Value can be attributed to things that produce value.
l = []; l.append(l); print l. Your definition is circular.
Value is a measure of how much we want or like something. I value personal liberties. I value economic liberties. I value food, clean air, sex, internet, staple guns, learning new things, intellect and reason in myself and others, science and lots of other things.
Value influences how much we're willing to give up to get the thing we value. If I had to choose between a house to live in and air to breath, I'd choose the air. If I had to choose between sex and internet, I'd choose sex. If I had to choose between 100$ and a copy of GH3+controller, I'd choose Guitar Hero. If I had to choose between 200$ and two Guitar Hero packs, I might choose the money, or I might choose the GH packs in hope of a resale.
Money has value for society because it allows us to break symmetry: I don't have to write code for the baker to get his bread. It has value to the individual (or the organization) because we all agree to trade it for other things we value.
Asking for the value of Linux is a vague question. The value of Linux what? The Copyrights? Not sure; even if everybody handed copyright on all FOSS code to a buyer, it's still FOSS, so we could just fork it and continue doing what we do. The buyer could allow itself to link GPL-incompatible code to _its_ GPL-licensed code. Or go all-the-way proprietary. How large a competitive advantage is that going to give? Not much, I think.
Linux use? To me, being able to use Linux is more valuable than being able to use Windows. I'm a member of our minority group on that. To some people, there's a big dollar amount [of saved money] attached to using Linux instead of $OS. Measure all those amounts well and add them up, and you may end up with a number that actually means something and has a relationship to reality.
An interesting bit from TFA:
In 2008, IDC forecast that the Linux ecosystem would be worth $49 billion by 2011. That report coincidentally was sponsored by the Linux Foundation as well.
Is that like a Gartner report saying Vista is worth $BIGNUM monies? Because from here I can't tell the difference, so someone please spell it out for me.
(#define Linux GNU/Linux or Linux, as appropriate)
Looks like a room or building size Faraday Cage (a foil hat the size of your house!) might be the only defence...
Would it be feasible and useful to shield only the keyboard case and wire? If it isn't useful by itself, could it be a necessary part of a bigger useful prevention measure?
Marxism was disproved as a theory in the late 19th century
Citation needed. Would you also please EITHER boil "Marxism" down to a single true-or-false statement OR explain what it means to disprove something that isn't a single true-or-false statement?
You have to see the forest for the trees; the forest is what Apple can do to your use of your iPhone compared to what Google can do to your use of your Android.
For any application A, Apple can prevent you from running A by not letting it be sold on iAppz. If you buy app A from gAppz, Google can delete it, but they can't prevent you from running it altogether since you can download it from my-gAppz.author-of-A.org.
If you bring the companies' past behavior into the picture, you're trying to use it to predict what will actually happen. That sounds like buying music from Wal-Mart based on the promise that "we would never shut down the DRM servers", versus buying mp3s from amazon: one of the companies can decrease the value of your product, the other can not do so.
It stands to reason that those who can't decrease the value of your product [that would be Google] are more pro-consumer.
If someone is peddling a universal VM, they are either doing a new low-level VM (oh great, we've already got x86, JVM and CLR and they have a lot more existing tool support thankyouverymuch)
I disagree with the characterization of JVM as a low-level VM. Of course there is the instructions that map one-to-one onto x86 instructions (arithmetic for ints and floats, jmp{,zero,neg}). But in it we also find the notion of classes and their relationships, plus introspection, i.e. accessing types (classes), data (objects) and code (methods) by name at runtime. I would say those are fairly high-level concepts which are not found on the x86 or the LLVM (= Low-Level Virtual Machine).
Also, there's the whole issue of bytecode verification: for each value of the instruction pointer, the stack must have the same height and type layout for all execution paths going through that value of the instruction pointer; you must also return or throw out of a method, you're not allowed to overrun it. Modifying the code is a no-no. There are per-class limits on some of {the number of fields, the number of the methods, the size of the code segment}.
