The Democrats may be overplaying their hand on this one. The Republicans have gone a long way in recent months toward laying the groundwork for ending the filibuster. If the Democrats aren't very careful in its application, they may may lose it forever.
I don't know who's making strategy on the Democratic side these days, but so far I'm not impressed. It would have been much smarter to go easy on the lower court judges and save the big guns for the Supreme Court.
Well, this is another case of the law of unintended consequences, isn't it? For many years Microsoft was perfectly happy to do its own thing and leave Washinton alone. Then we had a couple of politicians (at the behest of Novel and Oracle) trying to make hay out of "getting" them. Having been forced into the political arena, how could they have been expected to respond?
They bought up a bunch of politicians. It was a matter of survival. But now they have all this political clout they can apply in other ways. I don't see any benefit to all that lawyering worth remaking Microsoft into a political force.
I'm not saying they never did anything illegal. The problem is the government was trying to put them out of business. DOJ should have slapped them with a large fine for exclusionary business deals and called it a day. Microsoft simply couldn't tolerate a situation where a judge has to sign off on every new feature they want to add to Windows.
That's just what I was thinking. When I was a kid we had an Apple II. In the early days the games were pretty crude. We all chalked it up to slow hardware. But as it reached the end of it's run, the newer games were an order of magnitude better than the early ones, with the exact same hardware.
That was back in the days when you could do it all yourself. But companies have a learning curve too.
They certainly do, but since they are paid considerably less, they collectively won't be able to buy as many Thinkpads as US or EU employees could. Somewhere down the line this means collapse for whoever is manufacturing Thinkpads these days.
Clearly that's true, as long as the Indian economy doesn't grow. But it does, creating more jobs and strengthening the Rupi. As the exchange rates adjust the Indians will get paid just as much as the Europeans, and they'll all need Thinkpads. Which is good, since there's literally a billion af them.
Elected governments now kiss the dirt where an Investor has walked. If democracy means electing decision-makers who influence your society, we should be voting for CEOs. And unless one day we do, we'll be back to feudal class system in short order.
I think that's much more true in the US than in Europe. We have foolishly allowed corporations to become "people" in the eyes of the law, so they can pump money into the elecoral system. The Europeans weren't that stupid (about this, at least).
WTF, I thought, because I'm apt to think in TLAs. (Julian Bucknall)
Oh, don't get me wrong. There will certainly be social unrest in Europe in the coming decades, but the problem isn't capitalism, it's democracy coupled with secular hedonism. To quote Alexander Tyler:
A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largess of the public treasury. From that time on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the results that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's great civilizations has been but a mere two hundred years, and they proceed through the following sequence: from bondage to spiritual faith, from spiritual faith to great courage, from great courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency, from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependency, from dependency back again to bandage.
We're having the same problem in the US, it's just not as pronounced because the framers of the US constitution feared democracy and put mechanisms in place to control it. In recent years, however, the courts have interpreted much of the constitution out of existence, so in 30 years or so we'll be where the Europeans are today.
Communism (as implimented by the USSR and others) failed because it competed with a system that served the people better. And that is why capitalism will fail.
Capitalism serves the poor just fine, provided you have a strong enough government to ensure the rules are respected and the playing field is level. What they have on continental Europe isn't capitalism - it's some sort of funny mix of state-dominated semi-capitalism and democratic socialism which the French like to call "the third way", or sometimes "the European social model". It only works marginally better than communism, as it seems the wheels are comming off in about the same length of time (about 70 years).
Here in the US we have allowed corporations too much leverage with our government, so it's been descending into banana-republic crony capitalism. However, at least for the time being it seems to work well enough to move the ball forward. As long as we're a democracy, though, the corporations will eventually be crippled and driven out (along with the jobs).
Please define "grow". Since when growth is less work for fewer people at lower wages?
If Europe loses 13,000 jobs, and India gains 14,000, how is that less work for fewer people? Don't Indians count?
Lower wages where? If IBM moves 14,000 jobs to India, India's economy is growing, and there are more jobs chasing fewer qualified workers. So while wages may go down in Bavaria, they're going up in Bangalore.
But more than that, economic growth isn't a zero-sum game. A healthy economy will not only import jobs but also create them. There's no way you can trace job growth in India and China to job loss in the rest of the world on a dollar for dollar basis. There are definitely new jobs being created in the countries with the most business-friendly policies.
