The only sacrifice communism demands of you is that you don't *own* anything. You are still free to pursuade whatever artistic endevours you want, whatever ideas and research you want, whatever you want. And in *real* communism, not these warped state-run capital economies, the populace is free to spend their time *doing* what they want to do as well - your job is what you enjoy, not forced upon you by the state, or forced upon you by the need to earn a living.
If you feel that not being able to own anything means that you are somehow sacrificing your individuality, then by definition that means that in your mind, your possessions somehow define who you are. If that is true, then indeed, you are one sorry individual.
... and reflect an old wives tale based on 70's and 80's era estimates of populaiton growth.
The fact of the matter is that in modern times nearly every country in the entire first world has sub-replacement population growth. Combine that with the recent paradigm shift in population growth in countries like China which previously had a major influence, and the probablye future advancement of third world countries, and you don't see anywhere near as dramatic an increase as what you say.
Until a few years ago, the United Nations and other institutions preparing population forecasts assumed that fertility would increase to replacement level and that subreplacement fertility was only a transitory phenomenon. This assumption is supported by the argument of homeostasis as discussed in Chapter 11 . In this view, fertility levels are not seen as the sum of individual behavior, but as one aspect of the evolution of a system in which individual behavior is a function of the status of the system (see Vishnevsky, 1991). Under such a systems approach the assumption of replacement fertility in the long run seems a defendable possibility. Therefore, we assumed a TFR between 2.1 and 2.3 in 2030-2035 as the high-fertility assumption in the five industrialized regions.
It is difficult, however, to find many researchers who support this view. Too much evidence points toward low fertility. The return to replacement fertility has been criticized as an assumed magnetic force without empirical support (Westoff, 1991). Many significant arguments support an assumption of further declining fertility levels. They range from the weakening of the family in terms of both declining marriage rates and high divorce rates, to the increasing independence and career orientation of women, and to a value change toward materialism and consumerism.
Read this for more info, specifically this graph show what the trend will more likely be like in the future.
You can't damn an entire political system because of a few bad eggs in history. If that were the case you'd also have to damn democracy ( The first French Revolution, Nazi germany, both examples of extremely violent ( even genocidal ) rulers elected to power through democratic states.
A properly constructed communist state would only require the dictatorship of the proletariat for a generation or so. After this time, no one would own any goods any more, and the only formalized government required would be for lawmaking and policing.
The "communist" societies of the former Soviet Union and China are not really communist at all, as the parent poster said. They're really just state sponsored capitalism, and there are still people hoarding the wealth.
I have been hearing a lot of rumors that the biggest buyer of the iPod mini has in fact been those female tech geeks out there. So much for the idea a $249 4-gig iPod was a mistake."
Screw that. It's not just females who want pretty colors here, and it is not a nieche market. Its the market of people, like me, who just cannot justify spending 500 bucks to carry around enough music to listen to for 4 weeks straight non-stop, when they only *have* around 1 GB of music they even listen to anyways. It's people who don't have 500 bucks to blow on nonsense like that.
IMO, its still too big and overpriced. I bet a 1GB iPod for 150 would sell 5x as many units as either of these.
I mean, you have USB2 / Firewire, you can swap the whole 1 GB in about 5 mins. You listen to the music for a few weeks, you get sick of it, you spend 5 mins and swap it out. Who needs to carry their whole freaking collection? I sure don't. 1 GB is enough for me.
I'd spend 150 for a 1 GB iPod, but I sure as hell won't spend 250 on a 4 GB one, or 500 on a 10 GB one. We're not all loaded enough to spend money on useless gadgets, when a cheaper alternative is just as practical.
And that's why this thing is succeeding. Has nothing to do with girls or colors.
1. That someone has enough time on his hands to push such a small issue.
2. That you have enough time on your hands to write such a huge rebuttal.
Come on, who the freak really cares? Does it matter what it is named? I wouldn't care if all the planets in our system were re-named "giant floating rocks", who the fuck cares? It's not like it changes their properties. And trust me, I doubt the residents of pluto care either.
Of course that story was from 2 weeks ago so it's old news. This week the latest variant has no attachment at all. It's just HTML that exploits an IE bug that downloads the worm from the infected computer that sent the message.
