dpreformer:President Bush signed a classified directive Jan. 8
Ellen Nakashima; Washington Post Staff Writer; Saturday, January 26, 2008; A03:...According to congressional aides and former White House officials with knowledge of the program, the directive outlines measures collectively referred to as the "cyber initiative," aimed at securing the government's computer systems against attacks by foreign adversaries and other intruders...
January 26 - January 8 = 18 days.
I.e. it takes less than three weeks for "Congressional Aides" to leak our most sensitive secrets to our enemies.
I don't know why we even bother to have secrets.
In fact, the level of treason in Washington DC is so high these days that I don't even know why we bother to have a military or an NSA.
We might as well just run up the white flag and let the Chinese enslave & sodomize us.
Q: Tell me, in the six years since 9-11, and the twelve years since Oklahoma City, just what exactly has been done to prevent ol' Timothy Abdul Hussein McVeigh from driving an ammonia-fertilizer truck bomb to One "Bilshire Woulevard" and taking out the entire telecomm infrastructure for the southwestern United States?
A: Not a damned thing.
the concentration of value making a centralized location more of a target
Exactly - CONCENTRATION MAKES FOR A HIGHER VALUE TARGET.
In general, subway bombings, like 3-11 in Spain, and 7-07 in England, can't work in the USA, because our transportation system is de-centralized: We don't ride mass transit subways, but rather drive individual cars and trucks, and the bad guys can't build enough bombs [or find enough suicide bombers] to take out each one of us individually.
Which is to say: From a strategic point of view, decentralization is a not a bad thing, it's a good thing.
Only a bean counter [in the pursuit of squeezing the last possible dollar out of the Accounts Payable side of the ledger] could possibly overlook the massive strategic advantage of decentralization.
By the way, when you're concentrated like that [you could call it a "monoculture of concentration"], it makes the facility not only more attractive to Jehadis wanting to take it down, but also to Jehadis [either geopolitically motivated, or merely of the corporate espionage variety] wanting to infiltrate the facility and become a mole there.
The more information you aggregate in one place, the more valuable it becomes to work your moles into that place, and the more effort will be expended trying to get the moles in the door.
Then you're an idiot for not setting up a backup at an independent facility.
If you're serious about commoditizing these IT services, then it's the responsibility of the commoditizer to commoditize the redundancy, with massively redundant facilities [each in a bomb-shelter-quality building, way out in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by Blackwater guys with 50 caliber machine guns], massively redundant uplinks from the client [high speed cable TV lines, high speed telecomm lines, high speed satellite connections], massively redundant downlinks to the client, and massively-redundant internal interconnects between the redundant facilities.
PS: But I will add a point which I made further down in this thread: Almost by definition, anything which can be commoditized [like basic email services] almost surely cannot be adding any value to your business, because if it is commoditized, then any of your [possible potential] competitors could be purchasing the commodity just as readily as you purchase that commodity.
Rather, it is necessarily the SPECIALIZED SYSTEMS which give you an advantage over your competition, and, by definition, the specialized systems cannot be commoditized.
I think the writing is on the wall that system administrators are going to go the way of the tv repairman.
I agree with you that certain aspects of today's IT infrastructure could be commoditized.
For instance, Hotmail, Yahoo!, and Google have long since proved that basic email functionality can be easily commoditized.
And Exchange Server backend [with Outlook frontend synchronization], while maybe an order of magnitude more difficult than basic email, could, in many cases, probably be commoditized [assuming you're that one-in-a-million business wherein there is no information of any monetary value which could be gleaned from snooping around in your Exchange database].
But the more specialized your IT tools become [which, generally speaking, is to say: THE MORE VALUE IS ADDED BY YOUR IT TOOLS], the more difficult it will be to commoditize them.
So, as always, the secret to job security will be in specialization - it won't be enough anymore to be just a general systems administrator - you'll have to specialize in e.g. Data Base Administration. And then it won't be enough anymore to be a general DBA - you'll need to learn specific schema & business logic suites, from the likes of Siebel/PeopleSoft/SAP/etc, or you'll need to learn specific data-mining techniques, from the likes of SAS/Ascential/Informatica/etc.
Which, of course, is the way it's always been: If you want absolute job security, then you need to be able to provide a service which no one else is capable of providing.
PS: There's another way to build job security, which is to shave, put on a coat and tie, and get out of the server room and meet some of the other people in your company. [And for some of you guys, it probably wouldn't hurt to lose 20 or 30 lbs, and to bathe and use deodorant on a regular basis.]
Learn how to give a good firm handshake, how to tell a joke [or, better yet, how to LISTEN to a joke - and even chuckle at it when it's not funny], and get in the habit of performing lots and lots of IT handholding: guiding your users through their software, teaching them its ins-and-outs, showing them that - lo and behold! - the little feature which they always wanted was there in the software already, getting the reputation for being that indispensable guy who always seems to be able to solve the problems which no one else can solve...
I keep reading all these comments about moving entire companies' worth of systems to a co-lo facility.
