He was naive, the coalition is not 50/50. It's more like 90/10 in favour of the other party (for those of non-UK and who care).
Then why were the Tories so desperate for the coalition then? They were so desperate that they conceded the referendum for AV, which if it hadn't been so hopelessly managed might have changed the political landscape forever in the Lib Dem's favour.
The Tories had 306 seats, while Labour had 258 and the Lib Dems 57. If they'd not been so pig headed, they could have had a veto on every piece of legislation that has passed since 2010.
That means they could have stopped tuition fee hikes, spending cuts, welfare decimation, selling off of the NHS, the continued accumulation of the public sector by private companies and the rest of the Great Fire Sale to the corporate class that the Tories have been running since they got back into power. Just because they put the kaibosh on one thing doesn't make them principled.
Face it, they had the power to stop any of it, and they didn't. We might as well combine the main three parties and call them the Conservative Party.
The rise of the micro-gig is very much a sign of the wider deterioration of working conditions. Rights are part of the issue, but the other is that the pay per hour is often pitiful.
This is another consequence of the neoliberal strategy of keeping a persistent pool of unemployed people. Don't believe government propaganda about wanting everyone in work; full employment in the US and other Western democracies has not been a policy goal since the late 70's.
Put very very simply, If there are two people for one job, wages, rights and benefits go down. If there are two jobs for one person, they go up.
I actually tried writing articles for one of those big content aggregator sites a couple of years ago, only to stop once I realised I'd written an entire novella worth of content and in return was making about 10 cents per article per month. At that rate, 1 article that pay have taken two hours to write would have needed about a decade just to make $6 an hour.
I doubt other sites in a similar vein are much better.
The UK economy has grown massively since the 1980's, so apparently we're insourcing more than we're outsourcing.
Economic growth, frankly, doesn't mean shit if the top 10% make all of the money. The 1980's was the start of the economic malaise we face today, where rising household debt ratios countered the stagnation in real wages and the steadily falling share of the wealth held by the bottom 50% of UK workers. This trend was started during the Thatcher years, and is at the point now where 10% of the households own about half of the wealth.
Manufacturing was dead by the time she arrived, the unions did it to themselves. All she did was pull the plug to put them out of their misery.
There are still whole cities that have never recovered from the death of manufacturing. Service sector jobs simply don't pay as well, and there aren't as many to go around. I say this a lot, but in an economy that relies primarily on consumerism this is bad fucking news in the long run.
Still, most that responsibility lies on those in the post Thatcher years. Don't even get me started on the malicious and ignorant buffoons that currently run the country.
Keynesians criticizing other Keynesians for being Keynesians. If you all backed off and shut it and let the damn thing crash, we could get back to having a stable market after we pick the pieces up
That is to suggest we had a stable market prior to the crash? We havn't had a stable market in decades, if by stable you mean few or no bubbles forming and no recessions or stock market crashes.
Higher household debt ratios over the last twenty years as a result of falling wages have meant what was previously just damaging is now becoming catastrophic. The 2008 crash was a lot of things, but one of the things we should have learned was that economic growth cannot be funded from debt. Governments across the western world have completely ignored that lesson, preferring to stick to frankly delusional neoliberal economics.
My point is without addressing the death of the western middle class, unemployment, underemployment, falling wages and spiralling debt ratios we will never have a stable market. We'll just have harder and bigger crashes.
My experiences of the more "user friendly" distros (mostly Ubuntu) was that while they automated a lot of steps it left me with something not entirely dissimilar to Windows - bloated with similar performance and needing a lot of tweaking to trim it down.
The nastiest part of Arch now the beautifully easy menu system has been removed is installation, though thankfully it is very, very well documented. The effort spent in understanding it and learning the command line will pay big dividends when you come to actually use it.
As a leftfield choice have you considered FreeBSD? The documentation isn't as good as Arch, but it is very easy to get a working machine up and running.
I've tried watching RT's coverage of things, and if you thing Western media is biased, you ain't seen nothing yet
I've been touting RT.com as a good source of foreign news for a while. It seems to carry a lot of stories that Western sources don't even bother to mention.
One concrete recent example is the Gitmo hunger strike, which has been going on for over a month and only in the last couple of days has been picked up elsewhere.
