Re:anonymous coward lobbyists are out in force her
on
Free Wi-Fi Threatened?
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· Score: 1
Well, to be fair, there are a variety of WLAN cards (802.11a/b/g) which work with Linux and even some which work with FreeBSD (the voluntary-charity arm of the capitalist utopia (or the developers who just code for the hell of it without the borderline-explicit goal of tearing down corporations?)? After all, copyrights are still maintained by their authors, so they are still "property" of their authors). Even socialist utopians will work within a market economy to obtain the goods they desire...:P
Anyway, the Netgear WG511T which I use on my laptop is one of them (and I highly reccommend it, BTW, even if it is still a bit pricey and devoid of an antenna jack). Use the madwifi driver for it on Linux (the driver is included with FreeBSD as ath(4)) and you're all set.:)
Don't confuse causation with correlation. Just because TCP/IP was invented by an arm of the military, DARPA, doesn't mean companies can't produce open protocols. You know, like the very IBM-derived PC on which you are (probably) reading this? Or how about the standards for optical media, such as for CD-ROMs, CD-R/RW, DVD-+R/RW, etc.? Industry consortiums hammered those out.
W3C too, anybody?
providing health insurance that doesn't leave you filing for bankruptcy if you get sick
To come back to the main topic at-hand though, I do quite agree that outlawing public access points is stupid, and is clearly a case of corporate cronyism, a.k.a. "crapitalism", a.k.a. "fascism" (government and business working together) -- problems for which this current Presidential administration are so well-known. Let us not confuse these practices with the functionality of a *true* free-market, free (or at least largely-so) of government interference.
I used a "free" wireless hotspot at Panera today, and I enjoyed it immensely. That Texas wants to outlaw such things is stupid and interferes with the functioning of the market -- I *do*, as a result of today's experience, prefer going to Panera now over other coffee shops and similarly-environed businesses. Why Texan regulators think they need to get their greedy mitts around the neck of this wonderful emerging technology is beyond me, although I have plenty of suspicions and could develop some conspiracy theories...
Ooo! Does this mean we can start calling Microsoft "beleagured"?
"It is official; Slashdot confirms: Windows is dying"
One more crippling bombshell hit the already-beleagured Windows community when Microsoft-Watch.com confirmed that Windows mindshare has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1% of all lead developers..."
Why not? It's competition. If Alice offers Bob a better deal than Charlie, then why shouldn't Bob leave and take Alice's offer if Bob thinks it suits him better than his current job working for Charlie?
There's not even a shred of ethical dilemma here.
The simple economic fact is that Microsoft didn't compete hard enough to keep that developer, and now he's gone -- too bad, tough shit to MSFT, and now Google is one (presumably) very-competent architect richer, at the expense of probably six-figures a year in salary and benefits from Google. But Google believes he's worth it, so they're happy; Marc Lucovsky is happier at Google, else he wouldn't have jumped ship, and MSFT - well, who knows whether they care or not.
Perhaps MSFT cares - perhaps they valued Lucovsky enough to keep him at the conditions of his previous employ, but clearly they didn't value him enough to keep him at newer, higher conditions which in Lucovsky's mind beat the conditions of working at Google. And perhaps MSFT doesn't care at all; that they think they can get along just fine without him - we don't know, and probably won't know for a long time, if ever.
In the end, this is a nice example of labor economics benefiting the laborer (Lucovsky), by his playing a game of wage/benefits/happiness shopping, and "buying" the package Google offered while "selling" the package MSFT was providing. Again, there is not even a *shred* of ethical dilemma here...
If I can't convince you on the sheer fundamental economics of the situation (in which case, please try Econ101 sometime), can I at least get you on a "Microsoft is evil, so it's good that quality developers are jumping ship" argument?;-)
What does Google stand to gain by writing their own OS? Or, more likely, if they are indeed creating a new OS, will it be built heavily off of Linux or BSD?
Given the low margins, intense competition, high barriers-to-entry (like MSFT's 95% desktop market share), high initial capital investment required (startup costs), and so on, I really don't see a market for a new OS at all. There's no way Google can market a proprietary OS to compete in the server space -- Linux, being free, is dominating there (alongside Win2k/2k3), and will for the foreseeable future. The desktop space is even bleaker, again, due to MSFT's controlling 95% of the market and the massive installed base of users, apps, etc. that goes along with such a large user base.
I truly don't understand the reasoning behind a supposed Google OS... They have made themselves a fantastic info warehouse/data-mining portal for the masses, making knowledge & info formerly only barely-available to wealthy customers available to everyone for nearly-free, leveraging the "market" of links available on trillions of webpages (among other factors in their algorithm, no doubt). But that's a set of services best provided to existing OS's over the Internet - not from a brand-new OS.
Now, if Google is going to make a modified GNU/Linux distribution... that could have some considerable potential, b/c much of the heavy-lifting has already been done and there's a large enough base of users they could cater to... But what would they offer over other Linux distros to make Google's distro stand out? A better file-searching tool, probably, but what else? A replacement for X11/XOrg? Perhaps not, as this is entering ito GUI coding, something they as a company don't do much of - or at least, the GUI stuff they do isn't made public (the desktop search and IE Google bar aside)...