I don't know much about the CLR; it's what C# runs on, right? I heard talk about using a different VM for a different kind of languages, either functional or scripting (i.e. dynamically typed). That would push towards (if not all the way to) a high-level VM characterization as well, as most low-level virtual machines are quite generic.
It would be interesting to explore the options of more modular political systems where citizens, when they dislike their unit enough, could reasonably easily disengage and join another unit.
What you're describing sounds like either political parties or federation member states. Whichever it is, you already have it, and it's broken;)
Having more than two parties would generally do you yanks a lot of good, I think. Even if the president is always going to be from $BIG_PARTY_1 or $BIG_PARTY_2, giving the population the ability to express more nuances of opinion and having that opinion influence the composition of the parliament might be a good thing. Then all the extremists can vote for the greenies without harming the democrat, and you'll get more environment-friendly policy reflecting public opinion(!) instead of handing the victory to the republican. And the libertarians can vote for the Libertarian Party who will then point at whomever is supporting the most important libertarian values for president [probably the republican], and y'all can have your freedoms in accordance with public opinion.
Who's going on a campaign on that message? Oh right, only those who don't win the power to change the broken system.
If Windows can be infected with viruses or malware within hours of installation, with almost no user input, that is an OS problem. Lame excuses not accepted.
Try s/hours/seconds/. Happened to me. I can't tell you how much I hated everything MS at that point.
While this new technology may be great for mouse users, I'm not up in arms with joy. Would there be a gain for trackballs? I'm using the Logitech Marble Mouse(*), and as far as I can tell, the optics goes on between the ball itself and a camera below the ball; as a producer, you control the surface completely. Would there be anything gained by tolerating more diverse surfaces if you're never going to use them?
(*) I can recommend everyone to go out and buy one, it's great. You can put more clutter near your 'puter since you don't need the surface to move the ball around, and it feels nice in your hands. It comes with scroll buttons instead of a wheel; if you use one as the EmulateWheel button (man ${xorg mouse driver}), you can use the ball as a vertical and horizontal scroll wheel. Horizontal scroll wheels is one of these things you don't know you want until you try it [so go out and try it].
generic VMs divorced from the syntactic details of specific languages
The syntax of programming languages is something understood by the front-end of a compiler. It then translates the code into code that does the same thing in the back-end language (such as JVM/PyVM/x86/LLVM bytecode). Neither back-end knows about the syntax of the front-end language.
The real challenge is to adopt conventions on the back-end VM that allows different languages to talk together. It'd be straightforward to implement an x86 emulator on top of the JVM and run the ${language} VM on that x86. Wow, you now have ${language} running on the JVM. So? You can't talk to the Java library that way.
If you want languages to talk together, they need to agree on data representation formats and calling conventions. Try getting object.field if you don't know where field is relative to the base address of object. Try calling object.method() if you don't know the format (or location) of object.__vtbl.
Also, the semantics of some operations have to be considered if a language has to deal with a foreign object model. Let's say we target the Java VM. How do you implement multiple inheritance? What does.super do on a class with multiple parents? How do you implement "Object *p = malloc(...); *p = my_object;"? How do you implement C++'s delete? How do you implement python's generators?
To support a set of languages, the VM must support the union of features. To make the languages talk together smoothly, the VM must support each feature in a reasonably straightforward way. The two demands pull the VM in opposite directions.
I don't want to just poo-poo this idea, but my experience with dealing with the Java VM (I've written a java-important-subset compiler in my compiler course) is that it's tightly coupled to the Java way of doing things. My experience with different languages (C, C++, Java, python, perl, ruby, haskell, scheme) says that things are different enough that you can transfer most of what you know from one language to another [at least for the oo/procedural], but that the devil is in the details, and the VM has to handle all values of $details.
Your password can be read in/proc; top will gladly do the work for me. Don't ever give the password as part of the command line.