This type of nonsense blows my mind. Why in God's name would anyone use this crap?!?!? I mean, I use Windows at work, but the first freaking thing I did when I got my new machine was download Thunderbird and remove all the Outlook shortcuts. Its a POS and should be banned.
Actually, in theory, as soon as the computer recognized from his tone and inflection that when he is saying "Picard to..", the computer can initiate the link and play *that* portion back (Don't forget that according to the technical manual, the computer is wrapped in a warp field for FTL processing, so there is essentially 0 delay there).
So, while Picard is saying "Bridge" the computer is playing "Picard to" on the bridge. Then take into account that Riker, as a human, has to have *some* delay before he can respond with "Riker here", and you have a live, 2-way link, with 0 delay.
Assuming you're a guy, you can buy a 15 dollar buzz razor, set it on 3 or 4, and have an acceptable haircut ( at least in comparison to a combover ) your whole life. You can even cut it yourself.
Dressing semi-normal is not "conforming", it is *joining society". People who do not know how to properly dress and groom themselves will find themselves being outcast from things their entire life, not just during school. You'll be denied jobs, rejected by the opposite sex, shunned by peers.
All because you still wear your 18 year old transformers t-shirt with holes in the side in public, and/or don't want to spend a lousy 10 bucks every two or three months on a haircut??!?! Man, get a clue and _get_some_clothes_. No amount of self respect is going to make you stop looking abnormal to everyone else, only you can do that.
* Note, that some people are anti-conformist by nature and dress abnormal on purpose (goth, etc ). All the power to them. But these people do not then subsequenty complain that they are rejected because of how they dress, the *know* this in advance and dress this way because of it.
It is people like you who dress and act horribly and *then* later complain about society's treatment that get my goat.
. My student is unbelievably smart, however has very limited social skills, is unable to cooperate with peers, doesn't understand why they make fun of his uncombed hair, etc.
This is step 1. Honestly, I know that it's shallow to judge someone on their looks, but hey, it is something that we have *evolved* over millions of years. People who look better succeed, it is a *fact*.
If the kid is upset that people laugh at his hairstyle, then, duh, maybe he should *change* it?
I honestly don't understand why geeks will get upset when people mock their style.. you have thousands of examples of (halfway) decent style to draw on daily, and you don't have to spend a bundle to be dressed normally for your age group. Unless you are going out of your way to look different on purpose (goth, etc ) there is no need for *looking" like a loser before anyone even speaks to you.
Everyone always uses "Google" when they just mean any old search engine. AS if the streets would be filled with encyclopedia salesmen if we all used Yahoo! and AltaVista.
Actually, it would be *far* more likely if Google had never come around. Google is the single driving force that has pushed and pushed at the other search engines to try and keep up ( sites like Teoma and the new Yahoo are getting closer in terms of accuracy, but Google has been at the top for so long now that it has found its brand name being added to the dictionary as a verb, and is constantly appearing in pop culture references like TV shows and Movies. You can't pay for that kind of advertising ).
If it weren't for Google pioneering the slick, streamlined search interface, the massive popup banners and "portal" monstrosities of AltaVista and Yahoo would still be the standard.. in fact, they would probably be even worse.
And thus, if it weren't for Google, searching for stuff on the internet would still be so incredibly painful and take so long that I could probably find it faster in the Britannica.
People just don't give Google enough credit. They totally revolutionized their space, and are still revolutionizing it( check out Google labs if you don't believe me ). You don't see many companies doing that nowadays.
You're gonna be a training treadmill that's only going faster and faster. You think new cars every year is bad? Hell, at least the way an engine works stays pretty much the same year after year. In IT, get ready to learn a whole new skill set, I'd say, every 6 months.
If you're in IT (especially development) and you don't learn new skills every *month* ( screw 6 ) and *enjoy* doing so, then you're in the wrong field altogether.
Software development isn't a slack-jaw type job where you learn a skill and coast on it the rest of your career, its a constantly changing environment, where you constantly have to learn new things. And the people who succeed in it are the people who *enjoy* learning new things, and don't find it work at all; rather, they would be leanring and experimenting with this stuff at home in their free time even without getting paid for it ( and often are ).
