Yeah, you are probably right - but what does that tell us? They have no concept at all to handle a major failure mode in one of their reactors, none at all. All we are seeing is seat-of-the-pants level improvisation, because they have no plan. Why do we let those guys operate a reactor again?
Why do we let them? Because as much as we'd all love to see a form of electricity generation that uses only perfectly safe fuel, operates without any risk to its users, and emits no waste, the gods have not yet graced us with such an energy source yet.
And why do they have no plan? Well... because we can't plan for everything. We *did* have a plan for an earthquake. Then nature fucked us with a bigger one. We did know the risks of tsunamis -- but nobody thought of the possibility of a big one following a record quake.
For every disaster you plan for, there's always the chance of another one that makes the one you prepared for look like a tiny mishap. You plan for a quake at level X on the Richter scale, nature will throw an X+2 at you. You plan for tropical storms, nature will throw hurricanes at you. You plan for those, you'll get get a tornado. No matter what you plan for, there's always something that you didn't.
And then, after it's all over, and your otherwise-well-designed $PROJECT is a pile of smoking rubble, some asshole will come out of the woodwork and snort "How could those guys not plan for __________?"
Yes? I am a developer at Oracle. I worked for 5 years on my original computer. After that I went through a lot of hassle, it took me about 6 hours of my time in total over few days to get a new computer. I've got 3 years old refurbished one. They kept in place my old CRT monitor, because it was "working". Now another 5 years passed, I've still got that now 8 years old computer and that 10 years old CRT monitor.
I don't believe you. There's no way that *any* software at Oracle can run on a single-core machine with a mere couple gig or three of RAM.
Heavier taxes on finance income, or some sort of legal restructuring or limitation of finance itself. If you can't get money for nothing... you can't get money for nothing. The wealth gap in the US is absurd.
I agree with this idea. We should take money from people who we don't believe are deserving of it. Then we can redistribute that wealth to everyone.
Honestly, I'm just surprised I never heard of someone suggesting this before. Of course I never studied world history or political philosophy, so maybe somebody did try this before...
Now we celebrate them! All hail the invisible hand!
Jesus. The amount of anti-capitalism smugness in these comments is amazing.
Look, the US telecom market is about as far from the free market as you can get. The carriers get massive privileges in the form of land usage. They get massive amounts of tax breaks and subsidies, not to mention innumerable perks from local governments. To top it all off, the carriers don't even have to compete in an open market; the wireless spectrum is a heavily-licensed, extremely expensive, very limited resource doled out by a single government agency.
Free market my ass. Let's not use this to crucify capitalism, shall we?
It's not a Ponzi scheme since there are viable alternatives for keeping the system solvent until the boomers are mostly dead. It's only a Ponzi scheme if it's impossible for it to be sustained. It isn't. You may not like the choices, but there are choices.
"A Ponzi scheme is a fraudulent investment operation that pays returns to separate investors, not from any actual profit earned by the organization, but from their own money or money paid by subsequent investors." [source] Just saying...
I've only ever torrented legal stuff, so I don't know why you bring up torrents. If you had said "Bye-bye unlawful torrents," then you would have been correct. I don't see any problem with that. The way I see it, this basically guarantees that my ISP can't slow down my latest Linux download or Netflix movie just because some other asshole is using a torrent stream to download a movie they didn't want to pay for.
So... uh... aside from deep packet inspection, how exactly do you propose the ISP make that distinction?
> So let me get this right, money equals speech, > Yet another distinction between serfs and lords in the information age.
Nope.
Cut the hyperbolic crap. Even the Wikipedia article that you linked to refutes that (emphasis mine):
Buckley v. Valeo, 424 U.S. 1 (1976), was a case in which the Supreme Court of the United States upheld a federal law which set limits on campaign contributions, but ruled that spending money to influence elections is a form of constitutionally protected free speech, and struck down portions of the law.
They didn't rule that "money equals speech". They ruled that "spending money to influence elections is a form of constitutionally protected free speech". There's a difference, a big one in fact.
While I am gaga over server side Java, I'm not a fan of interpreted code for client applications.
Me neither! Fortunately, I can sleep soundly, secure in the knowledge that it hasn't been interpreted for well over a decade (JIT was introduced in 1997 with 1.1).
AT&T and Comcast are companies with both natural and government-created monopolies. You are quite naive if you think that they are at the mercy of the free market.
