It sounds pretty much like the system we have here, actually. Had the PP reached 1% (or rather, will it - it's still a day of counting left) it would have gotten / will get a "refund" for the money they had to collect in order to have the ballots printed, and it would also have ensured printing and distribution of ballots for the next election. No party can print its own ballots. Orders have to be placed in advance with the Election Authority.
Also, basically, voting is for parties, not individual candidates. Since fairly recently though, we are able to tick a certain candidate on a party's ballots, to increase his or hers chances of getting into parliament.
And if you get more than a certain percentage of the votes (I believe it's 2.5%), you're entitled to a sort of grant, which is given out based on your last general election results, in tenths of a percent increments. (Which means, of course, that the bigger parties get the most - surprise!)
Despite needing a much higher % of votes to get an MP for the EU Parliament, it might be easier to get in there. Scandinavians consider the EU Parliament a joke anyway, so why not just vote for a "less-serious" party?
Indeed. Considering that the latest big surprise came in the last EU elections, and that people generally had no idea what the party ("The June list") actually stood for, except some vague idea that "they're against the EU" (they really are more of eurosceptics who want to limit the EU's influence over member countries, afaik); for the pirates to get enough protest votes to get in doesn't seem all that improbable.
(Wow, that sentence really did run on, didn't it?)
And I think the limit for getting into the European Parliament is 4%, same as in our general elections, is it not?
I understand that there's concern because apparently most of the developers work for Wasabi and development appears to proceed (or stagnate) dependent on Wasabi's whims; but apart from the undisputed mis-management, are there any other signs of decay I'm just simply missing?
Doesn't seem to be any gotchas, really.
And as for the allegations of mismanagement, what I have seem on the mailing lists so far is exactly one former bigshot shouting "coup d'etat!" (for some reason timed to coincide with his commit privileges being revoked), and tons of people saying "if what you say is true, it's serious". It does seem that the project could do with an infusion of transparency, though.
Until more than only one person says the city is burning, I'll rather believe it's the fallout from some petty power stuggle that he appears to have lost. The later part of the discussion, with all the insults and the he said/she said level of discussion doesn't inspire confidence in mycroft either.
That is not to say that his original post did not have any valid points. I think the project lacks a sense of direction, and it's really hard to see what exactly makes NetBSD a better choice than any of the other BSDs for a new user today.
But still, NetBSD continues to run just fine on my machine. There's serious development going on too, with Elad Efrat's new security model/authentication work for example, and just today I read a post from one guy offering to add support for pluggable schedulers. This does not look like decay and stagnation to me.
Note: I am just a user, and this is all from what I have been able to read on the public mailing lists. I'm sure there are factual errors here, but but my general impression if far, far from the "NetBSD is dying!" scenario that it seems some people here are taking for granted.
You're probably right that it's easier to mix-and-match using Linux than NetBSD; fundamentally different goals and all that.
But you'll have to explain exactly how "more configurable" implies "more portable", because I don't see the connection. If anything, it seems to imply that Linux-based solutions would be more fragmented (if you want to use Linux on platform X, you need to use library Y and the Z tools, etc).
That looks like less portability to me -- the kernel is portable, but the userland is not, and you have to pick the right tools for your specific platform. (OTOH, that would make it more scalable; use less memory-hungry tools or more fully featured ones, whichever is the best fit.)
Or have I misread you completely? Feel free to tell me exactly how I'm wrong.
The whole point of NetBSD is portability. If it weren't for portability, NetBSD might as well not exist. But the problem is Linux has taken over as the portability leader and has a huge margin.
Any NetBSD advocate worth his salt will tell you there's a big difference between being easy to port, and actually having been ported. And the next point in the argument is that Linux runs on many architectures simply because there's lots of people working on porting Linux to many architectures; it's a brute-force approach, if you will; whereas NetBSD's architecture makes it easier to do the actual porting.
I can't really offer any insight myself, I've never gotten involved with anything that would require me to port an OS, or even look at the kernel code. I do run NetBSD though, and used to run Linux.
