The amusing thing about this is, with secure boot coming out GRUB2 will probably be tossed out in favour of a boot loader with a more liberal license.
Yes, the "amusing thing"* that people would want to have as much possible information about their boot system, which is precisely where things like MBR trojans or what will possible be the new "secure boot" versions. And that more "liberal license" than the GPLv3 is only more "liberal" for the OEMs/MS/Vendors in that it gives them more freedom to say while being less liberal in what a user can do.
Ubuntu has already stated they are dropping GRUB2, I imagine other distros will follow in the next few years.
I really hope they don't. I hope they are as vocal and as loud as possible. You know why? Because I can only see "Secure Boot" having flaws in it and being used by malware. I can only see "Secure Boot" turning into "Secure ID" or some other BS and people becoming angry when it backfires. I really hope some distros stick to their guns even if they appear to be Richard Stallman-like crazy because the truth is, they're the only sane ones and the only way to prove that in the long-term is keep arguing for sanity, not kowtow to the craziness just because it'll point out you're different and make people realize the absurdity of the "Secure Boot" option. Yes, if even after all that, computers still keep coming out with TPM and it becomes as far as mandated for internet access, I can see even the die-hards buying a TPM machine. They'll just tunnel through it with their own VPN and try to continue to use their uninfected machines. In the end, I just hope TPM as a whole dies. The technology could be used for so many good things. But, the two powers involved who keep pushing TPM--government (legislative and executive branches, actually) and corpratists--are hardly the groups I'd put any long-term faith in, let alone short-term faith, when it comes to considerations of freedom or liberty at the individual level.
*Yet again, another one of Richard Stallman's speculations holds out as coming true with TPM and is precisely one of the reasons why the GPLv3 software requires the encryption keys used for execution. The fact that some distributions are so quick to brush aside the clear implications of having to avoid GPLv3 code over precisely that issue and to just consider some of Stallman's speculations on the outcome...is just stupid. And this comes with the point that TPM isn't inherently bad; it's just that by nearly every implementation, it doesn't work to foremost given the actual user the keys and the control but instead the hardware/software producers the keys and the control.
Why not? That is the way we distribute food, clothing and housing. Why should organs be different?
Organs are a rival good, are generally a required component for sustaining life*, and the window to negotiate pricing is often small/non-existent.
What you are missing, is that if there were no artificial restrictions on organs, they would be far more plentiful.
There are already plenty of organs on Earth. Why, there's over 6 billion livers. And without artificial restrictions, there might be thousands of compatible matches (I don't know how exact cross-matching needs to be) just a murder away. And without murder, it's all about rich people needing an organ trolling morgues for parts and plenty of fresh corpse auctions, something to unlikely work well given the very small window that organ transplants are viable without specific care.
Most people don't check the donor box, because there is no incentive to do so. If they were prepaid $100, many more would do so.
Yep. On the black market, a single kidney might we worth thousands. But, for a mere $100, I'll potentially accept giving up the whole bundle--or not. Seriously, it's actually more insulting to most people to severely lowball an offer on something than to accept that it's a gift being given. After all, you can feel right (and have some legal ground for it) to retract a gift yet given; but, what sort of legal nightmare do you think is going to happen when potential transplant recipients go around suing families for going against the donor's wishes, arguing logically that they're breaking a contract.
*Yea, you have multiple of some organs, but as a general point there's significant risk for giving any of those away. I'd imagine it also decreases life expectancy, given that it suddenly only takes one lung, one kidney, etc to fail. You will note, though, that people are regularly paid for blood more or less precisely because it's rather low risk, it auto regenerates, etc. So, I'd imagine the risk to the donor has a lot to do with it even more than the rival aspect of things, which is likely just to make it a rich man's game.
Well, pathological cases should be a real concern if the user has some control over the input and the server or other clients are doing the hashing. As for big-O analysis for various cases, that is technically true in the mathematical sense, but it's almost always understood (unless explicitly stated) in computer science terms (and I really have to presume, that's the sense the Google interviewer meant) to be a worse case scenario, precisely because there's a general interest in using a stated algorithm in all sorts of locations, including possible hostile ones.
And, yes, sure, there's plenty of reason to want to know the average case in a specific application where you're sanitizing the input or the harm is self-inflictable only while the benefits can be substantial. Nor do I think using hashes are a bad idea as a general point in a lot of applications. But if the issue were raised about hashed tables not being O(1) in most operations, I would recognize the inherent truth to it and instead likely argue more the point that, as you said, while it might not be technically O(1), for the specific application I don't see there being a need to be concerned about the pathological case, while then further trying to avoid using the hash table since it's obviously not what they were after.:)
Someone else a little above here was saying the difference between MS and Apple demos is that Apple is shipping units to the stores when the put them on demo. MS is demoing a product that may never make it to the stores. They aren't even finished designing it yet.
Well, that's been SOP at MS for years. Consider Windows and the original Macintosh.
They're so late to the tablet game that they're throwing a barely bootable early prototype up on stage and dangling it on a string over reviewers heads trying to stall for time. All they've done is shown their hand about where they'd like to be in 6 months.
But like most MS products, they may "like to be" at that stage in 6 months, it usually takes at least two years to get to a remotely usable state. And invariably that comes at the cost of stripping out 50% of the cutting edge features. I'd say the big difference here is just how low they're aiming, feature wise.
By then there will probably be a dozen tablets that have magnetic clicky keyboard cover/stand accessories available for them. This demo is probably going to do them more harm than good. And if they're as consistent with the Surface's "early preview" launch as they usually are, a few of the features they talked about it having won't even BE in the final product.
Well, that's MS. They promise the moon, and they never deliver. The interesting thing is, MS's real problem is that around ten years ago, people were clueless enough about MS's behavior to bet on MS's vaporware which was really good at harming the competition. But, MS's cried wolf too many times, that even when they do deliver a demo of an actually working product, people are reluctant to really trust that MS will devote itself to that product for any serious length of time...unless it's Windows/Office/XBox related. I see Google going down this same route, actually, given how frequently they kill projects.
It all comes down to just how willing MS is to supporting Surface for the long-term, even if that means ten years from now working on maintaining backwards compatibility with misbehaving v0.1 programs on whatever the latest iteration of Surface will be at that time. Personally, I just don't see that happening. And as your Zune example suggests, I don't think you do either. In the end, MS will have to go out of its way to really prove a commitment in action, not in just words.
That is like saying that if I drop my credit card in the street I have "published" its details for everyone to see due to my own carelessness.
More accurately, it's like accidentally posting a photocopy of your credit card on a bulletin board, presumably with a variety of other documents.
I really hope people like you get their bank accounts cleared out by criminal twats like these idiots, then you'll see whether "just copying" information is so fucking harmless.
Interestingly enough, if you were to do the above and be so careless, I'm not entirely sure if the bank would be obligated to refund your money. Certainly, most banks/credit card companies have policies speak about only 24 hours to report "stolen" credit card information to maintain minimal liability on the card holder's part. Having said that, the criminal is still, well, criminal.
Want to share your bank login and password information with me?
Considering the GP didn't speak about "just copying" information being harmless, I'd gather the answer is no. After all, the point isn't that blackmail or clearing out someone else's bank account isn't illegal and unethical/immoral. It's that one can't charge the person with "hacking" just because you're careless anymore than you could charge people with theft because they took a photo of your photocopied credit card. I mean, a lot of people may have accessed the information and done little or nothing with it; but certainly, there's a lot of legal things you could do, like mock the person who was so careless with their personal/company details.
And you don't think that happens now? If someone started working someplace for minimum wage and they became so valuable to their employer that he gave them a raise to keep them from going someplace else, and minimum wage rises to the rate the employer is now paying them, don't you think that the employer is going to be under some pressure to give them a raise so that they do not leave to go to work for someone else?
So...that 3% of the workforce figure I gave you is probably closer to 4-5% who will be effected by a minimum wage increase because they earn something like $0.25/hr more than minimum wage now?
Of course that likely means that the employer is going to have to raise the rate he charges people for his product.
And? I mean, if labor isn't a large cost of the final product, then very small wage increases are unlikely to matter much in the cost of the final product, certainly relative to an individual and their individual purchases. And if they're the major part, then, well, generally production has already been outsourced to China which has much lower cost of living, has questionable envrionmental standards, questionable employee treatment standards, etc--and we'd have to likely adopt a good bit of that to stay competitive on that front, anyways. This is, btw, why I'm a stronger believer in things like automation, anyways, since it increases productivity per worker and hence readily justifies allowing for decent wages. And if the issue is that given enough automation there isn't enough jobs to go around...well, we're been up that creek for decades due to the obvious point that it only takes ~3% of the population to make the food we need, not much more to maintain and build houses, and very few more to make our clothes. The only way to make a capitalistic system like ours work then where a large percentage of people work is significant, wasteful consumerism. So, one would seem to have to accept the idea that additional consumerism (and additional jobs) just need to be created to take up the slack.
The other thing is, if a job is worth $8 an hour to me, and you make minimum wage $9 an hour, that doesn't mean that I will pay someone $9 an hour to do the job. It means that I will pay someone $0 an hour and either do the job myself or do without.