So even on that idea, I'm having a hard time imagining what they have up their sleeve, and therefore, a hard time imagining why they'd bother in the first place.:-/
Anybody remember the story of Around the World in 80 Days by Jules Verne (or the more-recent Jackie Chan movie adaptation)? Admittedly, I don't b/c I never read it or saw the movie, but I'm looking at this from a historical context...
How long ago was it that getting around the world in 80 days was considered an incredible feat? 100 years ago? Given that people traveled by steamship, trains, and unreliable cars then (and only if one was rich, at that), roughly, yes.
And yet, here we are, with a person making a trip around the world not only in far less than 80 days, but in under 80 hours. In the time you spent doing a Stage 1 Gentoo install, Steve Fosset was able to fly around the entire planet.
Who, 100 years ago, would've likely believed it likely (possible, perhaps, but likely?)?:)
Admittedly, in replying to the post, that seemed like an awfully far-fetched use for a firearm.:)
But then, I can imagine plenty of rednecks (some related to me) who would probably do just that from their front porch... Heck, I'd probably do it, but not so casually (I'd get up off the porch) - they'd make good and plentiful targets in the woods of Missouri or Arkansas or Tennessee probably - not that there'd be much left of the nuts inside, but still...
Track & Field - competing at murdering skills -- This is not even *close* to murder (is there a trend here?). Gun fires a *blank*, not a bullet into the air.
Happiness (if warm) - warmth come from emptying the gun into your ex-wife -- Straw-man argument. Illogical.
Cracking Walnuts at 100 yards - murdering poor, innocent walnuts -- Walnuts do not live once they have fallen from the tree. This is more akin to "shooting a dead horse." Will have to try shooting walnuts at 100 yards sometime...
Network Administration (see LART, definition of) - they'll have a different attitude if you murder them -- Illogical. Again, straw-man argument. Funny.
1) Target-shooting. Many people do this recreationally, as it is a test of one's physical ability (to hold a gun steady) and mental ability (to factor in external elements, like the wind, if it's a distance shot).
2) Hunting. Unless you consider killing animals to be "murder", in which case, let me lump you in with the PETA crowd.
3) Art/aesthetics. Some people use guns as decoration on their walls; who are you to say they cannot?
4) Self-defense (and yes, goddamn you, self-defense is a morally-justifiable, fundamental human right). Note that fending off somebody who is threatening your life does not necessarily require pulling the trigger -- often, the mere *threat* of violence is enough to scare somebody away. Moreover, it is possible to shoot somebody without killing them (e.g., shoot them in the arm, foot, knee, etc.), should the situation come to that (although, most people, if they are concerned at all for their safety, legal liability, and so on, will simply shoot towards the torso or head, lest they miss a smaller target (like the knee) and suffer the violent, quite-possibly deadly consequences of missing their attacker). I don't consider self-defense to be "murder" (assuming the case of self-defense comes to killing somebody in the first place - which is usually *not* the case in reality), as you probably think of it, but it can be reasonably described as "murder in defense of the person of one or another."
Of course, this is Slashdot, where all guns are bad all of the time. The argument typically goes that either:
1) As if the gun has a mind of its own, it clearly wants to kill people, or
2) Gun owners want to kill people and/or are too irresponsible to own a gun
The first assertion is ridiculous and logically-retarded; yet many on the anti-gun side of the debate promote it. Color me not surprised. For such people, especially computer geeks, ask them if their PC has a mind of its own, or if it obeys solely the commands issued to it as a result of developer work and end-user use. The answer, obviously, is the latter -- the computer's functioning is entirely dependent on the people operating it, hence, it is neither "good" or "evil", and nor does it "think" for itself (although we can program it to be artificially-intelligent, such programming still requires the work of a human).
The first part of the second assertion is not always ridiculous, but typically is. Most gun owners are not out to kill other people; more than anything, they fear for their own safety, or enjoy hunting, or enjoy the competition of target shooting.
The second part of the second assertion is relatively reasonable. There are certainly people too irresponsible to own guns; the question is, who are those people, and who decides who those people are? You? Are you so arrogant as to believe you can decide who is competent to own a gun - even if you've never met that person?
IMO, we can safely remove violent convicts from the list of people we allow to purchase any more than a bolt-action rifle or manually-reloadable (non-pump, non-autoloader) shotgun, if we allow even those (after all, why should somebody with a history of violence be permitted the means to cause more violence?)... I have no problem with non-violent convicts additionally being able to own handguns; I'm not too worried about embezzlers or pot-smokers shooting at me on the street, unlike with violent criminals.
But to purchase automatic weapons and small explosives - which I do believe people should be allowed to do, as well as manufacture (outlawed by that "conservative" Ronald Reagan in 1986) - IMO such purchases ought to require that a person have no criminal record beyond those of moving violations in vehicles or of "soft" drug use (e.g. weed, but not coke or heroin), be certifiably-sane and mentally-stable, and ought to be required to take a competence test to prove their competence to use such weapons and their understanding of their uses.