All news media is biased. The BBC website is better than most, but has been pushing a pro-rebel Syria view despite the evidence that they are just as cruel and authoritarian as the Asaad government. BBC Radio 5 here in the UK seems to push a right wing POV quite hard, I suspect to pander to its reasonably affluent middle aged audience.
Let's also not forget the bad old days when ThinkPads had twice as many screws and screw lengths as Dell laptops had, making servicing them a major pain. Putting in a too-long screw in the wrong place risked damage to the motherboard.
Which is why ThinkPads have always had a freely downloadable hardware service manual, which would include every step of disassembly, including which screws went where!
It was inevitable I suppose. The fuck-knows-how-many dollars spent on advertising and marketing and consumer focus were going to be spent somewhere. As a result, the last few years people have been flocking to build sites whose entire business model was developed in order to provide data and information in exchange for it.
Inevitably, there is a push for more information. What your real name is. Your DOB. Where you work or live. What your favourite place to eat is. What you like. Even where you are at any moment.
(It follows that government either already is or will be a customer.)
I do wonder if there is a speculative bubble forming around the market for that particular business model. How much of what is gathered can actually be used? How much is it actually worth?
I suspect that is the escape. If the bubble bursts and the data isn't profitable enough then the intrusion should subside dramatically.
Do they really think NK will launch a missile our way, or is this just another example of security theater?
I imagine it is just another imaginary threat which is a perfect excuse to ramp up defence spending.
US officials during the Cold War would frequently state that the USSR had a massive advantage over the US in ballistic missles, even though in reality the US had thousands more. It was simply a fabrication in order to justify more and more military spending.
Nothing surprises me with US defence spending any more.
Isn't it a bit too black and white to say one sector is unequivocally more innovative than the other?
Call Of Duty 8: Kill The Arabs (or whatever money spinning title the publisher is mulching out now) isn't innovative in the same way Half Life (1 or 2), Deus Ex (original!), Doom or Starcraft etc. were, but likewise I don't doubt with modern AAA titles a lot of work goes into the graphics.
Microtransactions are innovative, certainly, but moreso in a psychologically manipulative sort of fashion.
I guess my point is does it have to be one or the other?
I suspect Sony really don't want to withstand another volley of terrible publicity. I also doubt that they want to drag the whole issue through a court, which would almost certainly happen.
The current rules seem to be ill defined. Gamers technically own the games, but are at the whim of the PS Network. This gives Sony enormous power over defining what "ownership" actually means.
Prohibiting second hand games formally now would jeopardize the console sales. Doing it gradually or suddenly (like with Linux on the PS3) a year or two down the line by way of PS Network T&C changes would be far safer for them.
This isn't about making games cheaper, it's about control and ownership.
I don't understand the goodwill Valve seem to receive from the PC gaming community simply because they have a few cheap deals on. Does it really give them a free pass to lock down PC gaming and take control of our purchases?
Some games might be cheap on Steam, but they come with a very high hidden cost.
These days I've got thousands of IP-addresses on my hosts.deny
What's even cooler is you can set Denyhosts to synchronise your local hosts.deny or hosts.evil list, so you can quickly build a large and fairly comprehensive blacklist that updates over time.
Younger people, speaking generally, don't tend to wear watches. The logic being that you've already got other devices that can tell you the time, such as a phone.
So if it's a "smart watch" then you're duplicating a load of stuff that would be easier to do on a phone already. If it's a fashionable normal watch but with patent troll rounded edges, then why would people need one anyway?
I'm assuming it'll be something else entirely. Apple, as much as I'm not fond of them, don't really release that many complete failures these days.
Slashdot Mirror
If they followed the lead of other UK burger manufacturers and they used horse meat instead.
...there needs to be some benefit for me the customer.
Does there? Or will people just buy it anyway and in some cases complain about it after their purchase?
Always on is the content industry's wet dream, whereby the purchase model turns to a leasing model. This has huge ramifications.
The time people will really start caring is in ten years time when the activiation servers are switched off and they can't play their games anymore.
He was naive, the coalition is not 50/50. It's more like 90/10 in favour of the other party (for those of non-UK and who care).
Then why were the Tories so desperate for the coalition then? They were so desperate that they conceded the referendum for AV, which if it hadn't been so hopelessly managed might have changed the political landscape forever in the Lib Dem's favour.
