The leakers are mostly pointing out *illegal acts* that are being carried out by our government. Don't we live in a democracy?
No. Whatever gave you that idea? The dog and pony shows that they call "elections" that happen every couple of years or so?
It's time to wake up, people. The "representative" in "representative republic" doesn't represent you, it represents the ruling class. The republic we all were brought up to believe in is long dead. And you will never get it back no matter how hard you try, because you don't have all the guns that matter -- they do. And if you push hard enough, I think you'll find that they're willing to use them on you, too.
Electricity is metered. Water is metered. Hell, even my trash is metered. What makes you think bandwidth will be any different?
Electricity is metered because the cost of producing the electricity is directly proportional to use.
Water is metered for the same reason: the more water that's produced, the more in the way of intermediate resources are needed.
But the cost of bits isn't proportional to the number of bits transferred, it's proportional to the rate, and only because the price of the routing equipment is roughly proportional to the speed of the equipment.
But even that relationship is tenuous at best.
You see, thanks to Moore's law, the price of the equipment needed to handle a given amount of bandwidth should continuously drop over time, which means that eventually the expense of providing that bandwidth should be dominated by two things:
The labor to set up the infrastructure. This is essentially independent of bandwidth. The amount of labor required to run fiber is roughly the same as the amount required to run twisted pair. The amount of labor required to add routes is the same no matter how fast or slow the links in question are.
The labor to maintain the infrastructure. This, too, is basically independent of bandwidth. When a circuit goes down, the primary cost of fixing it is in paying for the labor to fix it. And material cost doesn't vary much with the speed of the link, either.
So any ISP which charges based on the amount of bandwidth being consumed is likely overcharging the high-bandwidth subscribers so they can undercharge the low-bandwidth subscribers, which they all should be charged the same flat fee.
And any really smart ISP will build infrastructure that's by design as fast as it can be (thus, they would be running fiber and not copper) because in the end, the cost of building out the infrastructure is almost certainly dominated by the cost of the labor to put it in place, or perhaps the cost of the right-of-ways (which is proportional to the distance, not the bandwidth), and not the equipment itself.
We've known since the 80s that fiber would be the fastest transport medium available, simply based on the fact that light has more bandwidth than any other conventional signal. Any bandwidth provider that has built out infrastructure using anything else is an idiot for doing so.
There are a lot of idiot providers in the U.S., thanks to the typical company's inability or unwillingness to look ahead more than a couple of months.
Although this bill requires disclosure to the government, it does not require companies to inform the victims of data theft.
Of course not. If it did, it would be strongly opposed by the corporations, who everyone by now should know are the entities that are really in control of the government today.
<sarcasm type="biting"> Yes, this clearly is government of the people, by the people, and for the people. Makes me proud to be an American!1!!11! </sarcasm>
If you turn a political dissident over to the Chinese government then you are responsible for your actions. If I do it then I'm responsinble. If Yahoo do it then as a company they are responsible, and the individuals involved in making the decisions and carrying them out are also responsible. Appeals of "well but it helps me make money" are not any kind of moral justification.
You can be even more direct than that. Ask this question: would you consider it to be acceptable for the CEO of Yahoo to personally forcibly drag a Chinese political dissident out back and shoot them in the head? Would the fact that they're being paid by the Chinese government to do that make it any more acceptable?
No?
Then why the hell is it any more acceptable for a company to do basically the same thing? Because in the end, that's exactly what Yahoo has done. They are directly responsible for the incarceration/death of the political dissidents in question. In my opinion, as someone who values liberty and freedom of expression, that's tantamount to treason, a direct violation of the fundamental principles which Yahoo and its owners have had the benefit to live under.
Jeez - why do people expect these for-profit companies to be driven by the same idealistic, personal visions they have for the internet?
Because the for-profit companies are run by people who should give a shit about these things, even though they apparently don't?
Make no mistake: Yahoo is aiding and abetting the enemy. The Chinese government is the enemy. They're the enemy of freedom and self-determination, and should for that reason should be considered the enemy by anyone who values those things for themselves. Make no mistake: the Chinese government would not hesitate to shackle you and everyone you know the same way they have shackled their own people if given the opportunity.