We apparently have different opinions of "works well with firefox" then...
Here's my assessment:
* It takes forever to load a new instance of it (approx. 10 seconds on my P2.4GHz, 768MB Gentoo laptop). My Zaurus 6000L -- with its 400MHz Xscale CPU -- loads PDFs as fast as Acrobat does, even when Acrobat has been loaded once before (i.e., is sitting in RAM waiting for a PDF to display in Firefox)!! * No mouse wheel scrolling * Default save path =/usr/bin/ (why? WTF is this nonsense? Non-root users can't save there! What moron at Adobe thought of this?) * No way to fill out forms and then print them out (we must still print, then fill-in fields by hand, for chrissakes) * Although I'm usually not a UI snob, the Reader UI uses fucking ATHENA widgets from way back when dinosaurs walked the Earth. Good Lord. * Have you ever seen the CPU usage of Acrobat Reader? Holy shit. And the PDFs still don't scroll anywhere nearly as smoothly as on Windows or my Zaurus......and last, but not least:
* It's still version 5.x, not 6.x as on Windows. Linux users are treated as the second-class citizens as they are (compared to Windows and OSX). I'm not asking for the whole Acrobat PDF-creation suite; that'd be nice, but I'm well-aware that the market isn't there. But I'm completely convinced that there is a market for an Acrobat Reader that is vastly-improved over the existing one.
Look, I'm just an end-user of PDFs. I very rarely create them; most of my involvement w/ PDFs is in reading them. I suspect it's often the same with the various other usually-technical people who run Linux.
But Adobe's Acrobat Reader for Linux sucks donkey balls, seriously, and yet, there are no better alternatives on Linux, nor are there any other PDF plugins for Firefox, AFAIK. Acrobat for Linux doesn't quite qualify as "garbage", but it's close.
Well, I'm not one of these people who compiles every line of source via the Stage 1 install. I do the Stage 3 install, which is a distro of lots of precompiled binaries. It's a full system ready to go.
I recompile apps as necessary afterwards. I do think spending days and days on end compiling Gentoo, as so many people do, is a waste of time. In terms of productivity there, I'm with you 100%...
Where we differ is in how we approach the system; I don't approach it from a standard Gentoo doofus' POV...
Nothing beats single-command installs of either a an app compiled from source or a pre-compiled binary package for efficiency in installing apps.
Windows has nothing on this - no central directory of the hundreds of thousands of various apps you can use: MS Office, Nero, Photoshop, all the games, your text/code editor, etc. etc. - from which you click a button and it installs...
In that way, the transaction cost of having to deal w/ paying somebody for software (and thus having to go to the store, or dl it off somebody's site after filling out registration, CC#, etc.) is a cost borne by users of proprietary, for-profit software, whereas free-beer software doesn't have this problem.
That's just app installation though. In day-to-day use, I find myself fighting fewer bugs in FreeBSD or Gentoo than I do on WinXP. Feature-wise, however, it depends on the use. If I want to do gaming, I'm far more productive on WinXP (b/c WINE just doesn't run most of the games I play, and the few it runs at all, it runs painfully). But for coding, for *basic* office work, for email, for websurfing, for file-transfers, for securely handling my documents, for serving anything at all, for scripting craploads of tasks I want done -- nothing beats a Linux/BSD box for me.
Then again, I don't own an OSX box. Maybe it's the best of all worlds? Maybe - but being locked in to proprietary hardware like Apple has doesn't make me any happier than being locked in to the proprietary software of Microsoft. Each company pursues both a proprietary and a relatively-open attitude, but from opposite directions...
If only Apple would bring OSX to a limited number of "Apple-approved" x86 machines (on AMD64, preferably). I'd be all over those boxes and laptops like white on rice; like sweet on honey; like cum on a pr0n star...
House-building: The wood and glass structure is the design!
Car building: Just slap it together - it's faster and cheaper than actually having an engineering diagram!
Financial planning: Forget about planning for retirement. Just save your money however seems to fit best! Your life's finances *is* the design!
Building a Wintel box: Don't research hardware incompatibilities beforehand - just put the parts together and see which ones work!
I've heard a quote that goes (paraphrased) "if you can't keep the design in your head, you're not qualified to be a developer." I think there's some truth to that.
But there is still a design involved in that theory, and I've worked on a couple projects in which a written, documented design, although probably not necessary (they were relatively-simple (about 5,000-6,000 LoC) projects), still proved to be useful occasionally. Mostly they were there to please management, but nonetheless, they weren't worthless.
Were they worth the time I spent creating the designs? Hard to say...
In general though, I think design documents are useful, if for no other reason than to be able to more-clearly explain what it is you're doing to people who wouldn't otherwise have a clue (read: management, your family, etc.)...
...before the FBI or Secret Service shut down the project.
That, or one of the various companies who depend on magstripe cards, such as the makers of Blackboard university groupware software (which ties in w/ uni students' ID cards), with whom Acidus has already dealt once...
Wow. I don't own a WRT54G, so I'm not involved in that circle of users/devs, but after reading about some of the things James has done, man, he's total asshole. I would NEVER buy his firmware.