The question is, why is the job worth $8 an hour to you? To say it's because you get $8/hr of productivity out of a person is absurd, unless you believe that all employees paid the same are equally productive and you have no interest in underpaying employees compared to their real worth. The former is very unlikely precisely because few companies micromanage the wages of people based on productivity--piecemeal work is one of the closest examples but that tends to be abused by employers as a means to cut the price of their products or simply to enrich themselves. The latter is just silly because almost no one pays for anything precisely on the value they attribute to the end product; instead, the group of buyers and the group of sellers reach a junction of cost and available cash to reach an effective compromise price that cuts buyers and sellers out while simultaneously overenriching other buyers and sellers; I say that purely from a free market perspective, mind you, as it's generally considered a positive of how the free market works.
But, in the end, if a person isn't worth being paid the $9/hr to do a job and it takes a $9/hr job to live, then the person is better off finding work that pays $9/hr instead of slowly languishing in an $8/hr job. That you might decide to take the work on yourself indicates you have the free time and there was never a good reason to be paying the person in the first place. And if you do without, then it implies that you could possibly have always done without; of course, that can translate into the company failing, but it seems more likely that if you had 9 $8/hr employees, you'd switch to 8 $9/hr employees and demand greater productivity (for the burger flipper example, that'd mean going from 60 burgers/hr to ~67.5 burgers/hr) and possibly might even bring in machines which are likely more cost effective anyways.
Except that it is not just one burger flipper who has gotten a raise, but every minimum wage employee.
Hence my comment about "further down the line you'd presumably see similar increases". If an industry is heavily minimum wage centered, then yeah, the benefits to minimum wage workers is likely to be low and possible even negative. But in the rest of industries, there will be a net positive for minimum wage workers. So, I'd guess the question is just how many people make minimum wage. After some googling on Minimum Wage workers, it would appear that ~59% of 16+ workers are hourly workers and ~5.2% of hourly workers are minimum wage or lower workers (~3% of all workers total; the "or lower" comes from many states which have waitresses and the like who are expected to supplement their income with tips and hence are allowed to be paid some amount less than minimum wage). Having said that, things like leisure and food services seem to rely heavily on minimum wage workers, so burger flippers would be one of the few minimum wage workers likely to suffer. Yet, in their potential suffering, they by definition will always be paid enough to live on a living wage.
The question is, if minimum wage is such a good idea, why don't we make $100 and hour?
I really don't know if you're being facetious or not, but the answer is obvious: very few people earn $100/hr or more so such a massive shift in the minimum wage would fall into the trap of it being a net negative. Further, such an act would spur significant inflation as people who are "worth more than minimum wage" would see or at least expect to see their wages scale upwards. After all, the point of a minimum wage isn't to group everyone into one pay bracket; it is to guarantee that the small percentage of full-time minimum wage workers aren't effectively worse off for working. It's not some sort of communist plot to give everyone an equal salary so they can be as wasteful as the average middle class American or the rich.
Two things. One, fast food is a luxury good; ie, it doesn't stand to reason that a living/minimum wage would afford the burger flipper an ability to afford the burgers he flips in the first place. Two, if the burger flipper flips 60 burgers/hr and he sees a $1/hr raise (~$0.75/hr after taxes), the increased cost per burger for his wage increase would be ~$0.02 (plus ~$0.08 employer FICA taxes plus whatever their unemployment insurance taxes are but probably around ~$0.06, so perhaps $0.16 total); further down the line you'd presumably see similar increases in things like beef, cooking supplies, cleaning supplies etc. Whether that is greater than the effective ~$0.75/hr raise, I don't know, but it's a pretty large jump to presume to know.
Making the minimum wage a living wage is equivalent to saying anything you can be paid for doing, you should be able to do for a living. Now think about that. I pay kids to shovel the sidewalk for me in winter. Should an adult be able to make a living doing nothing but that all his life?
If they can find either 40hrs/week, 52 weeks/year or 80hrs/week, 26 weeks/year of snow shoveling, sure. It's a minimum wage, after all, not a minimum salary. And there's no guarantee that anyone can find work. But setting the standard that "if you work full time, you won't starve to death" seems like a pretty minimal standard for a humane society. And lucky for us, thanks to automation due to tapping fossil fuel reserves, it's quite possible.
The economy is full of different kinds of jobs, ranging from difficult ones which pay a lot, to easy ones which pay a little but are good working experience. If you raise the minimum wage to where it's a living wage, you're not making life easier for those in those low-end jobs, you're eliminating those jobs from existence.
Um, it's called "minimum" wage. And I have to say, having jobs that are "easy ones which pay a little [or none] but are good working experience" only works if you (a) accept that you have to save up money to work for cheap or free and (b) that either your work is so subpar it makes sense they're paying you so little or the company is effectively screwing you over by not paying the minimal of what you're worth--which is, again, enough money so you don't starve to death.
The whole point of paying people for a job is that the value you get from them doing the job (the productivity they generate) exceeds what you're paying them. I pay the kid with the shovel $8/hr because I can use that hour I save to earn more than $8 (or I value the free hour I get to spend with my family more than $8). You pay the burger flipper $8/hr because by selling the burgers you can net more than $8/hr in earnings. If you can't net more than you're paying them for their labor, there is no point having them do the job. You'd lose money doing it. In other words, it would detract from the country's economy, not contribute to it.
Yet people want burger flippers. Maybe some of those people only make $8/hr, but a lot more make $10-$20/hr. So, if that burger flipper gets a raise, then there's still a lot of customers who hourly make enough to eat the extra cost in their burgers to pay enough that the burger flipper doesn't starve to death.
e.g. If you raise the minimum wage to give the janitor a better living, he doesn't get a better living. The company which hired him to clean the offices once every week? It's no longer cost-effective to have him clean every week. The clean office was worth (say) $80/wk, and they were paying him $64/day to clean once a week. Now you raise his wage to $100/day. What's going to happen? It's no longer worth it to clean once a week. So they reschedule him to clean every other week. He's making more money per hour, but he (and all other janitors) are working fewer hours. They'd be the same or worse off than before, and everyone's offices are dirtier. All because you've artificially priced labor above what it's really worth.
No. Odds are good some percentage of the offices will recognize they can't stand a dirty office and think its worth $110/wk while others already thought it was only worth $50/wk and were only hiring the janitor about 40 weeks out of the year. Whether its a net gain or loss obviously depends on the janitor's situation. In any case, it's a pretty absurd wealth redistribution anyways since the office itself exists precisely as a means to sales and cleaning is generally, but not always, an ornate task without much real benefit to anyone (and if that's not the case, it's most often due to a few unhygienic people whom I doubt are really worth the $64/week janitor cost to co
It takes time to build a house just like it takes time to make art. Just because it costs very little to copy the final product does not automatically mean that there wasn't some investment of time and effort on the front end.
It costs very little to copy a house? Wow, that's news to me. Last I checked, the major cost to a house is the land it resides on, the materials to build it, and the labor in the act of copying. Generally, whatever design copyright there is over the construction is a very trivial component. Put another way, there's nothing to stop a painter from selling each individual painted canvas for a nice fee, but expecting poster prints to sell at near the same price and return much higher income is silly. The same goes for musicians and concerts/hand-written manuscripts. In the end, the labor and materials are what people pay for, most often paying a premium on good labor.
Copyright law seeks to recognize that original time and effort.
Granted. But why? Is it because we have a soft spot for artists? No. It's because we want that artist, on creating his art, to distribute his work and then to further create more works. One could argue that happens now...except for all the one-hit wonders and how the RIAA has converted the system into one where the large profits from the few big hits pay for many experimental possible hits to be mass marketed with the knowledge that most will fail and few will go on to produce more works in any sort of copyright-made-possible profitable way. That might be great and all, but clearly that's not what copyright was all about. By the same token, stocks weren't supposed to be bought and sold in mass at fraction of a second intervals to make a profit. One could argue what the RIAA does is good...but then you're no longer really standing on copyright anymore or any of those supposed principals except the most base, to encourage more works to be produced. To that point, I don't even know if copyright is really needed except to prevent artists from undercutting the RIAA's marketing machine.
The question that the author of TFA is posing isn't a "what can I do to legislate people away from doing what they're doing" but "how can I properly explain to people what they, not the RIAA, are doing to the music and musicians they say they love".
The public is fickle. They "love" a new song every week. And a lot of the people who are "devote" fans are just liars.
He is pointing out that changing the way that music is created and that society treats artists is the tyranny of the majority.
Yep, that's the free market for you. You can set whatever price you want for your services and your products. But you can't make people buy your services and certainly you can't--at least in any other industry--prevent other companies/people from copying your products and undercutting you. That copyright was meant to promote the useful arts and sciences and of which I doubt anything David Lowery has every created qualifies--and I doubt very very little of anything I've created qualifies--really just makes me want to play a small violin. Having said that, I still like the idea of showing my appreciation of various works I enjoy. That doesn't mean I necessary feel compelled to buy a copy just because it was on TV or a need to send a check in. Meanwhile, if we wish to ignore the basis for copyright and support the idea of mass-produced entertainment, I'd suggest making a new copyright-like law to cover it with a much more limited time span, untransferable to others, and setup with fixed price structures so musicians don't get screwed over by producers/distributors. But, then, there's really no solution to the digital download problem, and certainly musicians complaining about it won't work because most people are greedy and fickle.
We are forcing these changes not because it's "the right thing to do" but simply because it's in our own intrest, and we vastly outnumber them.