The only profession close to a software developer RE the satisfaction someone of who truely loves it is an artist. An artist will write, or paint, or compose, whether they get paid or not, because it's something they *enjoy* to do. it is not work. The same with a true coder.
Anyone who does not fit this profile will, IMO, never produce the same quality of work as someone who truely loves coding.
Hunting is not much of an exuse... humans were alive, multiplying and flourishing for tens of thousands of years before the invention of firearms. Just look at the native american, they never seemed to have any trouble with hunting.
Aside from this, how much hunting do people have to do nowadays to survive?
Sure maybe it may have taken a hundred or two more years for society to advance to this technological level without firearms, but IMO it would have been well worth it.
Development on the Firebird 2 codebase began early in Firebird 1 development, with the porting of the Firebird 1 C code to C++ and the first major code-cleaning. Firebird 1.5 is the first release of the Firebird 2 codebase.
Someone care to translate? What's the damn version? 1? 1.5? 2? How can 1.5 be a release on the 2.0 codebase??
There are a myrid of legal uses for stripe readers, including computer and home security, and making really cool copies of your bank cards*
I have a friend who has a reader who does this.. he takes a plastic generic card with a cool photo on it, with a blank stripe, and copies your ATM stripe onto it. Fully functional, totally customized ATM card.
You should see the looks he gets using his "superman" debit card.
I can't think of any possible "good" associated with the "bad" of firearms.
Think about it, if you could go back to the beginning and prevent man from inventing firearms, how different would the world be?
What is the possible benefit of a firearm, other than to shoot someone else who has a firearm before he shoots you?
Sure there would still be violence without firearms, but at least it would be forced to either be hand to hand or bow+arrow and thus there'd be much less civilian deaths in large scale conflicts.
Correct me if I am wrong, but I thought scientists had already created ( in sub-microscopic amounts ) anti-matter in laboratories, and measured it's presence.
Or is this "dark matter" something different than anti-matter?
Someone please explain, the article is high on fluff but low on details.
why does 'going public' always equate into 'after this they must try to bring in all the cash they can
A public corperation is obligated (by law even I believe) to maximize profits for its shareholders, by pretty much any means they can. Trust me, if the majority interests think that that can make more money by using pop-up ads, not only *will* they, but if the current CEO doesn't aree with it, they will fire him.
That is the reality of going public; the original owners no longer have control of the company, it is now delegated to the board.
You cant have two DHCP servers running as the broadcast domains overlap
Again... this is a *home network*. What are the freaking odds he is running his own DHCP server?
No one in their right minds would be trying to use a single NIC for a firewall in a professional environment anyways. This discussion is about a small firewall for home use only to his upstream ISP, made out of a gamecube(?!?!), and you are talking about problems with running multiple DCHP servers on the LAN??
Like I said, for a home connection having 1 port vs. two ports is pretty much irrelevant due to your available bandwidth. ANd despite what the above poster said, to the Linux kernel a virtual NIC is the *exact* same as a normal NIC, you can do the exact same IPTables rules between two virtual interfaces as two seperate cards.
Trust me I have done this myself before, it works fine. Don't let the lack of a second card stop you. It's fine for home use.
Again I should stress natting does not make a firewall. You need a lot of proxy applications that can filter at higher levels than IPs ports and who initiated a connection.
Er, who saind anything about NAT?
To Linux, a virtual interface *IS* a real interface. You can do all the exact same stuff with IPTables just as if you had two seprate ethernet cards.
Your above comments lead me to believe you didn't know what I meant by virtual interface.
A GameCube would make a sweet firewall/router box if you could get two network ports on it and Linux. The price would be right too.
Note that if you're just a home user (and since you are seriously considering using a gaming console as a Firewall / router, I assume you are), then you're Internet pipe is likely limited to 1-5 Mbps down maximum, and a fraction of that up. In this case the gamecube's single 10/100 NIC would do just fine for a firewall. Just make a virtual ethernet port (ifconfig eth0:0 etc) and have fun.