I'm not so sure about the natural monopolies part... to paraphrase a classic movie "You keep using that phrase... I don't think it means what you think it means."
But the "government monopolies" bit, that I agree with. I agree that governments' power to intervene in the telecommunications market has proven to be a net negative. That's why I'm skeptical that increasing and concentrating that power is a good solution.
IMHO, the "net neutrality" issue is quite solvable: socialize the last mile and lease the connection to private companies. All ISPs, regardless of size, would be eligible to take use the line if you elect to give your business to them. This would put the ISPs back where they belong -- simple transit providers. I'm sure a Slashdotter much more clever than I can flesh out that idea, but that's the gist of it.
I've never understood why America doesn't seem to have an EFTPOS (electronic funds at point of sale) system that doesn't rely on Mastercard/Visa etc. From what I've seen all your 'debit' cards over there are essentially just masquerading as credit cards (i.e. are Visa or Mastercard, with a 16 digit number and an expiry date etc.), just that the funds come from your bank account, not from credit.
We do.
The PLUS network is widely-used and well supported here. I can't remember the last time I saw a POS device that supported credit cards but offered no option for debit.
In my country EFTPOS is a completely separate thing from MC/Visa debit cards. You get to the checkout, swipe your standard ATM card, type your PIN and you are good to go. But there's no Visa or MC logo on the cards and they don't have a credit-card-like number or expiry date etc. (Note that you CAN also get the Visa/MC debit cards - they are useful for shopping online and overseas trips - but they aren't the only type of cashless payment card).
The main difference is that most debit cards happen to be of the latter type that you described. My bank, for example, issues Visa debit cards that also work on the PLUS network "by default". You can ask for a debit card that doesn't have the Visa "feature", and you'll get a standard debit card like the one you described.
so, if we were back in slavery days, and slave in a plantation owners' farm, and talking at night in the log cabin that the plantation owner stuffed us into, while eating the food that plantation owner had given us, it would be totally wrong if i said 'hey, we are slaves here, we have no freedom' ??
You'd be completely correct in that case.
But that's not what we're facing now. You're basically complaining about your lack of freedom of speech in a capitalist economy, whilst simultaneously disproving your point by criticizing the exact system in a public, commercially-supported forum.
I suspect your idea of what oppression and free speech (or the lack thereof) would change if you actually were to live under an oppressive regime. A corporation refusing to provide payment processing for a group, chilling though it may be, doesn't even come close.
There were idiots believing there could be freedom with full feudalism (capitalism) being allowed in the economic side of life, and democracy and equality in the political side of life.
See how that works ? you are free to say anything you want, from the political side, but, you dont have the MEANS to say it from the economic side.
You know, I never thought about how oppressed we really were until your post on this commercial, advertising-supported Web site cleared it up for me.
The government wouldn't have anything to do with internet enforcement. It would only be tasked with preventing other companies from regulating traffic. Net neutrality, at least in the form proposed, wouldn't at all give the government the ability to do this sort of thing.
You just don't get it, do you?
Let's try an analogy. Pretend it's 2001 for a second:
"The DHS wouldn't have anything to do with copyright enforcement. It would only be tasked with ensuring the national security from terrorists/foreign threats. The DHS, at least in the form proposed, wouldn't at all have anything to do with the Web."
Actually, why would customs mount the drive in a way that it could be modified at all? It seems like if they can modify it, anything they found would be tainted.
Because your average customs/DHS schmo has as much grasp of computing as he does of theoretical particle physics.
The patch is simple, reasonable, and doesn't require distributors to ship updated userland files to put processes in groups.
It also doesn't do a good god damn for the average desktop user. Sure, if your benchmark is a massively-parallel kernel build it works great. But if -- oh, I don't know -- you launch most of your X apps via your DE's menu, guess what? They'll all be grouped together and the patch will do bugger-all for you.
So it's 200+ lines of code to help a subset of developers... who are basically the only people who used the existing control group stuff in the first place.
*sigh* Why is it that the scheduler is always such a facepalm-evoking area of the kernel?
Seriously, why must every attempt to increase security be viewed as the the end of all democracy & privacy?
Because, at least in the model of how the US is supposed to work, the response to a government calling for more power should not be "why not?" but rather "why?"
In this case, that's a very good question to ask. See they [the various three-letter organizations] already have vast powers of surveillance. They have all sorts of legal privileges allowing them to intercept foreign and criminal communications with ease, all contingent on the provision of a warrant (and thus probable cause). Hell, thanks to the last regime, they don't even need that much of the time, especially not to spy on a common citizen like you or I.
