LSB packages are RPM packages. LSB just took an older version of RPM and made it their "standard". Which is why Debian has stayed separate with their.deb format, as they weren't consulted nor were their concerns addressed by the LSB "standard".
The package formats aren't really the issue anyway, the issue is all the detailed rules (explicit, written down, implied, and/or undocumented) that are applied by each distro in how and where packages and their components are installed and how they interact with one another. These are the problems that programs like alien have to solve, parsing each others package file format is relatively trivial.
I don't know why you think sales tax is complicated.
Not the tax, but how the category of "basic necessities" is determined and then managed. This is where I believe the FT idea is better because it doesn't create such a category of exceptions, because once you do create such a category, it'll be exploited, ie, "gamed" by the powerful. Granted, the FT system does have the "consumables" distinction, but defining what is consumed by individuals is a lot more straightforward than defining what is a "basic necessity", I believe.
[The next three paragraphs basically apply to FT was well..]
But I don't like the "rebate" system.
I wouldn't either if it weren't for the fact that doing it this way obviates the need for SS, welfare, minimum wage rules, etc, etc. Without this, there will inevitably be a desire for more "handouts". By providing this "handout" (which of course really is their own money being returned to them) for everyone, we can eliminate the need or arguments for other welfare/security/support systems (health care will remain the other major problem of course).
If doesn't have to be a once a year refund of course, it could done via electronic deposit per week or month. This would also be a good way for the government to encourage savings, as this is already close to the idea of private savings accounts.
That's why its so interesting to me, in that it solves several different problems at once with a single, (relatively) simple, coherent system.
We have to start with the simplest possible way, so the inevitable "tweaks" won't send us right back to the mess we're in
:) I know. That is my argument for FT. For the average person and for our economy, it is simple to implement and adhere to, and it reduces the control points to just 2 things, the definition of what a consumable is (easier to define than what a necessity is), and how the minimum cost of living value is calculated, which is a single formula printable on just a few pages. Note how the calculation doesn't have to decide on what are necessities, only on what the base level of quality of life we expect, which itself is an inherently political thing. Meaning the political fight over this will be out in the open centered on just a handful of variables in that formula, rather than hidden in hundreds of pages of exceptions and special rules attached to our existing tax code. This reduces the level of gaming of the system a lot, but as we both realize, no system of wealth redistribution is immune to politics.
But that's another rant for another day.
Alas, there is never enough time to persue all the rants I'm interested in.:)
Was catching up after a long absence from/., found this thread and post. I'm curious if you've read about the "Fair Tax" proposal at http://fairtax.org? The reason I'm bringing it up is this part of your post:
So a fair sales tax merely leaves fundamental needs untaxed. Raw food, uncut cloth, some minimum healthcare and primary shelter costs (established by economists per county/town), educational materials (notebooks, etc), daily public transportation: none of those retailers would collect sales tax. Equity transactions would pay a sharply lowered sales tax, to reflect their intangible nature, and the growth value of cycled transactions. But everything else would pay something like a 25% sales tax, shared among all enclosing jurisdictions. With a $12T economy, that's $3T, which is 15% higher than the current Federal budget.
The "problem" I see with this is that its a complicated system, which means there is room for the wealthy or politically empowered to "game" the system. The Fair Tax idea eliminates this by taxing all *consumables* *equally*, then sending a refund back to *everyone* at the end of the year of an amount based on the government's calculation of a base annual cost of living. This plan would also have the effect of eliminating the need for social security and all the related welfare plans for the poor, because *everyone* gets that check at the end of the year, no matter how much or how little the person earned. The tax is wholly focused on consumption instead of income. Its very close to your idea of a sales tax, except for the part about the tax only applying to end-user consumables. While there is still room for the gaming of this system, the room is much smaller, and the fact is no matter which system we use, there will be folks trying to game it. With this idea, there seems to be less room to do so, since the political fights will be reduced to one, how is the annual CoL refund calculated, and two, how do we determine what is an "end-user consumable".
As you, I believe nearly any sales/consumption system is better than any income system, but I wanted to make sure you had heard about the consumption variation on the sales tax idea, if you've not heard of it before, because it also manages to do several other things for us as well, eliminating the need for other financial programs like SS because their purpose is nicely wrapped into and handled by this idea, eliminating government agencies like the IRS, and simplifying much of the burden of paying taxes for most people and businesses (and eliminating it for many businesses and poor), as well as reducing the burden and complexity on the whole economy to the point where our economy would pick up many points of growth because of the increased efficiency. Its the only really interesting idea I've heard of for replacing the income tax.
PS: I was trying to figure out how to send a private message since this thread is already a week old, and I saw your journal entry about the SlashStalker. lol! Strangely enough, I'm kinda jealous, after all, its usually the "celebrities" that attract the stalkers.:)
give me a desert the size of California, limitless budget, and 10 years and I could hide something you'd never find too.
Give me a decent budget and 1 year and I could find it if it had a significant radioactive component. Forget Bio/Chem, the only thing that really mattered to everyone was whether he had nuclear weapons.
Liberal media
I'll see your "Librul Media" rhetoric, and raise you by the "Fair and Balanced FOX NEWS".:)
It was all about tyranny
If it was just about tyranny, then there are countries and dictatorships out there that make Hussein's regime look like the Boy Scouts of America. The US does not, never has, and for all practical reasons can not ever have a policy of military aggression against every "bad" regime out there, since that would mean having to conqueror and occupy at least 1/4 to 1/3 of the world. Its absurd. We don't even have enough troops to occupy Afghanistan and Iraq well enough to assure success there. The ONLY legitimate rationale was the imminent acquisition of nuclear weapons, and that turned out to be nothing more than an optimistic (from the true aggressor's point of view) assumption. Never mind that there are countries who will be far more dangerous than Hussein if they get nukes, and since our entire army is now pinned down in Afghanistan and Iraq and will be there for several more years, we can't do a damn thing about those other guys anymore.