And, setting aside the question of reliability of the uplink [yes, Virgina, backhoes - not to mention tornadoes, hurricanes, and earthquakes - do take out fiber optic lines every now and then], and setting aside questions of privacy [do you really want God only knows whom to be able to sniff your company's email traffic?], then what about the fact that you're dealing with a single point of failure?
What if there's a fire at the co-lo?
Or, God forbid, what if some of these terrorists were to wise up and go after a really important piece of command and control infrastructure?
There's a certain high-rise building [or cluster of buildings] in the western United States, sitting on a thoroughfare which rhymes with "Bilshire Woulevard", which, if it were taken out, would put an immediate end to all economic activity in a region with the 7th largest GDP in the world.
Do you really want all of your sensitive info co-lo'd at a single site which is one good ammonia-fertilizer truck bomb [not to mention EMP weapon] removed from vanishing into thin air?
Now you might get away with calling me "eccentric" [although I doubt that, in their heart of hearts, most people would call me even that], but would you kindly point towards any single item which I have posted which is factually FALSE?
If you are seriously curious about the looming disaster which is dysgenic fertility, then I can give you enough links to contemplate for a month [or more], but it would take me some time to put it all together, and I don't want to waste all that time if you're being sarcastic.
Of course, even if you are being sarcastic, the tautological certitude of dysgenic fertility will have wiped the grin off your face in another 15 or 20 years - that I can guarantee you.
However, it could quite possibly be that there is no sch thing as a limit to what a human mind can learn, and by human mind I am including those person who by luck and misfortune happen to have been born in regions of the world where knowledge resources are traditionally restricted to the ruling elite. This theory is perhaps the pedagogical underpinigs which the OLPC is attempting to address.
Or, it could quite possibly be that there is such a thing as a limit to what a human mind can learn.
Which, of course, there is.
An OLPC laptop will not turn a child with an IQ of 90 [or 80 or 70] into a child with an IQ of 120.
Rather, it will turn a child with an IQ of 90 into a child with an IQ of 90 who was handed a laptop on a silver platter [i.e. who didn't even have to work to earn the laptop in the first place].
The OLPC program, like all other programs of its ilk, is doomed to failure.
In another five years, it will have been forgotten, and the educrats who con you into subsidizing their [rather lavish] lifestyles will have moved on to some other con designed to fool you into parting with your money.
And the poor children with IQs of 90 [or 80 or 70] will still be saddled with the same IQs they started out with, only they'll be a little older, and a little further along in their journey towards becoming adults with IQs of 90 [or 80 or 70] - adults with memories of many years spent surfing pr0n on the OLPC laptops which they were given as children.
PS: If laptops are so über-good for low-IQ children, then why don't you give them something even less expensive, more environmentally friendly, and far better for their intellectual development, namely: Books?
Because everyone knows that the books will never be opened - they won't even spend any time on a shelf gathering dust before they will immediately be discarded in the garbage [unless maybe the pages are torn out to be used as toilet paper].
I wish there were some way we could laugh at this looming catastrophe, but in about 15 or 20 years, it [the catastrophe] is going to rise up and swallow us:
So my advice would be to learn how to laugh at yourself [if you don't know how to already], because the remainder of your life is going to be one long, never-ending tragedy, and there isn't going to be anything funny about it at all.
Biology is a part, but even more important is environment (for comparisons within a species).
Sadly, that's just not true.
If you were to take one of these Peruvian children, with an IQ of 90, and put them in an intensive, decade-long, 8-hour a day, 5 days a week, 50 weeks a year course of intellectual training, you might [JUST MIGHT!] be able to push their IQ test scores up to around 95 [although, at that point, you'd be in Pavlovian Dog territory, and you'd have to wonder whether they really understood what they were doing, or were merely parroting the answers as they had been taught to parrot them], but, fundamentally, you'd only be working at the margins.
As a case in point, the LAUSD is already spending in excess of $18,431 per child, per year, on a clientele of students who are largely African-American & Mestizo-Aboriginal illegal aliens, with mean IQ's around 85, and even at that price [$18,431 X 12 = $221,172 - which doesn't begin to address the time value of the money], they can only get about 7% of them up to the modern SAT average of 1000 [which is a classical SAT score of 890]:
And even there, the 7% of all LAUSD students who make it to 1000 on the modern SAT almost certainly have last names like "Nguyen" and "Diem".
There just isn't enough money in all the world to get every child with an IQ of 90 to the point where they can mimic the behavior of a child with an IQ of 95, and there certainly isn't an infinite supply of spinsters like Ann Sullivan who would be willing to devote decades of their lives to such a Quixotic fantasy.
For the rest of them [the other 80%, or thereabouts], they'll just be using their OLPC laptops to download pr0n and text-message their meth dealers [or clients].
Intel and the group had a rocky relationship from the start in their short-lived effort to get inexpensive laptops into the hands of the world's poorest children.
Speaking of Godwin...
The world's poorest children are the progeny of the world's poorest parents, who, by and large, are poor because, well, let's face it: They just aren't that smart.
In fact, they're pretty darned stupid.
