What's extraordinarily wise about it? The Patriot Act flagrantly violates the Constitution. Mr Marreo may or may not be wise, but to make this decision, he just needed to be able to read and reason at a grade-school level.
You could, I suppose, point to other laws which violate the constitution, for example the war-on-drugs laws which violate the prohibition on unreasonable search and seizure. But I would rather describe the judges who failed to strike down those as unwise, than accept that folly is the norm among our judiciary.
Unless you do live in SE Asia, then IPv6 isn't really necessary.
Everywhere in the world, except the USA, has run out of IP addresses
With my cable ISP (in Switzerland) a standard package costs more than twice as much with a static IP address as without one. If it weren't for companies like DynDns.org, I wouldn't be able to host web sites at all.
(Not a plug for Dyndns, there are others equally good that do the same thing, I just happen to use them).
This post is either ignorant or sarcastic. I'm not sure which. It costs about $500 million to launch a Shuttle. For that cost you could afford to purchase a 747, fly one mission a year down to Antarctica
How many runways are there in Antarctica capable of taking 747s?
If you are in charge of a multi-million dollar super computer, I would hope that you wouldn't say, "Well, I can get better performance out of this commerical compiler, but I disagree with commercial software, so I'll use open source"
A multi-million dollar supercomputer will not use 32-bit Intel processors, so you can't choose the Intel compiler anyway.
For some other architecture, it's much less likely that a proprietary compiler will do better than the Gnu compilers. Most compilers have bugs. The Gnu compilers are well tested, as a result of their wide use over many years.
With XP I only reboot once every 2 weeks to once a month. In my personal experience XP is a much more stable environment.
Windows users obviously have a different expectation of "stable" from Linux users. In my office we have just 2 Linux machines but both are heavily used, one for C++ development.
I just ran "uptime" on them. One has been up for 99 days (I remember shutting it down to install a DVD-rom drive about that long ago) and the other has been up for 127 days. Of course I keep them both up-to-date with security patches, but since they're both Debian, that's just a matter of typing apt-get update / apt-get upgrade occasionally. No reboot needed.
It's that there are too few IT jobs compared with the number of well-qualified people, especially in software development, but in some other areas as well.
Demand for people in any field will vary as the US and world economies change. That's inevitable.
But demand (=jobs) is not the whole story. US universities are still producing IT graduates, most of whom will never find a job at a salary that will justify the tuition costs. That is not inevitable. That situation could be fixed by better informing high-school graduates about the employment market. Kids are going into CS courses with the expectation that this is a route to a well-paid future, when in fact it's an expensive trip to nowhere.
How do you feel about what the Democrats are doing to Ralph Nader, preventing free choice by blocking him from the ballot
I suspect you're a troll, but since you're modded up to 4, I'll reply anyway.
The November 2004 Presidential election will decide whether Bush or Kerry will be president. I don't like that choice, but it's a fact that that's the choice.
A third candidate who's seen as right-of-center will take votes away from Bush, and therefore help Kerry. Just as Ross Perot decided the 1992 election by taking votes away from Bush Sr.
And a third candidate who's seen as left-of-center will take votes away from Kerry, which (since the election is close) will cause Bush to be elected.
Since the likely result of his participation is to ensure the election of George W. Bush, I cannot understand why anybody other than a Bush supporter wants Nader to take part in this election. It's got nothing to do with freedom of choice. Even if he's on the ballot, you can't choose Nader as your President; you can vote for him, but the result is equivalent to not voting at all.
As for Nader's motivation in helping Dubya to win by running, it simply shows once again that nobody should expect a pol to believe what he says. Nader has made a career out of causes like the environment, but he clearly doesn't give a shit for them per se - it's just a career move.
without any performance hit. That would allow any program written for Windows to run on Linux or Mac, and vice-versa,... What do you think, vaporware or miracle?