That's the Republican way. Well, it's also the Democrat way too, but they'd want to enshrine the RIAA into the government and setup the above mentioned quasi-copyright to keep musicians employed. As for "the right thing to do"? Given that there's nothing "right" about copyright and it's wholly a social construct and especially copyright over most entertainment really falls into the category of "society could do without"--the copyright laws as I'm sure entertainment would continue--, it's really more a political question of just how much and where society should be forced to pay for government inflated CD/digital download prices, be it through a government mandate or a copyright law.
Just like how all those automakers will make a big turn around... Oh, right... No, I'm not so optimistic that Intel can have its cake and eat it too. So far, all Intel's efforts, while impressive by x86 standards, are horrible by ARM standards. The only chance I see Intel really having is the same that the big three in the US have--be willing to fork a new brand and release subcompacts with the full knowledge that (a) it might take years for it to catch on in any meaningful sense and (b) it'll probably never supplant your main line because way too many people want performance with little thought of power/gas draw. One could argue that's what Intel's Atom line is all about, but look above. I'd argue Intel's Atom line is tantamount to the whole hybrid/electric fad. It misses the point that the only way to strip out most the power draw is to significantly shrink the die usage/car weight. Once you've gotten to that inherent point of improved performance, only then do you look in ways to augment extant components to incorporate technology that doesn't increase the die usage/car weight while still decreasing the power draw. Intel sort of went that direction...but they're going to have to regress a lot further back than the Pentium M with its multiple instruction cores.:/
There's nothing inherently "superior" about ARM or PPC instruction sets.
The GP didn't say anything of the sort. He was pointing out that to say "CISC won" is only true if you consider that x86 is CISC and Intel spend gobs of money to be at the forefront of CPU manufacturing technology, both in shrinking die size/increasing clock speed and shoehorning all the negative characteristics of the x86 design into a form that was more RISC like so it could allow for super-scalar and deep pipeline designs. Intel deserves a lot of credit in proving just how far CISC design can go. But it certainly wasn't that CISC won because it had greater strengths.
Is x86, possibly, more inelegant than ARM or PPC? Maybe. Then again, what exactly is so elegant about a "catch all" platform where the basic processor architecture can change wildly between manufacturers, leading one to require many "flavors" of code simply to cover multiple vendor platforms?
Sounds like Linux on the x86, actually. Seriously, though, RISC design tends to have a few very strong design elements: it tends to have a good many registers which absolves a lot of cache/stack work, it tends to have a fixed opcode size and requires aligned memory which usually improves throughput and allows for a much more streamlined instruction decoding engine, and precisely because there's a lot less need to support legacy platforms there's a lot more leeway to segment memory for power considerations.
x86 may be ugly and hackish. But it's probably THE best documented platform in history and has very VERY few platform segregation points.
Well, you can think MS's monopolistic actions for that. Seriously, "ugly and hackish"* might well describe near everything MS and Intel can be known for, in their question to maintain backwards compatibility. And if Intel had started out with an 8-bit RISC design, I'm certain there'd be the same problems, so it's not really an x86/CISC thing. Never the less, it's precisely the fact that Intel is unlikely to allow platform segregation points that x86 will probably never be low power.
*And please realize, I say this with a great deal of respect towards both Intel and MS in maintaining performance giving how many hacks they've put in over the years to compensate for not only their own bugs but the bugs of other developers. So, as pretty and clever as a lot of the hacks may be, it's still ugly overall to have the hacks in the first place and to have so many over so many places and to be so incapable of removing any without the risk of significant backlash or simply to lose their customer base. Ie, the code may be pretty but it's put them in an ugly place.
I am not sure what definition of rape [reference.com] you use but the definition I know of requires sexual intercourse.
Well, perhaps I'm wrong on that point. I thought various forms of sodomy with phallic objects were considered legally rape in many locales.
Also, I didn't say it would stop sexual mutilation, just rape.
The point, though, is sexual mutilation is generally held to be in the same class of offenses as rape. I don't think taking away a person's gun to prevent them using a gun is equivalent to shooting them to prevent them from using a gun.
I don't mind registration. I don't see the point to microstamping. As someone else already mentioned, it is basically the gun equivalent of DRM. It is a waste of resources (criminals will just use revolvers), it hinders those who are using guns legitimately (increases cost), and it is ineffective on stopping those that are criminals (filing the pin).
As another poster mentioned, it's more like watermarking. More to the point, you speak as if "criminals" are a type of person who specialize in the use of guns for nefarious purposes and hence plan things like filing down the pin. Sure, there are those types of people. But if it's possible through other means to deduce the person was the gun user, that shows a strong amount of intent on the part of that person. Meanwhile, for most gun uses, the pin not being filed down helps a lot: it can detect exactly which police officer shot the suspect, it can prove or disprove that a certain gun owner actually shot a person, etc. In essence, it's a way to indirectly register every bullet fired.
Consider how difficult it is to legally carry a gun in a lot of areas, you are right, you will most likely not have a gun around when you need it. But that is not the fault of the gun.
Given the choice, would you carry a loaded gun with you at virtually all times? Personally, I wouldn't; I don't think most people would. The risk of accidentally shooting myself or someone else would simply be too great compared to the relative probability of actually needing that gun to prevent some victim from being shot; and I don't say this because I think it likely I'd shoot myself or someone else. And once the gun is off your person, even if it's loaded and relatively nearby in your home, it still might well be too far away to be of use.
I have no problem with requiring a reasonable amount of training in order to carry a gun. As long as we don't require ridiculous amounts of time and make it prohibitively expensive. Also, we should not have to be law enforcement in order to carry around a gun without worrying about accidentally breaking an obscure or foolish gun law.
Granted on both. It would seem obvious given the relative common situation of National Guard stations that they would serve as a useful base for free or near free training and registration services for guns. And given the National Guard is at least figuratively supposed to be the militia, it'd be reasonable to set the standard that if a Natinonal Guard member can register/possess/own a gun for their duties, so could any person with a bit of training, of the presumed sort they themselves received. After all, the whole point of their training and existence is supposed to be defense, right--and not in the "a good offense is a good defense" "Department of Defense" defense.
You can also prevent rape by cutting off the penis of every male and sewing up the vagina of every female.
Ignoring that that's not true--as rape doesn't require sexual intercourse, such ignores that cutting off the penis of a man or sewing up the vagina of a woman is itself a sexual offense, mutilation, etc. That's more in line with the logic of preemptively killing all possible gun owners, which isn't at all what is being suggested.
Just because something can be used for a crime it doesn't mean we should make it a criminal offense to own one. Guns are a tools. How you use a tool makes all the difference.
Granted. The issue, then, is if 76% of the known usages of a tool in a certain environment--say, a handgun in a large city--is criminal, premeditated practice before a crime, or practice by police/citizens for a criminal that never comes, do we just look the other way and not at all consider that the common use of said tool makes some difference? Does it mean an outright ban? I don't think that's needed. But, I could see the rational behind registration, logging of gun transfers, and things like microstamps to at least try to narrow down the possibilities.
Law-abiding citizens use guns for fun, hunting, and most importantly defense. Criminals use guns to murder, rape, steal, and destroy.
Except most guns aren't really used. They're there for defense in the same way nuclear bombs are there for defense. Well, you know, there's something to be said about the point of having too many nuclear bombs floating around in any country, no matter how paranoid and cautious that country tries to be, as it seems ripe for way too many accidents. Yet, when you really need a gun, the last thing you want is to be denied access because some bureaucrat thinks they know better than you. I really question, though, how many law-abiding citizens really need a gun for defense vs it just being an object to fetish away their fears; as the simple truth is that either you're unlikely to have the gun on you and readily usable when the time arises (ie, a criminal already has you at gun point) and odds are good that any attempt to brandish your gun when you do have the time risks escalating a conflict unnecessarily or potentially painting you as a target since it seems way too few people who own guns have sufficient, regular training to actually be necessarily good shots.
In short, I'd probably feel a lot better about the whole situation if there was more "well regulated" training and more limited ownership as a matter of social expectation instead of treating guns as some sort of defensive panacea.
As many others have said, I already have a WM I use and I don't see a real need to move. Just like XFCE, Icewm is lightweight enough yet complete enough to fulfill most of my needs. For the little bit left, I use ROX for the rare GUI file management I do. And when ROX isn't enough, I launch Dolphin. The point, of course, isn't that Icewm is perfect or anything. It's just that it does the best job for me: it's lightweight, it can be setup to avoid most window focus stealing, and it really hasn't moved much in its design goals--at least since I've been using it--, so I have little fear or reason to really consider another WM as the primary one I use. That isn't to say I "can't stand" Gnome 2 or 3 or KDE or whatever. I just don't go out of my way to use them.:)
Apparently you are baffled as to why the National Rifle Association of the United States - think about it. . . National Rifle Association - doesn't advocate for the Constitutional rights documented in the United States Constitution for foreign citizens living in their own countries under their own laws and constitutions?