And you're wrong, using crypto isn't hard. I use then full-disk encryption Ubuntu has spoon-fed me. When I boot, I enter "hunter2" at the password prompt. That's it.
2. it is superior design to have a browser that gracefully degrades rather than being and brittle and refusing to render everytime someone forgets to close a
element. not simply because of nonstandard pages, but for a whole host of other reasons, including handling partial transmissions
If all browsers implemented the standard correctly and was anal retentive about compliance (just like your average compiler/interpreter is), people would learn to write compliant pages (just like hobbyists learn to write syntactically correct C programs). The problem of nonstandard pages would not have occured, and it will disappear over time when people realise their web page is not getting out there.
Partial transmissions of valid pages is still an issue; parse what you have and render it, then add to the parse tree and re-render until the page is all the way there.
hobbyists should not expected to be anal retentive standards zealots
Hobbyists can write valid C/python/java programmers even though the compiler is anal-retentive about it. The only thing won by browsers not being strict is that we don't have to do the work required to climb out of the hole we've dug ourselves into.
if ever there were some sort of gatekeeper organization or rigorous technical specification that enforced standards compliance,
Like the C specification enforced by your compiler?
you would raise the barrier to entry onto the web by regular joes. you would reduce the variety of the web, make it more monoclonal, and hurt a vibrant ocmmunity
You'd get rid of some of the crap. Some of the crap would remain crap but for fewer reasons. Some of the crap would cease to be crap.
low standards compliance is not only a complete nonissue and not a problem, its a good sign. the lower standards compliance is, the better for us all
You can only access your bank over the web if you not only switch browser but also switch operating system because the browser your banks compels you to use doesn't run on the operating system you like.
If you actually do that, it also means your favorite IDE is going to look, feel and act like crap, you'd have to change versioning system, and you'd have to spend time making LaTeX use Computer Modern so your output is going to remain looking pretty, you'd have shitty window management, and... [your favorite reason to stick with your current OS].
Low standards compliance is probably not a big problem for my previous bank; I wasn't that big of a customer. In a sense, I shouldn't have to switch banks to get a functioning web banking service. No, I don't feel entitled. But I do think every developer should at some point in their training develop an application target to a 64-bit big-endian multi-CPU box running Amiga-OS and lynx, just to be forcefully yanked out of the "all the world's a PC/Mac/IE/*nix."
One of the major advantages of a central repository for software is [...] It's a big advantage distributions like Ubuntu have over Windows.
Sure; that's fine. But Ubuntu doesn't come with a Canonical Remote Administration Account that lets Mark ssh into my box and delete my installed launchpad-competitor. What information I'm presented with says that Google will have that. How I installed the software Google deletes is pretty orthogonal to Google's ability to delete it.
I'm with you most of the way. If you don't play, don't complain about not winning; sure.
It is clear that it doesn't take brains to vote for Democrats, which is why Democrats all look stupid. And the Republicans aren't far behind, so all you beer swilling Nascar idiots better shut up now.
I'm sure glad I'm Libertarian.
Here you're just being unnecessarily arrogant. For the record, it doesn't take brains to vote Libertarian. It takes a cross on a piece of paper [substitute your local equivalent]. Same is true for casting any other vote.
But let me ask, why are you glad you hold Libertarian views? How would you be unhappier if you were a Democrat? Or a Republican?
I think I'd be happier as a Democrat: then my guy would have good chances of winning (as it stands right now). And [if Obama wins] I'd be proud that my party was the first to put a black man in the oval office.
If I were a republican, I might be happy that my party has been in office, but I might also be not-so-happy about what those terms have done to the public perception of my party (from fiscally responsible and loved by the upper middle class to warmongering science-hating fundies).
[disclaimer, I'm not a US citizen, I've never been there, and the only black people I know are distant acquaintances].
Say I was a US citizen. I'd probably be happier as a Creationist than if I accepted the findings biology, geology, astronomy and probably some other science(s) I've left out, because then my country has, from my subjective viewpoint, seen the light of reason and accepted God. And some schools have finally put Creation Science, the only god-fearing kind of science, on the curriculum.