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The only sacrifice communism demands of you is that you don't *own* anything. You are still free to pursuade whatever artistic endevours you want, whatever ideas and research you want, whatever you want. And in *real* communism, not these warped state-run capital economies, the populace is free to spend their time *doing* what they want to do as well - your job is what you enjoy, not forced upon you by the state, or forced upon you by the need to earn a living.
If you feel that not being able to own anything means that you are somehow sacrificing your individuality, then by definition that means that in your mind, your possessions somehow define who you are. If that is true, then indeed, you are one sorry individual.
The fact of the matter is that in modern times nearly every country in the entire first world has sub-replacement population growth. Combine that with the recent paradigm shift in population growth in countries like China which previously had a major influence, and the probablye future advancement of third world countries, and you don't see anywhere near as dramatic an increase as what you say.
Until a few years ago, the United Nations and other institutions preparing population forecasts assumed that fertility would increase to replacement level and that subreplacement fertility was only a transitory phenomenon. This assumption is supported by the argument of homeostasis as discussed in Chapter 11 . In this view, fertility levels are not seen as the sum of individual behavior, but as one aspect of the evolution of a system in which individual behavior is a function of the status of the system (see Vishnevsky, 1991). Under such a systems approach the assumption of replacement fertility in the long run seems a defendable possibility. Therefore, we assumed a TFR between 2.1 and 2.3 in 2030-2035 as the high-fertility assumption in the five industrialized regions.
It is difficult, however, to find many researchers who support this view. Too much evidence points toward low fertility. The return to replacement fertility has been criticized as an assumed magnetic force without empirical support (Westoff, 1991). Many significant arguments support an assumption of further declining fertility levels. They range from the weakening of the family in terms of both declining marriage rates and high divorce rates, to the increasing independence and career orientation of women, and to a value change toward materialism and consumerism.
Read this for more info, specifically this graph show what the trend will more likely be like in the future.
You can't damn an entire political system because of a few bad eggs in history. If that were the case you'd also have to damn democracy ( The first French Revolution, Nazi germany, both examples of extremely violent ( even genocidal ) rulers elected to power through democratic states.
A properly constructed communist state would only require the dictatorship of the proletariat for a generation or so. After this time, no one would own any goods any more, and the only formalized government required would be for lawmaking and policing. The "communist" societies of the former Soviet Union and China are not really communist at all, as the parent poster said. They're really just state sponsored capitalism, and there are still people hoarding the wealth.
I have been hearing a lot of rumors that the biggest buyer of the iPod mini has in fact been those female tech geeks out there. So much for the idea a $249 4-gig iPod was a mistake."
Screw that. It's not just females who want pretty colors here, and it is not a nieche market. Its the market of people, like me, who just cannot justify spending 500 bucks to carry around enough music to listen to for 4 weeks straight non-stop, when they only *have* around 1 GB of music they even listen to anyways. It's people who don't have 500 bucks to blow on nonsense like that.
IMO, its still too big and overpriced. I bet a 1GB iPod for 150 would sell 5x as many units as either of these.
I mean, you have USB2 / Firewire, you can swap the whole 1 GB in about 5 mins. You listen to the music for a few weeks, you get sick of it, you spend 5 mins and swap it out. Who needs to carry their whole freaking collection? I sure don't. 1 GB is enough for me.
I'd spend 150 for a 1 GB iPod, but I sure as hell won't spend 250 on a 4 GB one, or 500 on a 10 GB one. We're not all loaded enough to spend money on useless gadgets, when a cheaper alternative is just as practical.
And that's why this thing is succeeding. Has nothing to do with girls or colors.
I don't know which is sadder....
1. That someone has enough time on his hands to push such a small issue.
2. That you have enough time on your hands to write such a huge rebuttal.
Come on, who the freak really cares? Does it matter what it is named? I wouldn't care if all the planets in our system were re-named "giant floating rocks", who the fuck cares? It's not like it changes their properties. And trust me, I doubt the residents of pluto care either.
Of course that story was from 2 weeks ago so it's old news. This week the latest variant has no attachment at all. It's just HTML that exploits an IE bug that downloads the worm from the infected computer that sent the message.