Last I checked, the rights in question are spelled out precisely to govern what the US government can or cannot do; ie, the NRA of the US would seem to have a lot to say about what the US government is doing. To that end, it makes as much sense for the NRA to advocate against the US government's actions upon foreign citizens precisely because such possible actions are part and parcel of recognizing the limits of US governmental power. To wit, it would be a slippery slope to accept that simply stepping outside the bounds of what the US government decides at some point to be its own jurisdiction or to revoke a person's citizenship suddenly gives it free range to kill anyone it pleases--and that's precisely the scope of power Congress has when it comes to deciding whether something is or is not a US territory as well as the naturalization process of citizenship. Certainly, death seems a much more direct threat to gun ownership than having to fill out some paper work and pay a token fee for every rifle owned.
So your view is that the US Constitution is the governing law of the land through the entire world? If that is so, how can there be "other" people - wouldn't they all be US citizens? Why don't they pay US Income tax?
Well, that's the irony of it, though. Someone kills an American citizen, no matter where, and the US government seems to think it has jurisdiction to engage in whatever action it pleases. I mean, what reason did the US have for invading Afghanistan if not for the fact that a few Afghan residents engaged in hostile acts and Afghanistan didn't simply comply with the US's demands. And last I checked, none of what the US has done has fallen under the generally wide latitudes attributed to a country which declares war given--you know--that the US hasn't declared war. But like you say, no, these aren't "US citizens" and they don't pay "US Income tax" so there's no real recognition of a right to bare arms being so protected from US governmental action. I guess only NRA-paying members get that recognition?
No, what he's arguing for isn't anywhere close to a justification for a (foreign) government to kill anyone who owns a gun. What causes trouble in Afghanistan is groups of 20-100 people armed with AKs, and perhaps the occasional machinegun or RPG, moving long distances in the dark going to a "wedding". Wedding party, or Taliban group? The Taliban have claimed that some of their groups that were attacked were "wedding parties". And some actual wedding parties have been attacked. Knowing that there is a war going on, wouldn't you think an actual wedding party might notify the government or the Americans that their heavily armed wedding party is going for a visit tonight, not for a raid on the neighboring village over a blood feud, or to impose Taliban style Islamic justice on the police station the next town over?
Well knowing there's a "war" going on, I guess we should also accept the possibility of anarchists or seditious elements in the US. So, I guess that means we need to, you know, acknowledge that it's acceptable to drone attack and bomb groups of US citizens in US borders if they happen to have a lot of armed AKs. I mean, sure, they claim it's a gun show; but, who are they really selling to? Enemies of the US government? (Oh, wait, no, the US government itself does that selling to Mexican cartels--but, I digress). Certainly, you'd understand a need for any heavily armed Americans to report their every move to assuage any fears.
Ahem... Shotgun wedding. Seriously, what you're arguing almost amounts to it being justifiable for a government (admittedly, foreign in this case) to kill anyone who owns a gun. Isn't that precisely what the NRA, a very powerful and influence political force in the US, is precisely against? I mean, that's just sweet, sweet irony on the tallest order. I guess those sorts of rights, supposedly inherently to all people--and merely explicitly guaranteed in the Second Amendment--, don't count when it comes to "other" people...or the NRA just can't bother/afford to defend non-US citizens.:/
There may be a god. I haven't seen any good evidence for it, but I haven't seen any evidence against it either.
As an agnostic, that's one part I don't particularly agree with. At least, I don't agree within the confines of what most people consider to be "God". You see, the general issue is that God is given specific characteristics, including being the ultimate originator and creator, omnipotent, loving, benevolent, etc. But, clearly there's something very unloving about giving someone cancer--terminal or not, painful or not, to the young or to the old. It could be argued God doesn't "give" people cancer, but he created everything, so he set the conditions that he knew would cause cancer to occur. It could be argued God is testing people or implementing some sort of tough love, but the story of Job makes it quite clear that even the most pious may suffer under God's seeming indifference to their suffering, all under the banner of "I'm God, so don't question me". The only thing left is to specify that God is not omnipotent, be it under some sense of free will--which really doesn't apply to something like congenital, terminal cancer in a newborn, unless you think God is punishing a newborn for something they did in the womb--or simply that God can't--be it through a selective choice or simple fact--interact with the world of today. Well, that might be a God to worship, I guess, but it's a little bit hard to not feel a little bit sick about the situation then, as if humans were to create some sort of artificial life and to consider all the moral questions and pitfalls that would almost certainly follow--consider the short life of the clone Dolly the sheep.
In the end, it's hard to take a lot of visions of what God is, if he/she exists, seriously if you really think about it. But, it leaves room for other sorts of gods to exist and they can't be so easily dismissed. Having said all that, I do really wonder about the fixation on "god", "religion", "morals", etc and really which or if all of the above are the real point of the consideration being set forth and just how much it may simply be a need to feel correct about a issue, no matter how trivial, irrelevant, or uninvested a person is.:/
And personally, I don't consider the question *interesting* either.
Well, yes and no. The whole reason I'm agnostic is precisely because any sort of supernatural being or even possible natural beings could manipulate humanity, given the specific desire, possible to the point that humanity would be entirely oblivious to those manipulations--ie, there could be the irony that humanity is being manipulated by a god of a certain type and by pure coincidence humanity could invent a whole religion around the idea of worshiping a god of the same type. And to me, that's interesting if for nothing else because it starts to set a boundary of consideration of where you simply march into some form of sophistry. That is worthwhile, I think, so I think the debate is interesting. Yet, the final conclusion, I'll admit, isn't as interesting.
The Law is not for Gentiles, so while many Jews became Christians it is misleading to claim that the whole of the Law is "Christian".
Which can lead back to the question of whether you can only be a Christian if you'vet converted to Judaism first. Given the Apostles didn't unanimously agree on the point and the subject seemingly only came up after Jesus was gone.... And let's not forget just how much of Paul's writings are taken as canon law for whatever reason--even though he may or may not have been an actual ordained Apostle--basically as The Law for Gentiles, which makes the whole situation rather messy...
You do make a valid point, but I am dismayed by the fact that cherry-picking mods passed over all the valid, similar criticisms of Islam to mod you up.
"How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me remove that splinter from your eye,’ while the wooden beam is in your eye? You hypocrite, remove the wooden beam from your eye first; then you will see clearly to remove the splinter from your brother’s eye." Now, it can obviously be said that not everyone in the Slashdot community believes those words, but as a general rule to live by, I think it mostly sound advice. In the end, after all, the problem isn't that Islam has bad or immoral advice any more than Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, etc have bad or immoral advice. The issue is that some people are willing to enact their will upon others, often using their religion as an excuse to justify their wants*, in a violent fashion, and there either doesn't exist the structure in their society to uniformly condemn those people or they've convinced enough people to overlook or override those structures in the wake of fear, self-doubt, etc.
Having said all that, attacking the tool or the messenger is unlikely to be any sort of answer. So, I'd understand if your complaint was the tit-for-tat response trying to show the fallacy of the complaint instead of addressing the real issues and how mods are quick to mod up the snarky counter reply. But, the best reply that can be made? I don't really known. Perhaps Thomas Jefferson was right about the need to spill blood for liberty. But, in the end, that was merely the catalyst for change. It required that people like Jefferson existed in the first place with the power to spill blood and set a new course. And even in places like Pakistan, which seem willing to make that transformation, it's very unclear to me that they're willing to accept a civil war as a solution since it's almost seem like trying to kill people over the ideas/beliefs they hold, when in reality it's about how those beliefs are translated into action upon people, and then the worry is how any government can seem effectively neutral when it can be defined as immoral/a sin not to act.:/
But, then, I digress.:/
*Oh, and a side point, but Republicans/Libertarians in the US do the same thing with the free market/free enterprise/taxes. So, it's not limited to religion. And yes, Democrats do it as well with trying to justify abortions as some sort of "right of the woman" ignoring that doesn't magically usurp "right of the child" nor explain "obligation of the sperm donor/'father' for child support". But, then, it's hard to sell people on pragmatism when it sounds incredibly immoral; or the whole issue is simply overlooked, like with things like civilian deaths by the military to fight a whole country and separate group, the Taliban, when a specific group, al Quaeda, is your enemy and for which an outright war seems unjustified--not that I'm really kosher on how the CIA/KGB/etc operate[d], but how is a war better? Well, that's enough hot-button topics for my rant, so I'll just end my rant now.:)
And I never said we could continue without making cuts to government departments. The difference is Ron Paul tries to paint a rosy picture that those cuts will be substantially through efficiency gains, not outright loss of functionality. Meanwhile, I and most people realize that tough choices and sacrifice are necessary to make the sort of cuts that are necessary. Meanwhile, taxes will probably have to go up. Now, it could be said that Ron Paul doesn't say these things because that'd make him unelectable. But, then, that's the problem with all the other politicians as well.
Um, I think the point is, some people actively choose activities which are either inherently socially exclusionary or exist within a subculture that, while still suffers under its own rules of social exclusion, doesn't suffer under the social exclusion rules pushed and indoctrinated into more mainstream sources by Authoritarians. In fact, you're helping push that propaganda yourself arguing about "healthy relationships as adults". It just doesn't seem to occur to you that some people simply prefer video games as a major component of their life and don't have the same desire to propagate themself that you seem to consider normal. Well, it might not be the average or median behavior, but it might well be "healthy" in the sense that (a) the person lives a long, happy life and (b) their interactions with other people aren't particularly negative or harmful in either direction. I mean, unless you think that people must accept other people's advances in relationships and to do otherwise is particularly negative or harmful, I really don't know what any of what you said really makes any sense.