The Tories had 306 seats, while Labour had 258 and the Lib Dems 57. If they'd not been so pig headed, they could have had a veto on every piece of legislation that has passed since 2010.
That means they could have stopped tuition fee hikes, spending cuts, welfare decimation, selling off of the NHS, the continued accumulation of the public sector by private companies and the rest of the Great Fire Sale to the corporate class that the Tories have been running since they got back into power. Just because they put the kaibosh on one thing doesn't make them principled.
Face it, they had the power to stop any of it, and they didn't. We might as well combine the main three parties and call them the Conservative Party.
That inflation exists. Or did he miss out that vital piece of information during his little rant?
Unfortunately for Steve Forbes, the value of things are relative.
I'm sorry, could you repeat that? I suffer from reading impairment.
The rise of the micro-gig is very much a sign of the wider deterioration of working conditions. Rights are part of the issue, but the other is that the pay per hour is often pitiful.
This is another consequence of the neoliberal strategy of keeping a persistent pool of unemployed people. Don't believe government propaganda about wanting everyone in work; full employment in the US and other Western democracies has not been a policy goal since the late 70's.
Put very very simply, If there are two people for one job, wages, rights and benefits go down. If there are two jobs for one person, they go up.
I actually tried writing articles for one of those big content aggregator sites a couple of years ago, only to stop once I realised I'd written an entire novella worth of content and in return was making about 10 cents per article per month. At that rate, 1 article that pay have taken two hours to write would have needed about a decade just to make $6 an hour.
I doubt other sites in a similar vein are much better.
The UK economy has grown massively since the 1980's, so apparently we're insourcing more than we're outsourcing.
Economic growth, frankly, doesn't mean shit if the top 10% make all of the money. The 1980's was the start of the economic malaise we face today, where rising household debt ratios countered the stagnation in real wages and the steadily falling share of the wealth held by the bottom 50% of UK workers. This trend was started during the Thatcher years, and is at the point now where 10% of the households own about half of the wealth.
Manufacturing was dead by the time she arrived, the unions did it to themselves. All she did was pull the plug to put them out of their misery.
There are still whole cities that have never recovered from the death of manufacturing. Service sector jobs simply don't pay as well, and there aren't as many to go around. I say this a lot, but in an economy that relies primarily on consumerism this is bad fucking news in the long run.
Still, most that responsibility lies on those in the post Thatcher years. Don't even get me started on the malicious and ignorant buffoons that currently run the country.
And we need to come to terms with that fact and work towards improving the 'Linux Inside' brand image.
I wasn't aware that there was even a need to have a brand image for Linux, let alone improve it.
Could it represent the seed money for the Europa Clipper?
It'd be so much cooler if it represented the seed money for a full scale Panther Clipper.
"Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!"
O R'LYEH?
Competition, the good part of capitalism.
Fixed that for you!
Keynesians criticizing other Keynesians for being Keynesians. If you all backed off and shut it and let the damn thing crash, we could get back to having a stable market after we pick the pieces up
That is to suggest we had a stable market prior to the crash? We havn't had a stable market in decades, if by stable you mean few or no bubbles forming and no recessions or stock market crashes.
Higher household debt ratios over the last twenty years as a result of falling wages have meant what was previously just damaging is now becoming catastrophic. The 2008 crash was a lot of things, but one of the things we should have learned was that economic growth cannot be funded from debt. Governments across the western world have completely ignored that lesson, preferring to stick to frankly delusional neoliberal economics.
My point is without addressing the death of the western middle class, unemployment, underemployment, falling wages and spiralling debt ratios we will never have a stable market. We'll just have harder and bigger crashes.
My experiences of the more "user friendly" distros (mostly Ubuntu) was that while they automated a lot of steps it left me with something not entirely dissimilar to Windows - bloated with similar performance and needing a lot of tweaking to trim it down.
The nastiest part of Arch now the beautifully easy menu system has been removed is installation, though thankfully it is very, very well documented. The effort spent in understanding it and learning the command line will pay big dividends when you come to actually use it.
As a leftfield choice have you considered FreeBSD? The documentation isn't as good as Arch, but it is very easy to get a working machine up and running.
I've tried watching RT's coverage of things, and if you thing Western media is biased, you ain't seen nothing yet
I've been touting RT.com as a good source of foreign news for a while. It seems to carry a lot of stories that Western sources don't even bother to mention.