This type of nonsense blows my mind. Why in God's name would anyone use this crap?!?!? I mean, I use Windows at work, but the first freaking thing I did when I got my new machine was download Thunderbird and remove all the Outlook shortcuts. Its a POS and should be banned.
Actually, in theory, as soon as the computer recognized from his tone and inflection that when he is saying "Picard to..", the computer can initiate the link and play *that* portion back (Don't forget that according to the technical manual, the computer is wrapped in a warp field for FTL processing, so there is essentially 0 delay there).
So, while Picard is saying "Bridge" the computer is playing "Picard to" on the bridge. Then take into account that Riker, as a human, has to have *some* delay before he can respond with "Riker here", and you have a live, 2-way link, with 0 delay.
Assuming you're a guy, you can buy a 15 dollar buzz razor, set it on 3 or 4, and have an acceptable haircut ( at least in comparison to a combover ) your whole life. You can even cut it yourself.
People like you do not live in reality.
Dressing semi-normal is not "conforming", it is *joining society". People who do not know how to properly dress and groom themselves will find themselves being outcast from things their entire life, not just during school. You'll be denied jobs, rejected by the opposite sex, shunned by peers.
All because you still wear your 18 year old transformers t-shirt with holes in the side in public, and/or don't want to spend a lousy 10 bucks every two or three months on a haircut??!?! Man, get a clue and _get_some_clothes_. No amount of self respect is going to make you stop looking abnormal to everyone else, only you can do that.
* Note, that some people are anti-conformist by nature and dress abnormal on purpose (goth, etc ). All the power to them. But these people do not then subsequenty complain that they are rejected because of how they dress, the *know* this in advance and dress this way because of it.
It is people like you who dress and act horribly and *then* later complain about society's treatment that get my goat.
This is step 1. Honestly, I know that it's shallow to judge someone on their looks, but hey, it is something that we have *evolved* over millions of years. People who look better succeed, it is a *fact*.
If the kid is upset that people laugh at his hairstyle, then, duh, maybe he should *change* it?
I honestly don't understand why geeks will get upset when people mock their style.. you have thousands of examples of (halfway) decent style to draw on daily, and you don't have to spend a bundle to be dressed normally for your age group. Unless you are going out of your way to look different on purpose (goth, etc ) there is no need for *looking" like a loser before anyone even speaks to you.
Actually, it would be *far* more likely if Google had never come around. Google is the single driving force that has pushed and pushed at the other search engines to try and keep up ( sites like Teoma and the new Yahoo are getting closer in terms of accuracy, but Google has been at the top for so long now that it has found its brand name being added to the dictionary as a verb, and is constantly appearing in pop culture references like TV shows and Movies. You can't pay for that kind of advertising ).
If it weren't for Google pioneering the slick, streamlined search interface, the massive popup banners and "portal" monstrosities of AltaVista and Yahoo would still be the standard.. in fact, they would probably be even worse.
And thus, if it weren't for Google, searching for stuff on the internet would still be so incredibly painful and take so long that I could probably find it faster in the Britannica.
People just don't give Google enough credit. They totally revolutionized their space, and are still revolutionizing it( check out Google labs if you don't believe me ). You don't see many companies doing that nowadays.
You're gonna be a training treadmill that's only going faster and faster. You think new cars every year is bad? Hell, at least the way an engine works stays pretty much the same year after year. In IT, get ready to learn a whole new skill set, I'd say, every 6 months.
If you're in IT (especially development) and you don't learn new skills every *month* ( screw 6 ) and *enjoy* doing so, then you're in the wrong field altogether.
Software development isn't a slack-jaw type job where you learn a skill and coast on it the rest of your career, its a constantly changing environment, where you constantly have to learn new things. And the people who succeed in it are the people who *enjoy* learning new things, and don't find it work at all; rather, they would be leanring and experimenting with this stuff at home in their free time even without getting paid for it ( and often are ).
The only profession close to a software developer RE the satisfaction someone of who truely loves it is an artist. An artist will write, or paint, or compose, whether they get paid or not, because it's something they *enjoy* to do. it is not work. The same with a true coder.