Don't get me wrong - there's no question this all sucks if you work in Europe. But it's the voters, through their elected governments, who've created this situation, and they're the ones who will need to fix it. Britain and the US went through that transition in the 80s. Continental Europe will do so when the tax base can't support the lifestyle it's become accustomed to. But the voters will cling to their inflexible labor markets as long as they can, and they'll seize any excuse to blame outsiders for their problems until reality intrudes too much to be ignored.
Corporations are now making record profits, and still seem to find it necessary to replace their workers with cheaper labor?
Is that really true? Record profits?
IBM may be profitable, but IBM is a multinational company that isn't based in Europe. Its officers aren't based in Europe. Why would you expect IBM would have more loyalty to European workers than Indian? And why would Europeans be entitled to those jobs when out-of-work Indians are willing to do the same work for less money?
What exactly is the point of all this - we'll all be back to 6:00 AM to 9:00 PM hours, with no vacation, at half the wage so that the elite have growth of their profits.
I think GM would be a great case study here. The workers managed to wrest lots of concessions from the company, but in doing so set it up for a huge fall when cheaper, higher quality cars showed up in North America. You and I can pass laws so we don't have to compete with Indian and Chinese labor, but IBM will always be competing with other multinationals. They have to contain costs, or they won't be able to compete. This year it might show up as profit, but next year it's the margin they have to lower prices to fend off NEC or Samsung.
Capitalism works because people assume that they have a chance of advancing, that the lives of their children will be better. If globalization simply means a gross reduction of wages and transfer of assets to the wealthy, capitalism will lose popular support. How many former IBM employees are going to be praising outsourcing?
Corporations work because they produce goods and services people are willing to buy. It really doesn't have much to do with how happy the employees are. And it may be that capitalism loses popular support in certain places, but so what? Countries that can't or won't compete will see stagnant growth and high unemployment while the capitalist countries will grow. Did we learn nothing from the travesty that was Communism?
There isn't any reason Europeans can't compete with Indians, despite the wage differentials. European companies have a lot of advantages Indian companies don't have, like proximity to wealthy markets, a better educated workforce (not everybody in India went to IIT), and better infrastructure.
I'd be willing to bet the Europeans could keep their generous vacations and wages, but it's so hard to fire people in Europe it doesn't make sense to hire people. I'll bet it's costing IBM a fortune to lay off 11,000 people. Companies expand and contract with normal business cycles, and forcing them to keep all their employees during contractions means they'll be really reluctant to hire people when times are good. Not only does that reduce the number of available jobs, but it puts companies at a competitive disadvantage.
The fifth amendment guarantees ONLY that you will be compensated for such seizures, NOT that such seizures will not occur and NOT that such seizures must be purely for non-private benefit.
This is wrong. As others have pointed out, the constitution gives government the authority to seize property only for public use. The court ruled New London had the authority to seize private property because the new owners would pay more taxes, a "public good". But they had to ignore the actual text to do so.
The whole concept is from legislation dating back to the 1800's for the railroads to gobble up property to build cross-country rail lines. It's extremely outdated- few if any projects are big enough to require that sort of thing (and anyway, the railroads made a SHITLOAD of money, they could have bought the land fair and square).
The whole concept is actually enshrined in the fifth amendment. Without eminent domain one guy could hold out until the rest of us coughed up 10x the fair price for whatever it is. The constitution allows the taking of land for "public use", so it's pretty clearly allowed for schools, military bases, harbors, etc.
In this case the city is taking land away from private owners and giving it to other private owners (violating the so-called "A to B" restriction). They justify it by saying the new owners will produce more revenue, and thus it benefits the public. Bullshit. They've givin a fig leaf to every corrupt municipality in the country which wants to take your land and give it to the mayor's son-in-law. Kudos to O'Connor for a well written dissent.
Between this ruling and the recent pot-as-interstate-commerce ruling, the court has really sort of unshackled the state from the constitution.
It's funny you should say that. When my sister went to Japan on a business she related how her colleagues ran from place to place and were generally thinner and in much better cardio-vascular shape than their American counterparts. In fact, she said, they might live longer if not for the (large) amount they drank and the (small) amount they slept.