DragonFly BSD has Matt Dillon. [...] He has the capabilities of five to ten average developers. And that is why DragonFly BSD has been so successful in so little time.
This sounds like obvious fanboyism, of course. But having lurked on the DFBSD mailing lists for a while, I can tell that it doesn't seem to be that far off. It's pretty amazing seeing someone someone reporting a faily obscure kernel bug in one post, and then Dillon posting a patch fixing it in the very next one. And from my perspective, apparently major rewrites of kernel subsystems sometimes have seemed to move impossibly fast.
Of course, I'm not in a position to accurately judge everything that goes on, since I really don't know enough about the internals of the kernel, so take it with a grain of salt, etc.
I'm sure that being in the position of being able to hack on his hobby project full time doesn't hurt either, of course.
One thing is for sure: from a NetBSD user's perspective, DragonFly is looking better and better all the time. Now if it would only run on Xen too...
It is important to note that the servers were siezed after a judge autorized the siezure. Once they notice that they cannot gain any info from the servers, they will be returned.
Does that sort of thing still work in Germany? I'm asking because I know that here (Sweden), it doesn't. The prosecutor is still holding on to completely unrelated hardware that was taken during the Pirate Bay raid, for example. I'd love to have the option to move to a somewhat better country, if it has to come to that.
I guess posting a week late won't exactly improve my chances of getting a response..
Considering that the blog post linked in the summary is very nearly three years old today, it does indeed look like someone did a bit of creative trawling...
Not neutrinos, muons.
[...]
Here, for instance is an image of the shadow of the moon. Big deal you say? Well that image was taken "in muons" from 700 meters underground in the Soudan mine of Minnesota.
Big deal, I say. Wikipedia also says:
The shadow is the result of approximately 120 muons missing from a total of 33 million detected in Soudan 2 over its 10 years of operation.
Maybe the information is wrong or you know something I don't, but it doesn't look very practical to me.
I was thinking more along the lines of getting people not to even do it in the first place. There's little reason for people to break the rules when they understand them. (again, IMHO.) And especially, when they understand why the rules are there.
But of course, being clear about what will happen if you break the rules can't hurt either.
It is possible to filter out these sites with a little more work. For example, my company blocks any url that contains 'proxy'. It also filters most proxy sites that you can find on Google.
That's why you should use proxies that have "secret addresses" and run over https. Lets say I choose to make a monthly $5 donation to Überproxy, Inc. Now you just see me connecting to www.abc23foo.net port 443; and the domain changes every 2-3 months.
That's not a comment on policy though. I know that some places (such as schools and libraries) really must do it. (Or try to.) But for most workplaces, IMHO, it would make more sense to just talk to people, and spend the time on something else.
You don't have to use "Yet Another Disc Format", it's entirely up to you how current you remain...
Not really. Manufacturers inevitably stop making older formats; and so when my CD- and DVD-writers break down, something that mechanical things do; or when stores stop selling CD-Rs, I will be forced to upgrade.
Your point is more valid when it comes to CPUs and other purely electrical pieces of technology (my Commodore 64 still works fine). They'll stop working too, but hopefully early enough that there's still spares on eBay, or late enough that I won't care.
But might be useful using some form of automatic system to at least provide an "early draft" of what has been written. That would at least be useful in keeping the public informed on the goals of the project, and let's set so double the killer delete select all.
It's already being done with terrorism (shipping people around the world to be tortured), this looks like an "excellent" way to do virtually the same thing a bit more discreetly, and for a whole new category of people.
I'm sure that's what they tell you, it certainly is what they're telling us over here in the EU ("We didn't want this law, but the US/UK/Germany insisted..."), but that doesn't make it true.
And of course they are adopting national laws after working out the treaties first, it's less work that way. Plus, making a national law and then going to treaty negotiations makes you look like an asshole who has already decided what the result will be.