So, you know, could you actually lay out some more objective standards that don't seem to appeals to the very Authority the GP was referring to?
If you look at Ron Paul's plan to cut 990 billion dollars, that's essentially what he does.... while the last third comes from merging departments together for greater efficiency.
So, Ron Paul thinks he can save $330 billion simply by merging departments for greater efficiency? Yeah, the only way I can see that working is if that translates into firing a lt of federal government employees. Even presuming that'd actually work, what sort of system do you think will be left? It sounds the same sort of "greater efficiency" you see when companies merger for greater "synergy", the CEO fires 30%-60% of employees, and then the company becomes a hollow shell of what it once was as the staff that are left are entirely incapable of expanding into the expected new roles--as that's outside accepted budge considerations--while being so severely understaffed to even perform anything but the most basic of expected tasks, and even then with ever growing queues and constant delays.
In short, it's a recipe to "kill the beast". Now, if you're one of the people who already think the government is a beast, that's a good thing. If you're on the fence, this will make you think of it as a beast--as now you're paying effectively for a crippled system which fails to deliver yet still costs a lot of money. And those on the opposite side will see it for what it is, either an ill-conceived plan by a person who thinks they know better and can selectively trim the government like it were a bonsai tree or an intentional attack that looks good on paper for a few years but by the time the shit hits the fan they'll be out of the system and someone else will be left to pick up the pieces.
So yea, Ron Paul is crazy. Increasing efficiency is great. But it's insane to think you can have the sort of efficiency gains proposed without some serious chopping of functionality. And if that's the plan all along, then it's just a grand lie, promising to have our cake and eat it too. I mean, as much as--a great example, I think--we spend on Medicare/Medicaid (covering the old and poor)--with private insurance being equivalent money spent for everyone else covered--and the whole point that it per capita is equivalent to a lot of socialist healthcare systems (covering everyone); yet, I think that even optimistically, if the US were to create a universal health care system that merged Medicare/Medicaid into it, it'd take a minimal of decades before the per capita figures for the new universal health care system were remotely in line with other countries And given Ron Paul can't be in office that long and there's not enough support for a long-term transition...
True, but then there are things that are organic and food and things that are organic and not food--either be indigestible or outright poison. Meanwhile, most said nano organic things are mostly contained until they enter the digestive track--something which above nano-particles are unlikely to be--and aren't inhale-able/injected--there's very few things you can direct inject--, and the body can usually safely broken down in the digestive track those organic nano-particles or they can be contained and expelled by the body before entering the blood stream--a by-product of billions of years of digestive and defensive evolution to extant, potentially lethal organic or inorganic nanoparticles. But, like I was saying, that's still far from foolproof and there's still lots of stuff that can kill us.
So, yea, I understand your pedantic point, but I'm pretty sure the discussion is on man-made nanoparticles and cutting out "man-made" is just shorthand. Meanwhile, I'm not a supporter of the idea of halting the use of man-made nanoparticles until long-term medical studies are done. That doesn't mean we shouldn't do those studies as man-made nanoparticles used, to see if they really are a threat. It's the same with just about anything radically new and innovative, really, because there's a lot of room for not only positive outcomes but pretty extensive side-effects. I mean, I don't think it likely that all the major conceived designs for man-made nanoparticles (ie, the expected foundation and components) have an inherently Achilles heel of being unsafe, but then who's to say there won't be a man-made nanoparticle version of DDT or asbestos and the component responsible is present in a large percentage of man-made nanoparticles? Such would likely mean simply reworking those man-made nanoparticles to overcome the side-effects. Still, the damage would be done.:/ But, that's just a sad truth of life, with hindsight and everything. I mean, to know if progress is harmful or not, you have to progress first.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, the "amusing thing"* that people would want to have as much possible information about their boot system, which is precisely where things like MBR trojans or what will possible be the new "secure boot" versions. And that more "liberal license" than the GPLv3 is only more "liberal" for the OEMs/MS/Vendors in that it gives them more freedom to say while being less liberal in what a user can do.
I really hope they don't. I hope they are as vocal and as loud as possible. You know why? Because I can only see "Secure Boot" having flaws in it and being used by malware. I can only see "Secure Boot" turning into "Secure ID" or some other BS and people becoming angry when it backfires. I really hope some distros stick to their guns even if they appear to be Richard Stallman-like crazy because the truth is, they're the only sane ones and the only way to prove that in the long-term is keep arguing for sanity, not kowtow to the craziness just because it'll point out you're different and make people realize the absurdity of the "Secure Boot" option. Yes, if even after all that, computers still keep coming out with TPM and it becomes as far as mandated for internet access, I can see even the die-hards buying a TPM machine. They'll just tunnel through it with their own VPN and try to continue to use their uninfected machines. In the end, I just hope TPM as a whole dies. The technology could be used for so many good things. But, the two powers involved who keep pushing TPM--government (legislative and executive branches, actually) and corpratists--are hardly the groups I'd put any long-term faith in, let alone short-term faith, when it comes to considerations of freedom or liberty at the individual level.
*Yet again, another one of Richard Stallman's speculations holds out as coming true with TPM and is precisely one of the reasons why the GPLv3 software requires the encryption keys used for execution. The fact that some distributions are so quick to brush aside the clear implications of having to avoid GPLv3 code over precisely that issue and to just consider some of Stallman's speculations on the outcome...is just stupid. And this comes with the point that TPM isn't inherently bad; it's just that by nearly every implementation, it doesn't work to foremost given the actual user the keys and the control but instead the hardware/software producers the keys and the control.
Organs are a rival good, are generally a required component for sustaining life*, and the window to negotiate pricing is often small/non-existent.
There are already plenty of organs on Earth. Why, there's over 6 billion livers. And without artificial restrictions, there might be thousands of compatible matches (I don't know how exact cross-matching needs to be) just a murder away. And without murder, it's all about rich people needing an organ trolling morgues for parts and plenty of fresh corpse auctions, something to unlikely work well given the very small window that organ transplants are viable without specific care.
Yep. On the black market, a single kidney might we worth thousands. But, for a mere $100, I'll potentially accept giving up the whole bundle--or not. Seriously, it's actually more insulting to most people to severely lowball an offer on something than to accept that it's a gift being given. After all, you can feel right (and have some legal ground for it) to retract a gift yet given; but, what sort of legal nightmare do you think is going to happen when potential transplant recipients go around suing families for going against the donor's wishes, arguing logically that they're breaking a contract.
*Yea, you have multiple of some organs, but as a general point there's significant risk for giving any of those away. I'd imagine it also decreases life expectancy, given that it suddenly only takes one lung, one kidney, etc to fail. You will note, though, that people are regularly paid for blood more or less precisely because it's rather low risk, it auto regenerates, etc. So, I'd imagine the risk to the donor has a lot to do with it even more than the rival aspect of things, which is likely just to make it a rich man's game.
Well, pathological cases should be a real concern if the user has some control over the input and the server or other clients are doing the hashing. As for big-O analysis for various cases, that is technically true in the mathematical sense, but it's almost always understood (unless explicitly stated) in computer science terms (and I really have to presume, that's the sense the Google interviewer meant) to be a worse case scenario, precisely because there's a general interest in using a stated algorithm in all sorts of locations, including possible hostile ones.
And, yes, sure, there's plenty of reason to want to know the average case in a specific application where you're sanitizing the input or the harm is self-inflictable only while the benefits can be substantial. Nor do I think using hashes are a bad idea as a general point in a lot of applications. But if the issue were raised about hashed tables not being O(1) in most operations, I would recognize the inherent truth to it and instead likely argue more the point that, as you said, while it might not be technically O(1), for the specific application I don't see there being a need to be concerned about the pathological case, while then further trying to avoid using the hash table since it's obviously not what they were after. :)
Well, that's been SOP at MS for years. Consider Windows and the original Macintosh.
But like most MS products, they may "like to be" at that stage in 6 months, it usually takes at least two years to get to a remotely usable state. And invariably that comes at the cost of stripping out 50% of the cutting edge features. I'd say the big difference here is just how low they're aiming, feature wise.
Well, that's MS. They promise the moon, and they never deliver. The interesting thing is, MS's real problem is that around ten years ago, people were clueless enough about MS's behavior to bet on MS's vaporware which was really good at harming the competition. But, MS's cried wolf too many times, that even when they do deliver a demo of an actually working product, people are reluctant to really trust that MS will devote itself to that product for any serious length of time...unless it's Windows/Office/XBox related. I see Google going down this same route, actually, given how frequently they kill projects.
It all comes down to just how willing MS is to supporting Surface for the long-term, even if that means ten years from now working on maintaining backwards compatibility with misbehaving v0.1 programs on whatever the latest iteration of Surface will be at that time. Personally, I just don't see that happening. And as your Zune example suggests, I don't think you do either. In the end, MS will have to go out of its way to really prove a commitment in action, not in just words.
More accurately, it's like accidentally posting a photocopy of your credit card on a bulletin board, presumably with a variety of other documents.
Interestingly enough, if you were to do the above and be so careless, I'm not entirely sure if the bank would be obligated to refund your money. Certainly, most banks/credit card companies have policies speak about only 24 hours to report "stolen" credit card information to maintain minimal liability on the card holder's part. Having said that, the criminal is still, well, criminal.