The internet/voip and other communication mediums have obsoleted the necessity for face to face contact and the costs associated with business travel. This is why (at least in the US) airlines are going bankrupt every single year. Only southwest manages to survive, but that's because they are like the walmart of the skies.
That's just plain wrong. Last year, 2004, saw the greatest number of passenger miles flown in history. The terrorist attacks of 2001 hurt the entire industry, but that only sped up the inevitable. The simple fact is Southwest and similar carriers are eating everyone else's lunch - the large incumbent carriers are saddled with inefficient systems and expensive union contracts, so they just can't compete.
There's no market for this kind of aircraft, and neither the Japanese nor the Europeans have the money to commit to this kind project as an expression of "national greatness". Big talk is cheap, but did you catch the amount of money they've actually committed? $1.84 million/year for three years, divied up over lots of companies? You can't design the tires for that much.
Wake me up when somebody actually makes a serious financial committment. Until then it's just talk, especially giving Japan and the major European powers have demographics-related budget problems from here to as far as the eye can see. They're going to have to stretch to pay for pensions under the rosiest scenarios. How can they afford this?
I remember reading the HST was originally supposed to be recovered by SST and put on display somewhere (the Smithsonian, I guess), but they decide not to do it because they thought SST couldn't handle the weight safely. Is there a large difference between launch payload weight and landing payload weight? Or was that just NASA being overly cautious in light of recent events?
I'm assuming they mean they're going to use 'chutes to land - landing on reverse thrusters or what have you in earth's gravity well could be fairly fuel expensive, and doesn't make much sense.
Fuel isn't the cost driver for this kind of venture. VTOL is a great way to save on operational costs, since you can pick your exact landing spot instead of landing wherever the wind takes you. The technical challenges of vertical landing aren't insurmountable, as they've been overcome by at least three groups I can think of (Armadillo, JSA, and USAF).
The real problem with vertical landing isn't cost, it's weight. You have to carry all the fuel you plan to use in you landing throughout every stage of the flight. For a sub-orbital shot that's no big deal, but building a VTOL orbital rocket that has any sort of reasonable payload is quite a technical challenge. This is the best discussion of the topic I'm familiar with.
I've been wondering about this for quite awhile. In fact, it came up just recently when we were considering PasswordSafe at work. Ok, so it's open source and all, so I tell myself "self, it's probably not mailing my passwords back to Bruce Schneier. But being as you're kinda paranoid, maybe you should just get the source, audit it, then build from the audited source. That way you'll know everything's on the up-and-up."
But then I ask myself "but, self, what if the code is written by someone really clever, I mean somebody who's smart enough to use a buffer overrun or mangled pointer or some such to do it on the sly? Not smart like Einstein, but smart like, oh, Professor Moriarty?"
I'll be kinda curious if the entrants of this contest can write code that doesn't look like it's doing something sneaky, even if the exact mechanism isn't clear. It has practical implications for the security of open source.
Thomas Jefferson... because of him, we're lining up at the voting booths like it's 1776.
That's kind of a silly thing to say. As originally passed the US Constitution left all voting restrictions to the state. So in most states, in order to vote you had to be a landowner. If that were still the case online voting would be a cinch, since poor people couldn't vote anyway.
In any event I don't see any reason why we can't have both online and physical voting. I don't see how online voting is any more or less convenient than voting by absentee ballot.
I can't belive you wrote that page-long screed without even reading what he wrote. I see this kind of crap on slashdot all the time. The only "Microsoft shill" there is the strawman you set up. I'll bet if I go back through your posting history you've made the same speech several times.
I'm so sick of this kind of brainless Microsoft bashing. Most of the people here parrot the group-think line without having any idea what they're talking about. I suspect that means you, since my experience with XP is much different.
Right now at work I'm using RHEL for development and XP for gaming/taxes/whatever at home. Guess what? XP, in my experience, is more stable than Redhat. That's not shilling, it's just my experience. I've never (not once) had XP crash on me. I wish I could say the same for Linux.
It's true Microsoft pays "journalists" to come up with nice reviews in trade magazines. They know that's what non-technical management reads to make up it's collective mind. The only way Linux is going to make inroads into the corporate desktop is by being demonstrably better than Windows. That way the one or two honest tradesheet writers will write a nice article to give some backing to those of us that want to support OSS.