So in light of that, the response to a call for even better tools and even more leeway to spy on US citizens should be "Why?" Why do we need these tools? Why are the existing ones inadequate? Can you demonstrate that? What crimes do propose new tools will help you solve -- cite specific examples please, not just "it may us catch some bad guys".
And if the government can't come up with a damn good answer to "Why?", then our answer should be "No."
The funny thing is if such a thing already existed Apple would have promoted it.
Yes, just like they promoted VirtueDesktops instead of rolling their own virtual desktop solution.
Just like they promoted Watson instead of releasing Sherlock 3.
Just like they promoted Audion instead of purchasing a competitor (SoundJam) and releasing it for free.
Just like they promoted the best app from the range of existing iOS e-book software instead of releasing their own.
Just like they promoted Konfabulator instead of releasing their own widget system.
No, make no mistake about it -- if Apple wants control of a product space, they *will* make sure they get it, whether that means acquiring, ripping off, or otherwise replacing the existing solutions, they will find a way to do it.
Sun owned the trademark before, it didn't hinder development then.
Oh yes, it absolutely did. Sun proved to be a major hinderance to the development process -- so much so, in fact, that a fork was created and actually became the go-to choice for some Linux distributions.
It was called go-oo, and if you've installed/used "OpenOffice" in Debian, Ubuntu, or a few other distros, you actually used Go-OO without realizing it.
Make it easier to install binaries used on other *nix systems.
What makes you think Apple has any interest in encouraging the use of cross-platform apps that might, say, allow a user to easily transition away from their locked-down, proprietary environment?
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, you are probably right - but what does that tell us? They have no concept at all to handle a major failure mode in one of their reactors, none at all. All we are seeing is seat-of-the-pants level improvisation, because they have no plan. Why do we let those guys operate a reactor again?
Why do we let them? Because as much as we'd all love to see a form of electricity generation that uses only perfectly safe fuel, operates without any risk to its users, and emits no waste, the gods have not yet graced us with such an energy source yet.
And why do they have no plan? Well... because we can't plan for everything. We *did* have a plan for an earthquake. Then nature fucked us with a bigger one. We did know the risks of tsunamis -- but nobody thought of the possibility of a big one following a record quake.
For every disaster you plan for, there's always the chance of another one that makes the one you prepared for look like a tiny mishap. You plan for a quake at level X on the Richter scale, nature will throw an X+2 at you. You plan for tropical storms, nature will throw hurricanes at you. You plan for those, you'll get get a tornado. No matter what you plan for, there's always something that you didn't.
And then, after it's all over, and your otherwise-well-designed $PROJECT is a pile of smoking rubble, some asshole will come out of the woodwork and snort "How could those guys not plan for __________?"
Yes? I am a developer at Oracle. I worked for 5 years on my original computer. After that I went through a lot of hassle, it took me about 6 hours of my time in total over few days to get a new computer. I've got 3 years old refurbished one. They kept in place my old CRT monitor, because it was "working". Now another 5 years passed, I've still got that now 8 years old computer and that 10 years old CRT monitor.
I don't believe you. There's no way that *any* software at Oracle can run on a single-core machine with a mere couple gig or three of RAM.
I can't help but be amused that your post berating someone's attitude closes with "congratulations jackass"...
Heavier taxes on finance income, or some sort of legal restructuring or limitation of finance itself. If you can't get money for nothing... you can't get money for nothing. The wealth gap in the US is absurd.
I agree with this idea. We should take money from people who we don't believe are deserving of it. Then we can redistribute that wealth to everyone.
Honestly, I'm just surprised I never heard of someone suggesting this before. Of course I never studied world history or political philosophy, so maybe somebody did try this before...
Let me start by saying, flat out, that I'm not trying to troll or start a war here, but what exactly would you have them cut?
How about our war budget?
Now we celebrate them! All hail the invisible hand!
Jesus. The amount of anti-capitalism smugness in these comments is amazing.
Look, the US telecom market is about as far from the free market as you can get. The carriers get massive privileges in the form of land usage. They get massive amounts of tax breaks and subsidies, not to mention innumerable perks from local governments. To top it all off, the carriers don't even have to compete in an open market; the wireless spectrum is a heavily-licensed, extremely expensive, very limited resource doled out by a single government agency.
Free market my ass. Let's not use this to crucify capitalism, shall we?