Leningrad was never truly brought under siege, because it was never completely surrounded. The Wiki article mentions the "Road of Life" which was actually a *railroad*. They literally laid down tracks on Lake Ladoga to the east when it had sufficiently frozen at the start of winter, so during the winter months, especially after the first year, Leningrad was able to get in supplies and reinforcements.
Some of the bitterest fighting for Leningrad actually took place well to the *east* with the Germans desperately trying to push far enough along the lakeshore to stop the resupply, but the terrain there was a defender's dream come true.
Then you have the fact that the Finns didn't actually assist Germany in the siege to the north, in fact it is likely that the Finns (who understood winter warfare as well as the Soviets) could have cut the resupply over Lake Ladoga if they wished to. Put those two things together, and you have a recipe for a failed "siege". Had Germany been able to cut off the Lake Ladoga lifeline, and/or had the Finns actively assisted from the north, Leningrad would have fallen probably by the second year, '42.
However, many optimizations must be implemented at a very low level and many programs are not utilizing the full potential. One such program that is, is MPlayer, a good portion of the code is implemented in Assembly specifically taking advantage of the 64bit architecture.
MPlayer is using the media instructions (SSE) that are in both Intel and AMD chips, this has nothing to do with 64 bit mode. Any application recompiled for AMD64 will benefit, because AMD64 is more than just widening all registers to 64 bits, it includes doubling the number of general purpose and media registers (16 new registers total). For most apps the extra registers make a difference, thus the typical %10-%20 speedup seen, and for some apps they make a *huge* difference.
I do wonder if we'd be better off (after 2 cores) with simply adding a ton more cache.
I'd say we won't be better off until we get some breakthroughs in memory and disk storage technology. They are the bottleneck that cache is meant to ameliorate but as long as the CPU keeps getting faster relative to the RAM, the problem only gets worse. Why does AMD's chips perform better than Intel's? One of the reasons is they moved the memory controller onto the CPU for speed, that's just one sign of where the real problem is: our RAM needs to get off its butt and get a move on!
FYI: Intel's EM64T (their copy of AMD64) extension to i386 includes doubling the number of general purpose *and* 128 bit multi-media registers, so assuming Apple moves straight to the 64 bit mode, the decrease in available registers won't be quite as painful as it is now in 32 bit mode.
Fedora simply was facing a lot of competition from organizations like Debian and Ubuntu that many developers saw as being less influenced by corporations.
Honestly, I can't see anything RH can do to take mind-share away from Debian, Gentoo, or Ubuntu, since on this particular score RH shot themselves in the foot back with their dumping of their free, personal version.
To the other poster: it doesn't matter how easy it was to "upgrade" from RH to Fedora, the issue wasn't a technical one, what hurt RH was the signal they sent to the Linux community that "we're really only interested in business customers; personal Linux users should look elsewhere". No matter how good Fedora becomes, it can't overcome that original damage, since the damage was really about trust, and no amount of technical excellence on their part can fix the trust problem. Which means that if this *is* the reason why they are loosening their hold on Fedora, it won't do them any good, IMO. As you can see from several posts here, people have long memories, and the folks who really *are* concerned with corporate influence are simply not going to use RH, *ever*, not as long as they have Debian, Ubuntu, Gentoo, etc.
You have to have all or nothing. I.e. you cannot have 32 bit code with 64 bit code. That is an Intel problem not a 64 bit problem.
Actually this isn't true. The X86 64bit CPU's have no problem running 32bit software while in 64bit mode, and the Linux kernel doesn't have a problem with this either, if you compile the kernel for 32bit support. You can easily run any 32bit software in 64bit mode right now, if the software is statically linked and thus has no need for run-time linkage. That is true because the problem is with the rest of the system, particularly the system linker that doesn't support the idea of multiple libraries (same version and name, just different bitness). So this problem is really with the system software (Linux/GNU), not the hardware. In time (not soon alas) this will be fixed with a new standard for Linux's file-system layout and system linker behavior (Debian has a proposal which would implement this called "bi-arch" - since it really is kind of like using 2 architectures at the same time).
Kubuntu is just Ubuntu running KDE intead of GNOME by default. They aren't really separate entities. You turn Ubuntu into Kubuntu by just installing the Kubuntu KDE meta-package (which pulls in all of KDE). However, you can just as easily run both or neither. Ubuntu is based on Debian, you have access to the same breadth of software that Debian has, including other window managers. The only catch is you have to remove some of the Ubuntu specific meta-packages to get more flexibility, but its easy for anyone already familiar with Debian's package management, and who understands that Ubuntu is just a particular "flavor" of Debian. I'm running "Ubuntu" with a stripped-down KDE and no GNOME for example, it technically isn't Kubuntu because not all KDE packages, and none of the Kubuntu specific meta-packages, are installed (and for that matter not all the Ubuntu specific meta-packages are installed either), but the effect is basically the same.
Kubuntu - Does this actually have enough people to make it sufficiently slick?
I have no idea what you mean by "sufficiently slick".:) KDE in Ubuntu is being supported by its users, so as Ubuntu's userbase grows so will Kubuntu's userbase, and therefore its "slickness". Since KDE support is already good for Debian itself, and Kubuntu is just working off that already good support, I'd say there is already enough users and devs to make it a viable alternative to the GNOME default in Ubuntu.
open doors for Linux on the desktop (although I think is very difficult to achieve that)
I actually tend to agree with you on this one.
I can see [...] that Ubuntu gives the impression that is going to continue.