But how can Linux improve if a substantial portion of its advocates can't even fucking see it's not perfect? As the grandparent noted, every release of Windows narrows the gap. If Microsoft adds a shell that I can use from a remote machine that removes one of the three reasons I don't use Windows for serious work:
no shell (cmd doesn't count)
viruses
I want to support OSS
I hope there never comes a day when the only reason I have to run Linux is the third reason. I'll never be able to sell that to the boss.
Oh, and by the way, don't bother accusing me of having "no knowlege" of the FOSS world. I've been writing and using FOSS since the internet was born. Have you?
In the US there is no basis for suing someone who insults your race or religion. First of all, it's simply not a claim; slander or libel do not apply to huge groups of people. Second of all, the constitution prevents it.
That was true at one time, but I don't think you can make that blanket assertion now. You can certainly be successfully sued by your coworkers (and, lets face it, most research is done for some institution, commercial or academic) for creating a "hostile work environment" as a result of being "someone who insults [somebody's] race or religion". The constitution should protect you, but for many years judges have been ignoring clear language in the document (the concept of enumerated powers just finished dying this week in Gonzales v. Raich, and the first amendment took a hit at the waterline when the SCOTUS allowed McCain-Feingold to regulate political speech) and reading their own opinions between the lines (Roe v. Wade). You won't get any help there.
I'm hoping some of us will be white on the right side, and black on the left. The rest should be black on the right, white on the left. The personal shields will be cool, too.
Be creative. Chances are if someone finds your magic list and thinks "Hey, these are his/her passwords! I 0wn3 them!" that once they try 1 or 2 of them as written and they fail they will discard the list as being old or garbage.
Agreed. Sure, some crypto whiz will cut through that clutter in a day or two, but that's probably not the guy who'll lift your wallet at a ball game.
One thing I wish security systems had was some kind of "tripwire" password, i.e. the account is locked if anyone ever tries it. That way you could put the tripwire at the top of the list so if it ever did get stolen the theif would lock himself out permanently before you ever knew your wallet was gone.
No, I don't think you'll see defense companies looking for H1B applicants. Unless we stack them like cordwood and burn them for warmth, they aren't of much use: even a janitor has to be able to get a clearance.
Clearly you have no idea what you're talking about (as others have pointed out). But even if what you're saying was true (which it's not), it wouldn't matter. Technical people tend to have skills that are usefull for military hardware as well as civilian. If they can glut the commercial job market defense workers will have considerably less clout when it comes to bargaining for compensation.
I've been hearing this kinda crap since I got out of school almost twenty years ago. Every time we're in the boom part of the cycle it's "we don't have enough [CS graduates | Engineers]". During a bust it's "We won't have enough to support the economy in a few years." Well kids, let me clue you in.
It's all a scam.
Big computer, defense, and, to a lesser extent, manufacturing companies pay shills in academia and "think tanks" to gin up these kinds of studies every couple of years so Congress has some political cover when they increase the H1-B cap. It's not true, and it never has been. The only shortage that ever materialized in those two decades happened during the boom, and that was caused by a huge spike in demand.
The goal here is to make sure there's plenty of hungry technical people around so they don't have to pay them too much.
Why go through any of that? That would be expensive and unnecessary. All the really need to do is sow uncertainty about whether or not they'll buy RedHat. Balmer just needs to have a press conference to say "we're going to buy RedHat, then shut it down."
As soon as he does the PHBs of corporate America will identify their RedHat installations as problematic, waste a bunch of money with risk analyses and migration plans, then decide this Linux thing might just be a big pain in the ass and use Windows for new projects. I wouldn't, you wouldn't, but remember to a corporation it's worth spending extra money for risk mitigation.
After the uncertainty has done its work, Microsoft can simply reverse itself and say "Oh, we're very dissappointed, but we don't think the government will let us do that." That way they can throw sand in the RedHat machine for free.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know who's making strategy on the Democratic side these days, but so far I'm not impressed. It would have been much smarter to go easy on the lower court judges and save the big guns for the Supreme Court.
They bought up a bunch of politicians. It was a matter of survival. But now they have all this political clout they can apply in other ways. I don't see any benefit to all that lawyering worth remaking Microsoft into a political force.