This is vaporware. What they're claiming - "without any performance hit" - is impossible. Accomplishing the rest of what they claim is not impossible, but it's very difficult, and since the "without any performance hit" claim establishes conclusively that these people are bullshitters, I don't believe they can even come close to doing it.
a 1 kiloton or less ground detonation would not be detectable by our current 'public' seismometers. In addition, this would be a realistic and practical test for North Korea. It would use very little weapons material,
In practical terms it's impossible to build a nuclear bomb that yields less than about 5 kilotons. The reason is that you need a critical mass of fissile material for an explosion to occur at all. The critical mass of U235 corresponds to a yield of over 100 kilotons; fission bombs usually yield less because only a small fraction of the uranium in a bomb actually fissions when it goes off. (The Hiroshima bomb had a yield of about 20 kilotons.) You can get a smaller yield by building a less efficient bomb, but the main factors determining the efficiency are the neutron/uranium reaction cross-section and the branching ratios, which are physical constants. You can't get a smaller yield by using less uranium.
The important thing is to educate the politicians.
That comment reveals a major misconception. You assume that if the pols knew what was best for the country, they'd do it.
It's very difficult to get elected to Congress. The rewards for getting elected are huge, so there's a lot of competition (at the stage where it matters - getting nominated by the incumbent party). You have to be very smart to succeed.
You may be thinking, "But pols are always saying stupid things, so how can they be smart?" Understand the answer to that question, and you will understand a lot about modern politics.
What a politician says has nothing to do with what he/she believes. A politician says whatever is most likely to result in re-election.
Educating pols is pointless. They're smarter than you, and better informed. Your only chance is to persuade voters to vote for better pols. That's extremely difficult, because corporate dollars are always against you. But it's always harder to do something effective than to do something pointless.
complaining that its none of Paypal's business to enforce their morals on the user. Anyone who has said something like that is a mindless slashdot troll who doesn't know anything about 3rd party processing or merchant accounts. Most merchant account providers have banned adult sites and gambling for years because they are High Risk Industries.
I live in a European country where prostitution and brothels are legal. The brothels here have no problem with credit cards. The "real thing" is obviously not a high-risk industry. Why should the pale substitute of porn be high-risk?
I've worked mainly in big international banks. Of the 5 I last worked at, J. P. Morgan uses Sybase, and so does the investment-banking arm of UBS (formerly UBS Warburg). These are two of the largest banks in the world (UBS was world #3 in the latest rankings I've seen - April 2003 - and J.P Morgan Chase was world #8 and the biggest American bank). They both employ thousands of software developers who need database skills.
Let's keep a sense of proportion here. There are other sources of satellite photographs than the US - you can buy photographs taken from satellites launched by Ariane, for example. If the US government prevents US companies from supplying you with photos, Europe, China and Russia all have the capability to fill the gap. With the disappearance of a subsidized competitor, no doubt they will expand their offerings. There's a link to some sources here (Google cache).
Could Microsoft be considering an Open Source license for Sender ID?
I can't tell you what the worker bees at Microsoft are considering, but I can tell you what the movers and shakers at the top are considering. They're considering what course of action will do the most harm to the Free Software community in general, and people's perception of the GPL in particular. When they think they've figured out what that course of action is, they'll tell the troops to do it.
Employee: Dear Redhat, your latest package broke our applications. Please fix it.
Redhat: Um, ok, we're looking into it.
(...)
Employee: Um, look harder please, remember we're paying you all this money for Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Redhat: Ah, ok, I think we've found the problem. We'll try out a bug fix and get back to you.
Either you live in some alternate universe in which vendors work on bugs for individual users, or you've been smoking some exceptionally strong weed. Or, possibly, you don't have a clue.
but how do you come up with the "in excess of 40 times the median salary" figure as the "triggering point" of "theft" by a C.E.O.?
Somebody did a historical study showing that that was roughly the ratio in the age of the "robber barons" - Carnegie et al. Sorry I haven't a URL.
Is "40x the median salary" the "magic number"? Who knows..
Of course it's arbitrary, but that doesn't make it bad. There are lots of arbitrary numbers in our laws. The age of consent in the statutory rape law, for example. At what age can a girl give meaningful consent? In reality it depends on the girl, but an arbitrary law is better than no law. Note also that my proposal was that >40x median salary is prima facie evidence of theft. That means it can be rebutted by other evidence. Exactly what could be used to rebut it I left open; perhaps people might think it reasonable that a CEO should get more money if he/she turned a failing business into a successful one, increased employment and salaries and profits, something like that. But we've all seen lots of cases where a CEO has failed by every possible measure of performance, and still pocketed millions.
And that's valuable work but editors, editorial assistants, copy editors, graphic designers, etc all work for pay
This, however, doesn't add so much value. You could almost automate the selection function of editors - let the reviewers give articles a score, a bit like Slashdot. Copy editors for academic journals do nothing - authors do the proofreading.