Banning people from the forums who've paid $20 and happen to be using the same nick on another forum? Sending people nastygrams for discussing the source? Fuck James.
I've never heard of a purportedly "open-source" developer acting like such a dickweed before...
No, government confiscation of intellectual property is socialist, just confiscation of *any* private property by government is (technically) socialist.
Read the first paragraph of TFA:
Unless the drug industry starts to negotiate significantly lower prices, it may find itself battling debt-strapped states for control over the manufacture of drugs. States already take land and other property in order to benefit the public by building things such as roads and schools. Now some legislators and officials are saying they should be able to take away a drug company's intellectual property, its patent. They want to give these patents, which allow a company to manufacture a product, to competitors that agree to sell the drugs to the states at much lower prices.
Actually, this isn't socialism so much as fascism -- the cooperation of government and business, rather than the separation of the two, as occurs under capitalism and socialism (socialism, however, does it by eliminating all capitalist traces to begin with; capitalism, allows for minimal government intervention where necessary, i.e., for security and legal purposes).
But this process does give rise to socialism in the end. Look at what's happening:
1) Company A invests time/money into R&D for a drug
2) Company A develops new Drug A to treat disease X
3) Government says "give me all of j00r juarez!!" and steals Drug A from Company A
4) Company B says "we didn't do the R&D, so we can make Drug A at a lower price than Company A!"
5) Government says "Company B, you agree to make Drug A at a lower price! Here is Company A's patent!"
6) Company B now makes Drug A which was R&D'd by Company A
7) Company A, which no longer can compete on the value of its own R&D (because it is being stolen and redistributed by the government) stops doing R&D
8) Government says "waah, Company A, you're not doing R&D!! Why?"
9) Company A says "because you steal it, you fucking pig-headed retard. FOAD."
10) Company A goes moves to doing the same thing Company B does -- making drugs that Companies C, D, and E do the R&D for -- until those companies wise up and stop doing R&D
11) Eventually, no more companies are doing R&D for drugs. American consumers whine "waaah, we want new drugs!" Companies say "the U.S. government has been stealing from us for years, so you get no new drugs"
12) Government says "we're just looking out for the 'public interest'!" Americans buy this line, and call for the government to do drug R&D, because the companies no longer are willing to do so
13) Government tasks the FDA to also develop drugs. If the President is a Democrat, taxes are raised to pay for the R&D. If the President is a Republican, taxes are not raised to pay for R&D, but instead, we deficit-spend to pay for it, which is to say, we wind up paying for that cost later, probably under a Democratic Presidency...
And hence, the market does NOT improve its competitive stance by government pillage of patents, because the market for R&D is destroyed by such pillage. Nor does drug development improve in quality or speed.
And hence, as in the progression above, we see a clear increase in socialism, eventually (in the form of higher taxes, in step 13), through fascism (steps 3 through 6).
In a way, for once, I actually agree with you. And Constitutionally-speaking, there's nothing preventing it, because of the 9th Amendment reserving those things not specifically outlined in the Constitution to be state-level matters, not federal-level matters.
Let some states go socialist if they so choose; let other states choose not to. Those which work the best will win the public's preference in the end, and people will move to/from those states as they choose. I will happily prefer the capitalist states of New Hampshire or Florida.
But you might not choose to -- hence, you could live in a less-capitalist area of the U.S., such as California or New York or the Chicago area of Illinois. The key is that we are free to choose which sort of society we live in -- rather than having it forced down upon us at the federal level.
Really, I think that's what the Founding Fathers intended for America -- for us to have a choice, given the various states they knew would be created, as to what sorts of politics and economies we want to live by, hence our system of federalism and again, the 9th Amendment along with the rest of the Constitution...
Of course, I say all this as a libertarian/ardent opponent of socialism. But at the state/local level, if we're free to leave what I would call a "socialist hell-hole" for other, less-socialist areas, that would make me quite happy, and would make many other people quite happy too, I suspect.
Funny that at a time when the rest of the world is actively privatizing various parts of their formerly-public economy in recognition of the fall of "communism" (actually socialism in practice, but communism in ideal) -- such as in Britain, where various automakers, such as Jaguar, were state-owned -- here in the U.S., we would consider stealing private property from people and redistributing the benefits of that property to all, i.e., we would move in the *reverse* direction from the rest of the world.
But then, we do that with religion too (in an attempt to promote "faith-based initiatives" and such). Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised.
Eminent Domain is the worst legal doctrine in the world, and it is routinely used by small cities to bulldoze private property for the benefit of large corporations for the sales tax revenue the city gains from doing so. Wal-Mart is a classic example of this.
And now the socialist hippies of America want to use Eminent Domain to steal patents from drug makers? Who the hell is going to develop new drugs then?