What, exactly, makes you happy about being Libertarian?
It's a zero-sum game. The total load on the planet is the same. The same total bunch of chips exits Intel's fabs. On the total, no energy was conserved.
Let's see. Google runs their CPUs in a warm environment. Now they can turn the AC down a little. I run my CPU in a cold environment (Denmark, normal living room, not exactly perfectly insulated). The environment assists a bit in cooling, probably more than Google's environment does (even without their artificial cooling).
I have to cool more than if Google didn't get the heat-tolerant CPUs, but Google can turn their cooling down more than I turn mine up, because my cooler environment already does some of the work.
because there isn't a person on this planet that can't be connected to an unsavory person in one or two steps.
And just so we here at slashdot don't feel holier than thou, most of us have used reiserfs. I've read his articles describing reiser4, and I was quite looking forward to it. One the face of it, he seems like a competent fs dev. There's the start of our connection to a not-one-of-the-best-human-beings-around.
(and before going off on a tanget, I _have_ read the best-selling trilogy Where Hans Went Wrong, Some More of Hans's Mistakes, and Who Is This Hans Fellow Anyways?)
Of course, maybe [subpopulation] people don't, on average, have the education or news access to vote responsibly and shouldn't be allowed to vote anyway?
Try inserting other values of subpopulation than "computer illiterate". For instance, nigger, white trash (identified by zip code), believers of any particular religion, slashdotters or whatever. Holding one person accountable for other persons' actions is unjust.
Also, there are lots of computer-illiterate people who are well educated and have good access to news (say, my parents). Should they be barred from voting because they have something irrelevant to their understanding of politics in common with "bad voters"? If you should forbid "bad voters" from voting, make sure that what you test is their being "bad voters" (however you define it), not something that merely correlates with it.
Also, you being well educated doesn't necessarily make you a "good voter"; it makes you knowledgeable about a particular topic. It makes you competent at informing public decision-making. But, as a part of politics, subjective value judgments need to be made. You can't educate yourself to "correct" values, only to know what the implications of a particular policy are going to be.
Where a king rules through the mercy of god, the church is the best "educated" in matters of governance, right? Should the church be the major influential party on public policy, then?
I'm sorry to hear you're not seeing the results you're hoping for.
That being said, you're one data point. Extrapolating from a single data point is a bad idea, and your single data point doesn't contradict the statement that being intelligent correlates positively with having good sperm. Also, the statement notably isn't that all nerds have good sperm.
Think hard about this. What is a conservative? Somebody who believes in their ideals and fundamentals. Thus they are not thinking about the future, but the past.
On the other hand a liberal challenges the notion of today and looks at what could be.
Wouldn't that be a progressive?
I think calling the left wingers Liberal is a phenomenon unique to the USA. In my country (Denmark), the liberals and conservatives are right-wing parties with adjacent seats; they often form a government together. Among the left wing parties are the Social Democrats and the Socialist People's Party.
Of course, politics is not one-dimensional. A dichotomy I've seen more than once is that between personal and economic freedom (c.f. http://www.theadvocates.org/quizp/index.html). And of course, those can be broken into dimensions of their own: abortion, same-sex marriage; tax-paid aqueducts/irrigation/roads/law+order; also, some of the personal freedoms have an economic impact (there's a lot of money rules surrounding married couples vs. singles).
Slashdot Mirror
Value can be attributed to things that produce value.
l = []; l.append(l); print l. Your definition is circular.
Value is a measure of how much we want or like something. I value personal liberties. I value economic liberties. I value food, clean air, sex, internet, staple guns, learning new things, intellect and reason in myself and others, science and lots of other things.