It will continue (for awhile at least) regardless of the actual license used, whether its GPL or BSD or whatever. The reason I think Ubuntu is different is that its deliberately, from the get go, trying to duplicate the success of Debian with its own strong user/dev community, but just re-targeting the focus to desktops.
I'm always skeptical on the whole Linux-on-the-desktop thing.
So am I actually, but you have to start somewhere, and that's what Ubuntu is trying to do. More importantly though, its *how* they're trying to do this that is interesting, by copying Debian's playbook, and doing that for the desktop. Their method of building a large user/dev community and leveraging that resource may mean they become very successful relative to all the other Linux distros, even if they don't succeed in the larger absolute sense. Linux may never unseat Windows, but Ubuntu *might* become the "top dog" when it comes to Linux on the desktop. I too have a hard time seeing how they could defeat a monopoly in that larger contest, but I *can* see why other Linux desktop-oriented distros should be worried... very worried.
Ubuntu is going after the FOSS type folks first, those who are attracted to Debian because it is non-commercial(*) rather than one of the Red Hat wannabes, in order to build a community around it. If they succeed at that, then attracting the remaining users of the other commercial distros is not that hard, as those folks don't particularly care whether their distro is proprietary or not, they just want something that works. As Debian has shown, if you can build a large enough community around an open distro, that can work in terms of quality just as well as a commercial distro, so in other words Ubuntu seems to have its priorities right (attract the FOSS thinkers and build a community first - go after everyone else only *after* you have a vibrant community in place) when thinking about a *long-term* viable distro plan.
(*) Ubuntu's creator, Canonical, is commercial, but not in the sense of a Red Hat. Their business model relies *entirely* on support, no one has to pay for the distro itself, unlike all the other commercial Red Hat wannabes. FOSS type people can jump on the Ubuntu bandwagon without ever paying a dime to Canonical (*lots* of ex-Debian users are in their community right now), but rather than considering these people as "leeches" or whatever, as Red Hat did when they decided to drop their free version, Canonical has decided to welcome those people into the community as well, thinking that even if these people don't send them any money, they will likely/hopefully contribute to the Ubuntu community as a whole, which Canonical recognizes will help them in the long run. That's where Ubuntu seems to be different, and thinking differently from the conventional commercial distros, whose business model depends on making people pay for the distro itself as well as follow-on support, and where people who don't pay for the distro are considered liabilities, not potential assets in building a community around the distro, since most of the commercial distros don't consider building a community around their distro to be important, whereas Ubuntu considers that to be a centerpiece of their business strategy (ala Debian). That's why I think their strategy is clever, and may very well succeed within the larger Linux-using community, although like you, I'm skeptical that they or anyone else could ever put a dent into MS's monopoly.
The reason there was a slight "edge" to my first response to you was that you sounded like a typical "Debian fan-boy" that just automatically assumed Debian is special, and no one else could duplicate it. Well
OTOH Ubuntu is a rich South African's eccentric toy.
Debian was once a small distro before it grew, why do you so smugly assume it can't be done by Ubuntu, especially if Ubuntu copies the successful parts of Debian's blueprints (leaving out only the zealotry and endless bickering over Free Software and licenses), and if Ubuntu starts with the foundation of work that Debian has already created?
I believe you have a vast lack of knowledge about what Ubuntu really is trying to be. It is not one person's toy, it is an attempt to create the same kind of community and spirit that Debian achieved, but with a focus on the desktop rather than the server (which was Debian's origin, and remains its primary focus). While I don't know if they can succeed in creating an *identical* type of community as they are a profit-oriented company rather than being a non-commercial enterprise, I am not ready at this point to so confidently assume it can't be done, because logically, it sounds entirely reasonable and possible.
There *is* an enormous groundswell of support for a "Debian for the Desktop". Ubuntu didn't come into existence inside a vacuum you know, and Mark Shuttleworth is not an idiot. He saw a "market segment" that wasn't being served (because Debian itself isn't currently capable of serving that market segment) and he's providing a solution to that market, and plans to leverage that new Debian-like community into a much wider and more widely used Linux distro than possibly any so far. I think Mark knows very well that Ubuntu must "play by the rules" to maintain such a community, so I don't doubt his sincerity or that of his employees, many of whom are also DDs (but whether hypothetical future owners of Canonical will be as adept and understanding is still an interesting question). Frankly his plan to me looks clever, *if* his profit-oriented company can cross that "trust barrier" with a lot of would-be developers and energetic users.
Finally, you may think what you will, but I just have a hard time believing its a sheer accident that Ubuntu, in so short a time span, is now at the top of distrowatch.com's listing of popular distros. Call me crazy, but that sounds like a message to me.
Whether or not it ultimately succeeds or not is an open question, but right now Ubuntu is Real(TM), and a force to be reckoned with already, certainly not one man's toy (unless you're also willing to accept that Debian started out as Ian Murdock's toy too, and look where *it* went...).
It's here today, who knows tomorrow?
Since its based on Debian, and all of Ubuntu's changes and unique software is all GPL'd I would think the answer to this would be fairly self-evident, or did I just fall for a troll?:)
How odd, an AC poster that signs his posts with his real name.:)
The 2 AC responses to the grandparent have reminded me *why* I've been modding down AC posts in my preferences for so long that I've forgotten when I first started doing it. After a month of experimentation, its time to return to old habits it seems. I know I'll miss the occasional gem, but having to wade through this kind of crud to find that gem just isn't worth it anymore.
