to do them.
You could reach a point when large numbers of people are going to be unemployable unless someone is willing to make work for them or is willing to support them on something that is essentially welfare.
There is a pretty good book on this topic, The Lights in the Tunnel
Its my understanding that 300,000 miles so far it has been perfect. The AI will probably have holes in it and there will be accidents but I wager they will be recording what happened when the accident occurred and correct the software so it doesn't happen again.
Eventually they are almost inevitably going to end up safer than humans. You can't change the fact that people doze off at the wheel, abuse substances and drive, or just suffer momentary loses of concentration or get distracted.
As compute power and the abilities of the sensors inevitably improve it is certain to get better and better.
Long haul truckers and taxi drivers aren't pillars of safety and responsibility. Robots will be an improvement
True the Chinese are exploiting state capitalism to make these regions extremely attractive. The areas around Hong Kong were intentionally created as free trade zones, with almost no taxes as honey pots to attract Western capital.
But the fact is they are just making clever use of the incentive structure of basic Capitalism. You dangle little or no environmental regulation, no work safety and compensation, low wage work force, authoritarian rule to crush worker dissent, low/no taxes and capitalists are going to come running, no matter where it is or how the zone was created. Singapore is a magnet for capital for many of the same reasons.
$350 a month in China isn't a particularly bad wage, its certainly not slave labor so maybe you could tone down the overblown rhetoric. Their cost of living is dramatically lower than the U.S. $350/month also dramatically beats what they can make trying to eek out a living as a farmer which is why large numbers of young people willingly flee rural China for those jobs.
If recent rumours out of Foxconn are true they are probably going to transfer most of the menial assembly line jobs to robots at which point there wont be any jobs at all for anyone, then what will all the Apple haters whine about.
All things considered, whining about Apple building their stuff in China is pointless and misguided. Nearly every western coporation moved their jobs and capital equipment to China. Seeking out cheap labor is what companies in a Capitalist system inherently do. It will reach its ultimate fulfillment when computers and robots are doing everything so there are no more jobs. Google's self driving cars are poised to wipe out long haul truckers, taxi drivers, auto insurance agents, highway patrolmen, and will significantly reduce the number of emergency responders, since car wrecks must be half their business.
As in, its been in the interest of Lockheed, Boeing, Northrop, etc. They've spent the entire period since the end of World War II exaggerating and propagansizing the "danger" of various "threats" because they get rich off it. Lockheed alone will rack up $1 trillion in revenue off the F-35, probably more, if it stays on its current course, plus a bunch of schedule and cost overruns.
The Navy has made no secret lately they consider the F-35 an overpriced lemon exactly like F-22, both built by Lockheed. After the F-22 debacle you would think the Pentagon would have had second thoughts about putting all its eggs in Lockheed's basket again.
I think the Navy just wants an incremental improvement of the F-18 and a lot more carrier qualified long range drones for bombers and recon. I think they would rather give the money to Boeing instead of Lockheed. They view Lockheed as the Air Force's screwed up, pampered, pet contractor and since the two services hate everything about each another they want nothing to do with each others weapons or contractor of choice.
Mark my words, the F-35 is almost certain to be another overpriced, behind schedule, underperforming Lockheed fiasco writ large.
Seriously dude, stop spewing this crap about "Garcetti v. Ceballos" all over this thread. It totally doesn't apply to this issue. That was a free speech issue where a DA complained to a supervisor about a warrant, the supervisor overruled him, DA claimed he was passed over for a promition because of it.
The issue here is Federal managers trying to interfer with employees whiste blowing to Congress which is quite explicitly prohibited by Federal law, has been since at least 1912, some of the protections date back to the Civil war.
I think the laws at issue here are Lloyd - La Follette Act of 1912 and the Treasury and General Government Appropriations Act of 1998.
It is explicitly forbidden for Federal agencies and managers to interfer with whistleblowers trying to contact Congress to report abuses. One caveat is the whistleblower can't usually divulge classified information to people not authorized to recieve it as part of the whistle blowing but I doubt there is any classified information in an FDA dispute.
Garcetti v. Ceballos has nothing to do with whistleblowing to Congress, it wasn't whistleblowing at all really. Its not whistleblowing when you report an issue to your boss. I can see no way it applies to this case. A DA disagreed with and disputed a warrant, Sherrif's office was furious and his boss overruled him and proceeded with the case. DA thought he was passover for a promotion over it.