Value influences how much we're willing to give up to get the thing we value. If I had to choose between a house to live in and air to breath, I'd choose the air. If I had to choose between sex and internet, I'd choose sex. If I had to choose between 100$ and a copy of GH3+controller, I'd choose Guitar Hero. If I had to choose between 200$ and two Guitar Hero packs, I might choose the money, or I might choose the GH packs in hope of a resale.
Money has value for society because it allows us to break symmetry: I don't have to write code for the baker to get his bread. It has value to the individual (or the organization) because we all agree to trade it for other things we value.
Asking for the value of Linux is a vague question. The value of Linux what? The Copyrights? Not sure; even if everybody handed copyright on all FOSS code to a buyer, it's still FOSS, so we could just fork it and continue doing what we do. The buyer could allow itself to link GPL-incompatible code to _its_ GPL-licensed code. Or go all-the-way proprietary. How large a competitive advantage is that going to give? Not much, I think.
Linux use? To me, being able to use Linux is more valuable than being able to use Windows. I'm a member of our minority group on that. To some people, there's a big dollar amount [of saved money] attached to using Linux instead of $OS. Measure all those amounts well and add them up, and you may end up with a number that actually means something and has a relationship to reality.
An interesting bit from TFA:
In 2008, IDC forecast that the Linux ecosystem would be worth $49 billion by 2011. That report coincidentally was sponsored by the Linux Foundation as well.
Is that like a Gartner report saying Vista is worth $BIGNUM monies? Because from here I can't tell the difference, so someone please spell it out for me.
(#define Linux GNU/Linux or Linux, as appropriate)
-- Jonas K
Looks like a room or building size Faraday Cage (a foil hat the size of your house!) might be the only defence...
Would it be feasible and useful to shield only the keyboard case and wire? If it isn't useful by itself, could it be a necessary part of a bigger useful prevention measure?
Why do you hate Cory? http://xkcd.com/239/ ;)
It's a great concept, and it works on the small scale but it would be far too unwieldy to work for an entire country.
If only we had a high-speed communications network or two that people could use to make their opinion heard...
Marxism was disproved as a theory in the late 19th century
Citation needed. Would you also please EITHER boil "Marxism" down to a single true-or-false statement OR explain what it means to disprove something that isn't a single true-or-false statement?
So I can't see how Google's is more pro-consumer.
You have to see the forest for the trees; the forest is what Apple can do to your use of your iPhone compared to what Google can do to your use of your Android.
For any application A, Apple can prevent you from running A by not letting it be sold on iAppz. If you buy app A from gAppz, Google can delete it, but they can't prevent you from running it altogether since you can download it from my-gAppz.author-of-A.org.
If you bring the companies' past behavior into the picture, you're trying to use it to predict what will actually happen. That sounds like buying music from Wal-Mart based on the promise that "we would never shut down the DRM servers", versus buying mp3s from amazon: one of the companies can decrease the value of your product, the other can not do so.
It stands to reason that those who can't decrease the value of your product [that would be Google] are more pro-consumer.
-- Jonas K
If someone is peddling a universal VM, they are either doing a new low-level VM (oh great, we've already got x86, JVM and CLR and they have a lot more existing tool support thankyouverymuch)
I disagree with the characterization of JVM as a low-level VM. Of course there is the instructions that map one-to-one onto x86 instructions (arithmetic for ints and floats, jmp{,zero,neg}). But in it we also find the notion of classes and their relationships, plus introspection, i.e. accessing types (classes), data (objects) and code (methods) by name at runtime. I would say those are fairly high-level concepts which are not found on the x86 or the LLVM (= Low-Level Virtual Machine).
Also, there's the whole issue of bytecode verification: for each value of the instruction pointer, the stack must have the same height and type layout for all execution paths going through that value of the instruction pointer; you must also return or throw out of a method, you're not allowed to overrun it. Modifying the code is a no-no. There are per-class limits on some of {the number of fields, the number of the methods, the size of the code segment}.
