So Why look at this from his perspective? In order to try and understand how best to deal with him. Life is full of people with personality ticks that are going to rub you the wrong way. Successfully dealing with difficult people will require self control and understanding of what motivates them and adapting your actions accordingly. It's how life works, or doesn't..
The best way to deal with people who can't behave is to ask if you actually have to deal with them, and if the answer is "no", not do so. And, apparently, new developers are doing this very analysis, which then led to this article.
Life is full of nice, well-adjusted people. Why waste it dealing with someone who isn't? Let natural selection do it instead: Software projects that drive new people away die. Those that draw them in survive and grow. It's evolution in action.
If authors didn't get paid anything for writing books, do you think we'd continue to have as many books?
Probably, judging by how much content the Internet has for free, but even if not, does it matter? There's more books than I, you or anyone can possibly read, and those written solely for money are unlikely to be great losses.
Do you really want to live in that world?
Seeing how "that world" produced the very tropes and settings current for-profit copyright regime is rehashing over and over and over again... yes.
Yes, of course. But did you read the next couple sentences of my post?
Yes, I quoted and answered them right in the next paragraph. And repeat myself below.
I've seen alcohol users drunk, but I've also seen many, many alcohol users NOT drunk, and as I stated, the vast majority of alcohol users I've seen have not been drunk. What I haven't heard much about is moderation in meth users. Every time I hear about meth (which, like I acknowledged in my post, is not much), I hear about meth heads being super high and totally messed up.
Because meth is illegal, a person who's using it doesn't advertize the fact. So how would you recognize anyone who used it in moderation?
You've committed a classical selection bias statistical error.
Sure. You realize though that China figured out that even with legal opium dens, it was still bad to have a good fraction of the population addicated to it?
Yes. Do you realize said opium dens were run by the British with the specific goal of selling as much opium as possible, and as such didn't have any of the safeguards I proposed? Or that few people are hell-bent on getting themselves addicted, so safer alternatives could be developed after lifting the stigma?
What I'm asking for is non-anecdotal studies on the addiction and abuse rates of the drugs everyone is proposing to legalize.
You simply cannot do garbage collection in a kernel and get predictable performance for interrupt routines, context switching, signal delivery and the like.
Do any of these need to allocate memory on the heap? Can they (locking issues etc)? Garbage collection seems like a red herring, since it can't make anything unpredictable that already wasn't.
Why? The article asserts that the Linux kernel project has a problem attracting new developers. And a lot of comments here assert that this problem is due to Linus' personality traits. If this is indeed so, it's up to him to change or watch his accomplishments go down in flames.
Right down to a scheduler that's friendly to interactive user processes. But maybe that scheduler's not as optimal for what you were doing with your server, so now we want a tunable scheduler that can be adjusted towards either.
That reminds me of the drama with Con Kolivas and his Staircase Deadline scheduler. There was some noises about pluggable schedulers, but apparently Linus wanted a one size fits all -approach. Dunno if that's true.
The existance of the comunist party or variations does not detract from from what was said, openly and known comunist switched to socialism in order to avoid the stigma of comunism.
If openly communistic people switched to socialism, then who are the members of the current communist parties? Hipster bankers?
I like deciding my own cost/benefit analyses. I can't do that when I'm tied down by the 'needs of the many' in ever growing numbers of cases.
The good side of living in a society is that you get Internet, shopping malls, the merchandise there, food, clothes, electricity, roads, people who patrol those roads and keep them safe from bandits, etc. etc. The bad side is that your personal interests may conflict with those of others and don't always trump them. After all, you might be the center of your world but to everyone else you're just one of the faceless "many" in "the needs of the many", and shouldn't expect them to care more about your interests than you care about theirs. Which is something you seem to not have quite grasped, since why else would you state the obvious?
Does that make for a better society? Ask this when you are violated and the criminal gets a slap on the wrist.
Nice selection bias you have there. Must be that famous US education system at work again. But the question actually is: which makes a better society, one where you have low chances of being violated but the criminal gets a slap on the wrist, or one where you have high chances of being violated but the culprit is hanged?
In other words, do you care more about your own welfare or that your enemies suffer? Or, even simpler, do you care more about yourself or your enemies?
Meth addicts don't only do stupid things just to get to the next fix. What they do while on meth is pretty stupid too. That's where the comparison between "hard drugs" and alcohol fails.
Just out of curiosity: have you ever actually seen a drunk person?