Manning wasn't whistleblowing to Congress and he was divulging classified information without authorization to people not authroized to receive it so his case has NO relevance to this case either.
Not sure why you are bringing up cases that have no particular bearing on this case and pretending like they do. You kind of sounded impressive there for a second until you acutally parse what you said.
And you vaccine uber alles people are doing what you ALWAYS do. I never even hinted that people shouldn't be vaccinated for communicable diseases that they are likely to encounter, especially where the vaccines are well understood and risks are tolerable.
I am just opposed to people who try to down play the issues with vaccines, pretend they don't exist, engage in the same scare tactics the anti vaccine people indulge in and maul anyone who suggests vaccinations, especially forced vaccinations, should be approached thoughtfully instead of with blind acceptance.
Like I said, you pro vaccine fanatics are just as bad and just as dangerous as the anti vaccine fanatics. A better path is the middle road to recognize the value of some vaccines, but not blindly accept them all. Some of them, like the chicken pox vaccine are worse than the disease. The polio vaccine has started to reach a point of diminishing returns since its been eradicated in most places. The use of Thimerisol, which has mercury in it, as a preservative in something you inject in children is really questionable even if its hard to prove it either way.
A maker like Merck of a product like Gardasil lobbying politicians in an effort to get laws passed to compel children to get a vaccine for a sexually transmitted disease so Merck can profit is where the boundaries are being crossed. Especially since its a vaccine for a sexually transmitted disease instead of a communicable disease.
Here, here.
Infantry only Karkand in BF2 is the best PvP shooter ever. I'd still be playing it if all the servers hadn't cratered or started sucking, were overrun by hacks and shitty admins, all the good players hadn't been herded in to the stupidity of BF3, etc.
The ridiculously overdone gimmicks and graphics in COD and BF3 add absolutely nothing to the game, they just make them expensive to produce and expensive to buy and cluttered to look at. Unlocks are also a non starter for me, everyone should have the same gear. Dont like air or armor either unless everyone is in armor or air. Parity is the key to good PvP, the people with the better skills should win, not the people with better equipment or who've spent the most hours playing the game, or who buy all the unlocks.
For me the absolute best shooter is one where everyone is evenly matched, there are a lot of players, 64 or more, the maps are big and interesting, you can do some strategy and tactics and the graphics aren't overdone. Absolutely don't like COD furballs where you just die, respawn on the squad and go round and round in never ending kill and be killed circle never really doing much of anything with a point. I'd actually like games focused on more strategy and tactics, goals beyond just capture the flag, longer rounds or persistence, more iron man so you die you start over at the back instead of spawning on a squad leader and medics perform miracles.
I'm thinking Ender's Game as an actual game, done right would be kind of cool.
BF2 had some horrible flaws, if EA had just fixed those and fixed the bugs it would still be a thriving game. (i.e. bug glitching the squads, C4 jumping, aimbotters, glitchers and assorted other easy to fix exploits, rein in the nade spamming a little though it never really bothered me, and worst of all it needed a mechanism to prevent team stacking without randomizing the teams every round)
As in most complex issues the truth is somewhere in the middle. The "anti vaccine" fanatics who are rabidly against all vaccines are probably wrong. So are people like you who are pro vaccine to the point of being blind to the risks.
Injecting vaccines, usually involving complex genetic material, preservatives, etc. in to people who are also composed of complex genetic material, is a not a no risk endeavor. Most of the time the benefits out weigh the risk, BUT. . . the more careless and cavalier the vaccines makers and advocates are the higher the risks become. Especially beware of vaccine makers who have a financial interest in everyone being injected with their vaccine.
When the pro vaccine crowd become completely blind to the risks and start pushing every vaccine under the sun to everyone for everything its just begging for trouble. Vaccines should be used appropriately to deal with real risks. If the risks of the vaccine outweigh or approach the risk of the pathogen, or the risks of exposure to the pathogen are very low, you pro vaccine bigots can do as much harm or even more than the anti vaccine fanatics. Performing science experiments on millions of people isn't a particularly great idea unless you need to deal with a real risk, and have a well understood solution.
DirectTV's boxes can already block by channel.
To be honest if cable and satellite don't switch to a model close to Netflix and Hulu they are probably doomed.
TV needs to be ala carte paying either by the channel or the show with no commercials. Huge blocks of time on basic cable are nothing but informercials and assorted other garbage now. There is almost nothing on to watch late night or early morning any more. TV advertising is even less effective than Internet advertising and everyone knows it. It is just getting progressively worse with DVR uptake. ABCF running Harry Potter movies that run 4 1/2 hours with 50% commercials is a completely dysfunctional business model.