Considering the GP didn't speak about "just copying" information being harmless, I'd gather the answer is no. After all, the point isn't that blackmail or clearing out someone else's bank account isn't illegal and unethical/immoral. It's that one can't charge the person with "hacking" just because you're careless anymore than you could charge people with theft because they took a photo of your photocopied credit card. I mean, a lot of people may have accessed the information and done little or nothing with it; but certainly, there's a lot of legal things you could do, like mock the person who was so careless with their personal/company details.
So...that 3% of the workforce figure I gave you is probably closer to 4-5% who will be effected by a minimum wage increase because they earn something like $0.25/hr more than minimum wage now?
And? I mean, if labor isn't a large cost of the final product, then very small wage increases are unlikely to matter much in the cost of the final product, certainly relative to an individual and their individual purchases. And if they're the major part, then, well, generally production has already been outsourced to China which has much lower cost of living, has questionable envrionmental standards, questionable employee treatment standards, etc--and we'd have to likely adopt a good bit of that to stay competitive on that front, anyways. This is, btw, why I'm a stronger believer in things like automation, anyways, since it increases productivity per worker and hence readily justifies allowing for decent wages. And if the issue is that given enough automation there isn't enough jobs to go around...well, we're been up that creek for decades due to the obvious point that it only takes ~3% of the population to make the food we need, not much more to maintain and build houses, and very few more to make our clothes. The only way to make a capitalistic system like ours work then where a large percentage of people work is significant, wasteful consumerism. So, one would seem to have to accept the idea that additional consumerism (and additional jobs) just need to be created to take up the slack.
The question is, why is the job worth $8 an hour to you? To say it's because you get $8/hr of productivity out of a person is absurd, unless you believe that all employees paid the same are equally productive and you have no interest in underpaying employees compared to their real worth. The former is very unlikely precisely because few companies micromanage the wages of people based on productivity--piecemeal work is one of the closest examples but that tends to be abused by employers as a means to cut the price of their products or simply to enrich themselves. The latter is just silly because almost no one pays for anything precisely on the value they attribute to the end product; instead, the group of buyers and the group of sellers reach a junction of cost and available cash to reach an effective compromise price that cuts buyers and sellers out while simultaneously overenriching other buyers and sellers; I say that purely from a free market perspective, mind you, as it's generally considered a positive of how the free market works.
But, in the end, if a person isn't worth being paid the $9/hr to do a job and it takes a $9/hr job to live, then the person is better off finding work that pays $9/hr instead of slowly languishing in an $8/hr job. That you might decide to take the work on yourself indicates you have the free time and there was never a good reason to be paying the person in the first place. And if you do without, then it implies that you could possibly have always done without; of course, that can translate into the company failing, but it seems more likely that if you had 9 $8/hr employees, you'd switch to 8 $9/hr employees and demand greater productivity (for the burger flipper example, that'd mean going from 60 burgers/hr to ~67.5 burgers/hr) and possibly might even bring in machines which are likely more cost effective anyways.
Hence my comment about "further down the line you'd presumably see similar increases". If an industry is heavily minimum wage centered, then yeah, the benefits to minimum wage workers is likely to be low and possible even negative. But in the rest of industries, there will be a net positive for minimum wage workers. So, I'd guess the question is just how many people make minimum wage. After some googling on Minimum Wage workers, it would appear that ~59% of 16+ workers are hourly workers and ~5.2% of hourly workers are minimum wage or lower workers (~3% of all workers total; the "or lower" comes from many states which have waitresses and the like who are expected to supplement their income with tips and hence are allowed to be paid some amount less than minimum wage). Having said that, things like leisure and food services seem to rely heavily on minimum wage workers, so burger flippers would be one of the few minimum wage workers likely to suffer. Yet, in their potential suffering, they by definition will always be paid enough to live on a living wage.
I really don't know if you're being facetious or not, but the answer is obvious: very few people earn $100/hr or more so such a massive shift in the minimum wage would fall into the trap of it being a net negative. Further, such an act would spur significant inflation as people who are "worth more than minimum wage" would see or at least expect to see their wages scale upwards. After all, the point of a minimum wage isn't to group everyone into one pay bracket; it is to guarantee that the small percentage of full-time minimum wage workers aren't effectively worse off for working. It's not some sort of communist plot to give everyone an equal salary so they can be as wasteful as the average middle class American or the rich.
Two things. One, fast food is a luxury good; ie, it doesn't stand to reason that a living/minimum wage would afford the burger flipper an ability to afford the burgers he flips in the first place. Two, if the burger flipper flips 60 burgers/hr and he sees a $1/hr raise (~$0.75/hr after taxes), the increased cost per burger for his wage increase would be ~$0.02 (plus ~$0.08 employer FICA taxes plus whatever their unemployment insurance taxes are but probably around ~$0.06, so perhaps $0.16 total); further down the line you'd presumably see similar increases in things like beef, cooking supplies, cleaning supplies etc. Whether that is greater than the effective ~$0.75/hr raise, I don't know, but it's a pretty large jump to presume to know.
If they can find either 40hrs/week, 52 weeks/year or 80hrs/week, 26 weeks/year of snow shoveling, sure. It's a minimum wage, after all, not a minimum salary. And there's no guarantee that anyone can find work. But setting the standard that "if you work full time, you won't starve to death" seems like a pretty minimal standard for a humane society. And lucky for us, thanks to automation due to tapping fossil fuel reserves, it's quite possible.
Um, it's called "minimum" wage. And I have to say, having jobs that are "easy ones which pay a little [or none] but are good working experience" only works if you (a) accept that you have to save up money to work for cheap or free and (b) that either your work is so subpar it makes sense they're paying you so little or the company is effectively screwing you over by not paying the minimal of what you're worth--which is, again, enough money so you don't starve to death.
Yet people want burger flippers. Maybe some of those people only make $8/hr, but a lot more make $10-$20/hr. So, if that burger flipper gets a raise, then there's still a lot of customers who hourly make enough to eat the extra cost in their burgers to pay enough that the burger flipper doesn't starve to death.
No. Odds are good some percentage of the offices will recognize they can't stand a dirty office and think its worth $110/wk while others already thought it was only worth $50/wk and were only hiring the janitor about 40 weeks out of the year. Whether its a net gain or loss obviously depends on the janitor's situation. In any case, it's a pretty absurd wealth redistribution anyways since the office itself exists precisely as a means to sales and cleaning is generally, but not always, an ornate task without much real benefit to anyone (and if that's not the case, it's most often due to a few unhygienic people whom I doubt are really worth the $64/week janitor cost to co
It costs very little to copy a house? Wow, that's news to me. Last I checked, the major cost to a house is the land it resides on, the materials to build it, and the labor in the act of copying. Generally, whatever design copyright there is over the construction is a very trivial component. Put another way, there's nothing to stop a painter from selling each individual painted canvas for a nice fee, but expecting poster prints to sell at near the same price and return much higher income is silly. The same goes for musicians and concerts/hand-written manuscripts. In the end, the labor and materials are what people pay for, most often paying a premium on good labor.
Granted. But why? Is it because we have a soft spot for artists? No. It's because we want that artist, on creating his art, to distribute his work and then to further create more works. One could argue that happens now...except for all the one-hit wonders and how the RIAA has converted the system into one where the large profits from the few big hits pay for many experimental possible hits to be mass marketed with the knowledge that most will fail and few will go on to produce more works in any sort of copyright-made-possible profitable way. That might be great and all, but clearly that's not what copyright was all about. By the same token, stocks weren't supposed to be bought and sold in mass at fraction of a second intervals to make a profit. One could argue what the RIAA does is good...but then you're no longer really standing on copyright anymore or any of those supposed principals except the most base, to encourage more works to be produced. To that point, I don't even know if copyright is really needed except to prevent artists from undercutting the RIAA's marketing machine.
The public is fickle. They "love" a new song every week. And a lot of the people who are "devote" fans are just liars.
Yep, that's the free market for you. You can set whatever price you want for your services and your products. But you can't make people buy your services and certainly you can't--at least in any other industry--prevent other companies/people from copying your products and undercutting you. That copyright was meant to promote the useful arts and sciences and of which I doubt anything David Lowery has every created qualifies--and I doubt very very little of anything I've created qualifies--really just makes me want to play a small violin. Having said that, I still like the idea of showing my appreciation of various works I enjoy. That doesn't mean I necessary feel compelled to buy a copy just because it was on TV or a need to send a check in. Meanwhile, if we wish to ignore the basis for copyright and support the idea of mass-produced entertainment, I'd suggest making a new copyright-like law to cover it with a much more limited time span, untransferable to others, and setup with fixed price structures so musicians don't get screwed over by producers/distributors. But, then, there's really no solution to the digital download problem, and certainly musicians complaining about it won't work because most people are greedy and fickle.
That's the Republican way. Well, it's also the Democrat way too, but they'd want to enshrine the RIAA into the government and setup the above mentioned quasi-copyright to keep musicians employed. As for "the right thing to do"? Given that there's nothing "right" about copyright and it's wholly a social construct and especially copyright over most entertainment really falls into the category of "society could do without"--the copyright laws as I'm sure entertainment would continue--, it's really more a political question of just how much and where society should be forced to pay for government inflated CD/digital download prices, be it through a government mandate or a copyright law.