By consorting with the enemy, Yahoo (and other corporations that give similar aid to the Chinese government) is increasing their (the Chinese government's) power over others. They're directly harming the cause of liberty.
That is why Yahoo should be held accountable for what they're doing, by you, me, and everyone else who cares at all about freedom (even if only their own).
(And yes, I know the U.S. government is headed down the same path)
I'm inclined to believe (hope), that the neo-cons are banished once and for all in 2008.
They won't be. They'll win in 2008. They'll win because they now have direct control over the voting results, thanks to the electronic voting machines that are far too common these days.
That's assuming they let the election happen at all, which is something I'm somewhat skeptical of.
I fully expect to see another "terrorist" attack before the 2008 elections. And like 9/11, it'll be mostly (if not completely) an inside job.
Those who really value freedom and democracy would be best served by leaving the damned place so we can see those who remain for the festering boil on humanity's behind that they truly are.
Perhaps, but there's no place to go. The entire world is going down the crapper and there isn't a damned thing we can do about it. We don't have all the guns that matter. They do. And it seems there's no place on earth where personal freedom is increasing. It's decreasing everywhere.
I'm telling you, the entire world will be controlled (in one way or another) by police states within the century. And that situation will last for thousands of years, because there's no outside to influence it. And thanks to the massive disparity in firepower today between a civilian (armed or not) and a soldier (after considering the soldier's support, e.g. air support and such), there will be no successful revolution.
Freedom in China ultimately depends on the citizenry. Barring external intervention, the future of a people are determined by the people. Period.
I'm sorry, but this is bullshit.
The future of a people is determined by the people who have all the guns, not by the citizenry at large. And Tianenman Square is an excellent demonstration of this.
The same thing is true here in the States. Even if a significant fraction of the population revolted against the government without the support of the military, it would be crushed in short order by that same military. This ain't the 1700's where the firepower of the average civilian was roughly equivalent to the firepower of the average soldier. Today, the average soldier has thousands to millions of times the firepower of the average civilian, and that's against an armed civilian population. Without military support, a civilian uprising will be squashed in its infancy. And without arms, the civilian population is utterly powerless.
So don't give us this bullshit about how the citizenry is responsible for its own freedom. It doesn't work that way anymore.
Now, I personally don't believe any of that. Not to troll, but to everyone posting about how the US is just like the PRC on censorship - read the above again. I can say that. All I want. Without fear of retribution from the government. I can talk about socialism, communism, monarchy, even anarchy. I can even encourage them - peacefully, of course.
For now. Enjoy it while you can, because if we keep going in the direction we're headed, it's quite possible it won't last.
That said, there have been a lot of really stupid totalitarian states throughout history. They tend to be the ones that try to control what you say.
The smart ones are the ones that recognize that what's important isn't what you can say, it's what you can do. Limit that, and it doesn't matter what people can say. Ultimately what makes the difference to a totalitarian state, then, is the government's ability to limit what you can do.
The current Presidential election system in the U.S. is an excellent example. You're given the illusion that you can vote for anyone you want. But in reality, you can only realistically vote for those people who have been chosen for you by those in power -- the ones that get all the air time, and thus the only ones that most people know about, all have the same basic agenda. This is all by design. The bottom line is that while you have the illusion of free choice in that system, you do not have actual free choice. The problem is further exacerbated by automatic voting machines that can be (and have been -- see Florida and Ohio) manipulated to show whatever results those who control them want to show.
Mainframes don't have the fastest CPUs around. Instead, they have the most reliable ones.
The same is true of their memory subsystems, their disk subsystems, etc., though their backplane performance tends to be second to none. Mainframes are designed for throughput.
Mainframes are capable of staying operational for decades at a time. If you don't want your computer to ever go down and can afford the price, a mainframe is what you want.
One other nice benefit: they've had virtualization figured out on mainframes since the 1960s, so allocating resources is a relatively easy thing to do.
If you're interested in finding out what the older mainframe OSes were like, check out the Hercules IBM mainframe emulator here.
Someone who doesn't implicitly get that it's not okay to look at porn while on company time, is not somebody I want to work with; full stop. It shows a lack of separation of one's personal life and business life, or at the minimum a great lack of understanding of the business world, which it is not an employer's job to rectify.
Really?
So you have no problem with the employee cleanly separating company time from personal time?