Re:How About Something, ANYTHING, Worth Watching?
on
Television Reloaded
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· Score: 1
I'm with you on this one. Gave up cable about ~3 years ago. Rarely watch broadcast at all anymore, unless I'm just too tired to do something on the computer but not yet ready to go to sleep (but there's usually nothing on that's worth watching so I'm normally in bed within a half hour of that point anyway). Ads are insulting and obnoxious or asinine and there's too many of them. I get more "entertainment value" out of my computer now, so I don't even care any more what happens in TV land. Those execs in the TV world had better hope the "disease" you and I have doesn't spread. Life without TV? And you *like* it, you say!?! Blasphemy!!!
I'd rather ride my bike,
Well, I can't go this far. This sounds suspiciously a lot like... *gasp*... physical exercise!
The point you miss is that Americans have the OPTION of selecting what health care they have.
And around 20% of the population, or higher in some places, and continually rising every year regardless of geography, has apparently "chose" the "option" of no health care at all because its so expensive. Yea, nice "choice" there. It just creates a vicious cycle, where the uninsured increase costs for the insured to the point where the insured at the lower end can't afford their insurance anymore. I'm afraid the point you've missed is that our system is fatally injured, its just that given the size of our population its going to take a while for it to bleed to death.
There's a threshold, based on the percentage of uninsured, at which our current health system will simply collapse. No one knows where the threshold is, but we know we're approaching it. Its the health system's equivalent of "Peak Oil". Peak Health. The point at which the insured become such a relatively small group compared to the uninsured that the costs of the uninsured result in runaway inflation within the health care system. Its either that or this society must decide to let the uninsured die on the sidewalks outside of hospitals if they can't pay. We may not even recognize it until we hit it, but when we hit it, everyone will know, because everyone but the very rich will suffer during the meltdown.
I'm no fan of big government either, but this isn't a problem where one solution wears a white hat, and all the other solutions are sporting black Stetsons. The real world is never as simple as some in Hollywood and Washington would have you believe.
You can ignore me because its now "only" 20% or so, I'm just one voice in a cacophony, and the Mod Mafia jackasses on/. can use M1 to punish me for having an unpopular viewpoint rather than using M1 for what it was meant for, but the fact remains that the current system is unsustainable without *some* form of government intervention. Double digit health care inflation will bankrupt this country just via Medicaid/Medicare/SS at some point, long before we reach the point of revolution due to human suffering, so this is not something the Powers That Be can put off to some point decades into the future. The crisis will come sooner than that. "Pay me now, or pay me later, but in the end, you *will* pay the piper". In truth, that is really the only "choice" we have.
But they can't do that in visual that well. There, the HST has no competition at today's technology [*]
Any links for this info? Its my understanding that several ground scopes are already exceeding HST's resolution in visible light using interferometry. The problem was difficulty in detecting faint objects, and adaptive optics is now starting to solve that problem. Yes, the Hubble is the only thing out there that can produce those Deep Field images at the moment, but its only a matter of time before numerous ground-based VLT Arrays surpass the HST even in that area, and those ground-based scopes are *vastly* cheaper to build and maintain than the HST.
You seem to be directing contradicting HST's Wikipedia entry.
That said, if you are going for IR, ground telescopes are often the right kind of place.
There are no ground-based IR scopes, AFAIK, at least not useful ones. The Earth's own heat interferes with an IR scope, even the scope's own heat can do that. Initially a similar problem existed for visible light scopes (atmospheric interference), which was why the HST was designed in the first place. Technology is now overcoming those problems however, allowing for ground-based VL scopes to surpass the HST. The same can't be said for the heat interference problem from the Earth (and the atmosphere) on IR scopes, no one has yet figured out how to solve that problem, which is why there aren't any ground-based IR scopes, and spaced-based IR scopes are placed some distance from Earth and coolant is used to get their own temperature down. Good IR scopes *have* to be away from the Earth or any large hot body, and kept cold, before they can even "see" the infrared spectrum at all.
I sense you may be a fellow in my field (probably a student).
Nope, just a guy who reads a lot.:)
You really need to get some facts streighten out before you
Well, maybe you should start out by straightening out the authors of the HST Wikipedia entry since they apparently have got it all wrong just as I supposedly do.:)
No one is arguing that the Hubble is utterly useless now, it obviously isn't. However, every estimate for a servicing mission is well over $1 billion, and that is an extraordinary amount of money to spend on a spacecraft that has ALREADY reached its expected operational lifespan. Even worse, the 2 shuttle disasters that have occurred since the HST was put up have drastically altered the situation (the Hubble was designed with the idea of frequent servicing missions in mind - so it wasn't designed to maximize its hands-off lifespan), in fact, if NASA is to abide by the recommendations of the Investigative Board after the Columbia tragedy, they literally CAN'T help the Hubble, because its too far away from the ISS, and NASA has said that from now on, the shuttle will dock at the ISS for inspection before returning to Earth.
Its not that the Hubble has lost value, its that its cost/value ratio has gone far higher than 1:1, and is no longer in Hubble's favor, and I don't see losing Hubble's capability for about 10 years or so (or less) before the James Webb gets up and ground-based scopes continue to improve, as a disaster. Its certainly not the kind of disaster I believe warrants spending more than a billion dollars and putting our astronauts at unnecessary risk to avoid. We've already got the Spitzer up there, and the Europeans are putting up other scopes of their own, its not like we're going be utterly blind for a whole decade.
A civil union in this case is no different than any 2 people making this union simply between themselves.
No, a "civil union" typically grants the same tax benefits and rights as a marriage permit does. Outlawing civil unions in addition to preventing homosexuals from using the word "marriage" to define what their union is, therefore goes beyond just protecting "marriage" and simply becomes discrimination against homosexuals, and arguably a violation of the Constitution's "Equal Protection" clause.
Sure there is, it doesn't have to squint up through a bunch of atmosphere.