Just like how all those automakers will make a big turn around... Oh, right... No, I'm not so optimistic that Intel can have its cake and eat it too. So far, all Intel's efforts, while impressive by x86 standards, are horrible by ARM standards. The only chance I see Intel really having is the same that the big three in the US have--be willing to fork a new brand and release subcompacts with the full knowledge that (a) it might take years for it to catch on in any meaningful sense and (b) it'll probably never supplant your main line because way too many people want performance with little thought of power/gas draw. One could argue that's what Intel's Atom line is all about, but look above. I'd argue Intel's Atom line is tantamount to the whole hybrid/electric fad. It misses the point that the only way to strip out most the power draw is to significantly shrink the die usage/car weight. Once you've gotten to that inherent point of improved performance, only then do you look in ways to augment extant components to incorporate technology that doesn't increase the die usage/car weight while still decreasing the power draw. Intel sort of went that direction...but they're going to have to regress a lot further back than the Pentium M with its multiple instruction cores. :/
The GP didn't say anything of the sort. He was pointing out that to say "CISC won" is only true if you consider that x86 is CISC and Intel spend gobs of money to be at the forefront of CPU manufacturing technology, both in shrinking die size/increasing clock speed and shoehorning all the negative characteristics of the x86 design into a form that was more RISC like so it could allow for super-scalar and deep pipeline designs. Intel deserves a lot of credit in proving just how far CISC design can go. But it certainly wasn't that CISC won because it had greater strengths.
Sounds like Linux on the x86, actually. Seriously, though, RISC design tends to have a few very strong design elements: it tends to have a good many registers which absolves a lot of cache/stack work, it tends to have a fixed opcode size and requires aligned memory which usually improves throughput and allows for a much more streamlined instruction decoding engine, and precisely because there's a lot less need to support legacy platforms there's a lot more leeway to segment memory for power considerations.
Well, you can think MS's monopolistic actions for that. Seriously, "ugly and hackish"* might well describe near everything MS and Intel can be known for, in their question to maintain backwards compatibility. And if Intel had started out with an 8-bit RISC design, I'm certain there'd be the same problems, so it's not really an x86/CISC thing. Never the less, it's precisely the fact that Intel is unlikely to allow platform segregation points that x86 will probably never be low power.
*And please realize, I say this with a great deal of respect towards both Intel and MS in maintaining performance giving how many hacks they've put in over the years to compensate for not only their own bugs but the bugs of other developers. So, as pretty and clever as a lot of the hacks may be, it's still ugly overall to have the hacks in the first place and to have so many over so many places and to be so incapable of removing any without the risk of significant backlash or simply to lose their customer base. Ie, the code may be pretty but it's put them in an ugly place.
Well, perhaps I'm wrong on that point. I thought various forms of sodomy with phallic objects were considered legally rape in many locales.
The point, though, is sexual mutilation is generally held to be in the same class of offenses as rape. I don't think taking away a person's gun to prevent them using a gun is equivalent to shooting them to prevent them from using a gun.
As another poster mentioned, it's more like watermarking. More to the point, you speak as if "criminals" are a type of person who specialize in the use of guns for nefarious purposes and hence plan things like filing down the pin. Sure, there are those types of people. But if it's possible through other means to deduce the person was the gun user, that shows a strong amount of intent on the part of that person. Meanwhile, for most gun uses, the pin not being filed down helps a lot: it can detect exactly which police officer shot the suspect, it can prove or disprove that a certain gun owner actually shot a person, etc. In essence, it's a way to indirectly register every bullet fired.
Given the choice, would you carry a loaded gun with you at virtually all times? Personally, I wouldn't; I don't think most people would. The risk of accidentally shooting myself or someone else would simply be too great compared to the relative probability of actually needing that gun to prevent some victim from being shot; and I don't say this because I think it likely I'd shoot myself or someone else. And once the gun is off your person, even if it's loaded and relatively nearby in your home, it still might well be too far away to be of use.
Granted on both. It would seem obvious given the relative common situation of National Guard stations that they would serve as a useful base for free or near free training and registration services for guns. And given the National Guard is at least figuratively supposed to be the militia, it'd be reasonable to set the standard that if a Natinonal Guard member can register/possess/own a gun for their duties, so could any person with a bit of training, of the presumed sort they themselves received. After all, the whole point of their training and existence is supposed to be defense, right--and not in the "a good offense is a good defense" "Department of Defense" defense.
Ignoring that that's not true--as rape doesn't require sexual intercourse, such ignores that cutting off the penis of a man or sewing up the vagina of a woman is itself a sexual offense, mutilation, etc. That's more in line with the logic of preemptively killing all possible gun owners, which isn't at all what is being suggested.
Granted. The issue, then, is if 76% of the known usages of a tool in a certain environment--say, a handgun in a large city--is criminal, premeditated practice before a crime, or practice by police/citizens for a criminal that never comes, do we just look the other way and not at all consider that the common use of said tool makes some difference? Does it mean an outright ban? I don't think that's needed. But, I could see the rational behind registration, logging of gun transfers, and things like microstamps to at least try to narrow down the possibilities.
Except most guns aren't really used. They're there for defense in the same way nuclear bombs are there for defense. Well, you know, there's something to be said about the point of having too many nuclear bombs floating around in any country, no matter how paranoid and cautious that country tries to be, as it seems ripe for way too many accidents. Yet, when you really need a gun, the last thing you want is to be denied access because some bureaucrat thinks they know better than you. I really question, though, how many law-abiding citizens really need a gun for defense vs it just being an object to fetish away their fears; as the simple truth is that either you're unlikely to have the gun on you and readily usable when the time arises (ie, a criminal already has you at gun point) and odds are good that any attempt to brandish your gun when you do have the time risks escalating a conflict unnecessarily or potentially painting you as a target since it seems way too few people who own guns have sufficient, regular training to actually be necessarily good shots.
In short, I'd probably feel a lot better about the whole situation if there was more "well regulated" training and more limited ownership as a matter of social expectation instead of treating guns as some sort of defensive panacea.
As many others have said, I already have a WM I use and I don't see a real need to move. Just like XFCE, Icewm is lightweight enough yet complete enough to fulfill most of my needs. For the little bit left, I use ROX for the rare GUI file management I do. And when ROX isn't enough, I launch Dolphin. The point, of course, isn't that Icewm is perfect or anything. It's just that it does the best job for me: it's lightweight, it can be setup to avoid most window focus stealing, and it really hasn't moved much in its design goals--at least since I've been using it--, so I have little fear or reason to really consider another WM as the primary one I use. That isn't to say I "can't stand" Gnome 2 or 3 or KDE or whatever. I just don't go out of my way to use them. :)
Last I checked, the rights in question are spelled out precisely to govern what the US government can or cannot do; ie, the NRA of the US would seem to have a lot to say about what the US government is doing. To that end, it makes as much sense for the NRA to advocate against the US government's actions upon foreign citizens precisely because such possible actions are part and parcel of recognizing the limits of US governmental power. To wit, it would be a slippery slope to accept that simply stepping outside the bounds of what the US government decides at some point to be its own jurisdiction or to revoke a person's citizenship suddenly gives it free range to kill anyone it pleases--and that's precisely the scope of power Congress has when it comes to deciding whether something is or is not a US territory as well as the naturalization process of citizenship. Certainly, death seems a much more direct threat to gun ownership than having to fill out some paper work and pay a token fee for every rifle owned.
Well, that's the irony of it, though. Someone kills an American citizen, no matter where, and the US government seems to think it has jurisdiction to engage in whatever action it pleases. I mean, what reason did the US have for invading Afghanistan if not for the fact that a few Afghan residents engaged in hostile acts and Afghanistan didn't simply comply with the US's demands. And last I checked, none of what the US has done has fallen under the generally wide latitudes attributed to a country which declares war given--you know--that the US hasn't declared war. But like you say, no, these aren't "US citizens" and they don't pay "US Income tax" so there's no real recognition of a right to bare arms being so protected from US governmental action. I guess only NRA-paying members get that recognition?
Well knowing there's a "war" going on, I guess we should also accept the possibility of anarchists or seditious elements in the US. So, I guess that means we need to, you know, acknowledge that it's acceptable to drone attack and bomb groups of US citizens in US borders if they happen to have a lot of armed AKs. I mean, sure, they claim it's a gun show; but, who are they really selling to? Enemies of the US government? (Oh, wait, no, the US government itself does that selling to Mexican cartels--but, I digress). Certainly, you'd understand a need for any heavily armed Americans to report their every move to assuage any fears.