Anyone who does not fit this profile will, IMO, never produce the same quality of work as someone who truely loves coding.
If you write your own song, record it, and distribute it, then you owe a royalty to the songwriter('s publisher) whose song you subconsciously copied
WTF? Is this supposed to mean that no one can create anything new anymore, because it has "all been done before" ?
I know a large number of independant musicians and artists who would now like to beat your ass.
Maybe if you would get your ears out of the Top 40 drivel, you'd realize there's still a lot of original content being created daily.
Hunting is not much of an exuse... humans were alive, multiplying and flourishing for tens of thousands of years before the invention of firearms. Just look at the native american, they never seemed to have any trouble with hunting.
Aside from this, how much hunting do people have to do nowadays to survive?
Sure maybe it may have taken a hundred or two more years for society to advance to this technological level without firearms, but IMO it would have been well worth it.
Someone care to translate? What's the damn version? 1? 1.5? 2? How can 1.5 be a release on the 2.0 codebase??
I am lost.
There are a myrid of legal uses for stripe readers, including computer and home security, and making really cool copies of your bank cards*
I have a friend who has a reader who does this.. he takes a plastic generic card with a cool photo on it, with a blank stripe, and copies your ATM stripe onto it. Fully functional, totally customized ATM card.
You should see the looks he gets using his "superman" debit card.
I can't think of any possible "good" associated with the "bad" of firearms.
Think about it, if you could go back to the beginning and prevent man from inventing firearms, how different would the world be?
What is the possible benefit of a firearm, other than to shoot someone else who has a firearm before he shoots you?
Sure there would still be violence without firearms, but at least it would be forced to either be hand to hand or bow+arrow and thus there'd be much less civilian deaths in large scale conflicts.
Correct me if I am wrong, but I thought scientists had already created ( in sub-microscopic amounts ) anti-matter in laboratories, and measured it's presence.
Or is this "dark matter" something different than anti-matter?
Someone please explain, the article is high on fluff but low on details.
why does 'going public' always equate into 'after this they must try to bring in all the cash they can
A public corperation is obligated (by law even I believe) to maximize profits for its shareholders, by pretty much any means they can. Trust me, if the majority interests think that that can make more money by using pop-up ads, not only *will* they, but if the current CEO doesn't aree with it, they will fire him.
That is the reality of going public; the original owners no longer have control of the company, it is now delegated to the board.
You cant have two DHCP servers running as the broadcast domains overlap
Again... this is a *home network*. What are the freaking odds he is running his own DHCP server?
No one in their right minds would be trying to use a single NIC for a firewall in a professional environment anyways. This discussion is about a small firewall for home use only to his upstream ISP, made out of a gamecube(?!?!), and you are talking about problems with running multiple DCHP servers on the LAN??
Like I said, for a home connection having 1 port vs. two ports is pretty much irrelevant due to your available bandwidth. ANd despite what the above poster said, to the Linux kernel a virtual NIC is the *exact* same as a normal NIC, you can do the exact same IPTables rules between two virtual interfaces as two seperate cards.
Trust me I have done this myself before, it works fine. Don't let the lack of a second card stop you. It's fine for home use.
Again I should stress natting does not make a firewall. You need a lot of proxy applications that can filter at higher levels than IPs ports and who initiated a connection.
Er, who saind anything about NAT?
To Linux, a virtual interface *IS* a real interface. You can do all the exact same stuff with IPTables just as if you had two seprate ethernet cards.
Your above comments lead me to believe you didn't know what I meant by virtual interface.
A GameCube would make a sweet firewall/router box if you could get two network ports on it and Linux. The price would be right too.
Note that if you're just a home user (and since you are seriously considering using a gaming console as a Firewall / router, I assume you are), then you're Internet pipe is likely limited to 1-5 Mbps down maximum, and a fraction of that up. In this case the gamecube's single 10/100 NIC would do just fine for a firewall. Just make a virtual ethernet port (ifconfig eth0:0 etc) and have fun.
come ON. Has *everyone* lost their sense of humour?
The fact that the parent was not only posted, but that people are modding it +1 Informative, has made me lose all faith in this site.