I'm not saying they never did anything illegal. The problem is the government was trying to put them out of business. DOJ should have slapped them with a large fine for exclusionary business deals and called it a day. Microsoft simply couldn't tolerate a situation where a judge has to sign off on every new feature they want to add to Windows.
That was back in the days when you could do it all yourself. But companies have a learning curve too.
Clearly that's true, as long as the Indian economy doesn't grow. But it does, creating more jobs and strengthening the Rupi. As the exchange rates adjust the Indians will get paid just as much as the Europeans, and they'll all need Thinkpads. Which is good, since there's literally a billion af them.
Elected governments now kiss the dirt where an Investor has walked. If democracy means electing decision-makers who influence your society, we should be voting for CEOs. And unless one day we do, we'll be back to feudal class system in short order.
I think that's much more true in the US than in Europe. We have foolishly allowed corporations to become "people" in the eyes of the law, so they can pump money into the elecoral system. The Europeans weren't that stupid (about this, at least).
WTF, I thought, because I'm apt to think in TLAs. (Julian Bucknall)
I love that quote.
Oh, don't get me wrong. There will certainly be social unrest in Europe in the coming decades, but the problem isn't capitalism, it's democracy coupled with secular hedonism. To quote Alexander Tyler:
We're having the same problem in the US, it's just not as pronounced because the framers of the US constitution feared democracy and put mechanisms in place to control it. In recent years, however, the courts have interpreted much of the constitution out of existence, so in 30 years or so we'll be where the Europeans are today.Communism (as implimented by the USSR and others) failed because it competed with a system that served the people better. And that is why capitalism will fail.
Capitalism serves the poor just fine, provided you have a strong enough government to ensure the rules are respected and the playing field is level. What they have on continental Europe isn't capitalism - it's some sort of funny mix of state-dominated semi-capitalism and democratic socialism which the French like to call "the third way", or sometimes "the European social model". It only works marginally better than communism, as it seems the wheels are comming off in about the same length of time (about 70 years).
Here in the US we have allowed corporations too much leverage with our government, so it's been descending into banana-republic crony capitalism. However, at least for the time being it seems to work well enough to move the ball forward. As long as we're a democracy, though, the corporations will eventually be crippled and driven out (along with the jobs).
Now you've managed to depress me.
If Europe loses 13,000 jobs, and India gains 14,000, how is that less work for fewer people? Don't Indians count?
Lower wages where? If IBM moves 14,000 jobs to India, India's economy is growing, and there are more jobs chasing fewer qualified workers. So while wages may go down in Bavaria, they're going up in Bangalore.
But more than that, economic growth isn't a zero-sum game. A healthy economy will not only import jobs but also create them. There's no way you can trace job growth in India and China to job loss in the rest of the world on a dollar for dollar basis. There are definitely new jobs being created in the countries with the most business-friendly policies.
Don't get me wrong - there's no question this all sucks if you work in Europe. But it's the voters, through their elected governments, who've created this situation, and they're the ones who will need to fix it. Britain and the US went through that transition in the 80s. Continental Europe will do so when the tax base can't support the lifestyle it's become accustomed to. But the voters will cling to their inflexible labor markets as long as they can, and they'll seize any excuse to blame outsiders for their problems until reality intrudes too much to be ignored.
Is that really true? Record profits?
IBM may be profitable, but IBM is a multinational company that isn't based in Europe. Its officers aren't based in Europe. Why would you expect IBM would have more loyalty to European workers than Indian? And why would Europeans be entitled to those jobs when out-of-work Indians are willing to do the same work for less money?
What exactly is the point of all this - we'll all be back to 6:00 AM to 9:00 PM hours, with no vacation, at half the wage so that the elite have growth of their profits.
I think GM would be a great case study here. The workers managed to wrest lots of concessions from the company, but in doing so set it up for a huge fall when cheaper, higher quality cars showed up in North America. You and I can pass laws so we don't have to compete with Indian and Chinese labor, but IBM will always be competing with other multinationals. They have to contain costs, or they won't be able to compete. This year it might show up as profit, but next year it's the margin they have to lower prices to fend off NEC or Samsung.
Capitalism works because people assume that they have a chance of advancing, that the lives of their children will be better. If globalization simply means a gross reduction of wages and transfer of assets to the wealthy, capitalism will lose popular support. How many former IBM employees are going to be praising outsourcing?