Moreover, archiving and preserving electronic access essentially forever will cost someone some money.
I think the money it costs is negligible. Who paid for the whole of Usenet to be archived? It's mostly worthless, but there seemed to be no difficulty in funding it. There are web site hosting companies nowadays who will give you your first year's hosting for free. Yahoo and Hotmail give anybody gigabytes of storage for $0.00. I think archiving and preserving electronic access for scientific papers essentially forever will cost, practically, nothing.
Get over your zero-sum marxist mind set. The more people working, the more wealth is created.
You are correct to remind us that capitalism is not a zero-sum game; wealth is created. It is unevenly distributed, but still, most people have gained in the past. If your boss increases his own income by $100k and increases yours by $5k, well, the bottom line for you is a gain of $5k.
Now, that is changing. Today's CEO is greedier than Carnegie or Rockefeller or J. P. Morgan were. To increase his personal income by $1M, today's CEO will destroy the careers of dozens of engineers. They are not being replaced by automation, which increases the productivity of other American workers. They are being replaced by Indians and Chinese. To economists, it's a gain if one man gains $1M while 10 others lose $80K each. In the real world, it's a disaster for our society.
One possible way to attack the problem, without unduly restricting the economic freedom which helps the whole world to progress, would be to recognize what these CEO's are doing. They determine their own salaries, in reality. A CEO who takes home more than 40 times the median salary of employees in his company is basically a thief. "Compensation" in excess of 40 times the median salary in the same company should be regarded as prima facie evidence of theft.
The big fallacy in all the economists' arguments for offshoring is right here: "US GDP increases, so that must be good for the US."
But what's really happening is this: incomes of a few CEOs go up from (say) $1M to $2M, while incomes of 10 times as many engineers go down from (say) $100k to $20k. That's a gain in money terms, but it's very bad for 90% of the people affected. So, it's bad for the USA.
(1) A disk whose decoder disrupted your device's firmware; this may be related to your DVD's region setting, especially if it was set to "zone-free".
Where I live (Switzerland), practically all DVD players sold are "zone-free". I assume this is true in most of Europe (though I haven't checked outside Switzerland - maybe someone elsewhere can comment). Obnoxious though DVD publishers are, I doubt whether one of them would be such an idiot as to do something that would piss off the ~350 million consumers in Europe.
Finally, as developers of open source e-mail technologies, we are
concerned that no company should be permitted IP rights over core Internet
infrastructure. We believe the IETF needs to revamp its IPR policies to
ensure that the core Internet infrastructure remain unencumbered.
Amen to that. But why did the IETF open the door to patent-encumbered, proprietary material in Internet standards in the first place? Sounds to me as though the current IETF needs to be largely replaced.
Slashdot Mirror
What's extraordinarily wise about it? The Patriot Act flagrantly violates the Constitution. Mr Marreo may or may not be wise, but to make this decision, he just needed to be able to read and reason at a grade-school level.
You could, I suppose, point to other laws which violate the constitution, for example the war-on-drugs laws which violate the prohibition on unreasonable search and seizure. But I would rather describe the judges who failed to strike down those as unwise, than accept that folly is the norm among our judiciary.
The processor is not the problem. Linux runs on many kinds of processor. The devices are the problem. Are there drivers for all the devices?
It's clear that the machine is a hostile environment for Linux - there are only 2 mouse buttons. Made for MSFT crap. Nothing to see here, move on.
Crap. No law of physics is broken by this behavior. It's interesting, unusual, possibly unprecedented, but it's not "law-breaking".
Everywhere in the world, except the USA, has run out of IP addresses
With my cable ISP (in Switzerland) a standard package costs more than twice as much with a static IP address as without one. If it weren't for companies like DynDns.org, I wouldn't be able to host web sites at all.
(Not a plug for Dyndns, there are others equally good that do the same thing, I just happen to use them).
How many runways are there in Antarctica capable of taking 747s?
A multi-million dollar supercomputer will not use 32-bit Intel processors, so you can't choose the Intel compiler anyway.
For some other architecture, it's much less likely that a proprietary compiler will do better than the Gnu compilers. Most compilers have bugs. The Gnu compilers are well tested, as a result of their wide use over many years.