In any case, you could always restrict the sale of some substance to a licensed establishment, and have them require an agreement to stay on the premises while under influence as a condition of sale. Licensed opium dens, in other words. This would also allow monitoring of usage, and medical intervention in case of addiction.
Is there such a thing as non-binge/moderate meth usage?
Probably, since Silk Road stayed online for several years despite needing a considerable amount of trouble to use.
I've never heard of that with meth (or cocaine, or heroin, for example), but please show me some evidence otherwise if it exists. I think it's because the effect is stronger and more addictive than alcohol, so users pretty instantly start going for the totally-fucked-up feeling rather than the moderate feeling.
Well, the whole concept of random drug testing only makes sense if you assume that a significant fraction of users are able to perform their work at acceptable level despite using one, which implies they are moderating their usage.
Also, some "hard" drugs are actually self-regulating; for example, according to Wikipedia, LSD causes such a rapid built-up of tolerance it's not possible to use it regularly.
This reminds me of the discredited parable that breaking a window is good for the 'conomy, because it generates business for the repairman, who then buys new shoes from the cobbler, who then bla bla bla. The real economy in the meantime registers the net loss of a window.
However, this assumes the glaziers can find a new job at or near the level of their old one. If they can't, you have the choice of desperate former glaziers causing trouble, breaking windows to keep them employed or eeevil communist welfare funded by robbing the rich righteous captains of industry at gunpoint.
That's because your government actually represents you reasonably well. And that, in turn, is because you keep it in check.
Yes, but not with guns. You can't keep a government in check with the threat of revolution because, even if you had all the guns, the cost of overthrowing one is so high and the risk of even worse one rising so dire it almost never happens. Rather, there's a political system that divides power between multiple (>2) parties, which means there's always the threat of an upstart outcompeting the established ones if they get too full of themselves.
Norway has a free market and competition for political parties, US has a cartel of two holding almost all power. One of these means you get to pick which flavour of two equal evils you dislike less, and othe other that there's always another party competing for your vote, and if they get corrupt that's fine, just switch to another. Which is kinda ironic, considering how much importance US puts on economic competition - I guess its leaders don't like to be subject to their own teachings.
Is America a democracy? It only has one more party than the Soviet Union did. And the candidates are those nominated by the powers that be. So how much choice does a voter actually has? And what does it matter, when the vote-counting process is highly suspect?
This has got to be the thousandth time I've read an analysis of debt from a Progressive that fails to account for the fact that government is only a redistributor of income. Any decrease in spending is an increase in the amount that taxpayers can keep for themselves.
Which means that in practice a decrease in spending makes the rich better and the average person worse off. That's fine if you believe the purpose of a society is to cater to the aristocracy, which many americans seem to. But of course such attempts to re-establish strict hierarchical power structures of feudalism are going to meet with pushback; pretty much the only reason they are possible at all is that many people are arrogant enough to think they'd be along the lords rather than the serfs.
I'm talking about something simple and inherently non-toxic, stored kinetic energy and rotation of heavy balanced cylinders in a near-vacuum. I vote fewer that are really big rather than many.
Yes... why settle for a battery that might leak, when you can build a system that's a single mechanical failure away from a spectacular explosion? And the fact that this thing can't ever be turned off unless it's fully discharged first should certainly add to the excitement.
However, it might be workable if we accept that the facility needs to be deep underground, unmanned, and is completely destroyed if anything at all goes wrong.
Not betting on the wrong horse is just as important as betting on the right horse.
However, if you bet on someone wanting barley, you're unlikely to lose. Which, for any form of solar and wind, means how to deal with lots of unpredictable weak generators with strong correlation of outputs of nearby generators (so you can't just put a lot of them in a small area to get a predictable average, but need to shift power around from one region to another).
Besides, even if solar and wind fail completely and future belongs to Mr. Fusion, we still need to decentralize our power generation. Huge power plants are single points of failure; but while power outages were annoying for an industrial-age society, an information age one basically ceases to exist during them. Whether brought by a terrorist, a not-so friendly rival or simple human error, a blackout causes untold economic devastation that will only grow with every passing decade. That's not a risk we can really afford. And the only way to avoid it is to decentralize.
Basically, we need "the Internet of electricity" rather than the current mainframe one.
I know that if someone screws with my Amex or Visa account, I will not be on the hook for more than $50. If someone steals my bitcoins I am screwed, period.
No thanks. I'll continue to take my chances on $US.
