where all laws expired after ten years and had to be relegislated
I like this... except for the part that there really are some laws that should not be subjected to "forgetting" about them. For example, murder. Or term limits (such as for the President). Perhaps a supermajority of both the house and congress plus a simple majority of state governors would allow the President to optionally sign the "make this permanent" line on a bill. Sort of like constitutional amendments (which also should not be put to expiry), but a bit simpler (since the courts can still overturn a "permanent" law, unlike a constitutional amendment).
Minor nit: sure, my bank has my email address. I do NOT want them emailing me. Under ANY circumstances. If it's important, send me normal snail mail.
If I have to start weeding out "legitimate" email from my bank vs "phishing" that appears to be from the same bank by actually opening the mail to look at it... well, I'll probably just ignore the legitimate stuff, to be honest.
And me, out of mod points. This is one of the most insightful points in favour of short-range EVs today. I'm not sure I agree with the cost savings of an EV vs a hybrid or any of that stuff, but that may simply be because I don't know what type of savings I'd see (currently doing ~10,000km/year on a single gas/electric hybrid vehicle), and haven't sat down to figure it out. But, assuming that it isn't actually enough savings, that'd sure be a great goal to acheive. And it'd be great in marketing the vehicles!
Just remember: the cost savings have to be not just "enough", but "much more." Because if I had to rent a vehicle for my next 1000km trip into the mountains with enough room for my toddler and all the paraphenelia associated with a toddler, that's an inconvenience And convenience has a real, tangible dollar value to most people. The EV needs to pay me more than that cost to be worth the switch. I'm not saying it's impossible, just that it needs to be part of the goal to acheive. Any less will be an economic failure, which will only further any myths against EVs.
To properly convey large-to-never timescales on Slashdot, one must refer to one or more of the following:
The contemporous release of Duke Nukem Forever
The proper, usable security lock-down of Windows and/or Internet Explorer. (The secure version of Outlook is just as likely, but not a proper Slashdot meme.)
The eventual release of Wine 1.0. (Ok, so that's now out, but still can be used as evidence that one believes a far-off action isn't impossible, unlike the other two memes.)
The wide-spread adoption of IPv6, though apparently just as long of a project as the above, is not an accepted meme. Bringing it up, or defending it, can be actionable. Keep it up, and your geek card will be revoked. This is your first, and only, warning.
I work in a similarly bureaucratic office. However, I approach things quite differently. This here is a resource problem. That makes it management's problem. You propose what you want to do to your manager. S/he approves or not. And then s/he is responsible to move roadblocks out of your way.
For example, in my case, I tell my manager that I can spend a week doing A, or we can get a machine and have A done pretty much automatically. If my manager chooses for me to spend my week (unlikely) or even that someone else on the team spends his week, that's her perogative. More likely, she'll want the machine. So she has to convince her manager, and then they can make the machine acquisition "urgent." If that doesn't work, my second-level manager would go to his manager, lather, rinse, repeat. It either gets marked urgent, or it comes back as a very conscious decision to waste human resources rather than purchase capital.
I just feel it's my responsibility to show this to my manager so that it becomes their responsibility for wasting corporate dollars rather than mine.
I have to wonder how Gentoo would fare on such a machine. With the new baselayout-2, boot times are far, far improved. Of course, *compiling* your own system would take forever... Now, granted, I have a quad-core 64-bit machine, so from grub to X is only about 15-20 seconds - it'd be longer on the older, single-core hardware.
Now, all that said, I have to agree with another user above who got slammed for it: you probably should just get a new machine. I mean, really. You can get reasonably modern hardware for $400-$500. My quad-core machine was only $1200, and it's fairly loaded. Expense accounts for this? What is your hourly salary? How many hours do you need to waste for it to be more worth it to the company to simply buy a new machine? Probably less than the amount of time it'll take to read this thread, procure whatever OS(es) you settle on trying, and install one after another until you find one that suits whatever task you have for the machine. So, just buy a $1000 machine, install VirtualBox or VMWare on it, install the special OS there, and you'll be off and running far faster, and far cheaper, than trying to repurpose hardware better sent to the recycler.