Some people seriously need to go fucking read Atlas Shrugged. Then take at least 2 courses in economics, and then read some about economic history, because nobody who understands economics, even economists on the left, promote such idiotic ideas.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, to be fair, there are a variety of WLAN cards (802.11a/b/g) which work with Linux and even some which work with FreeBSD (the voluntary-charity arm of the capitalist utopia (or the developers who just code for the hell of it without the borderline-explicit goal of tearing down corporations?)? After all, copyrights are still maintained by their authors, so they are still "property" of their authors). Even socialist utopians will work within a market economy to obtain the goods they desire... :P
:)
Anyway, the Netgear WG511T which I use on my laptop is one of them (and I highly reccommend it, BTW, even if it is still a bit pricey and devoid of an antenna jack). Use the madwifi driver for it on Linux (the driver is included with FreeBSD as ath(4)) and you're all set.
Nor would private, companies bother to do any research of their own for their own competitive advantage (or erectile advantage, in this last case). Of course not...
Try Blackwater Security.
Don't confuse causation with correlation. Just because TCP/IP was invented by an arm of the military, DARPA, doesn't mean companies can't produce open protocols. You know, like the very IBM-derived PC on which you are (probably) reading this? Or how about the standards for optical media, such as for CD-ROMs, CD-R/RW, DVD-+R/RW, etc.? Industry consortiums hammered those out.
W3C too, anybody?
Causation/correlation problem again. There are a variety of possible reasons for this occurrence, none of which have been proven fully one way or another. My theory of choice is that of the problem of third-party payments, as told by this great Nobel prize-winning economist.
To come back to the main topic at-hand though, I do quite agree that outlawing public access points is stupid, and is clearly a case of corporate cronyism, a.k.a. "crapitalism", a.k.a. "fascism" (government and business working together) -- problems for which this current Presidential administration are so well-known. Let us not confuse these practices with the functionality of a *true* free-market, free (or at least largely-so) of government interference.
I used a "free" wireless hotspot at Panera today, and I enjoyed it immensely. That Texas wants to outlaw such things is stupid and interferes with the functioning of the market -- I *do*, as a result of today's experience, prefer going to Panera now over other coffee shops and similarly-environed businesses. Why Texan regulators think they need to get their greedy mitts around the neck of this wonderful emerging technology is beyond me, although I have plenty of suspicions and could develop some conspiracy theories...
"It is official; Slashdot confirms: Windows is dying"
One more crippling bombshell hit the already-beleagured Windows community when Microsoft-Watch.com confirmed that Windows mindshare has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1% of all lead developers..."
Why not? It's competition. If Alice offers Bob a better deal than Charlie, then why shouldn't Bob leave and take Alice's offer if Bob thinks it suits him better than his current job working for Charlie?
;-)
There's not even a shred of ethical dilemma here.
The simple economic fact is that Microsoft didn't compete hard enough to keep that developer, and now he's gone -- too bad, tough shit to MSFT, and now Google is one (presumably) very-competent architect richer, at the expense of probably six-figures a year in salary and benefits from Google. But Google believes he's worth it, so they're happy; Marc Lucovsky is happier at Google, else he wouldn't have jumped ship, and MSFT - well, who knows whether they care or not.
Perhaps MSFT cares - perhaps they valued Lucovsky enough to keep him at the conditions of his previous employ, but clearly they didn't value him enough to keep him at newer, higher conditions which in Lucovsky's mind beat the conditions of working at Google. And perhaps MSFT doesn't care at all; that they think they can get along just fine without him - we don't know, and probably won't know for a long time, if ever.
In the end, this is a nice example of labor economics benefiting the laborer (Lucovsky), by his playing a game of wage/benefits/happiness shopping, and "buying" the package Google offered while "selling" the package MSFT was providing. Again, there is not even a *shred* of ethical dilemma here...
If I can't convince you on the sheer fundamental economics of the situation (in which case, please try Econ101 sometime), can I at least get you on a "Microsoft is evil, so it's good that quality developers are jumping ship" argument?
What does Google stand to gain by writing their own OS? Or, more likely, if they are indeed creating a new OS, will it be built heavily off of Linux or BSD?
:-/
Given the low margins, intense competition, high barriers-to-entry (like MSFT's 95% desktop market share), high initial capital investment required (startup costs), and so on, I really don't see a market for a new OS at all. There's no way Google can market a proprietary OS to compete in the server space -- Linux, being free, is dominating there (alongside Win2k/2k3), and will for the foreseeable future. The desktop space is even bleaker, again, due to MSFT's controlling 95% of the market and the massive installed base of users, apps, etc. that goes along with such a large user base.
I truly don't understand the reasoning behind a supposed Google OS... They have made themselves a fantastic info warehouse/data-mining portal for the masses, making knowledge & info formerly only barely-available to wealthy customers available to everyone for nearly-free, leveraging the "market" of links available on trillions of webpages (among other factors in their algorithm, no doubt). But that's a set of services best provided to existing OS's over the Internet - not from a brand-new OS.
Now, if Google is going to make a modified GNU/Linux distribution... that could have some considerable potential, b/c much of the heavy-lifting has already been done and there's a large enough base of users they could cater to... But what would they offer over other Linux distros to make Google's distro stand out? A better file-searching tool, probably, but what else? A replacement for X11/XOrg? Perhaps not, as this is entering ito GUI coding, something they as a company don't do much of - or at least, the GUI stuff they do isn't made public (the desktop search and IE Google bar aside)...