One concrete recent example is the Gitmo hunger strike, which has been going on for over a month and only in the last couple of days has been picked up elsewhere.
All news media is biased. The BBC website is better than most, but has been pushing a pro-rebel Syria view despite the evidence that they are just as cruel and authoritarian as the Asaad government. BBC Radio 5 here in the UK seems to push a right wing POV quite hard, I suspect to pander to its reasonably affluent middle aged audience.
It all needs to be treated with specticism.
Is that instead of one there will now be two agencies doing drone missions. The Pentagon will take over, but the CIA will still do it in secret.
CAPTCHA: Truthful
Let's also not forget the bad old days when ThinkPads had twice as many screws and screw lengths as Dell laptops had, making servicing them a major pain. Putting in a too-long screw in the wrong place risked damage to the motherboard.
Which is why ThinkPads have always had a freely downloadable hardware service manual, which would include every step of disassembly, including which screws went where!
Pick one or more:
This is bullshit.
Slashdot was better 5/8/10 years ago!
[Obvious thing] results in [obvious outcome]. News at eleven.
Where is the CowboyNeal option?
This isn't News for Nerds.
It was inevitable I suppose. The fuck-knows-how-many dollars spent on advertising and marketing and consumer focus were going to be spent somewhere. As a result, the last few years people have been flocking to build sites whose entire business model was developed in order to provide data and information in exchange for it.
Inevitably, there is a push for more information. What your real name is. Your DOB. Where you work or live. What your favourite place to eat is. What you like. Even where you are at any moment.
(It follows that government either already is or will be a customer.)
I do wonder if there is a speculative bubble forming around the market for that particular business model. How much of what is gathered can actually be used? How much is it actually worth?
I suspect that is the escape. If the bubble bursts and the data isn't profitable enough then the intrusion should subside dramatically.
Do they really think NK will launch a missile our way, or is this just another example of security theater?
I imagine it is just another imaginary threat which is a perfect excuse to ramp up defence spending.
US officials during the Cold War would frequently state that the USSR had a massive advantage over the US in ballistic missles, even though in reality the US had thousands more. It was simply a fabrication in order to justify more and more military spending.
Nothing surprises me with US defence spending any more.
In an ideal world, we would be able to eliminate CO2 from our atmosphere completely.
No need to wait! Make a difference and stop exhaling today!
Isn't it a bit too black and white to say one sector is unequivocally more innovative than the other?
Call Of Duty 8: Kill The Arabs (or whatever money spinning title the publisher is mulching out now) isn't innovative in the same way Half Life (1 or 2), Deus Ex (original!), Doom or Starcraft etc. were, but likewise I don't doubt with modern AAA titles a lot of work goes into the graphics.
Microtransactions are innovative, certainly, but moreso in a psychologically manipulative sort of fashion.
I guess my point is does it have to be one or the other?
I suspect Sony really don't want to withstand another volley of terrible publicity. I also doubt that they want to drag the whole issue through a court, which would almost certainly happen.
The current rules seem to be ill defined. Gamers technically own the games, but are at the whim of the PS Network. This gives Sony enormous power over defining what "ownership" actually means.
Prohibiting second hand games formally now would jeopardize the console sales. Doing it gradually or suddenly (like with Linux on the PS3) a year or two down the line by way of PS Network T&C changes would be far safer for them.
Steam games are so cheap, does it really matter?
Yes, it matters.
This isn't about making games cheaper, it's about control and ownership.
I don't understand the goodwill Valve seem to receive from the PC gaming community simply because they have a few cheap deals on. Does it really give them a free pass to lock down PC gaming and take control of our purchases?
Some games might be cheap on Steam, but they come with a very high hidden cost.
These days I've got thousands of IP-addresses on my hosts.deny
What's even cooler is you can set Denyhosts to synchronise your local hosts.deny or hosts.evil list, so you can quickly build a large and fairly comprehensive blacklist that updates over time.
Younger people, speaking generally, don't tend to wear watches. The logic being that you've already got other devices that can tell you the time, such as a phone.
So if it's a "smart watch" then you're duplicating a load of stuff that would be easier to do on a phone already. If it's a fashionable normal watch but with patent troll rounded edges, then why would people need one anyway?
I'm assuming it'll be something else entirely. Apple, as much as I'm not fond of them, don't really release that many complete failures these days.