In the case of Peru, Lynn & Van Hanen guestimate a mean Peruvian IQ of about 90:
Ergo, right off the bat, about 50% of all Peruvian children [the ones with IQ's below 90] will be uneducable, and I doubt that much more than 20% of them will have IQ's up around the threshold of 100 which is necessary if you want to have any hope of being able to engage in abstract thinking with even the prospect of the most marginal of success.
I.e. only about 1/5th of these children possess the gray matter necessary to use a computer to write letters or essays, to organize data in a spreadsheet, or to fill out a PDF tax form. And that 1/5th will have parents who are wealthy enough to have computers in the household already.
For the rest of them [the other 80%, or thereabouts], they'll just be using their OLPC laptops to download pr0n and text-message their meth dealers [or clients].
Which is to say: These children don't need laptops - they need an alteration to their genome.
First of all, I went back and looked at his comment, and I didn't see anything about a "laptop".
Having said that, though, I have no experience with putting K6-2's or K6-3's in Pentium Laptops.
If there isn't any underlying BIOS/system obstacle which can't be surmounted [to include whether the laptop can actually be "unscrewed" to get at its motherboard (& CPU), or whether the whole thing is permanently glued/welded shut], then the only other really obvious problem would be whether a housing which was designed to dissipate the heat from a 200MHz Intel Pentium could also withstand the higher heat of a 500MHz AMD K6-2 or K6-3.
In that regards, UNDER-clocking can be a real life-saver: If the 500MHz [or 550MHz or 600MHz] part runs too hot at 500MHz, then underclocking it, down to 450MHz, or 400MHz, might get you cool enough that the plastic wouldn't melt.
With the obvious added benefit that it might do wonders for the battery life.
Consider socket 775. The first processors for that came out in december 2004, clocked at around 2.6ghz. Replace that with a 3ghz quad core.
IF you've got a quality motherboard from a quality manufacturer [like Tyan - maybe Intel or ASUS] & they bother to issue whatever BIOS upgrades might be necessary to support it.
Remember, by issuing those BIOS upgrades, they lose money not once, but twice:
1) First they have to put big $$$'s into paying the salaries of the guys who write & test [both development test & regression test] the BIOS upgrade.
2) Then they lose the even bigger $$$'s which you would have spent to upgrade to a more modern board.
So they really have to be pretty decent fellows to treat their customers so conscientiously - it's certainly not something that the suits [with their MBA's] are gonna be crazy about.
You're right - sorry, it was late at night & thanks for the correction. [I think I must have been getting "K6" & "K7" mixed up with "Socket 7" & the "Socket 6" which my imagination appears to have invented.]
the wonderful multiplier 2x = 6x
Yes, dollar for dollar, possibly the single greatest innovation in the entire history of the Personal Computer.
Because of that multiplier, I haven't had to upgrade any of the word-processing desktops or SOHO firewall/routers around here FOR 10 YEARS!!!
[And if the cable company can't offer us any more than 10mbps downstream, then I don't see any compelling reason to upgrade those SOHO firewall/routers FOR ANOTHER 10 YEARS!!!]
Talk about return on investment & the time value of money...
God, it's almost enough to make me nostalgic for an era when Chinese labor hadn't yet driven down hardware prices to the point that computers had become disposable items.
We certainly do seem to have lost the art of the in-place upgrade.
Boy, I'm starting to feel old.
K6-2 500mhz @ 6x 83mhz 460mhz
And the beauty of underclocking is two-fold:
1) Less power consumption = lower power bill.
2) Less heat = less chance of that 24 X 7 SOHO firewall/router catching on fire and burning the building down. [Knock on wood...]
Nothing like having that 24 X 7 SOHO firewall/router churning away at not a whole lot more than 98.6F.
By the way, for the original poster: For mere pocketchange, many, many "Socket 6" motherboards can be upgraded to 500MHz [or higher] with a K6-2 [or, in some instances, a K6-3]:
On the other hand, if you're running a Pentium Pro at 200MHz, then there was an upgrade part to 333MHz, called the "OverDrive"; here's a guy who appears to be selling one of them for $15.99:
Now as far as being the "typical" user, I've got some older Socket 6 motherboards [some of them Intel TX chipsets, others VIA chipsets] which, with 500MHz K6-2's, can still handle most of the stuff I throw at them, although, admittedly, AJAX, Flash, and Acrobat Reader can be a pain in some web pages [particularly in poorly coded pages, like the "New & Improved" Slashdot, which can produce some really awful hangs with its sloppy Javascript].
Personally, I've often thought that the Socket 6's potential for a five-fold [or, in some cases, greater than five-fold] increase in speeds [when upgrading from circa 100MHz, to circa 500MHz] was, dollar for dollar, the greatest value in the history of the Personal Computer.
To get the equivalent bang for the buck nowadays, there would need to be a roughly 3GHz motherboard on the market already, which, five or ten years from now, would be capable of an upgrade to 15GHz.
And I just don't see that happening.
About the most you might hope for is that some single-core motherboards could get upgraded to maybe quad or octal cores, but I kinda doubt you'll have much luck with that.
You're exceptionally lucky if a really outstanding board, like an older Tyan, is capable of upgrading from single-core to [merely] dual-core.