So even on that idea, I'm having a hard time imagining what they have up their sleeve, and therefore, a hard time imagining why they'd bother in the first place.
Anybody remember the story of Around the World in 80 Days by Jules Verne (or the more-recent Jackie Chan movie adaptation)? Admittedly, I don't b/c I never read it or saw the movie, but I'm looking at this from a historical context...
:)
How long ago was it that getting around the world in 80 days was considered an incredible feat? 100 years ago? Given that people traveled by steamship, trains, and unreliable cars then (and only if one was rich, at that), roughly, yes.
And yet, here we are, with a person making a trip around the world not only in far less than 80 days, but in under 80 hours. In the time you spent doing a Stage 1 Gentoo install, Steve Fosset was able to fly around the entire planet.
Who, 100 years ago, would've likely believed it likely (possible, perhaps, but likely?)?
Admittedly, in replying to the post, that seemed like an awfully far-fetched use for a firearm. :)
But then, I can imagine plenty of rednecks (some related to me) who would probably do just that from their front porch... Heck, I'd probably do it, but not so casually (I'd get up off the porch) - they'd make good and plentiful targets in the woods of Missouri or Arkansas or Tennessee probably - not that there'd be much left of the nuts inside, but still...
Eh, I thought you were serious. My mistake...
Yes.
Unless you had another job waiting for you when you quit your previous company, you are a fool.
I did, and it's easy.
Warning Shots - warning that you're going to murder -- This is not murder. Illogical; slippery slope argument.
Target Practice - practicing murder -- This is not murder; paper and clay targets are not alive. Illogical; begging the question argument.
Long-Term Loans from Financial Institutions - threatening murder -- Threatening murder != murder.
Track & Field - competing at murdering skills -- This is not even *close* to murder (is there a trend here?). Gun fires a *blank*, not a bullet into the air.
Happiness (if warm) - warmth come from emptying the gun into your ex-wife -- Straw-man argument. Illogical.
Cracking Walnuts at 100 yards - murdering poor, innocent walnuts -- Walnuts do not live once they have fallen from the tree. This is more akin to "shooting a dead horse." Will have to try shooting walnuts at 100 yards sometime...
Network Administration (see LART, definition of) - they'll have a different attitude if you murder them -- Illogical. Again, straw-man argument. Funny.
You mean you can't think of any? Let's start:
1) Target-shooting. Many people do this recreationally, as it is a test of one's physical ability (to hold a gun steady) and mental ability (to factor in external elements, like the wind, if it's a distance shot).
2) Hunting. Unless you consider killing animals to be "murder", in which case, let me lump you in with the PETA crowd.
3) Art/aesthetics. Some people use guns as decoration on their walls; who are you to say they cannot?
4) Self-defense (and yes, goddamn you, self-defense is a morally-justifiable, fundamental human right). Note that fending off somebody who is threatening your life does not necessarily require pulling the trigger -- often, the mere *threat* of violence is enough to scare somebody away. Moreover, it is possible to shoot somebody without killing them (e.g., shoot them in the arm, foot, knee, etc.), should the situation come to that (although, most people, if they are concerned at all for their safety, legal liability, and so on, will simply shoot towards the torso or head, lest they miss a smaller target (like the knee) and suffer the violent, quite-possibly deadly consequences of missing their attacker). I don't consider self-defense to be "murder" (assuming the case of self-defense comes to killing somebody in the first place - which is usually *not* the case in reality), as you probably think of it, but it can be reasonably described as "murder in defense of the person of one or another."
Of course, this is Slashdot, where all guns are bad all of the time. The argument typically goes that either:
1) As if the gun has a mind of its own, it clearly wants to kill people, or
2) Gun owners want to kill people and/or are too irresponsible to own a gun
The first assertion is ridiculous and logically-retarded; yet many on the anti-gun side of the debate promote it. Color me not surprised. For such people, especially computer geeks, ask them if their PC has a mind of its own, or if it obeys solely the commands issued to it as a result of developer work and end-user use. The answer, obviously, is the latter -- the computer's functioning is entirely dependent on the people operating it, hence, it is neither "good" or "evil", and nor does it "think" for itself (although we can program it to be artificially-intelligent, such programming still requires the work of a human).
The first part of the second assertion is not always ridiculous, but typically is. Most gun owners are not out to kill other people; more than anything, they fear for their own safety, or enjoy hunting, or enjoy the competition of target shooting.
The second part of the second assertion is relatively reasonable. There are certainly people too irresponsible to own guns; the question is, who are those people, and who decides who those people are? You? Are you so arrogant as to believe you can decide who is competent to own a gun - even if you've never met that person?
IMO, we can safely remove violent convicts from the list of people we allow to purchase any more than a bolt-action rifle or manually-reloadable (non-pump, non-autoloader) shotgun, if we allow even those (after all, why should somebody with a history of violence be permitted the means to cause more violence?)... I have no problem with non-violent convicts additionally being able to own handguns; I'm not too worried about embezzlers or pot-smokers shooting at me on the street, unlike with violent criminals.