If people only watch what they pay for and pay for what they watch it will ruthlessly kill all the total crap being aired. People will also spend less time being vegetables and watching stuff just because its on.
There are already a number of articles floating around from people who have raised there kids solely on commercial free Netflix and Hulu and they absolutely wont watch TV with commercials in it.
Those were Jewish tablets.
Where I live the winters are milder and the growing season is substantially longer than it was a decade or two ago which is a boon to agriculture. Some animal species are thriving since the winters are easier to ride out and their breeding season is starting substantially earlier.
The jury is out on precipitation. Obviously there has been a severe drought this winter and spring but since the monsoon flow started this month its becoming quite wet now.
The one issue I have with the chicken littles are the proclamations of inevitable doom. Yes that might happen, it needs to be allowed for as a possibility and guarded against but they, in fact, don't really have a clue where our climate will be in 10, 20, 100 or a thousand years.
They keep predicting catastrophic droughts where I live but the warming in the ocean could just as easily result in big increases in the monsoon flow and a lusher, more tropical climate.
I'm sorry but I simply don't have any confidence that anyone has succesfully modelled our climate to the point that they can predict the weather a week from now, let alone years from now. They would probably be better served saying the things they know, sharing possible scenarios and maybe even give some odds, but refrain from declaring us doomed if we don't shut down our civilization post haste. It would enhance their credibility, as would never ever pretending climate simulations are anything but an entertaining intellectial exercise.
Im fine with them forcing bundled channels with commercials in to the lineup for free. Not OK with them charging a few billion for their packages which translate in to ever higher monthly subscription fees AND ruining the programs with commercials.
On ABCF for example they run Harry Potter movies fairly often. Many of these movies are up to 4 or 4 1/2 hour runtimes. They are running shows with 50% commercials now. They are completely unwatchable and they wonder why people are using DVR's and switching to Netflix.
Its just a totally dead business model. Everyone needs to have real broadband and just pull the plug on the networks, cable and satellite companies. Of course the jury is still out on whether you can sustain expensive premium content on whatever model follows or if we are doomed to a future of reality TV and sports because they are cheap to produce.
I kind of wish the Kickstarter model would work so people can sustain the Firefly's and first gen Futurama where networks won't.
"People don't have to pay for them as premium channels"
People have to pay for them because they are being charged for them as part of the packages they are being sold. If Viacom succeeds in getting their extra billion a week later our fees will go up another $5 dollars a month. Comprendo.
"But nobody is forcing those channels down your throat"
They are forced down your throat because they are interspersed with the content channels and as I said you have to setup a custom guide to not have to look at them everytime you bring up the guide. They could segregate them all in one area of the guide but they don't because they want to force people to see them. They are like little mini ads embedded in the guide.
"Countries such as Germany, and to some extent China, have been pushing massive and sustained investments in renewables for years"
China has also been pushing massive increases in coal burning power plants for years. At the growth rates they've been running they need energy from every source they can get. It wont be an environmental success story until they shutter all their dirty coal fired power plants. Get back to me when they do that. They've also been exploiting financial repression of their people to fund massive and unsustainable capital intensive stimulus programs which is how they are paying for Three Gorges and all their wind and solar capacity. Its not a sustainable economic strategy and its running out of gas as we speak.
The Germans are able to do their renewable programs on the backs of the rest of Europe and their own workers. They've been driving down real wages for their workers to enhance their competitiveness, and they've beem exploiting the fact that the rest of Europe is locked in to the Euro with them but can't compete with them. It turned them in to an export powerhouse because the euro is at a lower value than it would be if Germany was still on its own with the Deutschemark. Its caused massive trade imbalances which is why Greece, Spain, Portugal and Italy are broke and Germany can afford expensive renewable energy without tanking their economy. It also isn't a sustainable economic model which is why the EU is about to implode. I wager Germany will eventually exit the Euro and have much tougher sledding with the return of an overvalued Deutschmark. I also doubt all those solar panels will prove to be the greatest idea in the long run, and if they actually shutter all the nukes they are going to see some serious energy issues in their economy.
On the other hand if you choose to completely ignore the economic consequences, you know like keeping people employed and fed you often see revolutions where the powers that be say "Let them eat cake" when there is no bread. This is also key reason civilizations no longer exist, revolutions. You want to take your argument to absurdist extremes we can all go back to being hunter gatherers and see how that works for ya, he who is probably sitting in front of a computer possibly powered by burning coal in a power plant someplace.