I find this comment offensive. Ability to learn depends more on intelligence and attitudes than on age or sex.
Windows users obviously have a different expectation of "stable" from Linux users. In my office we have just 2 Linux machines but both are heavily used, one for C++ development.
I just ran "uptime" on them. One has been up for 99 days (I remember shutting it down to install a DVD-rom drive about that long ago) and the other has been up for 127 days. Of course I keep them both up-to-date with security patches, but since they're both Debian, that's just a matter of typing apt-get update / apt-get upgrade occasionally. No reboot needed.
It's that there are too few IT jobs compared with the number of well-qualified people, especially in software development, but in some other areas as well.
Demand for people in any field will vary as the US and world economies change. That's inevitable.
But demand (=jobs) is not the whole story. US universities are still producing IT graduates, most of whom will never find a job at a salary that will justify the tuition costs. That is not inevitable. That situation could be fixed by better informing high-school graduates about the employment market. Kids are going into CS courses with the expectation that this is a route to a well-paid future, when in fact it's an expensive trip to nowhere.
I suspect you're a troll, but since you're modded up to 4, I'll reply anyway.
The November 2004 Presidential election will decide whether Bush or Kerry will be president. I don't like that choice, but it's a fact that that's the choice.
A third candidate who's seen as right-of-center will take votes away from Bush, and therefore help Kerry. Just as Ross Perot decided the 1992 election by taking votes away from Bush Sr.
And a third candidate who's seen as left-of-center will take votes away from Kerry, which (since the election is close) will cause Bush to be elected.
Since the likely result of his participation is to ensure the election of George W. Bush, I cannot understand why anybody other than a Bush supporter wants Nader to take part in this election. It's got nothing to do with freedom of choice. Even if he's on the ballot, you can't choose Nader as your President; you can vote for him, but the result is equivalent to not voting at all.
As for Nader's motivation in helping Dubya to win by running, it simply shows once again that nobody should expect a pol to believe what he says. Nader has made a career out of causes like the environment, but he clearly doesn't give a shit for them per se - it's just a career move.
This is vaporware. What they're claiming - "without any performance hit" - is impossible. Accomplishing the rest of what they claim is not impossible, but it's very difficult, and since the "without any performance hit" claim establishes conclusively that these people are bullshitters, I don't believe they can even come close to doing it.
In practical terms it's impossible to build a nuclear bomb that yields less than about 5 kilotons. The reason is that you need a critical mass of fissile material for an explosion to occur at all. The critical mass of U235 corresponds to a yield of over 100 kilotons; fission bombs usually yield less because only a small fraction of the uranium in a bomb actually fissions when it goes off. (The Hiroshima bomb had a yield of about 20 kilotons.) You can get a smaller yield by building a less efficient bomb, but the main factors determining the efficiency are the neutron/uranium reaction cross-section and the branching ratios, which are physical constants. You can't get a smaller yield by using less uranium.
That comment reveals a major misconception. You assume that if the pols knew what was best for the country, they'd do it.
It's very difficult to get elected to Congress. The rewards for getting elected are huge, so there's a lot of competition (at the stage where it matters - getting nominated by the incumbent party). You have to be very smart to succeed.
You may be thinking, "But pols are always saying stupid things, so how can they be smart?" Understand the answer to that question, and you will understand a lot about modern politics.
What a politician says has nothing to do with what he/she believes. A politician says whatever is most likely to result in re-election.
Educating pols is pointless. They're smarter than you, and better informed. Your only chance is to persuade voters to vote for better pols. That's extremely difficult, because corporate dollars are always against you. But it's always harder to do something effective than to do something pointless.
I live in a European country where prostitution and brothels are legal. The brothels here have no problem with credit cards. The "real thing" is obviously not a high-risk industry. Why should the pale substitute of porn be high-risk?
I've worked mainly in big international banks. Of the 5 I last worked at, J. P. Morgan uses Sybase, and so does the investment-banking arm of UBS (formerly UBS Warburg). These are two of the largest banks in the world (UBS was world #3 in the latest rankings I've seen - April 2003 - and J.P Morgan Chase was world #8 and the biggest American bank). They both employ thousands of software developers who need database skills.