Protip: US dollars are the paper slips with pictures of dead people on them people keep in their wallet, not the rounded plastic rounded rectangle that says "Visa". If someone steals the dollars, you've lost them, period.
The plastic rectangle is called a "credit card". It's not a dollar, nor any other type of money. It is, however, an easy way to get yourself in debt ("screwed", to put it in your terms).
Gold ownership doesn't mean having to carry around the gold, just having some evidence that you own it.
And if you lose that evidence, well, at least there's a record elsewhere to confirm it.
So how does that work? You give me a voucher to some amount of gold? Except that's not enough, the record needs to be updated too. In fact, since I always have to contact the record, we can as well not bother with the vouchers, since they don't accomplish anything; and in fact there's no point in keeping gold in a vault somewhere, since it's never actually used for anything in this system. And of course, at this point, we have an account-oriented fiat currency, and with some refinements Bitcoin.
Depends what you mean by "economically independent"?
You don't depend on anyone more than they depend on you, nor does anyone exert any real control over you - for example, you're a farmer and grow what you eat yourself, and trade your produce for what else you need. That was the original American Dream: that rather than being someone's servant, you could get land and work for yourself.
Later versions are variations of that, but it's only really a realistic dream in a rapidly expanding economy - in a slow-growing one, even if it was a perfect meritocracy, the fact is that most people are average and won't ever make the cut. The same goes for the US itself: just an average country, no more opportunities than anywhere else, no manifest destiny to chase. And that's a bitter pill to swallow.
If it means, you personally make everything you ever need, then it's not a particularly useful definition since even in the hunter/gatherer days, some reliance on others was necessary. If it means that you can do work in exchange for the things you want and need, then almost everyone can be economically independent.
An employee depends on their employer far more than the employer depends on any one employee. It is a relationship of subservience, where the employer dictates the terms and the employee has, at best, a chance to choose who to serve - and nowadays even that is getting unlikely, with the job market being what it is.
Well, I believe nurb432 below summed it up best in his tag (emphasis mine):
---- Booth was a patriot ---- If you dont agree with me, dont bother replying as i dont care what you have to say ----
Politics in USA are based on the idea that those who disagree can always leave and go West to find a new community that embraces their ideas, rather than trying to negotiate a compromise that everyone can live with. Well, they can't anymore since that pesky Pacific Ocean blocks the way. So now you have people who's mythology prices independence and individuality forced to live and work together. It worked somewhat as long as the Soviet Union provided a boogeyman of external threat, but now that it's gone and Al-Qaeda being too pathetic to provide a serious threat it's breaking down.
So, what's happening is that US is finally being forced to confront the fact it has no frontier anymore. It has no land that could be settled or virgin resources to be tapped for quick economic growth. This also means that most people will never be economically independent, no matter how hard or smart they work. The political machine is breaking down as its assumptions break, the budget circus being a symptom of that, and everyone who can is trying to grap as much power as possible to control the direction the country takes. And of course there's always the possibility that the union falls apart entirely, which is reason enough for the federal government to grab as much power as possible.
It's just the death struggles of the American Dream. We shall see what replaces it, and whether the country can avoid a slide to either dictatorship or break-up. It's not going to be easy, and depends on how much shared culture still exists between the states - and the Federal government isn't exactly helping by constantly wiping its metaphorical body opening with the US Constitution, thus illegitimazing itself and discrediting the document.
"Depends on" in the sense that if you didn't make people do pointless busywork the scheme wouldn't work, yes.
Doesn't mean you have actually done anything of actual value, though. Mining work is basically completely pointless.
Counting votes is pointless busywork without which the scheme - democracy - couldn't work. We could avoid it completely by simply obeying whoever happens to have the biggest club. But that has other problems which, at least in some people's minds, justify the extra expenditure required for a somewhat decentralized power structure, rather than one that's completely controlled by a single entity.
Slashdot Mirror
The best way to deal with people who can't behave is to ask if you actually have to deal with them, and if the answer is "no", not do so. And, apparently, new developers are doing this very analysis, which then led to this article.
Life is full of nice, well-adjusted people. Why waste it dealing with someone who isn't? Let natural selection do it instead: Software projects that drive new people away die. Those that draw them in survive and grow. It's evolution in action.
Probably, judging by how much content the Internet has for free, but even if not, does it matter? There's more books than I, you or anyone can possibly read, and those written solely for money are unlikely to be great losses.
Seeing how "that world" produced the very tropes and settings current for-profit copyright regime is rehashing over and over and over again... yes.