Really, (again, I'm not a biologist) it seems like simpler organisms are generally the things that make it through massive changes in the enviornment, because the more complicated animals are too-adapted to the current condiditions
Not really. Well, "simpler" does not equal "less adapted", anyway; unless you define one to be the other. What helps "simpler" organisms is that there's just so damn many of them. Even if 90% of all species of insects were to go extinct tomorrow, you could bet that the remaining 10% would evolve quickly to fill pretty much all the niches left empty.
Do the same thought experiment for bacteria, and it's still a mass extinction, but perhaps not one that we might even notice.
and can't evolve fast enough (too long of lifespans maybe?).
Spot on.
The exception to this might be animals (humans) that are smart enough to either adapt their enviornment to them (for better or worse), or use tools to protect themselves from that change.
Don't forget that we're also pretty damn good generalists. There's not much that we haven't, at one time or another, been eating or living in. And our ridiculously large brains "just" makes us even more so. (That plant makes you sick? Have you tried cooking it? No water in the desert? Have you tried digging with a stick? Etc.)
I haven't read the article yet, but it seems that the more advanced organisms are always going to be the first to die out from changes in the environment, because they're specially adapted to the current situation.
Algae (and "slime") are adapted to their situation too. They're just affected by different variables than us. (like for instance pH, weather)
Something that likely does makes a difference, though, is the rate of reproduction. The faster you reproduce, the faster you (as a species) adapt. Bad news for humans, elephants, whales, etc; good news for bacteria and algae.
The space shuttle is so big it can practically carry a moon landing system into orbit for assembly in one or two missions.
What advantages would that give us, exactly? Seems to me like having to haul up fuel into low Earth orbit would be enough of a hassle not to bother, and go with a direct shot instead.
"That's not quite right. You might very well have had some form of directed evolution."
The that is certianly not natural selection. Which is what people mean when they say evolution.
And that was my point, that when people say "evolution" (observable facts) they should not confuse it with "natural selection" (hypothesis that explains them). Thank you.
"But you're probably from the US, and they don't teach this kind of stuff there, right?;-)"
haha fuck you.
I am tired of that attitude.
What attitude? Jokes?
Well, at least you knew what I was talking about. Can't have it all I guess.
Since a good 90% of what I and others do is not specific to a distro or even an operating system, I thought I'd take the opportunity to ask if anyone here can recommend a decent place for Unix discussion (mailing lists, forums, etc). I gave up on Usenet a long time ago, but perhaps there's something there too?
Slashdot Mirror
Also, basically, voting is for parties, not individual candidates. Since fairly recently though, we are able to tick a certain candidate on a party's ballots, to increase his or hers chances of getting into parliament.
And if you get more than a certain percentage of the votes (I believe it's 2.5%), you're entitled to a sort of grant, which is given out based on your last general election results, in tenths of a percent increments. (Which means, of course, that the bigger parties get the most - surprise!)
(Wow, that sentence really did run on, didn't it?)
And I think the limit for getting into the European Parliament is 4%, same as in our general elections, is it not?
Yes, it's hard to believe, but they actually foresaw that there would be some international interest in this whole thing.
By the way, thanks for posting the HTML as plaintext - made quoting easier.
And as for the allegations of mismanagement, what I have seem on the mailing lists so far is exactly one former bigshot shouting "coup d'etat!" (for some reason timed to coincide with his commit privileges being revoked), and tons of people saying "if what you say is true, it's serious". It does seem that the project could do with an infusion of transparency, though.
Until more than only one person says the city is burning, I'll rather believe it's the fallout from some petty power stuggle that he appears to have lost. The later part of the discussion, with all the insults and the he said/she said level of discussion doesn't inspire confidence in mycroft either.
That is not to say that his original post did not have any valid points. I think the project lacks a sense of direction, and it's really hard to see what exactly makes NetBSD a better choice than any of the other BSDs for a new user today.
But still, NetBSD continues to run just fine on my machine. There's serious development going on too, with Elad Efrat's new security model/authentication work for example, and just today I read a post from one guy offering to add support for pluggable schedulers. This does not look like decay and stagnation to me.