Let's keep a sense of proportion here. There are other sources of satellite photographs than the US - you can buy photographs taken from satellites launched by Ariane, for example. If the US government prevents US companies from supplying you with photos, Europe, China and Russia all have the capability to fill the gap. With the disappearance of a subsidized competitor, no doubt they will expand their offerings. There's a link to some sources here (Google cache).
I can't tell you what the worker bees at Microsoft are considering, but I can tell you what the movers and shakers at the top are considering. They're considering what course of action will do the most harm to the Free Software community in general, and people's perception of the GPL in particular. When they think they've figured out what that course of action is, they'll tell the troops to do it.
Either you live in some alternate universe in which vendors work on bugs for individual users, or you've been smoking some exceptionally strong weed. Or, possibly, you don't have a clue.
I don't believe in alternate universes.
Somebody did a historical study showing that that was roughly the ratio in the age of the "robber barons" - Carnegie et al. Sorry I haven't a URL.
Is "40x the median salary" the "magic number"? Who knows..
Of course it's arbitrary, but that doesn't make it bad. There are lots of arbitrary numbers in our laws. The age of consent in the statutory rape law, for example. At what age can a girl give meaningful consent? In reality it depends on the girl, but an arbitrary law is better than no law. Note also that my proposal was that >40x median salary is prima facie evidence of theft. That means it can be rebutted by other evidence. Exactly what could be used to rebut it I left open; perhaps people might think it reasonable that a CEO should get more money if he/she turned a failing business into a successful one, increased employment and salaries and profits, something like that. But we've all seen lots of cases where a CEO has failed by every possible measure of performance, and still pocketed millions.
And that's valuable work
but editors, editorial assistants, copy editors, graphic designers, etc all work for pay
This, however, doesn't add so much value. You could almost automate the selection function of editors - let the reviewers give articles a score, a bit like Slashdot. Copy editors for academic journals do nothing - authors do the proofreading.
Moreover, archiving and preserving electronic access essentially forever will cost someone some money.
I think the money it costs is negligible. Who paid for the whole of Usenet to be archived? It's mostly worthless, but there seemed to be no difficulty in funding it. There are web site hosting companies nowadays who will give you your first year's hosting for free. Yahoo and Hotmail give anybody gigabytes of storage for $0.00. I think archiving and preserving electronic access for scientific papers essentially forever will cost, practically, nothing.
You are correct to remind us that capitalism is not a zero-sum game; wealth is created. It is unevenly distributed, but still, most people have gained in the past. If your boss increases his own income by $100k and increases yours by $5k, well, the bottom line for you is a gain of $5k.
Now, that is changing. Today's CEO is greedier than Carnegie or Rockefeller or J. P. Morgan were. To increase his personal income by $1M, today's CEO will destroy the careers of dozens of engineers. They are not being replaced by automation, which increases the productivity of other American workers. They are being replaced by Indians and Chinese. To economists, it's a gain if one man gains $1M while 10 others lose $80K each. In the real world, it's a disaster for our society.
One possible way to attack the problem, without unduly restricting the economic freedom which helps the whole world to progress, would be to recognize what these CEO's are doing. They determine their own salaries, in reality. A CEO who takes home more than 40 times the median salary of employees in his company is basically a thief. "Compensation" in excess of 40 times the median salary in the same company should be regarded as prima facie evidence of theft.
The big fallacy in all the economists' arguments for offshoring is right here: "US GDP increases, so that must be good for the US."
But what's really happening is this: incomes of a few CEOs go up from (say) $1M to $2M, while incomes of 10 times as many engineers go down from (say) $100k to $20k. That's a gain in money terms, but it's very bad for 90% of the people affected. So, it's bad for the USA.
That is a damn good idea! - the best and most useful comment on this topic. Try it, and tell us what happens.
Where I live (Switzerland), practically all DVD players sold are "zone-free". I assume this is true in most of Europe (though I haven't checked outside Switzerland - maybe someone elsewhere can comment). Obnoxious though DVD publishers are, I doubt whether one of them would be such an idiot as to do something that would piss off the ~350 million consumers in Europe.
Finally, as developers of open source e-mail technologies, we are concerned that no company should be permitted IP rights over core Internet infrastructure. We believe the IETF needs to revamp its IPR policies to ensure that the core Internet infrastructure remain unencumbered.
Amen to that. But why did the IETF open the door to patent-encumbered, proprietary material in Internet standards in the first place? Sounds to me as though the current IETF needs to be largely replaced.