So you have no problem with the employee not carrying a pager and not being reachable by cellphone during non-business hours?
Oh, you do have a problem with that?
Then make up your fucking mind. Do you want the employee at your beck and call 24 hours a day 7 days a week, or do you want the employee to cleanly separate personal time from company time? You can't have both. Pick one.
Aside from this, I'm in complete agreement with you on the problem of quality employees. Just make sure that you're a quality employer in return.
Hint to moderators: "Redundant" in the context of Slashdot means that someone else said the same thing in the same thread before the article you're modding as redundant.
Don't go modding down someone's article just because you don't like it.
Could they possibly make that "article" any more annoying? They'd have been better-served to turn it into a flash-animated slide show. I'm not going to click all the way through that thing.
You read the article??
You're new here, aren't you? It's much easier to just comment about the article without reading it. As your experience so clearly demonstrates.:-)
How difficult would it be to restrict the sale of this equipment, just like certain defense equipment?
Won't happen.
The reason it won't happen is that the U.S. government almost certainly wants the same technology for the same reasons as the PRC (to monitor and quash dissenting views). But it's better to have the R&D happen on someone else's nickel.
At least, that's the way I see things going, given the trends.
No point you proofreading you own code. You see what you think you've written, not what you've actually written, therefore don't spot any problems with it.
Sometimes.
But sometimes, you do spot problems. I'll often spot errors in prose I've written here prior to submitting it. It's one of the reasons I use the "Preview" button (as shocking and unconventional as that may be). I don't necessarily catch everything, but I do catch a lot.
It's the same for coding. If I go over what I've written first, there's a decent chance I'll spot something wrong. I won't necessarily spot everything, but something is better than nothing.
Back in college they made us use punch cards on a mainframe in one of our classes. I'm sure part of the reason was that they didn't (at the time) want to upgrade to newer equipment because of the cost, but another part was to force people to proofread their code before submitting it for compilation/execution. The turnaround cycle was long enough that it was worth reviewing the code in detail to ensure that it would compile and that it would do what you intended. After a while, you got good at this.
There's not nearly the incentive to do that with an interactive system, and in some ways that's unfortunate. The discipline of reviewing your code is useful. That said, the perception of improved productivity of letting the machine figure out all the problems is so great that even those who have done it the other way will naturally gravitate towards letting the machine do all the work. People are naturally lazy that way, and there's no getting around human nature.
The bottom line is that you're probably better off reviewing your own code, even if it feels less productive.
Mister Coward, you obviously didn't read TFM where Dvorak says Microsoft will continue to make "gobs and gobs" of money. He argues that they will be less and less relavent, not that they will make less and less profit.
You can't make gobs of money in the amounts Microsoft makes and not be highly relevant. Especially in commodity software, where the per-unit price is low and thus the volume (and thus the number of people you have influence over) has to be high.
Experience matters more than certs. This has always been the case.
Experience isn't what matters. What one learns from experience is what matters.
What matters is understanding, and the ability to use that understanding to solve problems.
Understanding is different from knowledge, though knowledge is required for understanding. And knowledge is different than experience, though often the most useful knowledge is gained through experience.
There are plenty of people with lots of experience but little understanding. There are comparatively few people who truly understand how and why things work, independent of how much experience they have.
Understanding and the ability to use it are so fundamentally important that it's impressive how many people don't look for it. But then, those same people lack, well, understanding...so it's not surprising.
Just installing the thing and getting a good set of apps on it took about 8 hours. I followed a guide posted online. It worked well, but that's 8 hours I'll never get back.
Different distributions have different strengths and weaknesses.
Package installation is not one of Fedora's strengths, and never has been.
For that, the title goes to Debian and its derivatives (Ubuntu, in particular).
So because your mission is different, I think you might do well to look at a different distribution, like Ubuntu.
The RIAA and their cohorts write the laws and pay the legislators to pass them. The People, whom the government is supposed to serve, no longer has any representation.
So by now, I would expect any such laws to have no teeth.
...for anything other than data that you have absolutely no problem with becoming completely public. That, and the fact that you have that data (association like that is itself a form of information that can be of great interest to some).
I don't care how good they claim their "safeguards" are, they're not going to be as good as they claim, and in any case the companies that host these services are not to be trusted. They do only that which is in their best interests, not yours. Those may be the same thing for a time, but I promise you that's temporary at best.