As best I remember the Inca and Aztec civilizations no longer exist because the were annihilated by ruthless civilizations willing to exploit technology to its fullest with little regard for the consequences or their karma. There should probably be a lesson in that for the luddites, pacifists and enivonment uber alles crowd.
For example, even if the U.S. signs on to dramatically reduce green house gasses it wont do any good if China and India don't sign and their growth in fossil fuel use cancels out the U.S. reductions. A way easy way to reduce U.S. emissions is just to move all heavy industry to China, remarkably the planet still suffers the same. In this scenario you end up with the U.S. being an economic basket case, China and India rule the world, global warming still happens and the U.S. looks like a bunch of chumps, of course thats kind of already happened. The fact that the U.S. over rotated on environmental regulation while China had none is one reason most of the heavy industry is in China now, their environment is a distater and the U.S. is broke.
Its a pretty well understood component of a anthopology that a successful civilization needs energy, the amount of energy they have available to them and its cost almost directly determines how successful they are and how good their quality of life is.
I'm all for developing cleaner and renewable source of energy, but doing it in a way that devastates your economy isn't a road to success.
Actually mother nature does counterbalance. As I said when CO2 levels are up plant life flourishes which helps scrub CO2. Much of the CO2 we are now releasing from fossil fuels was, at some point in the past, in our atmosphere so mother nature has already scrubbed it and sequestered it at least once. If global temperatures rise and Antartica, Greenland, Siberia and Canada return to be lushing tropical forest or jungle there are big new biospheres to scrub more CO2.
The problem is we've released in a few hundred years CO2 it took mother nature millions of years to sequester.
There is a considerable hypocrisy in DirectTV's CEO looping a video on the down channels complaining about how awful it is that Viacom is forcing them to take all the channels as one package.
I would love it if DirectTV let me buy the few channels they have we still watch ala carte for a small fraction of what they are charging for their packages.
As others have said, Viacom expecting another billion dollars for their especially pathetic channel line up is over the top. Once you get past The Daily Show, South Park and Colbert there is absolutely nothing Viacom is offering that is worth paying for. And since they are all loaded with ads, why do people even have to pay for them like they are premium channels.
I would also greatly appreciate if their boxes were setup to kill all the annoying shopping and religious channels they are carrying with simple switches. You can setup a custom guide without them but since they constantly move their channels around it is annoying to maintain it. Of course I imagine the shopping channels are paying them to force their channels down the throats of their customers so. . .
One of the great mysteries of life to me is why people watch shopping channels or buy the crap they sell keeping them in business. Consumerism has achieved its ultimate goal when people actually sit and watch channels that are nothing but ads. The pinnacle of this phenomenon is I recently saw a shopping channel purportedly selling houses in Florida. Pretty much the last thing anyone should be doing is buying real-estate sight unseen on a shopping channel using an auction that is guaranteed to be rigged.
I'm pretty sure more CO2 in the atmosphere is very beneficial to plant life and will help it flourish in forests and agriculture, not sure about in the ocean(i.e. plankton) since disolved CO2 in water leads to acidity issues. It is possible mother nature could counterbalance increasing CO2 levels by putting CO2 consuming organisms in to overdrive.
Ocean physics, chemistry and biology is so complex I seriously doubt there is any one who can claim they have a accurate holistic understanding, could model changes in it with any accuracy or make any reliable predictions about what it will do.
The one issue I have with the global warming chicken littles is that there is no inherent reason that recent CO2 levels or temperatures are some kind gold standard that must be maintained at all costs. Our planet has been all over the map on both temperatures and atmospheric chemistry, whose to say that some of those other levels weren't actually better overall.
On the other hand the rate at which are changing the atmosphere's composition thanks to industrail scales, and the rate at which we could change global temperatures and sea levels may prove to be very problematic to a lot of species including our own, especially since, as a species we are very fond of building large amounts of infrastructure on the coasts.
We could have a runaway climatic catastrophe, we could muddle along, or mother nature could eventually counterbalance our mistakes. Absolutely no one knows, anyone who claims to know with certainty is not being particularly truthful, anyone who claims to have an accurate computer model of our climate is really being untruthful.
