Go here to listen to the man talk. He gave an amazing convention speech, but ONLY CSPAN covered it because all the other stations are rooting for either Dumb or Dumber. It's awful hard sometimes to find information about Nader in the media other than Democrat stations saying what a bad man he is for running against their candidate and possibly splitting the vote in spite of 25% of Nader's vote coming from registered Republicans, only 38% from Democrats, and the rest wouldn't vote otherwise (according to exit polls).
Hehe, I did the same major change, except I made the mistake of thinking I was some sort of verbal poet or journalist. I guess it's further proof that you don't need a CS degree to program professionally, just a good CS teacher.
Future: Information Security in Disinformation Age
on
Ask Neal Stephenson
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
From the beginning of the Internet, information has gone from being open to proprietary to closed. The DMCA has made more information illegal due to locking it and making keys illegal instead of establishing the trade secret status or copyright of the information inside. As predicted by many SF writers, people have begun to trust computers to keep real secrets. Hackers, once lauded for their abilities, are now feared for them. Diebold, for example, got embarrassed badly by having their secrets uncovered. How do you believe governments will deal with unpredictable hackers who suddenly have such powers?
Re:anti-immigration sentiment
on
The Jobs Crunch
·
· Score: 1
Don't forget that consumers in America aren't necessarily helping the economy. Just because immigrants are consumers doesn't change the fact that the federal trade deficit is at an all-time high and most of the low cost items they buy don't give back to American workers in terms of raises. Ultimately, any job can be sent overseas until our lives get cheaper and our world leadership destroyed. Do we really want our houses and jobs to be pushed aside like a sand castle against the waves?
The real problem is corporations that refuse to respect America and outsource the skilled jobs that are the core of our economy now that manufacturing is pretty much gone already. Corporations need to be controlled by the folks who really own them, not their management, nor even the stockholders they habitually lie to every quarter, but the workers and pensionholders with their 401Ks who own American industry. The same workers who have no say in it whatsoever because their brokerages vote against America every time. They will make a numbers case against American workers, but ultimately, they're taxing our economy. We can't live on Walmart retail alone.
There is no economic sense in the bottom line, only greed that leads to more greed. This greed destroys economies. Corporations don't consider, as Henry Ford once did, that employees need to make enough to buy a Ford in order to sell them. First it's moving jobs to India, then it's moving Indian jobs to Central Africa. What next? Will you continue to live in a sand castle?
The greatest issue to me this campaign is probably the most oft-ignored one. Only three democracies in the world don't have runoff elections. This has limited the political debate to what only two elites want us to hear. Third party voices have been willfully silenced. Many feel their voices on critical issues extinguished. Minnesota, however, has the highest voter turnout due to its election reform. If elected, what would you do to promote open and fair elections and debates in America?
There is no greater waste of a vote than to vote for a candidate who wants to destroy your right to vote-- That candidate is John Kerry.
Read Kerry's site and look for the portion on election reform where he tells America how he will push for instant runoff voting, public funding of elections, open debates, campaign finance reform. There is none. Kerry and Edwards are U.S. senators! If they wanted Nader not to be a spoiler, they could sponsor bills for any number of reforms, but they DON'T WANT THIRD PARTIES to compete. If they wanted to reform campaign finance, they could at least use their positions to try.
This election, sworn statements were given in court by the Maine Democratic chairwoman and others saying that their national party PAID both volunteers and lawyers for the official duty of removing Ralph Nader from the state ballots. She admitted in court that volunteers called Nader petition signatories and begged them to remove their names during the grace period on signatures asking them if they were certain they wanted to do so and hurt Kerry.
Dang, I didn't want to respond to myself, but had to add a critical corollary question that matters a lot to me, since I see another political party I supported rotting away from its own apathy. If the Democratic candidate and party you endorse fundamentally opposes all forms of electoral reform (proportional representation, instant runoff voting, debate reform, public funding, etc.) that could allow third parties to compete fairly, then how do you ever intend to grow as a party and matter to America?