That advantage is rapidly being overcome by new technology being used on ground-based scopes, which I've already referred to several times elsewhere. Those new developments are precisely why there is now a dispute over whether keeping the HST going at this point is cost effective. Read the other posts, and read the "Future" section of HST's entry on Wikipedia.
And never will until it's too late, I'm afraid.
Me too.:(
I just hope I'm long gone to my grave before The Big One finally shows up on our scopes.:)
If Lyman Spitzer heard you say something like that, he'd ripped your head out of your body...
If he's still alive, maybe we should ask him. Given the changes in scope technology since the HST was designed, perhaps his answer would surprise you more than me?
Not many other professionals would agree with your view
I understand some professionals don't agree, but as I said earlier, the primary push for space-based scopes was always about seeing distant objects (looking back into time), and since the HST was designed, the state-of-the-art for seeing distant objects has moved to the infrared, because the "light" of the most distant objects is only reaching us in the infrared.
I realize there are many astronomers who aren't cosmologists and/or aren't necessarily interested in seeing the most distant objects, but are interested in seeing visible light objects in greater detail. The problem is money and technology. NASA doesn't have the money to maintain Hubble and put up the newer scopes that are in the pipeline, and the technology is rapidly allowing ground based scopes to achieve the same results of HST which was designed in the '70s. In other words, for the visible light range, its far more cost effective now to spend money on ground-based scopes and continue to advance the technology that's allowing ground-based scopes to overcome atmospheric interference and detect weak signals, than it is to spend $500 million on a risky repair mission for the HST, which has just about reached its expected end-of-operational-life anyway.
Huh? Amateur telescopes can't get ANY of the images that the major ground or space-based telescopes can. And of course they can relate to computer-enhanced IR images, just like computer-enhanced VL images, did you *look* at any of the images I linked to?
g) We're very overdue for a major impact disaster from an asteroid or comet. When, not if, this occurs, the only warning we'll have to all move to Kansas won't come from ground-based telescopes - it will come from space-based ones, which need to be serviced by manned spaceflight.
There is nothing inherently better about a space-based scope for spotting asteroids. We now have the tech to use ground scopes to spot an asteroid sized objects in our solar system, and those are cheaper to operate.
The even scarier truth is that the only way to have any *useful* warning is to spot the asteroid *decades* before it reaches us, and that requires a painstaking, tedious, never-ending survey of the solar system looking for objects on an intersecting course with Earth, something which many governments still haven't taken seriously.
Slashdot Mirror
LSB packages are RPM packages. LSB just took an older version of RPM and made it their "standard". Which is why Debian has stayed separate with their
The package formats aren't really the issue anyway, the issue is all the detailed rules (explicit, written down, implied, and/or undocumented) that are applied by each distro in how and where packages and their components are installed and how they interact with one another. These are the problems that programs like alien have to solve, parsing each others package file format is relatively trivial.
Not the tax, but how the category of "basic necessities" is determined and then managed. This is where I believe the FT idea is better because it doesn't create such a category of exceptions, because once you do create such a category, it'll be exploited, ie, "gamed" by the powerful. Granted, the FT system does have the "consumables" distinction, but defining what is consumed by individuals is a lot more straightforward than defining what is a "basic necessity", I believe.
[The next three paragraphs basically apply to FT was well..]
I wouldn't either if it weren't for the fact that doing it this way obviates the need for SS, welfare, minimum wage rules, etc, etc. Without this, there will inevitably be a desire for more "handouts". By providing this "handout" (which of course really is their own money being returned to them) for everyone, we can eliminate the need or arguments for other welfare/security/support systems (health care will remain the other major problem of course).
If doesn't have to be a once a year refund of course, it could done via electronic deposit per week or month. This would also be a good way for the government to encourage savings, as this is already close to the idea of private savings accounts.
That's why its so interesting to me, in that it solves several different problems at once with a single, (relatively) simple, coherent system.
Alas, there is never enough time to persue all the rants I'm interested in.
Was catching up after a long absence from
The "problem" I see with this is that its a complicated system, which means there is room for the wealthy or politically empowered to "game" the system. The Fair Tax idea eliminates this by taxing all *consumables* *equally*, then sending a refund back to *everyone* at the end of the year of an amount based on the government's calculation of a base annual cost of living. This plan would also have the effect of eliminating the need for social security and all the related welfare plans for the poor, because *everyone* gets that check at the end of the year, no matter how much or how little the person earned. The tax is wholly focused on consumption instead of income. Its very close to your idea of a sales tax, except for the part about the tax only applying to end-user consumables. While there is still room for the gaming of this system, the room is much smaller, and the fact is no matter which system we use, there will be folks trying to game it. With this idea, there seems to be less room to do so, since the political fights will be reduced to one, how is the annual CoL refund calculated, and two, how do we determine what is an "end-user consumable".
As you, I believe nearly any sales/consumption system is better than any income system, but I wanted to make sure you had heard about the consumption variation on the sales tax idea, if you've not heard of it before, because it also manages to do several other things for us as well, eliminating the need for other financial programs like SS because their purpose is nicely wrapped into and handled by this idea, eliminating government agencies like the IRS, and simplifying much of the burden of paying taxes for most people and businesses (and eliminating it for many businesses and poor), as well as reducing the burden and complexity on the whole economy to the point where our economy would pick up many points of growth because of the increased efficiency. Its the only really interesting idea I've heard of for replacing the income tax.
PS: I was trying to figure out how to send a private message since this thread is already a week old, and I saw your journal entry about the SlashStalker. lol! Strangely enough, I'm kinda jealous, after all, its usually the "celebrities" that attract the stalkers.
Give me a decent budget and 1 year and I could find it if it had a significant radioactive component. Forget Bio/Chem, the only thing that really mattered to everyone was whether he had nuclear weapons.