Yes, I quoted and answered them right in the next paragraph. And repeat myself below.
Because meth is illegal, a person who's using it doesn't advertize the fact. So how would you recognize anyone who used it in moderation?
You've committed a classical selection bias statistical error.
Yes. Do you realize said opium dens were run by the British with the specific goal of selling as much opium as possible, and as such didn't have any of the safeguards I proposed? Or that few people are hell-bent on getting themselves addicted, so safer alternatives could be developed after lifting the stigma?
Start here.
Do any of these need to allocate memory on the heap? Can they (locking issues etc)? Garbage collection seems like a red herring, since it can't make anything unpredictable that already wasn't.
Why? The article asserts that the Linux kernel project has a problem attracting new developers. And a lot of comments here assert that this problem is due to Linus' personality traits. If this is indeed so, it's up to him to change or watch his accomplishments go down in flames.
That reminds me of the drama with Con Kolivas and his Staircase Deadline scheduler. There was some noises about pluggable schedulers, but apparently Linus wanted a one size fits all -approach. Dunno if that's true.
If openly communistic people switched to socialism, then who are the members of the current communist parties? Hipster bankers?
The good side of living in a society is that you get Internet, shopping malls, the merchandise there, food, clothes, electricity, roads, people who patrol those roads and keep them safe from bandits, etc. etc. The bad side is that your personal interests may conflict with those of others and don't always trump them. After all, you might be the center of your world but to everyone else you're just one of the faceless "many" in "the needs of the many", and shouldn't expect them to care more about your interests than you care about theirs. Which is something you seem to not have quite grasped, since why else would you state the obvious?
In other words, grow up.
Nice selection bias you have there. Must be that famous US education system at work again. But the question actually is: which makes a better society, one where you have low chances of being violated but the criminal gets a slap on the wrist, or one where you have high chances of being violated but the culprit is hanged?
In other words, do you care more about your own welfare or that your enemies suffer? Or, even simpler, do you care more about yourself or your enemies?
Just out of curiosity: have you ever actually seen a drunk person?
In any case, you could always restrict the sale of some substance to a licensed establishment, and have them require an agreement to stay on the premises while under influence as a condition of sale. Licensed opium dens, in other words. This would also allow monitoring of usage, and medical intervention in case of addiction.
Probably, since Silk Road stayed online for several years despite needing a considerable amount of trouble to use.
Well, the whole concept of random drug testing only makes sense if you assume that a significant fraction of users are able to perform their work at acceptable level despite using one, which implies they are moderating their usage.
Also, some "hard" drugs are actually self-regulating; for example, according to Wikipedia, LSD causes such a rapid built-up of tolerance it's not possible to use it regularly.
However, this assumes the glaziers can find a new job at or near the level of their old one. If they can't, you have the choice of desperate former glaziers causing trouble, breaking windows to keep them employed or eeevil communist welfare funded by robbing the rich righteous captains of industry at gunpoint.
Yes, but not with guns. You can't keep a government in check with the threat of revolution because, even if you had all the guns, the cost of overthrowing one is so high and the risk of even worse one rising so dire it almost never happens. Rather, there's a political system that divides power between multiple (>2) parties, which means there's always the threat of an upstart outcompeting the established ones if they get too full of themselves.
Norway has a free market and competition for political parties, US has a cartel of two holding almost all power. One of these means you get to pick which flavour of two equal evils you dislike less, and othe other that there's always another party competing for your vote, and if they get corrupt that's fine, just switch to another. Which is kinda ironic, considering how much importance US puts on economic competition - I guess its leaders don't like to be subject to their own teachings.
Is America a democracy? It only has one more party than the Soviet Union did. And the candidates are those nominated by the powers that be. So how much choice does a voter actually has? And what does it matter, when the vote-counting process is highly suspect?
Which means that in practice a decrease in spending makes the rich better and the average person worse off. That's fine if you believe the purpose of a society is to cater to the aristocracy, which many americans seem to. But of course such attempts to re-establish strict hierarchical power structures of feudalism are going to meet with pushback; pretty much the only reason they are possible at all is that many people are arrogant enough to think they'd be along the lords rather than the serfs.
Yes... why settle for a battery that might leak, when you can build a system that's a single mechanical failure away from a spectacular explosion? And the fact that this thing can't ever be turned off unless it's fully discharged first should certainly add to the excitement.
However, it might be workable if we accept that the facility needs to be deep underground, unmanned, and is completely destroyed if anything at all goes wrong.