I supported and sat on a local committee of the Florida Green Party and voted for Ralph Nader in the 2000 elections. As a former Democrat who supported Paul Wellstone in Minnesota, my biggest surprise ever in American democracy is that there is no greater enemy to the First Amendment rights to ballot and debate access today than the Democratic party (who refuses to even acknowledge sworn testimony in court on the part of their campaign chairs that the national party paid volunteers to attack third party ballot access rights) and their supporters including the ACLU (who defends the neo-Nazis' right to speech, but refused to defend the ballot access rights of Nader in Florida or the Independence Party in Minnesota). This is the same ACLU that fought for the rights to trade Nader's votes away to safe states in the 2000 election. Somehow, these organizations can fool America into believing that they care about civil liberties with their words while removing them with their hands.
Without its fundamental rights to ballot and debate access, how can a major third party reach mainstream America with the only fundamentally different political messages about corporate misuse of power, media ownership, and issues that actually matter?
Also, why did you choose to run against Ralph Nader instead of endorsing him as a party with views so similar? Where do you two differ?
SearchEnterpriseLinux
on
Linux Clustering
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I noticed that this article by the PenguinComputing CTO appears to answer the article by the Cray CTO and contradicts it. All I want to know is this: how much did PenguinComputing and Cray spend on advertising banners on SearchEnterpriseLinux to have these articles made? Let's let vapor settle before it gets to our heads.
Given the Libertarian Party's reliance upon the free market and free trade system in many situations to solve America's and the world's problems, do you believe that free markets and free trade have any negative socioeconomic effects? What do you propose that America should do to save our jobs from offshoring and keep our wages high enough to afford our cost of living?
Secondly, what about Third World countries who may make up to 20% of their budget from tariffs and foreign aid? Can you build new, profitable markets where you can't afford to build roads?
Whee! Could we mod this funniest flame war? I want to watch the flames burn some more. Haha, funny slashbots.
And remember folks, the easiest way to win the Turing test is to pick dumber test subjects.
William Shatner never really could act and he couldn't write a book either, but had to put his name on the author line of a famous freelancer's science fiction books. The real proof is in a little known movie called "Incubus" which was shot in complete earnest in the 60s in the rare language Esperanto (once supposed to be the international language) on black and white. Where would they use this language? In Hollywood, believe it or not. If it wasn't shot in Esperanto with English subtitles, we might just have to know fully how bad the young Shatner's acting actually was.
I wouldn't get your hopes up. The National Association of Broadcasters told NPR to fight the lower power FM proposal with them. They really crippled it and dang near killed it in Congress. They aren't likely to go softly into the night on this, even if the FCC likes it. They'll claim interference again, not like they'll ever whine the same way about Broadband over Power Lines causing it.
Sorry, but if you think this is a troll, you're burying your head in the sand. It's an immature response to an honest critique. I'm obviously not talking about everyone on Slashdot, but certainly a moderator knows where there's a shred of truth.
This is a cross-post from Groklaw because I felt it was more important here. I wouldn't be surprised if astroturfing succeeds to some extent at Slashdot. You have to understand the difference in audiences. There's actually one thing Enderle is right about-- Slashboys. I'm a frequent Slashdot user and I'm sad to report that you reguarly get stupid comments on stories which suggest:
1. Many slashboys believe charging money for things is evil. I used to be a Linux trainer as my only job during college and the local LUG had too many misguided folks who refused to pay one cent for training by principle. That's one reason I'm not a Linux trainer anymore.
2. Slashboys don't often RTFA (read the frickin' articles). They assume to know things they simply can't or trust the author of the original post too much. They think that comments were designed for preaching to the choir and act accordingly.
3. Slashboys seem to think Beowulf clusters are clearly superior to custom hardware supercomputers, which to them are analogous to buggy whips. I'm now in the supercomputer industry and the opposite is true if anything. Modern clusters, especially those using open standard networking, suck for bandwidth. These Slashboys refuse to listen to reason when even their own leaders whack them with it, however. More hardware technology is needed in the marketplace, not less.