Your connection of declining intelligence to liberals is nothing more than a fanciful leap of logic.
I* am not saying that "Liberals" cause stupidity.
I am saying, however, that their disinterest in "technological" issues [vis-a-vis their obsession with "social" issues], as evidenced by their performance in our current Congress, does reflect the underlying stupidity of their constituencies.
*On the other hand, in his original work on the subject, Charles Murray did take the point of view that "Liberal" social policies have a dysgenic effect: If our government taxes the lives & behaviors of smart, industrious people, and subsidizes the lives & behaviors of lazy, stupid people, then we shouldn't be surprised when smart, industrious people come to have more and more difficulty in finding the time & financial resources necessary to make & raise babies, and that neither should we be surprised if lazy, stupid people are more than happy to move in and occupy that nature-abhorred vacuum.
Now I agree with Murray that the financial aspects of government social policy can impart some inertia in the general direction of fertility rates [be those rates dysgenic or eugenic], but I don't think for a second that the fiscal burden of "Liberalism" is the primary culprit here: There is something far more evil at work in the Death of the Civilized World, and "Liberalism" is merely a very poor, rather dim shadow of that Evil.
However, people who flock to social programs tend to be in a state of non-self-determination. Their hands are more tied and thus form lower income strata.
Their "non-self-determination" stems from the fact that they lack the gray matter necessary to perform almost any work which is much more productive than, say, mowing your yard, or clipping your hedges [and if the discipline of robotics ever advances to the point that robots can perform those jobs, then they're gonna be S.O.L.].
They will never grow up to be rocket scientists or brain surgeons - they can't "succeed" in a free-market economy [the way that a George Soros or a Warren Buffet can be wildly successful] because they don't have the intellect for it.
We're talking entire blocks of voters whose average IQ is below [or well below] 90 - and a child needs an IQ of about 90 just to have any hope of being able to benefit from even the most modest of educations.
As children's IQ's head south of 90, they very, very rapidly become ineducable.
And these children already form, effectively, almost half of our population - which is to say, they will determine one half of our future.
PS: Did you know that the average ineducable high-school dropout costs the taxpayer more than $19,500?
As for the definition of the word "racist": There are only a tiny handful of peoples who are capable of producing a man who can win a Fields Medal or a Nobel Prize in Physics: Largely they are Caucasians [to include the Ashkenazim & the Lebanese Christians], Pacific Rim Asians, and [only] the very highest castes from the Indian Subcontinent; conversely, the finals of the 100 meter dash at the Olympics will always consist almost entirely of men who are descended from the tribes of West Africa [or at least the finals would consist almost entirely of such men if national quotas didn't unfairly and unnaturally limit and restrict the participants at the Olympics].
No one - not even the most ardent marxist academic - bothers to try to convince himself otherwise anymore.
But, of course, the modern definition of "racist" does not identify, as the villain, he who notices these differences - we all notice them - but rather the word "racist" has come to apply to anyone who has the temerity [or foolhardiness] to verbalize the observation.
On the other hand, that's not what the word "racist" is supposed to mean: A racist is supposed to be someone who believes that a government should enforce [with the barrel of a gun] an agenda which:
1) Involves seizing the privateproperty of dis-favored races.
So it's impossible for any classical liberal - one who believes that men should be judged not by the color of their skin, but by rather the content of their character, and who believes that governments, and their gun barrels, really ought not exist in the first place - it is impossible for him to be a "racist" within the bounds of any meaning which that word was intended to connote.
But, again, as I have said over and over in this little conversation of ours: NONE OF THE SEMANTIC DISTINCTIONS ARE OF ANY IMPORTANCE WHATSOEVER.
What is important is the underlying truth of the matter: Barring some unforseen tragedy [your being struck by lightning, etc], YOU WILL LIVE TO EXPERIENCE THE IMMINENT TRAGEDY [& CATASTROPHE] OF DYSGENIC FERTILITY.
In the meantime, perform your very small - yet almost infinitely important - role in making the future a better place for us all [both we who are already born, and those of us who are yet-to-be-born]: Go find the smartest girl yo
Slashdot Mirror
The character had built a supercomputer out of dumpster-dived wifi-enabled smartphones.
Fox already did this on the third episode of Sarah Connor:
SPOILER
Kid drops out of CalTech, supports himself as a cellphone salesman, and, in his spare time, builds a sentient super computer out of commodity parts.
Newegg has a category for them [the "AGEIA PhysX Card"]:
Yes.
dpreformer: President Bush signed a classified directive Jan. 8
Ellen Nakashima; Washington Post Staff Writer; Saturday, January 26, 2008; A03:
January 26 - January 8 = 18 days.
I.e. it takes less than three weeks for "Congressional Aides" to leak our most sensitive secrets to our enemies.
I don't know why we even bother to have secrets.
In fact, the level of treason in Washington DC is so high these days that I don't even know why we bother to have a military or an NSA.
We might as well just run up the white flag and let the Chinese enslave & sodomize us.