I don't know much about the CLR; it's what C# runs on, right? I heard talk about using a different VM for a different kind of languages, either functional or scripting (i.e. dynamically typed). That would push towards (if not all the way to) a high-level VM characterization as well, as most low-level virtual machines are quite generic.
'a registurd church'.
I would've went with 'a registard church'.
It would be interesting to explore the options of more modular political systems where citizens, when they dislike their unit enough, could reasonably easily disengage and join another unit.
What you're describing sounds like either political parties or federation member states. Whichever it is, you already have it, and it's broken ;)
Having more than two parties would generally do you yanks a lot of good, I think. Even if the president is always going to be from $BIG_PARTY_1 or $BIG_PARTY_2, giving the population the ability to express more nuances of opinion and having that opinion influence the composition of the parliament might be a good thing. Then all the extremists can vote for the greenies without harming the democrat, and you'll get more environment-friendly policy reflecting public opinion(!) instead of handing the victory to the republican. And the libertarians can vote for the Libertarian Party who will then point at whomever is supporting the most important libertarian values for president [probably the republican], and y'all can have your freedoms in accordance with public opinion.
Who's going on a campaign on that message? Oh right, only those who don't win the power to change the broken system.
and their mission critical app,be it a POS,a billing app,customer database,etc, was a VB app.
All VB apps are a POS.
</over-the-top-sarcasm>
If Windows can be infected with viruses or malware within hours of installation, with almost no user input, that is an OS problem. Lame excuses not accepted.
Try s/hours/seconds/. Happened to me. I can't tell you how much I hated everything MS at that point.
While this new technology may be great for mouse users, I'm not up in arms with joy. Would there be a gain for trackballs? I'm using the Logitech Marble Mouse(*), and as far as I can tell, the optics goes on between the ball itself and a camera below the ball; as a producer, you control the surface completely. Would there be anything gained by tolerating more diverse surfaces if you're never going to use them?
(*) I can recommend everyone to go out and buy one, it's great. You can put more clutter near your 'puter since you don't need the surface to move the ball around, and it feels nice in your hands. It comes with scroll buttons instead of a wheel; if you use one as the EmulateWheel button (man ${xorg mouse driver}), you can use the ball as a vertical and horizontal scroll wheel. Horizontal scroll wheels is one of these things you don't know you want until you try it [so go out and try it].
generic VMs divorced from the syntactic details of specific languages
The syntax of programming languages is something understood by the front-end of a compiler. It then translates the code into code that does the same thing in the back-end language (such as JVM/PyVM/x86/LLVM bytecode). Neither back-end knows about the syntax of the front-end language.
The real challenge is to adopt conventions on the back-end VM that allows different languages to talk together. It'd be straightforward to implement an x86 emulator on top of the JVM and run the ${language} VM on that x86. Wow, you now have ${language} running on the JVM. So? You can't talk to the Java library that way.
If you want languages to talk together, they need to agree on data representation formats and calling conventions. Try getting object.field if you don't know where field is relative to the base address of object. Try calling object.method() if you don't know the format (or location) of object.__vtbl.
Also, the semantics of some operations have to be considered if a language has to deal with a foreign object model. Let's say we target the Java VM. How do you implement multiple inheritance? What does .super do on a class with multiple parents? How do you implement "Object *p = malloc(...); *p = my_object;"? How do you implement C++'s delete? How do you implement python's generators?
To support a set of languages, the VM must support the union of features. To make the languages talk together smoothly, the VM must support each feature in a reasonably straightforward way. The two demands pull the VM in opposite directions.
I don't want to just poo-poo this idea, but my experience with dealing with the Java VM (I've written a java-important-subset compiler in my compiler course) is that it's tightly coupled to the Java way of doing things. My experience with different languages (C, C++, Java, python, perl, ruby, haskell, scheme) says that things are different enough that you can transfer most of what you know from one language to another [at least for the oo/procedural], but that the devil is in the details, and the VM has to handle all values of $details.
openssl des3 -d -salt -in file.des3 -out file.txt -k horsefeathers
Your password can be read in /proc; top will gladly do the work for me. Don't ever give the password as part of the command line.