Are you serious? With the fglrx drivers, I get KDE4's composites features. Great. But any time I try to shut down X, I get a hard lock. With the radeonhd driver, I get FEWER crashes (using the git code - the last released version didn't work for me, either), but no composites, and even video is shaky. (AMD64, quad-core, with ATI 3870HD card.)
This is compared to my old nvidia-based P4 where video was *always* rock-solid using the proprietary drivers.
(Seriously, my wife used the photoshop trial version for a month and loved it. I asked her to spend a month on gimp just to see if the "free" version was good enough. She couldn't be happier - she can do digitial scrapbooking with all sorts of cool effects without spending money. And it's been over six months now, and she hasn't once brought up a desire to go back to photoshop.)
Though I don't disagree with your conclusion, your support is... lacking. Why we don't hear about longshoreman pedophiles may actually be because there aren't any kids there, so those pedophiles can't actually commit the crime they want to. Cause and effect may be reversed - those who have a philia for children remove themselves from temptation by becoming longshoremen - a brilliant way to deny your criminal urges, if you were smart about it. Sort of like why alcoholics who are actually trying to recover from that disease generally would avoid bars and pubs.
Memory is about $20-$40/GB. Disk space is down to about $0.30-$0.50/GB. CPU is about $0.01 per bogomip (hey, there isn't really a good measurement out there, so what the hell).
The holy grail here isn't the testing of the genome. It's the *interpretation* of it. Personally, I wouldn't want anyone other than a qualified medical professional (i.e. MD, preferably specialised in the study of the genome) to try to tell me what it means. Anything else is no different than going to your local psychic to get your palms read.
Why would they need step 3? If they offered alternative-based gasoline that could power my smartcar, moped, and 1973 v8 pickup truck, without modification, for even 10% less than ground-based petroleum, NO ONE WOULD BUY CONVENTIONAL OIL-BASED GASOLINE AGAIN.
Apparently, someone is trying to make Rumsfeld out to be an idiot. Though that he may be, IMO this quote is actually fairly insightful, if somewhat poorly worded. I've had a similar saying (is it a saying if I'm the only one saying it?): "There are three types of people in the world. Those who don't know what they're doing and know they don't; those who know what they're doing and know they do; and those who don't know what they're doing but think they do. It's the last group that screws everything up for the other two groups." The thing to realise is that everyone falls into all three categories for different aspects of our lives, and the challenge is to tell the difference for each situation to try to avoid being in the last group.
In Rumsfeld's quote, "known knowns" are the areas where we are in the middle group: knowing what we're doing, and knowing that. "Known unknowns" are the areas where we don't know what we're doing and know we don't. And "unknown unknowns" are the last group: things we think we know, but don't. (Ok, that's not quite precisely what he's talking about, but it's analogous.) And that last group is the most dangerous one.
You're assuming that they didn't already have huge numbers of such engineers together and among the top recommendations was this gem. That said, it does seem like a reasonable assumption, but we do have to recognise it as an assumption. All we really know is the output from whatever meetings they may have held, and not how they got there.
Also, keep in mind some constraints. This is the Pentagon looking, not the FAA. It is outside the Pentagon's purvue to dictate the make-up of civilian aircraft. It is INSIDE their purvue to protect no-fly zones. They don't just want to stop terrists from hijacking commercial aircraft to use as missiles (again), they are actually being insightful by looking at ALL methods of air attacks, such as terrists renting (haha) a smaller aircraft for use, where the possibility of innocent citizens being on the aircraft is an unknown. Or a sleeper cell where someone actually is a licensed and employed pilot, so locking the doors doesn't help. There are many scenarios where other solutions just don't work. Though they're unlikely, so was the concept of four co-ordinated hijackings occurring simultaneously on U.S. soil (or in U.S. airspace) and doing the damage they did. So it seems reasonable that they want failsafe (and foolproof, and especially terrist-proof) options.
Arguing both sides are fine is no different than identical twins pointing the finger at each other to get out of a murder rap where the sole evidence is DNA. It's up to the plaintiff to prove the infringement/prosecution to prove the crime, not the defendant to prove innocence. Since we are talking about two defendants/cases, one defendant/case can argue that downloading is fine (whereas I thought the problem was lack of proof) while the other can argue that sharing is fine. There is no problem here because we're dealing with independent cases.