It's not a Ponzi scheme since there are viable alternatives for keeping the system solvent until the boomers are mostly dead. It's only a Ponzi scheme if it's impossible for it to be sustained. It isn't. You may not like the choices, but there are choices.
"A Ponzi scheme is a fraudulent investment operation that pays returns to separate investors, not from any actual profit earned by the organization, but from their own money or money paid by subsequent investors." [source] Just saying...
I've only ever torrented legal stuff, so I don't know why you bring up torrents. If you had said "Bye-bye unlawful torrents," then you would have been correct. I don't see any problem with that. The way I see it, this basically guarantees that my ISP can't slow down my latest Linux download or Netflix movie just because some other asshole is using a torrent stream to download a movie they didn't want to pay for.
So... uh... aside from deep packet inspection, how exactly do you propose the ISP make that distinction?
Frying pan, fire...
> So let me get this right, money equals speech,
> Yet another distinction between serfs and lords in the information age.
Nope.
Cut the hyperbolic crap. Even the Wikipedia article that you linked to refutes that (emphasis mine):
Buckley v. Valeo, 424 U.S. 1 (1976), was a case in which the Supreme Court of the United States upheld a federal law which set limits on campaign contributions, but ruled that spending money to influence elections is a form of constitutionally protected free speech, and struck down portions of the law.
They didn't rule that "money equals speech". They ruled that "spending money to influence elections is a form of constitutionally protected free speech". There's a difference, a big one in fact.
While I am gaga over server side Java, I'm not a fan of interpreted code for client applications.
Me neither! Fortunately, I can sleep soundly, secure in the knowledge that it hasn't been interpreted for well over a decade (JIT was introduced in 1997 with 1.1).
AT&T and Comcast are companies with both natural and government-created monopolies. You are quite naive if you think that they are at the mercy of the free market.
I'm not so sure about the natural monopolies part... to paraphrase a classic movie "You keep using that phrase... I don't think it means what you think it means."
But the "government monopolies" bit, that I agree with. I agree that governments' power to intervene in the telecommunications market has proven to be a net negative. That's why I'm skeptical that increasing and concentrating that power is a good solution.
IMHO, the "net neutrality" issue is quite solvable: socialize the last mile and lease the connection to private companies. All ISPs, regardless of size, would be eligible to take use the line if you elect to give your business to them. This would put the ISPs back where they belong -- simple transit providers. I'm sure a Slashdotter much more clever than I can flesh out that idea, but that's the gist of it.
I've never understood why America doesn't seem to have an EFTPOS (electronic funds at point of sale) system that doesn't rely on Mastercard/Visa etc. From what I've seen all your 'debit' cards over there are essentially just masquerading as credit cards (i.e. are Visa or Mastercard, with a 16 digit number and an expiry date etc.), just that the funds come from your bank account, not from credit.
We do.
The PLUS network is widely-used and well supported here. I can't remember the last time I saw a POS device that supported credit cards but offered no option for debit.
In my country EFTPOS is a completely separate thing from MC/Visa debit cards. You get to the checkout, swipe your standard ATM card, type your PIN and you are good to go. But there's no Visa or MC logo on the cards and they don't have a credit-card-like number or expiry date etc. (Note that you CAN also get the Visa/MC debit cards - they are useful for shopping online and overseas trips - but they aren't the only type of cashless payment card).
The main difference is that most debit cards happen to be of the latter type that you described. My bank, for example, issues Visa debit cards that also work on the PLUS network "by default". You can ask for a debit card that doesn't have the Visa "feature", and you'll get a standard debit card like the one you described.
Since EasyDNS couldn't handle them anymore. Oh wait, wasn't there a problem with Amazon to start with?
You got the company wrong! EasyDNS actually has volunteered to take on WikiLeaks as a customer. It was *EveryDNS* that bowed to the US government and dropped WikiLeaks.
so, if we were back in slavery days, and slave in a plantation owners' farm, and talking at night in the log cabin that the plantation owner stuffed us into, while eating the food that plantation owner had given us, it would be totally wrong if i said 'hey, we are slaves here, we have no freedom' ??
You'd be completely correct in that case.
But that's not what we're facing now. You're basically complaining about your lack of freedom of speech in a capitalist economy, whilst simultaneously disproving your point by criticizing the exact system in a public, commercially-supported forum.