Note: I am just a user, and this is all from what I have been able to read on the public mailing lists. I'm sure there are factual errors here, but but my general impression if far, far from the "NetBSD is dying!" scenario that it seems some people here are taking for granted.
But you'll have to explain exactly how "more configurable" implies "more portable", because I don't see the connection. If anything, it seems to imply that Linux-based solutions would be more fragmented (if you want to use Linux on platform X, you need to use library Y and the Z tools, etc).
That looks like less portability to me -- the kernel is portable, but the userland is not, and you have to pick the right tools for your specific platform. (OTOH, that would make it more scalable; use less memory-hungry tools or more fully featured ones, whichever is the best fit.)
Or have I misread you completely? Feel free to tell me exactly how I'm wrong.
I can't really offer any insight myself, I've never gotten involved with anything that would require me to port an OS, or even look at the kernel code. I do run NetBSD though, and used to run Linux.
Of course, I'm not in a position to accurately judge everything that goes on, since I really don't know enough about the internals of the kernel, so take it with a grain of salt, etc.
I'm sure that being in the position of being able to hack on his hobby project full time doesn't hurt either, of course.
One thing is for sure: from a NetBSD user's perspective, DragonFly is looking better and better all the time. Now if it would only run on Xen too...
I guess posting a week late won't exactly improve my chances of getting a response..
Seriously, the column linked isn't all that bad; but it's hardly newsworthy.
But of course, being clear about what will happen if you break the rules can't hurt either.
That's why you should use proxies that have "secret addresses" and run over https. Lets say I choose to make a monthly $5 donation to Überproxy, Inc. Now you just see me connecting to www.abc23foo.net port 443; and the domain changes every 2-3 months.
That's not a comment on policy though. I know that some places (such as schools and libraries) really must do it. (Or try to.) But for most workplaces, IMHO, it would make more sense to just talk to people, and spend the time on something else.
Freenet has already been mentioned. (Here's a link.) Funny that Ian Clarke is involved in both.I've never seen anyone use it though.
Your point is more valid when it comes to CPUs and other purely electrical pieces of technology (my Commodore 64 still works fine). They'll stop working too, but hopefully early enough that there's still spares on eBay, or late enough that I won't care.
But might be useful using some form of automatic system to at least provide an "early draft" of what has been written. That would at least be useful in keeping the public informed on the goals of the project, and let's set so double the killer delete select all.
It's already being done with terrorism (shipping people around the world to be tortured), this looks like an "excellent" way to do virtually the same thing a bit more discreetly, and for a whole new category of people.
I'm sure that's what they tell you, it certainly is what they're telling us over here in the EU ("We didn't want this law, but the US/UK/Germany insisted..."), but that doesn't make it true.
And of course they are adopting national laws after working out the treaties first, it's less work that way. Plus, making a national law and then going to treaty negotiations makes you look like an asshole who has already decided what the result will be.
Intelligent de-sign, I hear they call it now. (come on mods, he was joking...)
Spot on. Don't forget that we're also pretty damn good generalists. There's not much that we haven't, at one time or another, been eating or living in. And our ridiculously large brains "just" makes us even more so. (That plant makes you sick? Have you tried cooking it? No water in the desert? Have you tried digging with a stick? Etc.)Do the same thought experiment for bacteria, and it's still a mass extinction, but perhaps not one that we might even notice.
Something that likely does makes a difference, though, is the rate of reproduction. The faster you reproduce, the faster you (as a species) adapt. Bad news for humans, elephants, whales, etc; good news for bacteria and algae.
Well, at least you knew what I was talking about. Can't have it all I guess.
Since a good 90% of what I and others do is not specific to a distro or even an operating system, I thought I'd take the opportunity to ask if anyone here can recommend a decent place for Unix discussion (mailing lists, forums, etc). I gave up on Usenet a long time ago, but perhaps there's something there too?
(I was aiming for "Funny", in case anyone was wondering..)