I'll see your "Librul Media" rhetoric, and raise you by the "Fair and Balanced FOX NEWS".
If it was just about tyranny, then there are countries and dictatorships out there that make Hussein's regime look like the Boy Scouts of America. The US does not, never has, and for all practical reasons can not ever have a policy of military aggression against every "bad" regime out there, since that would mean having to conqueror and occupy at least 1/4 to 1/3 of the world. Its absurd. We don't even have enough troops to occupy Afghanistan and Iraq well enough to assure success there. The ONLY legitimate rationale was the imminent acquisition of nuclear weapons, and that turned out to be nothing more than an optimistic (from the true aggressor's point of view) assumption. Never mind that there are countries who will be far more dangerous than Hussein if they get nukes, and since our entire army is now pinned down in Afghanistan and Iraq and will be there for several more years, we can't do a damn thing about those other guys anymore.
Uhmm, not really.
Leningrad was never truly brought under siege, because it was never completely surrounded. The Wiki article mentions the "Road of Life" which was actually a *railroad*. They literally laid down tracks on Lake Ladoga to the east when it had sufficiently frozen at the start of winter, so during the winter months, especially after the first year, Leningrad was able to get in supplies and reinforcements.
Some of the bitterest fighting for Leningrad actually took place well to the *east* with the Germans desperately trying to push far enough along the lakeshore to stop the resupply, but the terrain there was a defender's dream come true.
Then you have the fact that the Finns didn't actually assist Germany in the siege to the north, in fact it is likely that the Finns (who understood winter warfare as well as the Soviets) could have cut the resupply over Lake Ladoga if they wished to. Put those two things together, and you have a recipe for a failed "siege". Had Germany been able to cut off the Lake Ladoga lifeline, and/or had the Finns actively assisted from the north, Leningrad would have fallen probably by the second year, '42.
MPlayer is using the media instructions (SSE) that are in both Intel and AMD chips, this has nothing to do with 64 bit mode. Any application recompiled for AMD64 will benefit, because AMD64 is more than just widening all registers to 64 bits, it includes doubling the number of general purpose and media registers (16 new registers total). For most apps the extra registers make a difference, thus the typical %10-%20 speedup seen, and for some apps they make a *huge* difference.
Or maybe the ones waiting for Debian to get on the AMD64 bandwagon just went to Ubuntu...
I'd say we won't be better off until we get some breakthroughs in memory and disk storage technology. They are the bottleneck that cache is meant to ameliorate but as long as the CPU keeps getting faster relative to the RAM, the problem only gets worse. Why does AMD's chips perform better than Intel's? One of the reasons is they moved the memory controller onto the CPU for speed, that's just one sign of where the real problem is: our RAM needs to get off its butt and get a move on!
FYI: Intel's EM64T (their copy of AMD64) extension to i386 includes doubling the number of general purpose *and* 128 bit multi-media registers, so assuming Apple moves straight to the 64 bit mode, the decrease in available registers won't be quite as painful as it is now in 32 bit mode.
Honestly, I can't see anything RH can do to take mind-share away from Debian, Gentoo, or Ubuntu, since on this particular score RH shot themselves in the foot back with their dumping of their free, personal version.
To the other poster: it doesn't matter how easy it was to "upgrade" from RH to Fedora, the issue wasn't a technical one, what hurt RH was the signal they sent to the Linux community that "we're really only interested in business customers; personal Linux users should look elsewhere". No matter how good Fedora becomes, it can't overcome that original damage, since the damage was really about trust, and no amount of technical excellence on their part can fix the trust problem. Which means that if this *is* the reason why they are loosening their hold on Fedora, it won't do them any good, IMO. As you can see from several posts here, people have long memories, and the folks who really *are* concerned with corporate influence are simply not going to use RH, *ever*, not as long as they have Debian, Ubuntu, Gentoo, etc.
Actually this isn't true. The X86 64bit CPU's have no problem running 32bit software while in 64bit mode, and the Linux kernel doesn't have a problem with this either, if you compile the kernel for 32bit support. You can easily run any 32bit software in 64bit mode right now, if the software is statically linked and thus has no need for run-time linkage. That is true because the problem is with the rest of the system, particularly the system linker that doesn't support the idea of multiple libraries (same version and name, just different bitness). So this problem is really with the system software (Linux/GNU), not the hardware. In time (not soon alas) this will be fixed with a new standard for Linux's file-system layout and system linker behavior (Debian has a proposal which would implement this called "bi-arch" - since it really is kind of like using 2 architectures at the same time).
Kubuntu is just Ubuntu running KDE intead of GNOME by default. They aren't really separate entities. You turn Ubuntu into Kubuntu by just installing the Kubuntu KDE meta-package (which pulls in all of KDE). However, you can just as easily run both or neither. Ubuntu is based on Debian, you have access to the same breadth of software that Debian has, including other window managers. The only catch is you have to remove some of the Ubuntu specific meta-packages to get more flexibility, but its easy for anyone already familiar with Debian's package management, and who understands that Ubuntu is just a particular "flavor" of Debian. I'm running "Ubuntu" with a stripped-down KDE and no GNOME for example, it technically isn't Kubuntu because not all KDE packages, and none of the Kubuntu specific meta-packages, are installed (and for that matter not all the Ubuntu specific meta-packages are installed either), but the effect is basically the same.
I have no idea what you mean by "sufficiently slick".
If the object is to compete with MS, then yes, agreed. Preinstallation is the only way to reach the masses.
I actually tend to agree with you on this one.
It will continue (for awhile at least) regardless of the actual license used, whether its GPL or BSD or whatever. The reason I think Ubuntu is different is that its deliberately, from the get go, trying to duplicate the success of Debian with its own strong user/dev community, but just re-targeting the focus to desktops.