Granted. And I'll admit,
Ahem... Shotgun wedding. Seriously, what you're arguing almost amounts to it being justifiable for a government (admittedly, foreign in this case) to kill anyone who owns a gun. Isn't that precisely what the NRA, a very powerful and influence political force in the US, is precisely against? I mean, that's just sweet, sweet irony on the tallest order. I guess those sorts of rights, supposedly inherently to all people--and merely explicitly guaranteed in the Second Amendment--, don't count when it comes to "other" people...or the NRA just can't bother/afford to defend non-US citizens. :/
As an agnostic, that's one part I don't particularly agree with. At least, I don't agree within the confines of what most people consider to be "God". You see, the general issue is that God is given specific characteristics, including being the ultimate originator and creator, omnipotent, loving, benevolent, etc. But, clearly there's something very unloving about giving someone cancer--terminal or not, painful or not, to the young or to the old. It could be argued God doesn't "give" people cancer, but he created everything, so he set the conditions that he knew would cause cancer to occur. It could be argued God is testing people or implementing some sort of tough love, but the story of Job makes it quite clear that even the most pious may suffer under God's seeming indifference to their suffering, all under the banner of "I'm God, so don't question me". The only thing left is to specify that God is not omnipotent, be it under some sense of free will--which really doesn't apply to something like congenital, terminal cancer in a newborn, unless you think God is punishing a newborn for something they did in the womb--or simply that God can't--be it through a selective choice or simple fact--interact with the world of today. Well, that might be a God to worship, I guess, but it's a little bit hard to not feel a little bit sick about the situation then, as if humans were to create some sort of artificial life and to consider all the moral questions and pitfalls that would almost certainly follow--consider the short life of the clone Dolly the sheep.
In the end, it's hard to take a lot of visions of what God is, if he/she exists, seriously if you really think about it. But, it leaves room for other sorts of gods to exist and they can't be so easily dismissed. Having said all that, I do really wonder about the fixation on "god", "religion", "morals", etc and really which or if all of the above are the real point of the consideration being set forth and just how much it may simply be a need to feel correct about a issue, no matter how trivial, irrelevant, or uninvested a person is. :/
Well, yes and no. The whole reason I'm agnostic is precisely because any sort of supernatural being or even possible natural beings could manipulate humanity, given the specific desire, possible to the point that humanity would be entirely oblivious to those manipulations--ie, there could be the irony that humanity is being manipulated by a god of a certain type and by pure coincidence humanity could invent a whole religion around the idea of worshiping a god of the same type. And to me, that's interesting if for nothing else because it starts to set a boundary of consideration of where you simply march into some form of sophistry. That is worthwhile, I think, so I think the debate is interesting. Yet, the final conclusion, I'll admit, isn't as interesting.
Which can lead back to the question of whether you can only be a Christian if you'vet converted to Judaism first. Given the Apostles didn't unanimously agree on the point and the subject seemingly only came up after Jesus was gone.... And let's not forget just how much of Paul's writings are taken as canon law for whatever reason--even though he may or may not have been an actual ordained Apostle--basically as The Law for Gentiles, which makes the whole situation rather messy...
"How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me remove that splinter from your eye,’ while the wooden beam is in your eye? You hypocrite, remove the wooden beam from your eye first; then you will see clearly to remove the splinter from your brother’s eye." Now, it can obviously be said that not everyone in the Slashdot community believes those words, but as a general rule to live by, I think it mostly sound advice. In the end, after all, the problem isn't that Islam has bad or immoral advice any more than Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, etc have bad or immoral advice. The issue is that some people are willing to enact their will upon others, often using their religion as an excuse to justify their wants*, in a violent fashion, and there either doesn't exist the structure in their society to uniformly condemn those people or they've convinced enough people to overlook or override those structures in the wake of fear, self-doubt, etc.
Having said all that, attacking the tool or the messenger is unlikely to be any sort of answer. So, I'd understand if your complaint was the tit-for-tat response trying to show the fallacy of the complaint instead of addressing the real issues and how mods are quick to mod up the snarky counter reply. But, the best reply that can be made? I don't really known. Perhaps Thomas Jefferson was right about the need to spill blood for liberty. But, in the end, that was merely the catalyst for change. It required that people like Jefferson existed in the first place with the power to spill blood and set a new course. And even in places like Pakistan, which seem willing to make that transformation, it's very unclear to me that they're willing to accept a civil war as a solution since it's almost seem like trying to kill people over the ideas/beliefs they hold, when in reality it's about how those beliefs are translated into action upon people, and then the worry is how any government can seem effectively neutral when it can be defined as immoral/a sin not to act. :/
But, then, I digress. :/
*Oh, and a side point, but Republicans/Libertarians in the US do the same thing with the free market/free enterprise/taxes. So, it's not limited to religion. And yes, Democrats do it as well with trying to justify abortions as some sort of "right of the woman" ignoring that doesn't magically usurp "right of the child" nor explain "obligation of the sperm donor/'father' for child support". But, then, it's hard to sell people on pragmatism when it sounds incredibly immoral; or the whole issue is simply overlooked, like with things like civilian deaths by the military to fight a whole country and separate group, the Taliban, when a specific group, al Quaeda, is your enemy and for which an outright war seems unjustified--not that I'm really kosher on how the CIA/KGB/etc operate[d], but how is a war better? Well, that's enough hot-button topics for my rant, so I'll just end my rant now. :)
And I never said we could continue without making cuts to government departments. The difference is Ron Paul tries to paint a rosy picture that those cuts will be substantially through efficiency gains, not outright loss of functionality. Meanwhile, I and most people realize that tough choices and sacrifice are necessary to make the sort of cuts that are necessary. Meanwhile, taxes will probably have to go up. Now, it could be said that Ron Paul doesn't say these things because that'd make him unelectable. But, then, that's the problem with all the other politicians as well.
Um...the western world?
Um, I think the point is, some people actively choose activities which are either inherently socially exclusionary or exist within a subculture that, while still suffers under its own rules of social exclusion, doesn't suffer under the social exclusion rules pushed and indoctrinated into more mainstream sources by Authoritarians. In fact, you're helping push that propaganda yourself arguing about "healthy relationships as adults". It just doesn't seem to occur to you that some people simply prefer video games as a major component of their life and don't have the same desire to propagate themself that you seem to consider normal. Well, it might not be the average or median behavior, but it might well be "healthy" in the sense that (a) the person lives a long, happy life and (b) their interactions with other people aren't particularly negative or harmful in either direction. I mean, unless you think that people must accept other people's advances in relationships and to do otherwise is particularly negative or harmful, I really don't know what any of what you said really makes any sense.
So, you know, could you actually lay out some more objective standards that don't seem to appeals to the very Authority the GP was referring to?
So, Ron Paul thinks he can save $330 billion simply by merging departments for greater efficiency? Yeah, the only way I can see that working is if that translates into firing a lt of federal government employees. Even presuming that'd actually work, what sort of system do you think will be left? It sounds the same sort of "greater efficiency" you see when companies merger for greater "synergy", the CEO fires 30%-60% of employees, and then the company becomes a hollow shell of what it once was as the staff that are left are entirely incapable of expanding into the expected new roles--as that's outside accepted budge considerations--while being so severely understaffed to even perform anything but the most basic of expected tasks, and even then with ever growing queues and constant delays.
In short, it's a recipe to "kill the beast". Now, if you're one of the people who already think the government is a beast, that's a good thing. If you're on the fence, this will make you think of it as a beast--as now you're paying effectively for a crippled system which fails to deliver yet still costs a lot of money. And those on the opposite side will see it for what it is, either an ill-conceived plan by a person who thinks they know better and can selectively trim the government like it were a bonsai tree or an intentional attack that looks good on paper for a few years but by the time the shit hits the fan they'll be out of the system and someone else will be left to pick up the pieces.
So yea, Ron Paul is crazy. Increasing efficiency is great. But it's insane to think you can have the sort of efficiency gains proposed without some serious chopping of functionality. And if that's the plan all along, then it's just a grand lie, promising to have our cake and eat it too. I mean, as much as--a great example, I think--we spend on Medicare/Medicaid (covering the old and poor)--with private insurance being equivalent money spent for everyone else covered--and the whole point that it per capita is equivalent to a lot of socialist healthcare systems (covering everyone); yet, I think that even optimistically, if the US were to create a universal health care system that merged Medicare/Medicaid into it, it'd take a minimal of decades before the per capita figures for the new universal health care system were remotely in line with other countries And given Ron Paul can't be in office that long and there's not enough support for a long-term transition...
True, but then there are things that are organic and food and things that are organic and not food--either be indigestible or outright poison. Meanwhile, most said nano organic things are mostly contained until they enter the digestive track--something which above nano-particles are unlikely to be--and aren't inhale-able/injected--there's very few things you can direct inject--, and the body can usually safely broken down in the digestive track those organic nano-particles or they can be contained and expelled by the body before entering the blood stream--a by-product of billions of years of digestive and defensive evolution to extant, potentially lethal organic or inorganic nanoparticles. But, like I was saying, that's still far from foolproof and there's still lots of stuff that can kill us.
So, yea, I understand your pedantic point, but I'm pretty sure the discussion is on man-made nanoparticles and cutting out "man-made" is just shorthand. Meanwhile, I'm not a supporter of the idea of halting the use of man-made nanoparticles until long-term medical studies are done. That doesn't mean we shouldn't do those studies as man-made nanoparticles used, to see if they really are a threat. It's the same with just about anything radically new and innovative, really, because there's a lot of room for not only positive outcomes but pretty extensive side-effects. I mean, I don't think it likely that all the major conceived designs for man-made nanoparticles (ie, the expected foundation and components) have an inherently Achilles heel of being unsafe, but then who's to say there won't be a man-made nanoparticle version of DDT or asbestos and the component responsible is present in a large percentage of man-made nanoparticles? Such would likely mean simply reworking those man-made nanoparticles to overcome the side-effects. Still, the damage would be done. :/ But, that's just a sad truth of life, with hindsight and everything. I mean, to know if progress is harmful or not, you have to progress first. :)