Omitting context ignores how language evolves over time. For example, the difference in meaning that "beg the question" has gone through from its original inception (indicating a circular argument) to its modern and common interpretation (raising a question - begging a question be asked).
It also ignores how society evolves over time - socially, technologically, etc. For the press to invade the privacy of even the President was unheard of in their time. It was a given: that doesn't happen in polite society. Today, invading the privacy of any public figure is the given, even if it takes telephoto lenses to do. It seems obvious to me that the US's first amendment was contextually referring solely to political and religious speech - areas of concern at the time from the former English rule of the colonies.
We're laughing at the suburban twats who bought them because they thought their 2.4 children were too large to fit in a normal sedan.
Well, putting aside an obesity epidemic in North America (and slowly taking over other parts of the world as well) where those kids might actually not fit in a sedan... you're also apparently forgetting some draconian laws about kids and seating in a vehicle. I'm not just referring to rear-facing baby seats, but even the car seats used by 1-5 year olds, followed by a booster until about 8 to 10. Some of these take up stupid amounts of space, limiting how many kids you can fit in a vehicle. Going to a smart car just isn't smart when you have young kids. Even a sedan will limit you to basically two kids (and they both are supposed to be in the *middle*, according to traffic safety experts - of course, if either one is in the middle, the other seat won't fit). If you have a third kid, well, forget it. They aren't fitting in your average sedan. You need a larger vehicle.
And even then, I'm ignoring the *stuff* you bring *everywhere* when you have a kid. Everything from spare diapers (preferably cloth, but we resort to disposables sometimes) to toys to spare outfits to a stroller... nevermind having room for whatever items you've gone out shopping for.
Going to Costco in our old sedan meant twice as many trips just to get everything. With the Saturn VUE, I can fit all of that comfortably. And that's a small SUV. (And it's hybrid, but that's beside the point, I think.) Half the trips for the same work means less gas used.
Slashdot Mirror
I like this ... except for the part that there really are some laws that should not be subjected to "forgetting" about them. For example, murder. Or term limits (such as for the President). Perhaps a supermajority of both the house and congress plus a simple majority of state governors would allow the President to optionally sign the "make this permanent" line on a bill. Sort of like constitutional amendments (which also should not be put to expiry), but a bit simpler (since the courts can still overturn a "permanent" law, unlike a constitutional amendment).
Minor nit: sure, my bank has my email address. I do NOT want them emailing me. Under ANY circumstances. If it's important, send me normal snail mail.
If I have to start weeding out "legitimate" email from my bank vs "phishing" that appears to be from the same bank by actually opening the mail to look at it ... well, I'll probably just ignore the legitimate stuff, to be honest.
That sounds like a lot of work... I just used make:
Then I just ran "make -j4". All four processors working like mad, with a minimal of effort.
(You may need to change the wildcard for your own scenario.)
And me, out of mod points. This is one of the most insightful points in favour of short-range EVs today. I'm not sure I agree with the cost savings of an EV vs a hybrid or any of that stuff, but that may simply be because I don't know what type of savings I'd see (currently doing ~10,000km/year on a single gas/electric hybrid vehicle), and haven't sat down to figure it out. But, assuming that it isn't actually enough savings, that'd sure be a great goal to acheive. And it'd be great in marketing the vehicles!
Just remember: the cost savings have to be not just "enough", but "much more." Because if I had to rent a vehicle for my next 1000km trip into the mountains with enough room for my toddler and all the paraphenelia associated with a toddler, that's an inconvenience And convenience has a real, tangible dollar value to most people. The EV needs to pay me more than that cost to be worth the switch. I'm not saying it's impossible, just that it needs to be part of the goal to acheive. Any less will be an economic failure, which will only further any myths against EVs.
You must be new here.
To properly convey large-to-never timescales on Slashdot, one must refer to one or more of the following:
The wide-spread adoption of IPv6, though apparently just as long of a project as the above, is not an accepted meme. Bringing it up, or defending it, can be actionable. Keep it up, and your geek card will be revoked. This is your first, and only, warning.
Well, and Harry Potter...