4. Slashboys think there's a technological solution to everything. If Bill Gates ever did wield a clue stick, it was to say the obvious at a Digital Divide conference and point out that you can't enjoy being digitally connected without food, water, shelter, and power. Without that, a network connection is just a toy for the baby to chew on while dreaming of milk.
5. Slashboys are often language lawyers who will fall for cheap tricks to make them look petty and who will support your straw men in a debate, rationalizing their argument only with "X said something like this once." X being Stallman, Torvalds, Perens, or PJ. They also take overly emphatic views about Your Rights Online articles. This is why trolling there is so much fun.
6. A sad number of Slashboys live in a bubble where idiotic political ideas like libertarianism, anarchy, or communism make sense. This is often because they're young, idealistic, and/or spend too much time in front of the computer to understand what they support. Quite often, Slashboys won't even know which candidates back them on technology or critical issues except for senators in other states.
7. Some Slashboys behave like every opinion of theirs is constantly justifying their purchase of a product or use of a technology. It's just like an Apple owner who went through childhood ignoring how their computer had terrible separation anxiety with floppy disks, didn't frequently blue screen because it was a white screen instead, and didn't complain about the tedious networking because they never tried to do it.
8. A number of Slashboys treat Slashdot as their main source of news. I admit I'm guilty here because I first learned of 9/11 while at college by reading Slashdot that day. However, Slashdot only has one beat and often only one angle. One should diversify their news sources from non-TV network sources and the like to avoid being culturally ignorant.
I'm not an astroturfer and frankly, I'd like to change these things. I noticed from Bruce Perens' sig line that he's practically given up on Slashdot lately. I'd prefer to see that Slashdot folks learn to recognize these faults and try to represent themselves better in public and the first step is education.
It's the mass media that hides stories so blatantly.
Even Slashdot is incapable of demolishing the most creative inventions of the mass media. Watch "Outfoxed" (outfoxed.org) if you don't believe me. Imagine all those FOX News viewers hearing these deliberate falsities repeated everywhere and having their world picture altered to include all of it. Or to include SCO's latest fabrications? What room does this leave blogs and the alternative media to reveal to the mainstream that Kerry really isn't that French and that the Bush administration really wanted invade Iraq long before 9/11?
Free market success might actually have lead to DARPA not funding any research in this thing called the Internet in the 60s or to more libertarians tooting their own revisionist history horns. Then again, the free market can do anything you say it did after the fact. That's why it's so free.
Umm, thanks. I knew that. It was 8AM in the morning and I impulsively hit Submit because it sounded right.
As for the issue, I think scientists are concerned about it because large computers have taken more and not less of a role in several critical fields. Just how much of astronomy is done with a slide rule and telescope anymore? What percentage of NSF and DOE money goes to computers for research?
On top of that, a year or two ago Japan beat America by 40x average on real problems (not Linpack numbers) with a traditional supercomputer based upon NEC vector processors called the Earth Simulator. It's still at the top. The concern is that our scientists will go to Japan instead, so national labs have been opening up new public supercomputer resources for scientific research that are superior to many university labs. The debate here is more how should we spend our science money than should we subsidize another industry.
Commodity clusters are cheap partly because the margins to compete are too low to allow for much risk-taking in design. Cray appears to be hurting because they devoted all their resources to a new processor that required huge investments in design without offering a cheaper product as well.
Slashdot Mirror
Hehe, I did the same major change, except I made the mistake of thinking I was some sort of verbal poet or journalist. I guess it's further proof that you don't need a CS degree to program professionally, just a good CS teacher.
From the beginning of the Internet, information has gone from being open to proprietary to closed. The DMCA has made more information illegal due to locking it and making keys illegal instead of establishing the trade secret status or copyright of the information inside. As predicted by many SF writers, people have begun to trust computers to keep real secrets. Hackers, once lauded for their abilities, are now feared for them. Diebold, for example, got embarrassed badly by having their secrets uncovered. How do you believe governments will deal with unpredictable hackers who suddenly have such powers?