You certainly don't own any software you've purchased, and the idea is starting to migrate to other things....
Exactly. I've always wondered how long it would be before we start seeing EULAs attached to hardware products. I think we can start expecting such things very soon. The number of hardware products out there that make use of some kind of software is growing, and each one represents something that can be EULAized.
When I rent a movie and rip it to make a keeper is it stealing? I guess so but I don't really care at this point. They hack away at my rights and in return I hack away at their profits.
The problem is that there isn't really any realistic resource. You won't get anywhere by talking with your "representatives" in Congress (they don't represent you, they represent their paymasters). You won't get anywhere by simply not buying -- it doesn't do enough damage and what little damage it does will just be chalked up to "pirates". And ever more draconian laws will be passed to favor the copyright cartels, because the only people who dislike draconian laws are peons like you and me.
Soon, very soon, there won't be a place on the planet where you can really be free in the Jeffersonian sense. That is, if that's not already the case. And it'll stay that way for a really, really long time.
They obviously aren't aware of Acer.....who build their own notebooks and brand them with the Ferrari logo.
Yeah, but are their notebooks worthy of the Ferrari name? Can their notebooks do 0-60 in 3.5 seconds or less, the 1/4 mile in 12 seconds, and corner at 0.95g or so?
Hmmm...I guess they can if you drop them from the top of a 1300 foot (i.e., roughly a quarter mile) office building (if you define "corner" here to mean "hit the ground on the corner of the notebook")...
Slashdot Mirror
No. Whatever gave you that idea? The dog and pony shows that they call "elections" that happen every couple of years or so?
It's time to wake up, people. The "representative" in "representative republic" doesn't represent you, it represents the ruling class. The republic we all were brought up to believe in is long dead. And you will never get it back no matter how hard you try, because you don't have all the guns that matter -- they do. And if you push hard enough, I think you'll find that they're willing to use them on you, too.
Electricity is metered because the cost of producing the electricity is directly proportional to use.
Water is metered for the same reason: the more water that's produced, the more in the way of intermediate resources are needed.
But the cost of bits isn't proportional to the number of bits transferred, it's proportional to the rate, and only because the price of the routing equipment is roughly proportional to the speed of the equipment.
But even that relationship is tenuous at best.
You see, thanks to Moore's law, the price of the equipment needed to handle a given amount of bandwidth should continuously drop over time, which means that eventually the expense of providing that bandwidth should be dominated by two things:
So any ISP which charges based on the amount of bandwidth being consumed is likely overcharging the high-bandwidth subscribers so they can undercharge the low-bandwidth subscribers, which they all should be charged the same flat fee.
And any really smart ISP will build infrastructure that's by design as fast as it can be (thus, they would be running fiber and not copper) because in the end, the cost of building out the infrastructure is almost certainly dominated by the cost of the labor to put it in place, or perhaps the cost of the right-of-ways (which is proportional to the distance, not the bandwidth), and not the equipment itself.
We've known since the 80s that fiber would be the fastest transport medium available, simply based on the fact that light has more bandwidth than any other conventional signal. Any bandwidth provider that has built out infrastructure using anything else is an idiot for doing so.
There are a lot of idiot providers in the U.S., thanks to the typical company's inability or unwillingness to look ahead more than a couple of months.
Of course not. If it did, it would be strongly opposed by the corporations, who everyone by now should know are the entities that are really in control of the government today.
<sarcasm type="biting">
Yes, this clearly is government of the people, by the people, and for the people. Makes me proud to be an American!1!!11!
</sarcasm>
You can be even more direct than that. Ask this question: would you consider it to be acceptable for the CEO of Yahoo to personally forcibly drag a Chinese political dissident out back and shoot them in the head? Would the fact that they're being paid by the Chinese government to do that make it any more acceptable?
No?
Then why the hell is it any more acceptable for a company to do basically the same thing? Because in the end, that's exactly what Yahoo has done. They are directly responsible for the incarceration/death of the political dissidents in question. In my opinion, as someone who values liberty and freedom of expression, that's tantamount to treason, a direct violation of the fundamental principles which Yahoo and its owners have had the benefit to live under.