No one seems to be aware that Slashdot was pwn3d today:
At least I assume those are pwn1ngs, and not merely the Eternal Sunshine of Cowboy Neal's Spotless Mind.
Note that the syntax for threaded is "thread", not "threaded":
Personally, if I want to read every single comment posted to a thread [no pun intended], then I prefer "nested", which is indeed "nested", not "nest":
Go figure.
better able to afford to reduce that risk itself
Q: Tell me, in the six years since 9-11, and the twelve years since Oklahoma City, just what exactly has been done to prevent ol' Timothy Abdul Hussein McVeigh from driving an ammonia-fertilizer truck bomb to One "Bilshire Woulevard" and taking out the entire telecomm infrastructure for the southwestern United States?
A: Not a damned thing.
the concentration of value making a centralized location more of a target
Exactly - CONCENTRATION MAKES FOR A HIGHER VALUE TARGET.
In general, subway bombings, like 3-11 in Spain, and 7-07 in England, can't work in the USA, because our transportation system is de-centralized: We don't ride mass transit subways, but rather drive individual cars and trucks, and the bad guys can't build enough bombs [or find enough suicide bombers] to take out each one of us individually.
Which is to say: From a strategic point of view, decentralization is a not a bad thing, it's a good thing.
Only a bean counter [in the pursuit of squeezing the last possible dollar out of the Accounts Payable side of the ledger] could possibly overlook the massive strategic advantage of decentralization.
By the way, when you're concentrated like that [you could call it a "monoculture of concentration"], it makes the facility not only more attractive to Jehadis wanting to take it down, but also to Jehadis [either geopolitically motivated, or merely of the corporate espionage variety] wanting to infiltrate the facility and become a mole there.
The more information you aggregate in one place, the more valuable it becomes to work your moles into that place, and the more effort will be expended trying to get the moles in the door.
Then you're an idiot for not setting up a backup at an independent facility.
If you're serious about commoditizing these IT services, then it's the responsibility of the commoditizer to commoditize the redundancy, with massively redundant facilities [each in a bomb-shelter-quality building, way out in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by Blackwater guys with 50 caliber machine guns], massively redundant uplinks from the client [high speed cable TV lines, high speed telecomm lines, high speed satellite connections], massively redundant downlinks to the client, and massively-redundant internal interconnects between the redundant facilities.
PS: But I will add a point which I made further down in this thread: Almost by definition, anything which can be commoditized [like basic email services] almost surely cannot be adding any value to your business, because if it is commoditized, then any of your [possible potential] competitors could be purchasing the commodity just as readily as you purchase that commodity.
Rather, it is necessarily the SPECIALIZED SYSTEMS which give you an advantage over your competition, and, by definition, the specialized systems cannot be commoditized.
I think the writing is on the wall that system administrators are going to go the way of the tv repairman.
I agree with you that certain aspects of today's IT infrastructure could be commoditized.
For instance, Hotmail, Yahoo!, and Google have long since proved that basic email functionality can be easily commoditized.
And Exchange Server backend [with Outlook frontend synchronization], while maybe an order of magnitude more difficult than basic email, could, in many cases, probably be commoditized [assuming you're that one-in-a-million business wherein there is no information of any monetary value which could be gleaned from snooping around in your Exchange database].
But the more specialized your IT tools become [which, generally speaking, is to say: THE MORE VALUE IS ADDED BY YOUR IT TOOLS], the more difficult it will be to commoditize them.
So, as always, the secret to job security will be in specialization - it won't be enough anymore to be just a general systems administrator - you'll have to specialize in e.g. Data Base Administration. And then it won't be enough anymore to be a general DBA - you'll need to learn specific schema & business logic suites, from the likes of Siebel/PeopleSoft/SAP/etc, or you'll need to learn specific data-mining techniques, from the likes of SAS/Ascential/Informatica/etc.
Which, of course, is the way it's always been: If you want absolute job security, then you need to be able to provide a service which no one else is capable of providing.
PS: There's another way to build job security, which is to shave, put on a coat and tie, and get out of the server room and meet some of the other people in your company. [And for some of you guys, it probably wouldn't hurt to lose 20 or 30 lbs, and to bathe and use deodorant on a regular basis.]
Learn how to give a good firm handshake, how to tell a joke [or, better yet, how to LISTEN to a joke - and even chuckle at it when it's not funny], and get in the habit of performing lots and lots of IT handholding: guiding your users through their software, teaching them its ins-and-outs, showing them that - lo and behold! - the little feature which they always wanted was there in the software already, getting the reputation for being that indispensable guy who always seems to be able to solve the problems which no one else can solve...
I keep reading all these comments about moving entire companies' worth of systems to a co-lo facility.
And, setting aside the question of reliability of the uplink [yes, Virgina, backhoes - not to mention tornadoes, hurricanes, and earthquakes - do take out fiber optic lines every now and then], and setting aside questions of privacy [do you really want God only knows whom to be able to sniff your company's email traffic?], then what about the fact that you're dealing with a single point of failure?
What if there's a fire at the co-lo?
Or, God forbid, what if some of these terrorists were to wise up and go after a really important piece of command and control infrastructure?