I suspect your idea of what oppression and free speech (or the lack thereof) would change if you actually were to live under an oppressive regime. A corporation refusing to provide payment processing for a group, chilling though it may be, doesn't even come close.
There were idiots believing there could be freedom with full feudalism (capitalism) being allowed in the economic side of life, and democracy and equality in the political side of life.
See how that works ? you are free to say anything you want, from the political side, but, you dont have the MEANS to say it from the economic side.
You know, I never thought about how oppressed we really were until your post on this commercial, advertising-supported Web site cleared it up for me.
Grow up and get some perspective.
Within our dataset of several million visitors, only one in 394 browsers have the same fingerprint as yours.
Fun fact: a browser that doesn't send a User-agent header and uses a whitelist for cookies and JS is actually damn hard to fingerprint.
Better not tell the BlueCava guys about this super-secret hax0r trick...
The government wouldn't have anything to do with internet enforcement. It would only be tasked with preventing other companies from regulating traffic. Net neutrality, at least in the form proposed, wouldn't at all give the government the ability to do this sort of thing.
You just don't get it, do you?
Let's try an analogy. Pretend it's 2001 for a second:
"The DHS wouldn't have anything to do with copyright enforcement. It would only be tasked with ensuring the national security from terrorists/foreign threats. The DHS, at least in the form proposed, wouldn't at all have anything to do with the Web."
*Now* do you see the problem?
Actually, why would customs mount the drive in a way that it could be modified at all? It seems like if they can modify it, anything they found would be tainted.
Because your average customs/DHS schmo has as much grasp of computing as he does of theoretical particle physics.
The patch is simple, reasonable, and doesn't require distributors to ship updated userland files to put processes in groups.
It also doesn't do a good god damn for the average desktop user. Sure, if your benchmark is a massively-parallel kernel build it works great. But if -- oh, I don't know -- you launch most of your X apps via your DE's menu, guess what? They'll all be grouped together and the patch will do bugger-all for you.
So it's 200+ lines of code to help a subset of developers... who are basically the only people who used the existing control group stuff in the first place.
*sigh* Why is it that the scheduler is always such a facepalm-evoking area of the kernel?
Seriously, why must every attempt to increase security be viewed as the the end of all democracy & privacy?
Because, at least in the model of how the US is supposed to work, the response to a government calling for more power should not be "why not?" but rather "why?"
In this case, that's a very good question to ask. See they [the various three-letter organizations] already have vast powers of surveillance. They have all sorts of legal privileges allowing them to intercept foreign and criminal communications with ease, all contingent on the provision of a warrant (and thus probable cause). Hell, thanks to the last regime, they don't even need that much of the time, especially not to spy on a common citizen like you or I.
So in light of that, the response to a call for even better tools and even more leeway to spy on US citizens should be "Why?" Why do we need these tools? Why are the existing ones inadequate? Can you demonstrate that? What crimes do propose new tools will help you solve -- cite specific examples please, not just "it may us catch some bad guys".
And if the government can't come up with a damn good answer to "Why?", then our answer should be "No."
The funny thing is if such a thing already existed Apple would have promoted it.
Yes, just like they promoted VirtueDesktops instead of rolling their own virtual desktop solution.
Just like they promoted Watson instead of releasing Sherlock 3.
Just like they promoted Audion instead of purchasing a competitor (SoundJam) and releasing it for free.
Just like they promoted the best app from the range of existing iOS e-book software instead of releasing their own.
Just like they promoted Konfabulator instead of releasing their own widget system.
No, make no mistake about it -- if Apple wants control of a product space, they *will* make sure they get it, whether that means acquiring, ripping off, or otherwise replacing the existing solutions, they will find a way to do it.
... i dont get it.. why now? why at all?
Because Mr. Strohmeyer needed an article, and PCWorld needs their advertising revenue.
If you have a working Treacherous Computing setup that you believe isn't breached, what would you want the technique in the article for?
Funding.
Sun owned the trademark before, it didn't hinder development then.
Oh yes, it absolutely did. Sun proved to be a major hinderance to the development process -- so much so, in fact, that a fork was created and actually became the go-to choice for some Linux distributions.
It was called go-oo, and if you've installed/used "OpenOffice" in Debian, Ubuntu, or a few other distros, you actually used Go-OO without realizing it.
Make it easier to install binaries used on other *nix systems.
What makes you think Apple has any interest in encouraging the use of cross-platform apps that might, say, allow a user to easily transition away from their locked-down, proprietary environment?