I work in a similarly bureaucratic office. However, I approach things quite differently. This here is a resource problem. That makes it management's problem. You propose what you want to do to your manager. S/he approves or not. And then s/he is responsible to move roadblocks out of your way.
For example, in my case, I tell my manager that I can spend a week doing A, or we can get a machine and have A done pretty much automatically. If my manager chooses for me to spend my week (unlikely) or even that someone else on the team spends his week, that's her perogative. More likely, she'll want the machine. So she has to convince her manager, and then they can make the machine acquisition "urgent." If that doesn't work, my second-level manager would go to his manager, lather, rinse, repeat. It either gets marked urgent, or it comes back as a very conscious decision to waste human resources rather than purchase capital.
I just feel it's my responsibility to show this to my manager so that it becomes their responsibility for wasting corporate dollars rather than mine.
I have to wonder how Gentoo would fare on such a machine. With the new baselayout-2, boot times are far, far improved. Of course, *compiling* your own system would take forever... Now, granted, I have a quad-core 64-bit machine, so from grub to X is only about 15-20 seconds - it'd be longer on the older, single-core hardware.
Now, all that said, I have to agree with another user above who got slammed for it: you probably should just get a new machine. I mean, really. You can get reasonably modern hardware for $400-$500. My quad-core machine was only $1200, and it's fairly loaded. Expense accounts for this? What is your hourly salary? How many hours do you need to waste for it to be more worth it to the company to simply buy a new machine? Probably less than the amount of time it'll take to read this thread, procure whatever OS(es) you settle on trying, and install one after another until you find one that suits whatever task you have for the machine. So, just buy a $1000 machine, install VirtualBox or VMWare on it, install the special OS there, and you'll be off and running far faster, and far cheaper, than trying to repurpose hardware better sent to the recycler.
Are you serious? With the fglrx drivers, I get KDE4's composites features. Great. But any time I try to shut down X, I get a hard lock. With the radeonhd driver, I get FEWER crashes (using the git code - the last released version didn't work for me, either), but no composites, and even video is shaky. (AMD64, quad-core, with ATI 3870HD card.)
This is compared to my old nvidia-based P4 where video was *always* rock-solid using the proprietary drivers.
Yes.
(Seriously, my wife used the photoshop trial version for a month and loved it. I asked her to spend a month on gimp just to see if the "free" version was good enough. She couldn't be happier - she can do digitial scrapbooking with all sorts of cool effects without spending money. And it's been over six months now, and she hasn't once brought up a desire to go back to photoshop.)
Though I don't disagree with your conclusion, your support is ... lacking. Why we don't hear about longshoreman pedophiles may actually be because there aren't any kids there, so those pedophiles can't actually commit the crime they want to. Cause and effect may be reversed - those who have a philia for children remove themselves from temptation by becoming longshoremen - a brilliant way to deny your criminal urges, if you were smart about it. Sort of like why alcoholics who are actually trying to recover from that disease generally would avoid bars and pubs.
Memory is about $20-$40/GB. Disk space is down to about $0.30-$0.50/GB. CPU is about $0.01 per bogomip (hey, there isn't really a good measurement out there, so what the hell).
Yeah, let's teach a fantasy.
Is that better?
The holy grail here isn't the testing of the genome. It's the *interpretation* of it. Personally, I wouldn't want anyone other than a qualified medical professional (i.e. MD, preferably specialised in the study of the genome) to try to tell me what it means. Anything else is no different than going to your local psychic to get your palms read.
Why would they need step 3? If they offered alternative-based gasoline that could power my smartcar, moped, and 1973 v8 pickup truck, without modification, for even 10% less than ground-based petroleum, NO ONE WOULD BUY CONVENTIONAL OIL-BASED GASOLINE AGAIN.
Apparently, someone is trying to make Rumsfeld out to be an idiot. Though that he may be, IMO this quote is actually fairly insightful, if somewhat poorly worded. I've had a similar saying (is it a saying if I'm the only one saying it?): "There are three types of people in the world. Those who don't know what they're doing and know they don't; those who know what they're doing and know they do; and those who don't know what they're doing but think they do. It's the last group that screws everything up for the other two groups." The thing to realise is that everyone falls into all three categories for different aspects of our lives, and the challenge is to tell the difference for each situation to try to avoid being in the last group.