But to purchase automatic weapons and small explosives - which I do believe people should be allowed to do, as well as manufacture (outlawed by that "conservative" Ronald Reagan in 1986) - IMO such purchases ought to require that a person have no criminal record beyond those of moving violations in vehicles or of "soft" drug use (e.g. weed, but not coke or heroin), be certifiably-sane and mentally-stable, and ought to be required to take a competence test to prove their competence to use such weapons and their understanding of their uses.
We apparently have different opinions of "works well with firefox" then...
Here's my assessment:
* It takes forever to load a new instance of it (approx. 10 seconds on my P2.4GHz, 768MB Gentoo laptop). My Zaurus 6000L -- with its 400MHz Xscale CPU -- loads PDFs as fast as Acrobat does, even when Acrobat has been loaded once before (i.e., is sitting in RAM waiting for a PDF to display in Firefox)!!
* No mouse wheel scrolling
* Default save path =
* No way to fill out forms and then print them out (we must still print, then fill-in fields by hand, for chrissakes)
* Although I'm usually not a UI snob, the Reader UI uses fucking ATHENA widgets from way back when dinosaurs walked the Earth. Good Lord.
* Have you ever seen the CPU usage of Acrobat Reader? Holy shit. And the PDFs still don't scroll anywhere nearly as smoothly as on Windows or my Zaurus...
* It's still version 5.x, not 6.x as on Windows. Linux users are treated as the second-class citizens as they are (compared to Windows and OSX). I'm not asking for the whole Acrobat PDF-creation suite; that'd be nice, but I'm well-aware that the market isn't there. But I'm completely convinced that there is a market for an Acrobat Reader that is vastly-improved over the existing one.
Look, I'm just an end-user of PDFs. I very rarely create them; most of my involvement w/ PDFs is in reading them. I suspect it's often the same with the various other usually-technical people who run Linux.
But Adobe's Acrobat Reader for Linux sucks donkey balls, seriously, and yet, there are no better alternatives on Linux, nor are there any other PDF plugins for Firefox, AFAIK. Acrobat for Linux doesn't quite qualify as "garbage", but it's close.
Well, I'm not one of these people who compiles every line of source via the Stage 1 install. I do the Stage 3 install, which is a distro of lots of precompiled binaries. It's a full system ready to go.
I recompile apps as necessary afterwards. I do think spending days and days on end compiling Gentoo, as so many people do, is a waste of time. In terms of productivity there, I'm with you 100%...
Where we differ is in how we approach the system; I don't approach it from a standard Gentoo doofus' POV...
Nothing beats single-command installs of either a an app compiled from source or a pre-compiled binary package for efficiency in installing apps.
Windows has nothing on this - no central directory of the hundreds of thousands of various apps you can use: MS Office, Nero, Photoshop, all the games, your text/code editor, etc. etc. - from which you click a button and it installs...
In that way, the transaction cost of having to deal w/ paying somebody for software (and thus having to go to the store, or dl it off somebody's site after filling out registration, CC#, etc.) is a cost borne by users of proprietary, for-profit software, whereas free-beer software doesn't have this problem.
That's just app installation though. In day-to-day use, I find myself fighting fewer bugs in FreeBSD or Gentoo than I do on WinXP. Feature-wise, however, it depends on the use. If I want to do gaming, I'm far more productive on WinXP (b/c WINE just doesn't run most of the games I play, and the few it runs at all, it runs painfully). But for coding, for *basic* office work, for email, for websurfing, for file-transfers, for securely handling my documents, for serving anything at all, for scripting craploads of tasks I want done -- nothing beats a Linux/BSD box for me.
Then again, I don't own an OSX box. Maybe it's the best of all worlds? Maybe - but being locked in to proprietary hardware like Apple has doesn't make me any happier than being locked in to the proprietary software of Microsoft. Each company pursues both a proprietary and a relatively-open attitude, but from opposite directions...
If only Apple would bring OSX to a limited number of "Apple-approved" x86 machines (on AMD64, preferably). I'd be all over those boxes and laptops like white on rice; like sweet on honey; like cum on a pr0n star...
House-building: The wood and glass structure is the design!
Car building: Just slap it together - it's faster and cheaper than actually having an engineering diagram!
Financial planning: Forget about planning for retirement. Just save your money however seems to fit best! Your life's finances *is* the design!
Building a Wintel box: Don't research hardware incompatibilities beforehand - just put the parts together and see which ones work!
I've heard a quote that goes (paraphrased) "if you can't keep the design in your head, you're not qualified to be a developer." I think there's some truth to that.
But there is still a design involved in that theory, and I've worked on a couple projects in which a written, documented design, although probably not necessary (they were relatively-simple (about 5,000-6,000 LoC) projects), still proved to be useful occasionally. Mostly they were there to please management, but nonetheless, they weren't worthless.
Were they worth the time I spent creating the designs? Hard to say...
In general though, I think design documents are useful, if for no other reason than to be able to more-clearly explain what it is you're doing to people who wouldn't otherwise have a clue (read: management, your family, etc.)...
"Linux is only free if your time isn't worth anything." -- somebody brilliant
...before the FBI or Secret Service shut down the project.