Because the for-profit companies are run by people who should give a shit about these things, even though they apparently don't?
Make no mistake: Yahoo is aiding and abetting the enemy. The Chinese government is the enemy. They're the enemy of freedom and self-determination, and should for that reason should be considered the enemy by anyone who values those things for themselves. Make no mistake: the Chinese government would not hesitate to shackle you and everyone you know the same way they have shackled their own people if given the opportunity.
By consorting with the enemy, Yahoo (and other corporations that give similar aid to the Chinese government) is increasing their (the Chinese government's) power over others. They're directly harming the cause of liberty.
That is why Yahoo should be held accountable for what they're doing, by you, me, and everyone else who cares at all about freedom (even if only their own).
(And yes, I know the U.S. government is headed down the same path)
They won't be. They'll win in 2008. They'll win because they now have direct control over the voting results, thanks to the electronic voting machines that are far too common these days.
That's assuming they let the election happen at all, which is something I'm somewhat skeptical of.
I fully expect to see another "terrorist" attack before the 2008 elections. And like 9/11, it'll be mostly (if not completely) an inside job.
Perhaps, but there's no place to go. The entire world is going down the crapper and there isn't a damned thing we can do about it. We don't have all the guns that matter. They do. And it seems there's no place on earth where personal freedom is increasing. It's decreasing everywhere.
I'm telling you, the entire world will be controlled (in one way or another) by police states within the century. And that situation will last for thousands of years, because there's no outside to influence it. And thanks to the massive disparity in firepower today between a civilian (armed or not) and a soldier (after considering the soldier's support, e.g. air support and such), there will be no successful revolution.
I'm sorry, but this is bullshit.
The future of a people is determined by the people who have all the guns, not by the citizenry at large. And Tianenman Square is an excellent demonstration of this.
The same thing is true here in the States. Even if a significant fraction of the population revolted against the government without the support of the military, it would be crushed in short order by that same military. This ain't the 1700's where the firepower of the average civilian was roughly equivalent to the firepower of the average soldier. Today, the average soldier has thousands to millions of times the firepower of the average civilian, and that's against an armed civilian population. Without military support, a civilian uprising will be squashed in its infancy. And without arms, the civilian population is utterly powerless.
So don't give us this bullshit about how the citizenry is responsible for its own freedom. It doesn't work that way anymore.
For now. Enjoy it while you can, because if we keep going in the direction we're headed, it's quite possible it won't last.
That said, there have been a lot of really stupid totalitarian states throughout history. They tend to be the ones that try to control what you say.
The smart ones are the ones that recognize that what's important isn't what you can say, it's what you can do. Limit that, and it doesn't matter what people can say. Ultimately what makes the difference to a totalitarian state, then, is the government's ability to limit what you can do.
The current Presidential election system in the U.S. is an excellent example. You're given the illusion that you can vote for anyone you want. But in reality, you can only realistically vote for those people who have been chosen for you by those in power -- the ones that get all the air time, and thus the only ones that most people know about, all have the same basic agenda. This is all by design. The bottom line is that while you have the illusion of free choice in that system, you do not have actual free choice. The problem is further exacerbated by automatic voting machines that can be (and have been -- see Florida and Ohio) manipulated to show whatever results those who control them want to show.
The same is true of their memory subsystems, their disk subsystems, etc., though their backplane performance tends to be second to none. Mainframes are designed for throughput.
Mainframes are capable of staying operational for decades at a time. If you don't want your computer to ever go down and can afford the price, a mainframe is what you want.
One other nice benefit: they've had virtualization figured out on mainframes since the 1960s, so allocating resources is a relatively easy thing to do.
If you're interested in finding out what the older mainframe OSes were like, check out the Hercules IBM mainframe emulator here.
Really?
So you have no problem with the employee cleanly separating company time from personal time?
So you have no problem with the employee not carrying a pager and not being reachable by cellphone during non-business hours?
Oh, you do have a problem with that?
Then make up your fucking mind. Do you want the employee at your beck and call 24 hours a day 7 days a week, or do you want the employee to cleanly separate personal time from company time? You can't have both. Pick one.
Aside from this, I'm in complete agreement with you on the problem of quality employees. Just make sure that you're a quality employer in return.
Well, 2 out of 4 isn't bad...