(Score:-1 Math-impaired)
The real problem is corporations that refuse to respect America and outsource the skilled jobs that are the core of our economy now that manufacturing is pretty much gone already. Corporations need to be controlled by the folks who really own them, not their management, nor even the stockholders they habitually lie to every quarter, but the workers and pensionholders with their 401Ks who own American industry. The same workers who have no say in it whatsoever because their brokerages vote against America every time. They will make a numbers case against American workers, but ultimately, they're taxing our economy. We can't live on Walmart retail alone.
There is no economic sense in the bottom line, only greed that leads to more greed. This greed destroys economies. Corporations don't consider, as Henry Ford once did, that employees need to make enough to buy a Ford in order to sell them. First it's moving jobs to India, then it's moving Indian jobs to Central Africa. What next? Will you continue to live in a sand castle?
The greatest issue to me this campaign is probably the most oft-ignored one. Only three democracies in the world don't have runoff elections. This has limited the political debate to what only two elites want us to hear. Third party voices have been willfully silenced. Many feel their voices on critical issues extinguished. Minnesota, however, has the highest voter turnout due to its election reform. If elected, what would you do to promote open and fair elections and debates in America?
Read Kerry's site and look for the portion on election reform where he tells America how he will push for instant runoff voting, public funding of elections, open debates, campaign finance reform. There is none. Kerry and Edwards are U.S. senators! If they wanted Nader not to be a spoiler, they could sponsor bills for any number of reforms, but they DON'T WANT THIRD PARTIES to compete. If they wanted to reform campaign finance, they could at least use their positions to try.
This election, sworn statements were given in court by the Maine Democratic chairwoman and others saying that their national party PAID both volunteers and lawyers for the official duty of removing Ralph Nader from the state ballots. She admitted in court that volunteers called Nader petition signatories and begged them to remove their names during the grace period on signatures asking them if they were certain they wanted to do so and hurt Kerry.
Dang, I didn't want to respond to myself, but had to add a critical corollary question that matters a lot to me, since I see another political party I supported rotting away from its own apathy. If the Democratic candidate and party you endorse fundamentally opposes all forms of electoral reform (proportional representation, instant runoff voting, debate reform, public funding, etc.) that could allow third parties to compete fairly, then how do you ever intend to grow as a party and matter to America?
Without its fundamental rights to ballot and debate access, how can a major third party reach mainstream America with the only fundamentally different political messages about corporate misuse of power, media ownership, and issues that actually matter?
Also, why did you choose to run against Ralph Nader instead of endorsing him as a party with views so similar? Where do you two differ?
I noticed that this article by the PenguinComputing CTO appears to answer the article by the Cray CTO and contradicts it. All I want to know is this: how much did PenguinComputing and Cray spend on advertising banners on SearchEnterpriseLinux to have these articles made? Let's let vapor settle before it gets to our heads.
What a silly question! Similarly, I might ask why Rationalists are completely and utterly irrational.
Secondly, what about Third World countries who may make up to 20% of their budget from tariffs and foreign aid? Can you build new, profitable markets where you can't afford to build roads?
Whee! Could we mod this funniest flame war? I want to watch the flames burn some more. Haha, funny slashbots. And remember folks, the easiest way to win the Turing test is to pick dumber test subjects.
William Shatner never really could act and he couldn't write a book either, but had to put his name on the author line of a famous freelancer's science fiction books. The real proof is in a little known movie called "Incubus" which was shot in complete earnest in the 60s in the rare language Esperanto (once supposed to be the international language) on black and white. Where would they use this language? In Hollywood, believe it or not. If it wasn't shot in Esperanto with English subtitles, we might just have to know fully how bad the young Shatner's acting actually was.
I wouldn't get your hopes up. The National Association of Broadcasters told NPR to fight the lower power FM proposal with them. They really crippled it and dang near killed it in Congress. They aren't likely to go softly into the night on this, even if the FCC likes it. They'll claim interference again, not like they'll ever whine the same way about Broadband over Power Lines causing it.
Frankly, the signal-to-noise ratio here sucks.