There's a certain high-rise building [or cluster of buildings] in the western United States, sitting on a thoroughfare which rhymes with "Bilshire Woulevard", which, if it were taken out, would put an immediate end to all economic activity in a region with the 7th largest GDP in the world.
Do you really want all of your sensitive info co-lo'd at a single site which is one good ammonia-fertilizer truck bomb [not to mention EMP weapon] removed from vanishing into thin air?
replying to him serves to bring out the ludicrousness of his position
This is Merriam-Webster on "ludicrous":
Now you might get away with calling me "eccentric" [although I doubt that, in their heart of hearts, most people would call me even that], but would you kindly point towards any single item which I have posted which is factually FALSE?
Thanks!
I can't tell whether you're being sarcastic.
If you are seriously curious about the looming disaster which is dysgenic fertility, then I can give you enough links to contemplate for a month [or more], but it would take me some time to put it all together, and I don't want to waste all that time if you're being sarcastic.
Of course, even if you are being sarcastic, the tautological certitude of dysgenic fertility will have wiped the grin off your face in another 15 or 20 years - that I can guarantee you.
However, it could quite possibly be that there is no sch thing as a limit to what a human mind can learn, and by human mind I am including those person who by luck and misfortune happen to have been born in regions of the world where knowledge resources are traditionally restricted to the ruling elite. This theory is perhaps the pedagogical underpinigs which the OLPC is attempting to address.
Or, it could quite possibly be that there is such a thing as a limit to what a human mind can learn.
Which, of course, there is.
An OLPC laptop will not turn a child with an IQ of 90 [or 80 or 70] into a child with an IQ of 120.
Rather, it will turn a child with an IQ of 90 into a child with an IQ of 90 who was handed a laptop on a silver platter [i.e. who didn't even have to work to earn the laptop in the first place].
The OLPC program, like all other programs of its ilk, is doomed to failure.
In another five years, it will have been forgotten, and the educrats who con you into subsidizing their [rather lavish] lifestyles will have moved on to some other con designed to fool you into parting with your money.
And the poor children with IQs of 90 [or 80 or 70] will still be saddled with the same IQs they started out with, only they'll be a little older, and a little further along in their journey towards becoming adults with IQs of 90 [or 80 or 70] - adults with memories of many years spent surfing pr0n on the OLPC laptops which they were given as children.
PS: If laptops are so über-good for low-IQ children, then why don't you give them something even less expensive, more environmentally friendly, and far better for their intellectual development, namely: Books?
Because everyone knows that the books will never be opened - they won't even spend any time on a shelf gathering dust before they will immediately be discarded in the garbage [unless maybe the pages are torn out to be used as toilet paper].
I'm going to be the optimist, and go along with those who say that your post should be modded as 'funny'.
To paraphrase Master Yoda: Oh, you will be pessimistic, you will be:
I wish there were some way we could laugh at this looming catastrophe, but in about 15 or 20 years, it [the catastrophe] is going to rise up and swallow us:
So my advice would be to learn how to laugh at yourself [if you don't know how to already], because the remainder of your life is going to be one long, never-ending tragedy, and there isn't going to be anything funny about it at all.
Biology is a part, but even more important is environment (for comparisons within a species).
Sadly, that's just not true.
If you were to take one of these Peruvian children, with an IQ of 90, and put them in an intensive, decade-long, 8-hour a day, 5 days a week, 50 weeks a year course of intellectual training, you might [JUST MIGHT!] be able to push their IQ test scores up to around 95 [although, at that point, you'd be in Pavlovian Dog territory, and you'd have to wonder whether they really understood what they were doing, or were merely parroting the answers as they had been taught to parrot them], but, fundamentally, you'd only be working at the margins.
As a case in point, the LAUSD is already spending in excess of $18,431 per child, per year, on a clientele of students who are largely African-American & Mestizo-Aboriginal illegal aliens, with mean IQ's around 85, and even at that price [$18,431 X 12 = $221,172 - which doesn't begin to address the time value of the money], they can only get about 7% of them up to the modern SAT average of 1000 [which is a classical SAT score of 890]:
And even there, the 7% of all LAUSD students who make it to 1000 on the modern SAT almost certainly have last names like "Nguyen" and "Diem".
There just isn't enough money in all the world to get every child with an IQ of 90 to the point where they can mimic the behavior of a child with an IQ of 95, and there certainly isn't an infinite supply of spinsters like Ann Sullivan who would be willing to devote decades of their lives to such a Quixotic fantasy.
For the rest of them [the other 80%, or thereabouts], they'll just be using their OLPC laptops to download pr0n and text-message their meth dealers [or clients].
Or, in the case of the girls, to upload pr0n.
Intel and the group had a rocky relationship from the start in their short-lived effort to get inexpensive laptops into the hands of the world's poorest children.
Speaking of Godwin...
The world's poorest children are the progeny of the world's poorest parents, who, by and large, are poor because, well, let's face it: They just aren't that smart.
In fact, they're pretty darned stupid.