In Rumsfeld's quote, "known knowns" are the areas where we are in the middle group: knowing what we're doing, and knowing that. "Known unknowns" are the areas where we don't know what we're doing and know we don't. And "unknown unknowns" are the last group: things we think we know, but don't. (Ok, that's not quite precisely what he's talking about, but it's analogous.) And that last group is the most dangerous one.
You're assuming that they didn't already have huge numbers of such engineers together and among the top recommendations was this gem. That said, it does seem like a reasonable assumption, but we do have to recognise it as an assumption. All we really know is the output from whatever meetings they may have held, and not how they got there.
Also, keep in mind some constraints. This is the Pentagon looking, not the FAA. It is outside the Pentagon's purvue to dictate the make-up of civilian aircraft. It is INSIDE their purvue to protect no-fly zones. They don't just want to stop terrists from hijacking commercial aircraft to use as missiles (again), they are actually being insightful by looking at ALL methods of air attacks, such as terrists renting (haha) a smaller aircraft for use, where the possibility of innocent citizens being on the aircraft is an unknown. Or a sleeper cell where someone actually is a licensed and employed pilot, so locking the doors doesn't help. There are many scenarios where other solutions just don't work. Though they're unlikely, so was the concept of four co-ordinated hijackings occurring simultaneously on U.S. soil (or in U.S. airspace) and doing the damage they did. So it seems reasonable that they want failsafe (and foolproof, and especially terrist-proof) options.
They probably also watch too much Jack Bauer.
Arguing both sides are fine is no different than identical twins pointing the finger at each other to get out of a murder rap where the sole evidence is DNA. It's up to the plaintiff to prove the infringement/prosecution to prove the crime, not the defendant to prove innocence. Since we are talking about two defendants/cases, one defendant/case can argue that downloading is fine (whereas I thought the problem was lack of proof) while the other can argue that sharing is fine. There is no problem here because we're dealing with independent cases.
Paying for illegal copies doesn't make them suddenly legal...
Omitting context ignores how language evolves over time. For example, the difference in meaning that "beg the question" has gone through from its original inception (indicating a circular argument) to its modern and common interpretation (raising a question - begging a question be asked).
It also ignores how society evolves over time - socially, technologically, etc. For the press to invade the privacy of even the President was unheard of in their time. It was a given: that doesn't happen in polite society. Today, invading the privacy of any public figure is the given, even if it takes telephoto lenses to do. It seems obvious to me that the US's first amendment was contextually referring solely to political and religious speech - areas of concern at the time from the former English rule of the colonies.
Well, putting aside an obesity epidemic in North America (and slowly taking over other parts of the world as well) where those kids might actually not fit in a sedan ... you're also apparently forgetting some draconian laws about kids and seating in a vehicle. I'm not just referring to rear-facing baby seats, but even the car seats used by 1-5 year olds, followed by a booster until about 8 to 10. Some of these take up stupid amounts of space, limiting how many kids you can fit in a vehicle. Going to a smart car just isn't smart when you have young kids. Even a sedan will limit you to basically two kids (and they both are supposed to be in the *middle*, according to traffic safety experts - of course, if either one is in the middle, the other seat won't fit). If you have a third kid, well, forget it. They aren't fitting in your average sedan. You need a larger vehicle.
And even then, I'm ignoring the *stuff* you bring *everywhere* when you have a kid. Everything from spare diapers (preferably cloth, but we resort to disposables sometimes) to toys to spare outfits to a stroller ... nevermind having room for whatever items you've gone out shopping for.
Going to Costco in our old sedan meant twice as many trips just to get everything. With the Saturn VUE, I can fit all of that comfortably. And that's a small SUV. (And it's hybrid, but that's beside the point, I think.) Half the trips for the same work means less gas used.
At my work, we call these people "managers."
I think the proper meme response is, "You must not be new here."
oooo... in that case, I want to see the price of gas *double* this year!
(Says the guy in a hybrid vehicle ... and works from home.)
Seems plausible to me - I can think of someone else who hates half of himself...
(For the humour-impaired: just because I think it's plausible doesn't mean I necessarily believe it to be true.)