1. Many slashboys believe charging money for things is evil. I used to be a Linux trainer as my only job during college and the local LUG had too many misguided folks who refused to pay one cent for training by principle. That's one reason I'm not a Linux trainer anymore.
2. Slashboys don't often RTFA (read the frickin' articles). They assume to know things they simply can't or trust the author of the original post too much. They think that comments were designed for preaching to the choir and act accordingly.
3. Slashboys seem to think Beowulf clusters are clearly superior to custom hardware supercomputers, which to them are analogous to buggy whips. I'm now in the supercomputer industry and the opposite is true if anything. Modern clusters, especially those using open standard networking, suck for bandwidth. These Slashboys refuse to listen to reason when even their own leaders whack them with it, however. More hardware technology is needed in the marketplace, not less.
4. Slashboys think there's a technological solution to everything. If Bill Gates ever did wield a clue stick, it was to say the obvious at a Digital Divide conference and point out that you can't enjoy being digitally connected without food, water, shelter, and power. Without that, a network connection is just a toy for the baby to chew on while dreaming of milk.
5. Slashboys are often language lawyers who will fall for cheap tricks to make them look petty and who will support your straw men in a debate, rationalizing their argument only with "X said something like this once." X being Stallman, Torvalds, Perens, or PJ. They also take overly emphatic views about Your Rights Online articles. This is why trolling there is so much fun.
6. A sad number of Slashboys live in a bubble where idiotic political ideas like libertarianism, anarchy, or communism make sense. This is often because they're young, idealistic, and/or spend too much time in front of the computer to understand what they support. Quite often, Slashboys won't even know which candidates back them on technology or critical issues except for senators in other states.
7. Some Slashboys behave like every opinion of theirs is constantly justifying their purchase of a product or use of a technology. It's just like an Apple owner who went through childhood ignoring how their computer had terrible separation anxiety with floppy disks, didn't frequently blue screen because it was a white screen instead, and didn't complain about the tedious networking because they never tried to do it.
8. A number of Slashboys treat Slashdot as their main source of news. I admit I'm guilty here because I first learned of 9/11 while at college by reading Slashdot that day. However, Slashdot only has one beat and often only one angle. One should diversify their news sources from non-TV network sources and the like to avoid being culturally ignorant.
I'm not an astroturfer and frankly, I'd like to change these things. I noticed from Bruce Perens' sig line that he's practically given up on Slashdot lately. I'd prefer to see that Slashdot folks learn to recognize these faults and try to represent themselves better in public and the first step is education.
Even Slashdot is incapable of demolishing the most creative inventions of the mass media. Watch "Outfoxed" (outfoxed.org) if you don't believe me. Imagine all those FOX News viewers hearing these deliberate falsities repeated everywhere and having their world picture altered to include all of it. Or to include SCO's latest fabrications? What room does this leave blogs and the alternative media to reveal to the mainstream that Kerry really isn't that French and that the Bush administration really wanted invade Iraq long before 9/11?
I wrote a decent essay on this topic four years ago.
Free market success might actually have lead to DARPA not funding any research in this thing called the Internet in the 60s or to more libertarians tooting their own revisionist history horns. Then again, the free market can do anything you say it did after the fact. That's why it's so free.
Umm, thanks. I knew that. It was 8AM in the morning and I impulsively hit Submit because it sounded right. As for the issue, I think scientists are concerned about it because large computers have taken more and not less of a role in several critical fields. Just how much of astronomy is done with a slide rule and telescope anymore? What percentage of NSF and DOE money goes to computers for research? On top of that, a year or two ago Japan beat America by 40x average on real problems (not Linpack numbers) with a traditional supercomputer based upon NEC vector processors called the Earth Simulator. It's still at the top. The concern is that our scientists will go to Japan instead, so national labs have been opening up new public supercomputer resources for scientific research that are superior to many university labs. The debate here is more how should we spend our science money than should we subsidize another industry. Commodity clusters are cheap partly because the margins to compete are too low to allow for much risk-taking in design. Cray appears to be hurting because they devoted all their resources to a new processor that required huge investments in design without offering a cheaper product as well.