Corporations work because they produce goods and services people are willing to buy. It really doesn't have much to do with how happy the employees are. And it may be that capitalism loses popular support in certain places, but so what? Countries that can't or won't compete will see stagnant growth and high unemployment while the capitalist countries will grow. Did we learn nothing from the travesty that was Communism?
There isn't any reason Europeans can't compete with Indians, despite the wage differentials. European companies have a lot of advantages Indian companies don't have, like proximity to wealthy markets, a better educated workforce (not everybody in India went to IIT), and better infrastructure.
I'd be willing to bet the Europeans could keep their generous vacations and wages, but it's so hard to fire people in Europe it doesn't make sense to hire people. I'll bet it's costing IBM a fortune to lay off 11,000 people. Companies expand and contract with normal business cycles, and forcing them to keep all their employees during contractions means they'll be really reluctant to hire people when times are good. Not only does that reduce the number of available jobs, but it puts companies at a competitive disadvantage.
This is wrong. As others have pointed out, the constitution gives government the authority to seize property only for public use. The court ruled New London had the authority to seize private property because the new owners would pay more taxes, a "public good". But they had to ignore the actual text to do so.
The whole concept is actually enshrined in the fifth amendment. Without eminent domain one guy could hold out until the rest of us coughed up 10x the fair price for whatever it is. The constitution allows the taking of land for "public use", so it's pretty clearly allowed for schools, military bases, harbors, etc.
In this case the city is taking land away from private owners and giving it to other private owners (violating the so-called "A to B" restriction). They justify it by saying the new owners will produce more revenue, and thus it benefits the public. Bullshit. They've givin a fig leaf to every corrupt municipality in the country which wants to take your land and give it to the mayor's son-in-law. Kudos to O'Connor for a well written dissent.
Between this ruling and the recent pot-as-interstate-commerce ruling, the court has really sort of unshackled the state from the constitution.
It's funny you should say that. When my sister went to Japan on a business she related how her colleagues ran from place to place and were generally thinner and in much better cardio-vascular shape than their American counterparts. In fact, she said, they might live longer if not for the (large) amount they drank and the (small) amount they slept.
Yeah, sure, but would you be willing to pay double or triple the ticket price to do it? Most people wouldn't.
That's just plain wrong. Last year, 2004, saw the greatest number of passenger miles flown in history. The terrorist attacks of 2001 hurt the entire industry, but that only sped up the inevitable. The simple fact is Southwest and similar carriers are eating everyone else's lunch - the large incumbent carriers are saddled with inefficient systems and expensive union contracts, so they just can't compete.
Wake me up when somebody actually makes a serious financial committment. Until then it's just talk, especially giving Japan and the major European powers have demographics-related budget problems from here to as far as the eye can see. They're going to have to stretch to pay for pensions under the rosiest scenarios. How can they afford this?
I remember reading the HST was originally supposed to be recovered by SST and put on display somewhere (the Smithsonian, I guess), but they decide not to do it because they thought SST couldn't handle the weight safely. Is there a large difference between launch payload weight and landing payload weight? Or was that just NASA being overly cautious in light of recent events?
Fuel isn't the cost driver for this kind of venture. VTOL is a great way to save on operational costs, since you can pick your exact landing spot instead of landing wherever the wind takes you. The technical challenges of vertical landing aren't insurmountable, as they've been overcome by at least three groups I can think of (Armadillo, JSA, and USAF).
The real problem with vertical landing isn't cost, it's weight. You have to carry all the fuel you plan to use in you landing throughout every stage of the flight. For a sub-orbital shot that's no big deal, but building a VTOL orbital rocket that has any sort of reasonable payload is quite a technical challenge. This is the best discussion of the topic I'm familiar with.
But then I ask myself "but, self, what if the code is written by someone really clever, I mean somebody who's smart enough to use a buffer overrun or mangled pointer or some such to do it on the sly? Not smart like Einstein, but smart like, oh, Professor Moriarty?"
I'll be kinda curious if the entrants of this contest can write code that doesn't look like it's doing something sneaky, even if the exact mechanism isn't clear. It has practical implications for the security of open source.