In the case of Peru, Lynn & Van Hanen guestimate a mean Peruvian IQ of about 90:
Ergo, right off the bat, about 50% of all Peruvian children [the ones with IQ's below 90] will be uneducable, and I doubt that much more than 20% of them will have IQ's up around the threshold of 100 which is necessary if you want to have any hope of being able to engage in abstract thinking with even the prospect of the most marginal of success.
I.e. only about 1/5th of these children possess the gray matter necessary to use a computer to write letters or essays, to organize data in a spreadsheet, or to fill out a PDF tax form. And that 1/5th will have parents who are wealthy enough to have computers in the household already.
For the rest of them [the other 80%, or thereabouts], they'll just be using their OLPC laptops to download pr0n and text-message their meth dealers [or clients].
Which is to say: These children don't need laptops - they need an alteration to their genome.
First of all, I went back and looked at his comment, and I didn't see anything about a "laptop".
Having said that, though, I have no experience with putting K6-2's or K6-3's in Pentium Laptops.
If there isn't any underlying BIOS/system obstacle which can't be surmounted [to include whether the laptop can actually be "unscrewed" to get at its motherboard (& CPU), or whether the whole thing is permanently glued/welded shut], then the only other really obvious problem would be whether a housing which was designed to dissipate the heat from a 200MHz Intel Pentium could also withstand the higher heat of a 500MHz AMD K6-2 or K6-3.
In that regards, UNDER-clocking can be a real life-saver: If the 500MHz [or 550MHz or 600MHz] part runs too hot at 500MHz, then underclocking it, down to 450MHz, or 400MHz, might get you cool enough that the plastic wouldn't melt.
With the obvious added benefit that it might do wonders for the battery life.
Consider socket 775. The first processors for that came out in december 2004, clocked at around 2.6ghz. Replace that with a 3ghz quad core.
IF you've got a quality motherboard from a quality manufacturer [like Tyan - maybe Intel or ASUS] & they bother to issue whatever BIOS upgrades might be necessary to support it.
Remember, by issuing those BIOS upgrades, they lose money not once, but twice:
1) First they have to put big $$$'s into paying the salaries of the guys who write & test [both development test & regression test] the BIOS upgrade.
2) Then they lose the even bigger $$$'s which you would have spent to upgrade to a more modern board.
So they really have to be pretty decent fellows to treat their customers so conscientiously - it's certainly not something that the suits [with their MBA's] are gonna be crazy about.
Socket 7
You're right - sorry, it was late at night & thanks for the correction. [I think I must have been getting "K6" & "K7" mixed up with "Socket 7" & the "Socket 6" which my imagination appears to have invented.]
the wonderful multiplier 2x = 6x
Yes, dollar for dollar, possibly the single greatest innovation in the entire history of the Personal Computer.
Because of that multiplier, I haven't had to upgrade any of the word-processing desktops or SOHO firewall/routers around here FOR 10 YEARS!!!
[And if the cable company can't offer us any more than 10mbps downstream, then I don't see any compelling reason to upgrade those SOHO firewall/routers FOR ANOTHER 10 YEARS!!!]
Talk about return on investment & the time value of money...
God, it's almost enough to make me nostalgic for an era when Chinese labor hadn't yet driven down hardware prices to the point that computers had become disposable items.
We certainly do seem to have lost the art of the in-place upgrade.
Boy, I'm starting to feel old.
K6-2 500mhz @ 6x 83mhz 460mhz
And the beauty of underclocking is two-fold:
1) Less power consumption = lower power bill.
2) Less heat = less chance of that 24 X 7 SOHO firewall/router catching on fire and burning the building down. [Knock on wood...]
Nothing like having that 24 X 7 SOHO firewall/router churning away at not a whole lot more than 98.6F.
For pete's sake, two HUNDRED MHz? I had a faster computer than that in 1996. You're not the typical user, or even in the ballpark.
The Pentium Pro peaked at 200MHz.
The Pentium peaked at 233MHz, but that chip was not released until June 2, 1997
The Pentium II debuted at 233MHz, on May 7, 1997.
By the way, for the original poster: For mere pocketchange, many, many "Socket 6" motherboards can be upgraded to 500MHz [or higher] with a K6-2 [or, in some instances, a K6-3]:
On the other hand, if you're running a Pentium Pro at 200MHz, then there was an upgrade part to 333MHz, called the "OverDrive"; here's a guy who appears to be selling one of them for $15.99:
Now as far as being the "typical" user, I've got some older Socket 6 motherboards [some of them Intel TX chipsets, others VIA chipsets] which, with 500MHz K6-2's, can still handle most of the stuff I throw at them, although, admittedly, AJAX, Flash, and Acrobat Reader can be a pain in some web pages [particularly in poorly coded pages, like the "New & Improved" Slashdot, which can produce some really awful hangs with its sloppy Javascript].
Personally, I've often thought that the Socket 6's potential for a five-fold [or, in some cases, greater than five-fold] increase in speeds [when upgrading from circa 100MHz, to circa 500MHz] was, dollar for dollar, the greatest value in the history of the Personal Computer.
To get the equivalent bang for the buck nowadays, there would need to be a roughly 3GHz motherboard on the market already, which, five or ten years from now, would be capable of an upgrade to 15GHz.