So am I actually, but you have to start somewhere, and that's what Ubuntu is trying to do. More importantly though, its *how* they're trying to do this that is interesting, by copying Debian's playbook, and doing that for the desktop. Their method of building a large user/dev community and leveraging that resource may mean they become very successful relative to all the other Linux distros, even if they don't succeed in the larger absolute sense. Linux may never unseat Windows, but Ubuntu *might* become the "top dog" when it comes to Linux on the desktop. I too have a hard time seeing how they could defeat a monopoly in that larger contest, but I *can* see why other Linux desktop-oriented distros should be worried... very worried.
Ubuntu is going after the FOSS type folks first, those who are attracted to Debian because it is non-commercial(*) rather than one of the Red Hat wannabes, in order to build a community around it. If they succeed at that, then attracting the remaining users of the other commercial distros is not that hard, as those folks don't particularly care whether their distro is proprietary or not, they just want something that works. As Debian has shown, if you can build a large enough community around an open distro, that can work in terms of quality just as well as a commercial distro, so in other words Ubuntu seems to have its priorities right (attract the FOSS thinkers and build a community first - go after everyone else only *after* you have a vibrant community in place) when thinking about a *long-term* viable distro plan.
(*) Ubuntu's creator, Canonical, is commercial, but not in the sense of a Red Hat. Their business model relies *entirely* on support, no one has to pay for the distro itself, unlike all the other commercial Red Hat wannabes. FOSS type people can jump on the Ubuntu bandwagon without ever paying a dime to Canonical (*lots* of ex-Debian users are in their community right now), but rather than considering these people as "leeches" or whatever, as Red Hat did when they decided to drop their free version, Canonical has decided to welcome those people into the community as well, thinking that even if these people don't send them any money, they will likely/hopefully contribute to the Ubuntu community as a whole, which Canonical recognizes will help them in the long run. That's where Ubuntu seems to be different, and thinking differently from the conventional commercial distros, whose business model depends on making people pay for the distro itself as well as follow-on support, and where people who don't pay for the distro are considered liabilities, not potential assets in building a community around the distro, since most of the commercial distros don't consider building a community around their distro to be important, whereas Ubuntu considers that to be a centerpiece of their business strategy (ala Debian). That's why I think their strategy is clever, and may very well succeed within the larger Linux-using community, although like you, I'm skeptical that they or anyone else could ever put a dent into MS's monopoly.
The reason there was a slight "edge" to my first response to you was that you sounded like a typical "Debian fan-boy" that just automatically assumed Debian is special, and no one else could duplicate it. Well
Debian was once a small distro before it grew, why do you so smugly assume it can't be done by Ubuntu, especially if Ubuntu copies the successful parts of Debian's blueprints (leaving out only the zealotry and endless bickering over Free Software and licenses), and if Ubuntu starts with the foundation of work that Debian has already created?
I believe you have a vast lack of knowledge about what Ubuntu really is trying to be. It is not one person's toy, it is an attempt to create the same kind of community and spirit that Debian achieved, but with a focus on the desktop rather than the server (which was Debian's origin, and remains its primary focus). While I don't know if they can succeed in creating an *identical* type of community as they are a profit-oriented company rather than being a non-commercial enterprise, I am not ready at this point to so confidently assume it can't be done, because logically, it sounds entirely reasonable and possible.
There *is* an enormous groundswell of support for a "Debian for the Desktop". Ubuntu didn't come into existence inside a vacuum you know, and Mark Shuttleworth is not an idiot. He saw a "market segment" that wasn't being served (because Debian itself isn't currently capable of serving that market segment) and he's providing a solution to that market, and plans to leverage that new Debian-like community into a much wider and more widely used Linux distro than possibly any so far. I think Mark knows very well that Ubuntu must "play by the rules" to maintain such a community, so I don't doubt his sincerity or that of his employees, many of whom are also DDs (but whether hypothetical future owners of Canonical will be as adept and understanding is still an interesting question). Frankly his plan to me looks clever, *if* his profit-oriented company can cross that "trust barrier" with a lot of would-be developers and energetic users.
Finally, you may think what you will, but I just have a hard time believing its a sheer accident that Ubuntu, in so short a time span, is now at the top of distrowatch.com's listing of popular distros. Call me crazy, but that sounds like a message to me.
Whether or not it ultimately succeeds or not is an open question, but right now Ubuntu is Real(TM), and a force to be reckoned with already, certainly not one man's toy (unless you're also willing to accept that Debian started out as Ian Murdock's toy too, and look where *it* went...).
Since its based on Debian, and all of Ubuntu's changes and unique software is all GPL'd I would think the answer to this would be fairly self-evident, or did I just fall for a troll?
How odd, an AC poster that signs his posts with his real name.
The 2 AC responses to the grandparent have reminded me *why* I've been modding down AC posts in my preferences for so long that I've forgotten when I first started doing it. After a month of experimentation, its time to return to old habits it seems. I know I'll miss the occasional gem, but having to wade through this kind of crud to find that gem just isn't worth it anymore.
Well, I can't go this far. This sounds suspiciously a lot like... *gasp*... physical exercise!
Driver, let me off at this stop please.
And around 20% of the population, or higher in some places, and continually rising every year regardless of geography, has apparently "chose" the "option" of no health care at all because its so expensive. Yea, nice "choice" there. It just creates a vicious cycle, where the uninsured increase costs for the insured to the point where the insured at the lower end can't afford their insurance anymore. I'm afraid the point you've missed is that our system is fatally injured, its just that given the size of our population its going to take a while for it to bleed to death.