And you're wrong, using crypto isn't hard. I use then full-disk encryption Ubuntu has spoon-fed me. When I boot, I enter "hunter2" at the password prompt. That's it.
2. it is superior design to have a browser that gracefully degrades rather than being and brittle and refusing to render everytime someone forgets to close a
element. not simply because of nonstandard pages, but for a whole host of other reasons, including handling partial transmissions
If all browsers implemented the standard correctly and was anal retentive about compliance (just like your average compiler/interpreter is), people would learn to write compliant pages (just like hobbyists learn to write syntactically correct C programs). The problem of nonstandard pages would not have occured, and it will disappear over time when people realise their web page is not getting out there.
Partial transmissions of valid pages is still an issue; parse what you have and render it, then add to the parse tree and re-render until the page is all the way there.
hobbyists should not expected to be anal retentive standards zealots
Hobbyists can write valid C/python/java programmers even though the compiler is anal-retentive about it. The only thing won by browsers not being strict is that we don't have to do the work required to climb out of the hole we've dug ourselves into.
if ever there were some sort of gatekeeper organization or rigorous technical specification that enforced standards compliance,
Like the C specification enforced by your compiler?
you would raise the barrier to entry onto the web by regular joes. you would reduce the variety of the web, make it more monoclonal, and hurt a vibrant ocmmunity
You'd get rid of some of the crap. Some of the crap would remain crap but for fewer reasons. Some of the crap would cease to be crap.
low standards compliance is not only a complete nonissue and not a problem, its a good sign. the lower standards compliance is, the better for us all
You can only access your bank over the web if you not only switch browser but also switch operating system because the browser your banks compels you to use doesn't run on the operating system you like.
If you actually do that, it also means your favorite IDE is going to look, feel and act like crap, you'd have to change versioning system, and you'd have to spend time making LaTeX use Computer Modern so your output is going to remain looking pretty, you'd have shitty window management, and... [your favorite reason to stick with your current OS].
Low standards compliance is probably not a big problem for my previous bank; I wasn't that big of a customer. In a sense, I shouldn't have to switch banks to get a functioning web banking service. No, I don't feel entitled. But I do think every developer should at some point in their training develop an application target to a 64-bit big-endian multi-CPU box running Amiga-OS and lynx, just to be forcefully yanked out of the "all the world's a PC/Mac/IE/*nix."
One of the major advantages of a central repository for software is [...] It's a big advantage distributions like Ubuntu have over Windows.
Sure; that's fine. But Ubuntu doesn't come with a Canonical Remote Administration Account that lets Mark ssh into my box and delete my installed launchpad-competitor. What information I'm presented with says that Google will have that. How I installed the software Google deletes is pretty orthogonal to Google's ability to delete it.
I'm with you most of the way. If you don't play, don't complain about not winning; sure.
It is clear that it doesn't take brains to vote for Democrats, which is why Democrats all look stupid. And the Republicans aren't far behind, so all you beer swilling Nascar idiots better shut up now.
I'm sure glad I'm Libertarian.
Here you're just being unnecessarily arrogant. For the record, it doesn't take brains to vote Libertarian. It takes a cross on a piece of paper [substitute your local equivalent]. Same is true for casting any other vote.
But let me ask, why are you glad you hold Libertarian views? How would you be unhappier if you were a Democrat? Or a Republican?
I think I'd be happier as a Democrat: then my guy would have good chances of winning (as it stands right now). And [if Obama wins] I'd be proud that my party was the first to put a black man in the oval office.
If I were a republican, I might be happy that my party has been in office, but I might also be not-so-happy about what those terms have done to the public perception of my party (from fiscally responsible and loved by the upper middle class to warmongering science-hating fundies).
[disclaimer, I'm not a US citizen, I've never been there, and the only black people I know are distant acquaintances].