Ah, the things college students will think of when they've had a bit too much to drink...
Don't go modding down someone's article just because you don't like it.
You read the article??
You're new here, aren't you? It's much easier to just comment about the article without reading it. As your experience so clearly demonstrates. :-)
Won't happen.
The reason it won't happen is that the U.S. government almost certainly wants the same technology for the same reasons as the PRC (to monitor and quash dissenting views). But it's better to have the R&D happen on someone else's nickel.
At least, that's the way I see things going, given the trends.
Sometimes.
But sometimes, you do spot problems. I'll often spot errors in prose I've written here prior to submitting it. It's one of the reasons I use the "Preview" button (as shocking and unconventional as that may be). I don't necessarily catch everything, but I do catch a lot.
It's the same for coding. If I go over what I've written first, there's a decent chance I'll spot something wrong. I won't necessarily spot everything, but something is better than nothing.
Back in college they made us use punch cards on a mainframe in one of our classes. I'm sure part of the reason was that they didn't (at the time) want to upgrade to newer equipment because of the cost, but another part was to force people to proofread their code before submitting it for compilation/execution. The turnaround cycle was long enough that it was worth reviewing the code in detail to ensure that it would compile and that it would do what you intended. After a while, you got good at this.
There's not nearly the incentive to do that with an interactive system, and in some ways that's unfortunate. The discipline of reviewing your code is useful. That said, the perception of improved productivity of letting the machine figure out all the problems is so great that even those who have done it the other way will naturally gravitate towards letting the machine do all the work. People are naturally lazy that way, and there's no getting around human nature.
The bottom line is that you're probably better off reviewing your own code, even if it feels less productive.
You can't make gobs of money in the amounts Microsoft makes and not be highly relevant. Especially in commodity software, where the per-unit price is low and thus the volume (and thus the number of people you have influence over) has to be high.
Experience isn't what matters. What one learns from experience is what matters.
What matters is understanding, and the ability to use that understanding to solve problems.
Understanding is different from knowledge, though knowledge is required for understanding. And knowledge is different than experience, though often the most useful knowledge is gained through experience.
There are plenty of people with lots of experience but little understanding. There are comparatively few people who truly understand how and why things work, independent of how much experience they have.
Understanding and the ability to use it are so fundamentally important that it's impressive how many people don't look for it. But then, those same people lack, well, understanding...so it's not surprising.
Different distributions have different strengths and weaknesses.
Package installation is not one of Fedora's strengths, and never has been.
For that, the title goes to Debian and its derivatives (Ubuntu, in particular).
So because your mission is different, I think you might do well to look at a different distribution, like Ubuntu.
The RIAA and their cohorts write the laws and pay the legislators to pass them. The People, whom the government is supposed to serve, no longer has any representation.
So by now, I would expect any such laws to have no teeth.
I don't care how good they claim their "safeguards" are, they're not going to be as good as they claim, and in any case the companies that host these services are not to be trusted. They do only that which is in their best interests, not yours. Those may be the same thing for a time, but I promise you that's temporary at best.
Exactly. I've always wondered how long it would be before we start seeing EULAs attached to hardware products. I think we can start expecting such things very soon. The number of hardware products out there that make use of some kind of software is growing, and each one represents something that can be EULAized.
Crap. Recourse, not resource. So much for the usefulness of previewing... Grr...
The problem is that there isn't really any realistic resource. You won't get anywhere by talking with your "representatives" in Congress (they don't represent you, they represent their paymasters). You won't get anywhere by simply not buying -- it doesn't do enough damage and what little damage it does will just be chalked up to "pirates". And ever more draconian laws will be passed to favor the copyright cartels, because the only people who dislike draconian laws are peons like you and me.
Soon, very soon, there won't be a place on the planet where you can really be free in the Jeffersonian sense. That is, if that's not already the case. And it'll stay that way for a really, really long time.
Yeah, but are their notebooks worthy of the Ferrari name? Can their notebooks do 0-60 in 3.5 seconds or less, the 1/4 mile in 12 seconds, and corner at 0.95g or so?
Hmmm...I guess they can if you drop them from the top of a 1300 foot (i.e., roughly a quarter mile) office building (if you define "corner" here to mean "hit the ground on the corner of the notebook")...