There's a threshold, based on the percentage of uninsured, at which our current health system will simply collapse. No one knows where the threshold is, but we know we're approaching it. Its the health system's equivalent of "Peak Oil". Peak Health. The point at which the insured become such a relatively small group compared to the uninsured that the costs of the uninsured result in runaway inflation within the health care system. Its either that or this society must decide to let the uninsured die on the sidewalks outside of hospitals if they can't pay. We may not even recognize it until we hit it, but when we hit it, everyone will know, because everyone but the very rich will suffer during the meltdown.
I'm no fan of big government either, but this isn't a problem where one solution wears a white hat, and all the other solutions are sporting black Stetsons. The real world is never as simple as some in Hollywood and Washington would have you believe.
You can ignore me because its now "only" 20% or so, I'm just one voice in a cacophony, and the Mod Mafia jackasses on
Well, they seem to be welcome in Washington too. They can even get press passes to the WhiteHouse.
Any links for this info? Its my understanding that several ground scopes are already exceeding HST's resolution in visible light using interferometry. The problem was difficulty in detecting faint objects, and adaptive optics is now starting to solve that problem. Yes, the Hubble is the only thing out there that can produce those Deep Field images at the moment, but its only a matter of time before numerous ground-based VLT Arrays surpass the HST even in that area, and those ground-based scopes are *vastly* cheaper to build and maintain than the HST.
You seem to be directing contradicting HST's Wikipedia entry.
There are no ground-based IR scopes, AFAIK, at least not useful ones. The Earth's own heat interferes with an IR scope, even the scope's own heat can do that. Initially a similar problem existed for visible light scopes (atmospheric interference), which was why the HST was designed in the first place. Technology is now overcoming those problems however, allowing for ground-based VL scopes to surpass the HST. The same can't be said for the heat interference problem from the Earth (and the atmosphere) on IR scopes, no one has yet figured out how to solve that problem, which is why there aren't any ground-based IR scopes, and spaced-based IR scopes are placed some distance from Earth and coolant is used to get their own temperature down. Good IR scopes *have* to be away from the Earth or any large hot body, and kept cold, before they can even "see" the infrared spectrum at all.
Nope, just a guy who reads a lot.
Well, maybe you should start out by straightening out the authors of the HST Wikipedia entry since they apparently have got it all wrong just as I supposedly do.
No one is arguing that the Hubble is utterly useless now, it obviously isn't. However, every estimate for a servicing mission is well over $1 billion, and that is an extraordinary amount of money to spend on a spacecraft that has ALREADY reached its expected operational lifespan. Even worse, the 2 shuttle disasters that have occurred since the HST was put up have drastically altered the situation (the Hubble was designed with the idea of frequent servicing missions in mind - so it wasn't designed to maximize its hands-off lifespan), in fact, if NASA is to abide by the recommendations of the Investigative Board after the Columbia tragedy, they literally CAN'T help the Hubble, because its too far away from the ISS, and NASA has said that from now on, the shuttle will dock at the ISS for inspection before returning to Earth.
Its not that the Hubble has lost value, its that its cost/value ratio has gone far higher than 1:1, and is no longer in Hubble's favor, and I don't see losing Hubble's capability for about 10 years or so (or less) before the James Webb gets up and ground-based scopes continue to improve, as a disaster. Its certainly not the kind of disaster I believe warrants spending more than a billion dollars and putting our astronauts at unnecessary risk to avoid. We've already got the Spitzer up there, and the Europeans are putting up other scopes of their own, its not like we're going be utterly blind for a whole decade.
No, a "civil union" typically grants the same tax benefits and rights as a marriage permit does. Outlawing civil unions in addition to preventing homosexuals from using the word "marriage" to define what their union is, therefore goes beyond just protecting "marriage" and simply becomes discrimination against homosexuals, and arguably a violation of the Constitution's "Equal Protection" clause.
That advantage is rapidly being overcome by new technology being used on ground-based scopes, which I've already referred to several times elsewhere. Those new developments are precisely why there is now a dispute over whether keeping the HST going at this point is cost effective. Read the other posts, and read the "Future" section of HST's entry on Wikipedia.
Me too.
I just hope I'm long gone to my grave before The Big One finally shows up on our scopes.
If he's still alive, maybe we should ask him. Given the changes in scope technology since the HST was designed, perhaps his answer would surprise you more than me?
I understand some professionals don't agree, but as I said earlier, the primary push for space-based scopes was always about seeing distant objects (looking back into time), and since the HST was designed, the state-of-the-art for seeing distant objects has moved to the infrared, because the "light" of the most distant objects is only reaching us in the infrared.
I realize there are many astronomers who aren't cosmologists and/or aren't necessarily interested in seeing the most distant objects, but are interested in seeing visible light objects in greater detail. The problem is money and technology. NASA doesn't have the money to maintain Hubble and put up the newer scopes that are in the pipeline, and the technology is rapidly allowing ground based scopes to achieve the same results of HST which was designed in the '70s. In other words, for the visible light range, its far more cost effective now to spend money on ground-based scopes and continue to advance the technology that's allowing ground-based scopes to overcome atmospheric interference and detect weak signals, than it is to spend $500 million on a risky repair mission for the HST, which has just about reached its expected end-of-operational-life anyway.
Huh? Amateur telescopes can't get ANY of the images that the major ground or space-based telescopes can. And of course they can relate to computer-enhanced IR images, just like computer-enhanced VL images, did you *look* at any of the images I linked to?
There is nothing inherently better about a space-based scope for spotting asteroids. We now have the tech to use ground scopes to spot an asteroid sized objects in our solar system, and those are cheaper to operate.
The even scarier truth is that the only way to have any *useful* warning is to spot the asteroid *decades* before it reaches us, and that requires a painstaking, tedious, never-ending survey of the solar system looking for objects on an intersecting course with Earth, something which many governments still haven't taken seriously.