And I just don't see that happening.
About the most you might hope for is that some single-core motherboards could get upgraded to maybe quad or octal cores, but I kinda doubt you'll have much luck with that.
You're exceptionally lucky if a really outstanding board, like an older Tyan, is capable of upgrading from single-core to [merely] dual-core.
Your connection of declining intelligence to liberals is nothing more than a fanciful leap of logic.
I* am not saying that "Liberals" cause stupidity.
I am saying, however, that their disinterest in "technological" issues [vis-a-vis their obsession with "social" issues], as evidenced by their performance in our current Congress, does reflect the underlying stupidity of their constituencies.
[Parenthetically: Were you aware that Obama wants to defund NASA's next generation of launch vehicles so as to be able to throw even more booty at his constituents in the National "Education" Association?]
*On the other hand, in his original work on the subject, Charles Murray did take the point of view that "Liberal" social policies have a dysgenic effect: If our government taxes the lives & behaviors of smart, industrious people, and subsidizes the lives & behaviors of lazy, stupid people, then we shouldn't be surprised when smart, industrious people come to have more and more difficulty in finding the time & financial resources necessary to make & raise babies, and that neither should we be surprised if lazy, stupid people are more than happy to move in and occupy that nature-abhorred vacuum.
[Again, parenthetically: Did you know that the bottom 50% of Americans pay no income taxes whatsoever? Or that the top 1% of Americans pay more income tax than the bottom 90%? Or that the average low-skilled citizen costs the government more than $19,500 per year every year of his life?]
Now I agree with Murray that the financial aspects of government social policy can impart some inertia in the general direction of fertility rates [be those rates dysgenic or eugenic], but I don't think for a second that the fiscal burden of "Liberalism" is the primary culprit here: There is something far more evil at work in the Death of the Civilized World, and "Liberalism" is merely a very poor, rather dim shadow of that Evil.
A shadow of A Shadow, if you will.
However, people who flock to social programs tend to be in a state of non-self-determination. Their hands are more tied and thus form lower income strata.
Their "non-self-determination" stems from the fact that they lack the gray matter necessary to perform almost any work which is much more productive than, say, mowing your yard, or clipping your hedges [and if the discipline of robotics ever advances to the point that robots can perform those jobs, then they're gonna be S.O.L.].
They will never grow up to be rocket scientists or brain surgeons - they can't "succeed" in a free-market economy [the way that a George Soros or a Warren Buffet can be wildly successful] because they don't have the intellect for it.
We're talking entire blocks of voters whose average IQ is below [or well below] 90 - and a child needs an IQ of about 90 just to have any hope of being able to benefit from even the most modest of educations.
As children's IQ's head south of 90, they very, very rapidly become ineducable.
And these children already form, effectively, almost half of our population - which is to say, they will determine one half of our future.
PS: Did you know that the average ineducable high-school dropout costs the taxpayer more than $19,500?
Per Year?
IN PERPETUITY, UNTIL THE END OF HIS LIFE?!?
I am very familiar with the definition of ad hominem:
As for the definition of the word "racist": There are only a tiny handful of peoples who are capable of producing a man who can win a Fields Medal or a Nobel Prize in Physics: Largely they are Caucasians [to include the Ashkenazim & the Lebanese Christians], Pacific Rim Asians, and [only] the very highest castes from the Indian Subcontinent; conversely, the finals of the 100 meter dash at the Olympics will always consist almost entirely of men who are descended from the tribes of West Africa [or at least the finals would consist almost entirely of such men if national quotas didn't unfairly and unnaturally limit and restrict the participants at the Olympics].
No one - not even the most ardent marxist academic - bothers to try to convince himself otherwise anymore.
But, of course, the modern definition of "racist" does not identify, as the villain, he who notices these differences - we all notice them - but rather the word "racist" has come to apply to anyone who has the temerity [or foolhardiness] to verbalize the observation.
On the other hand, that's not what the word "racist" is supposed to mean: A racist is supposed to be someone who believes that a government should enforce [with the barrel of a gun] an agenda which:
So it's impossible for any classical liberal - one who believes that men should be judged not by the color of their skin, but by rather the content of their character, and who believes that governments, and their gun barrels, really ought not exist in the first place - it is impossible for him to be a "racist" within the bounds of any meaning which that word was intended to connote.
But, again, as I have said over and over in this little conversation of ours: NONE OF THE SEMANTIC DISTINCTIONS ARE OF ANY IMPORTANCE WHATSOEVER.
What is important is the underlying truth of the matter: Barring some unforseen tragedy [your being struck by lightning, etc], YOU WILL LIVE TO EXPERIENCE THE IMMINENT TRAGEDY [& CATASTROPHE] OF DYSGENIC FERTILITY.
In the meantime, perform your very small - yet almost infinitely important - role in making the future a better place for us all [both we who are already born, and those of us who are yet-to-be-born]: Go find the smartest girl yo
Yeah, it costs a ton of money in disk space, mirroring, bandwidth, and power bills to maintain all those duplicates of the original.