That, or one of the various companies who depend on magstripe cards, such as the makers of Blackboard university groupware software (which ties in w/ uni students' ID cards), with whom Acidus has already dealt once...
Wow. I don't own a WRT54G, so I'm not involved in that circle of users/devs, but after reading about some of the things James has done, man, he's total asshole. I would NEVER buy his firmware.
Banning people from the forums who've paid $20 and happen to be using the same nick on another forum? Sending people nastygrams for discussing the source? Fuck James.
I've never heard of a purportedly "open-source" developer acting like such a dickweed before...
Read the first paragraph of TFA:
Actually, this isn't socialism so much as fascism -- the cooperation of government and business, rather than the separation of the two, as occurs under capitalism and socialism (socialism, however, does it by eliminating all capitalist traces to begin with; capitalism, allows for minimal government intervention where necessary, i.e., for security and legal purposes).
But this process does give rise to socialism in the end. Look at what's happening:
1) Company A invests time/money into R&D for a drug
2) Company A develops new Drug A to treat disease X
3) Government says "give me all of j00r juarez!!" and steals Drug A from Company A
4) Company B says "we didn't do the R&D, so we can make Drug A at a lower price than Company A!"
5) Government says "Company B, you agree to make Drug A at a lower price! Here is Company A's patent!"
6) Company B now makes Drug A which was R&D'd by Company A
7) Company A, which no longer can compete on the value of its own R&D (because it is being stolen and redistributed by the government) stops doing R&D
8) Government says "waah, Company A, you're not doing R&D!! Why?"
9) Company A says "because you steal it, you fucking pig-headed retard. FOAD."
10) Company A goes moves to doing the same thing Company B does -- making drugs that Companies C, D, and E do the R&D for -- until those companies wise up and stop doing R&D
11) Eventually, no more companies are doing R&D for drugs. American consumers whine "waaah, we want new drugs!" Companies say "the U.S. government has been stealing from us for years, so you get no new drugs"
12) Government says "we're just looking out for the 'public interest'!" Americans buy this line, and call for the government to do drug R&D, because the companies no longer are willing to do so
13) Government tasks the FDA to also develop drugs. If the President is a Democrat, taxes are raised to pay for the R&D. If the President is a Republican, taxes are not raised to pay for R&D, but instead, we deficit-spend to pay for it, which is to say, we wind up paying for that cost later, probably under a Democratic Presidency...
And hence, the market does NOT improve its competitive stance by government pillage of patents, because the market for R&D is destroyed by such pillage. Nor does drug development improve in quality or speed.
And hence, as in the progression above, we see a clear increase in socialism, eventually (in the form of higher taxes, in step 13), through fascism (steps 3 through 6).
Shh, you'll ruin his socialist ideals! And that would be bad for his self-esteem and make him sad... and we can't have *that*...
BRING ON THE LADIES! I won't dissuade you from joining this lively and exciting profession!
OK, I admit, I really need a date... (I'm posting this at 10:15PM on a Saturday night for crying out loud!)
In a way, for once, I actually agree with you. And Constitutionally-speaking, there's nothing preventing it, because of the 9th Amendment reserving those things not specifically outlined in the Constitution to be state-level matters, not federal-level matters.
Let some states go socialist if they so choose; let other states choose not to. Those which work the best will win the public's preference in the end, and people will move to/from those states as they choose. I will happily prefer the capitalist states of New Hampshire or Florida.
But you might not choose to -- hence, you could live in a less-capitalist area of the U.S., such as California or New York or the Chicago area of Illinois. The key is that we are free to choose which sort of society we live in -- rather than having it forced down upon us at the federal level.
Really, I think that's what the Founding Fathers intended for America -- for us to have a choice, given the various states they knew would be created, as to what sorts of politics and economies we want to live by, hence our system of federalism and again, the 9th Amendment along with the rest of the Constitution...
Of course, I say all this as a libertarian/ardent opponent of socialism. But at the state/local level, if we're free to leave what I would call a "socialist hell-hole" for other, less-socialist areas, that would make me quite happy, and would make many other people quite happy too, I suspect.
Funny that at a time when the rest of the world is actively privatizing various parts of their formerly-public economy in recognition of the fall of "communism" (actually socialism in practice, but communism in ideal) -- such as in Britain, where various automakers, such as Jaguar, were state-owned -- here in the U.S., we would consider stealing private property from people and redistributing the benefits of that property to all, i.e., we would move in the *reverse* direction from the rest of the world.
But then, we do that with religion too (in an attempt to promote "faith-based initiatives" and such). Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised.
Eminent Domain is the worst legal doctrine in the world, and it is routinely used by small cities to bulldoze private property for the benefit of large corporations for the sales tax revenue the city gains from doing so. Wal-Mart is a classic example of this.
And now the socialist hippies of America want to use Eminent Domain to steal patents from drug makers? Who the hell is going to develop new drugs then?
Some people seriously need to go fucking read Atlas Shrugged. Then take at least 2 courses in economics, and then read some about economic history, because nobody who understands economics, even economists on the left, promote such idiotic ideas.
Solidarity comrade, solidarity.
Wintendo!