That's kind of a silly thing to say. As originally passed the US Constitution left all voting restrictions to the state. So in most states, in order to vote you had to be a landowner. If that were still the case online voting would be a cinch, since poor people couldn't vote anyway.
In any event I don't see any reason why we can't have both online and physical voting. I don't see how online voting is any more or less convenient than voting by absentee ballot.
I can't belive you wrote that page-long screed without even reading what he wrote. I see this kind of crap on slashdot all the time. The only "Microsoft shill" there is the strawman you set up. I'll bet if I go back through your posting history you've made the same speech several times.
I'm so sick of this kind of brainless Microsoft bashing. Most of the people here parrot the group-think line without having any idea what they're talking about. I suspect that means you, since my experience with XP is much different.
Right now at work I'm using RHEL for development and XP for gaming/taxes/whatever at home. Guess what? XP, in my experience, is more stable than Redhat. That's not shilling, it's just my experience. I've never (not once) had XP crash on me. I wish I could say the same for Linux.
It's true Microsoft pays "journalists" to come up with nice reviews in trade magazines. They know that's what non-technical management reads to make up it's collective mind. The only way Linux is going to make inroads into the corporate desktop is by being demonstrably better than Windows. That way the one or two honest tradesheet writers will write a nice article to give some backing to those of us that want to support OSS.
But how can Linux improve if a substantial portion of its advocates can't even fucking see it's not perfect? As the grandparent noted, every release of Windows narrows the gap. If Microsoft adds a shell that I can use from a remote machine that removes one of the three reasons I don't use Windows for serious work:
- no shell (cmd doesn't count)
- viruses
- I want to support OSS
I hope there never comes a day when the only reason I have to run Linux is the third reason. I'll never be able to sell that to the boss.Oh, and by the way, don't bother accusing me of having "no knowlege" of the FOSS world. I've been writing and using FOSS since the internet was born. Have you?
That was true at one time, but I don't think you can make that blanket assertion now. You can certainly be successfully sued by your coworkers (and, lets face it, most research is done for some institution, commercial or academic) for creating a "hostile work environment" as a result of being "someone who insults [somebody's] race or religion". The constitution should protect you, but for many years judges have been ignoring clear language in the document (the concept of enumerated powers just finished dying this week in Gonzales v. Raich, and the first amendment took a hit at the waterline when the SCOTUS allowed McCain-Feingold to regulate political speech) and reading their own opinions between the lines (Roe v. Wade). You won't get any help there.
His time was much better spent than yours. You could have forgotten the whole thing for the price of flowers, dinner for two, and a bottle of wine.
I'm hoping some of us will be white on the right side, and black on the left. The rest should be black on the right, white on the left. The personal shields will be cool, too.
Agreed. Sure, some crypto whiz will cut through that clutter in a day or two, but that's probably not the guy who'll lift your wallet at a ball game.
One thing I wish security systems had was some kind of "tripwire" password, i.e. the account is locked if anyone ever tries it. That way you could put the tripwire at the top of the list so if it ever did get stolen the theif would lock himself out permanently before you ever knew your wallet was gone.
Clearly you have no idea what you're talking about (as others have pointed out). But even if what you're saying was true (which it's not), it wouldn't matter. Technical people tend to have skills that are usefull for military hardware as well as civilian. If they can glut the commercial job market defense workers will have considerably less clout when it comes to bargaining for compensation.
It's all a scam.
Big computer, defense, and, to a lesser extent, manufacturing companies pay shills in academia and "think tanks" to gin up these kinds of studies every couple of years so Congress has some political cover when they increase the H1-B cap. It's not true, and it never has been. The only shortage that ever materialized in those two decades happened during the boom, and that was caused by a huge spike in demand.
The goal here is to make sure there's plenty of hungry technical people around so they don't have to pay them too much.
As soon as he does the PHBs of corporate America will identify their RedHat installations as problematic, waste a bunch of money with risk analyses and migration plans, then decide this Linux thing might just be a big pain in the ass and use Windows for new projects. I wouldn't, you wouldn't, but remember to a corporation it's worth spending extra money for risk mitigation.
After the uncertainty has done its work, Microsoft can simply reverse itself and say "Oh, we're very dissappointed, but we don't think the government will let us do that." That way they can throw sand in the RedHat machine for free.