However, if you bet on someone wanting barley, you're unlikely to lose. Which, for any form of solar and wind, means how to deal with lots of unpredictable weak generators with strong correlation of outputs of nearby generators (so you can't just put a lot of them in a small area to get a predictable average, but need to shift power around from one region to another).
Besides, even if solar and wind fail completely and future belongs to Mr. Fusion, we still need to decentralize our power generation. Huge power plants are single points of failure; but while power outages were annoying for an industrial-age society, an information age one basically ceases to exist during them. Whether brought by a terrorist, a not-so friendly rival or simple human error, a blackout causes untold economic devastation that will only grow with every passing decade. That's not a risk we can really afford. And the only way to avoid it is to decentralize.
Basically, we need "the Internet of electricity" rather than the current mainframe one.
Protip: US dollars are the paper slips with pictures of dead people on them people keep in their wallet, not the rounded plastic rounded rectangle that says "Visa". If someone steals the dollars, you've lost them, period.
The plastic rectangle is called a "credit card". It's not a dollar, nor any other type of money. It is, however, an easy way to get yourself in debt ("screwed", to put it in your terms).
So how does that work? You give me a voucher to some amount of gold? Except that's not enough, the record needs to be updated too. In fact, since I always have to contact the record, we can as well not bother with the vouchers, since they don't accomplish anything; and in fact there's no point in keeping gold in a vault somewhere, since it's never actually used for anything in this system. And of course, at this point, we have an account-oriented fiat currency, and with some refinements Bitcoin.
Apparently.
An authoritarian - someone who breaks laws, rules and regulations if a perceived authority figure tells them to.
Now, what kind of person is someone hiding NSAs dirty laundry likely to be?
You don't depend on anyone more than they depend on you, nor does anyone exert any real control over you - for example, you're a farmer and grow what you eat yourself, and trade your produce for what else you need. That was the original American Dream: that rather than being someone's servant, you could get land and work for yourself.
Later versions are variations of that, but it's only really a realistic dream in a rapidly expanding economy - in a slow-growing one, even if it was a perfect meritocracy, the fact is that most people are average and won't ever make the cut. The same goes for the US itself: just an average country, no more opportunities than anywhere else, no manifest destiny to chase. And that's a bitter pill to swallow.
An employee depends on their employer far more than the employer depends on any one employee. It is a relationship of subservience, where the employer dictates the terms and the employee has, at best, a chance to choose who to serve - and nowadays even that is getting unlikely, with the job market being what it is.
Well, I believe nurb432 below summed it up best in his tag (emphasis mine):
---- Booth was a patriot ---- If you dont agree with me, dont bother replying as i dont care what you have to say ----
Politics in USA are based on the idea that those who disagree can always leave and go West to find a new community that embraces their ideas, rather than trying to negotiate a compromise that everyone can live with. Well, they can't anymore since that pesky Pacific Ocean blocks the way. So now you have people who's mythology prices independence and individuality forced to live and work together. It worked somewhat as long as the Soviet Union provided a boogeyman of external threat, but now that it's gone and Al-Qaeda being too pathetic to provide a serious threat it's breaking down.
So, what's happening is that US is finally being forced to confront the fact it has no frontier anymore. It has no land that could be settled or virgin resources to be tapped for quick economic growth. This also means that most people will never be economically independent, no matter how hard or smart they work. The political machine is breaking down as its assumptions break, the budget circus being a symptom of that, and everyone who can is trying to grap as much power as possible to control the direction the country takes. And of course there's always the possibility that the union falls apart entirely, which is reason enough for the federal government to grab as much power as possible.
It's just the death struggles of the American Dream. We shall see what replaces it, and whether the country can avoid a slide to either dictatorship or break-up. It's not going to be easy, and depends on how much shared culture still exists between the states - and the Federal government isn't exactly helping by constantly wiping its metaphorical body opening with the US Constitution, thus illegitimazing itself and discrediting the document.
I dunno. I kinda like a forum where you can't make your stupid comments disappear, yet can start anew with a new username.
I was unaware you needed a license for that. Or did you mean to imply procreation should be regulated - perhaps by you?
As a side note, is it just me or is there a correlation between use of passive and hideous proposals?
Counting votes is pointless busywork without which the scheme - democracy - couldn't work. We could avoid it completely by simply obeying whoever happens to have the biggest club. But that has other problems which, at least in some people's minds, justify the extra expenditure required for a somewhat decentralized power structure, rather than one that's completely controlled by a single entity.