It is safe to say burning fossil fuels at our current rate probably isn't a particularly great idea. It obviously does pose a greenhouse gas risk, no one knows how much, and equally important we are going to eventually run out of them so we really should be working hard to find alternatives. Pretty much the last thing the U.S. government should be doing is subsidizing fossil fuels with things like huge tax breaks for oil companies but good luck getting rid of those.
On the other hand taxing fossil fuels in to the ground to force the switch to alternatives isn't exactly a great idea either. It hammers your economy and it really hammers lower income people who spend a lot of their income on energy.
"Its not like you can'tget the TB treatement at any hospital, you can."
The chances a privately owned hospital is going to house dozens of homeless black men, many with mental issues, for six months for a TB regimen are vanishingly small, unless the government makes them and the government picks up the staggering tab they will generate.
You pretty much need a charity hospital or a state run hospital, which is why closing down the state run hospital that was housing the probably homeless people quarantined by court order probably caused a problem. The fact is the state run hospital probably did run up some huge bills for this kind of treatment which is why the Republican legislature and the Republican governor decided closing it was a convenient way to balance their budget. Hopefully there are other state run or charity hospitals that would pick up the slack, but since they started putting the homeless in to motels to try to force them to take the antibiotics with regular nurse visits, there is an implication that maybe the hospital facilities might not be there any more in Florida.
Having a TB epidemic spiraling out of control is REALLY expensive, especially if you are a state that is heavily dependent on tourism.
Just a guess but if anyone was trying to intentionally cover up this outbreak it was probably because they were worried what damage it would do their tourism industry if word got out, which it apparently just did.
Seems kind of like a classic case of being penny wise and pound foolish. You probably should spend whatever it takes to control a TB outbreak, and catch it early, because the consequences of it spreading, and the damage it can do to your economy once it spreads, and the news of it spreads, is enormous.
Uh, this article indicates 11 people were quarantined in Florida under court order last year to treat TB. If the people involved are willing to self quarantine at home and take the meds its preferred to not quarantine because its very expensive and punishing to people who are victims, not perpetrators of anything. In this case the outbreak was a worst case scenario because it was among homeless people, the first case being a schizophrenic, who can't self quarantine, can't get good health care, and about whom most people could care less.
A problem seems to be the Republicans who control Florida closed the hospital where TB cases were quarantined. They've apparently been putting the infected homeless in motels as an alternative which isn't the greatest idea since they will come in contact with a lot of people, but it is less bad than homeless shelters and wandering the streets. They are trying to send nurses around to make them take the antibiotics, so it helps they are in a fixed location, but still.
Duval County is historically Republican, though its pretty evenly divided now. Florida has been under Republican governors since 1999, The legislature has been Republican dominated since the mid 90's.
Its incredibly pointless sit here and play our stupid partisan game on this issue, but if any party is to blame it would probably be the Republicans.
To be honest /. discourse in particular, and in America in general, is getting so sickening its getting hard to read, and the posts tonight just reaffirms. A very sad and disturbing crisis turns in to another round of shrill partisan trolling and you, jmorris, always seem to be the right wing ring leader kicking it off. There are some left wing ring leader that don't particularly help but they pale in comparison to you.
It would probably be better if we all stopped being Democrats and Republicans, and started being Americans, and start working on ways to fix our inceasingly screwed up country. In particular our government is going broke at all levels, large numbers of our fellow citizens are going broke, we can't seem to provide even basic services that most would take for granted in the world's supposedly richest and most powerful country, a very small number people are getting fabulously wealthy and most of them apparently could care less if their country is unraveling around them as long as life in the gated communities is still good.
" But make no mistake: when US policy makers of any political stripe make the decision to go to war, the thinking isn't, "Hey, this can line the pockets of my corporate buddies!! Lulz!"
Well actually there was LBJ, he was a pretty successful war profiteer on Bell helicopter, General Dynamics fighters and his buddy ran Brown and Root. Brown and Root did very profitable general contracting for the military in Vietnam.
Brown and Root became Kellog Brown and Root and ended up owned by Halliburton which Dick Cheney used to war profiteer in Iraq 30 years later. The second Iraq war turned in to one massive exercise in war profiteering for people well connected with the Republican party. The U.S. would fly in plane loads of 100 dollar bills and they would be made to disappear. How else do you explain the Bush administrations overwhelming urge to invade Iraq. There was no actual rational reason for it that wasn't a lie.
War profiteering is as old as war, Dave. Are you actually that naive or do you not even believe the stuff you're writing anymore.
Profiteering may not be the prime reason for a war but it sure is a huge fringe benefit for the well connected.