Say I was a US citizen. I'd probably be happier as a Creationist than if I accepted the findings biology, geology, astronomy and probably some other science(s) I've left out, because then my country has, from my subjective viewpoint, seen the light of reason and accepted God. And some schools have finally put Creation Science, the only god-fearing kind of science, on the curriculum.
What, exactly, makes you happy about being Libertarian?
It's a zero-sum game. The total load on the planet is the same. The same total bunch of chips exits Intel's fabs. On the total, no energy was conserved.
Let's see. Google runs their CPUs in a warm environment. Now they can turn the AC down a little. I run my CPU in a cold environment (Denmark, normal living room, not exactly perfectly insulated). The environment assists a bit in cooling, probably more than Google's environment does (even without their artificial cooling).
I have to cool more than if Google didn't get the heat-tolerant CPUs, but Google can turn their cooling down more than I turn mine up, because my cooler environment already does some of the work.
You're assuming everyone prefers them willing.
You're assuming Alyson isn't willingly duct taped to the bed.
Intel's 486SX line was just a 486 (later renamed the 486DX) where the FPU didn't work.
Mod parent +5.0000000018623, Informative
because there isn't a person on this planet that can't be connected to an unsavory person in one or two steps.
And just so we here at slashdot don't feel holier than thou, most of us have used reiserfs. I've read his articles describing reiser4, and I was quite looking forward to it. One the face of it, he seems like a competent fs dev. There's the start of our connection to a not-one-of-the-best-human-beings-around.
(and before going off on a tanget, I _have_ read the best-selling trilogy Where Hans Went Wrong, Some More of Hans's Mistakes, and Who Is This Hans Fellow Anyways?)
Of course, maybe [subpopulation] people don't, on average, have the education or news access to vote responsibly and shouldn't be allowed to vote anyway?
Try inserting other values of subpopulation than "computer illiterate". For instance, nigger, white trash (identified by zip code), believers of any particular religion, slashdotters or whatever. Holding one person accountable for other persons' actions is unjust.
Also, there are lots of computer-illiterate people who are well educated and have good access to news (say, my parents). Should they be barred from voting because they have something irrelevant to their understanding of politics in common with "bad voters"? If you should forbid "bad voters" from voting, make sure that what you test is their being "bad voters" (however you define it), not something that merely correlates with it.
Also, you being well educated doesn't necessarily make you a "good voter"; it makes you knowledgeable about a particular topic. It makes you competent at informing public decision-making. But, as a part of politics, subjective value judgments need to be made. You can't educate yourself to "correct" values, only to know what the implications of a particular policy are going to be.
Where a king rules through the mercy of god, the church is the best "educated" in matters of governance, right? Should the church be the major influential party on public policy, then?
Now I just [...] every once in a while
I'd like you to meet my friend, Cron. He likes meeting new people :)
I'm sorry to hear you're not seeing the results you're hoping for.
That being said, you're one data point. Extrapolating from a single data point is a bad idea, and your single data point doesn't contradict the statement that being intelligent correlates positively with having good sperm. Also, the statement notably isn't that all nerds have good sperm.
Think hard about this. What is a conservative? Somebody who believes in their ideals and fundamentals. Thus they are not thinking about the future, but the past.
On the other hand a liberal challenges the notion of today and looks at what could be.
Wouldn't that be a progressive?
I think calling the left wingers Liberal is a phenomenon unique to the USA. In my country (Denmark), the liberals and conservatives are right-wing parties with adjacent seats; they often form a government together. Among the left wing parties are the Social Democrats and the Socialist People's Party.
Of course, politics is not one-dimensional. A dichotomy I've seen more than once is that between personal and economic freedom (c.f. http://www.theadvocates.org/quizp/index.html). And of course, those can be broken into dimensions of their own: abortion, same-sex marriage; tax-paid aqueducts/irrigation/roads/law+order; also, some of the personal freedoms have an economic impact (there's a lot of money rules surrounding married couples vs. singles).