I disagree, I think it's the hardest belief to hold, but the easiest to proof is true. It such an unrewarding belief, no one wants to hold it.
I have very similar views as you do, but I find this belief that you describe very rewarding in itself. There is no higher reason or goal in life, there is nothing important in itself unless we give it a value. Such belief gives an individual a freedom to construct it's own values. At any moment we can decide what we life for - it's only for us to decide - since there is no higher reason for our existence.
Also I find thought of eternal life (or afterlife, whatever) scary to say at least and I'm so happy it makes no sense. I could say that life itself is the ultimate reason for me. Belief in temporary nature of my life makes it easier to enjoy all the little things around me, which otherwise I might forget. Should I fear death? Death, total inexistence, nothing... how could I fear nothing? Whenever I (my conciousness) exist I'm alive.
Part-time second jobs. Living with a roommate to ameliorate the expenses. From experience I can tell you its very possible to escape poverty and America has possibly the greatest social mobility. Those that stay at the poverty level (in most instances) do so by choice - in that they choose not to make the necessary sacrifices or put forward the effort toward actively acquiring a better life.
Sure, hard work always helps, but in no way it demonstrates that that US has a high degree of social mobility.
By international standards, the United States has an unusually low level of intergenerational mobility: our parents' income is highly predictive of our incomes as adults. Intergenerational mobility in the United States is lower than in France, Germany, Sweden, Canada, Finland, Norway and Denmark. Among high-income countries for which comparable estimates are available, only the United Kingdom had a lower rate of mobility than the United States. http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2006/04/b1579981.html
When you've got things right, wealth of parents doesn't correlate noticeably with future wealth of their kids. Scandinavia (or almost any place in developed world) is lot closer to it than the US, actually I think kids from less wealthy families are doing better since they put that little extra value to monetary wealth and are willing to study harder and with clearer focus.
Free (tax sponsored) and good quality education, so that you get all the education you want without personal monetary investment is the key that would make the playing field level for everyone. Better education benefits everyone in the society (well, maybe not the filthy rich types) so it is a very sensible investment.
Is there any sensible reason to care about moderations? It's something that has escaped me, but I'm relatively new here so maybe someone could elaborate.
What speech recognition software does Eee PC 701 use?
I'm asking as I couldn't find it mentioned anywhere. It seems and sounds like something that would be fun to launch apps with on my Thinkpad X41. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0aK3PVacIXc
You can screw it up just as badly in the opposite direction. When the successful can expect to be expropriated, expect a lot less innovation. There are lots of examples of stagnant societies where anyone who produces more than others can expect to either "share" most of it (an effective ~80% marginal tax rate) or be expelled.
Like Scandinavian countries? (heavily progressive taxation)
Well...atleast we don't have slums around here (yet) and it's not like people who earn more would actually do more work (and thus produce more), often quite contrary.
There can be other motivators for innovation (when you have _enough_ income to begin with) than money, like happiness. Shitloads of money wont buy it, but altruism might well do so. Sharing IS benefical to society as whole, no matter what your multimillionaire overlords might want you to believe.
PS. I'm not saying things are perfect here and they are surely going for worse (mainly because politicians are beginning to favor big business instead of public as whole). Just from my POV - seeing the slow but gradual change here in finland - I consider social democratic market economy better for society as whole than straight out capitalism.
Bullshit. The earth has been much warmer in the past without the "zomg serious consequences".
If people want others to take this stuff seriously, stop with the FUD.
The question is not how much warmer it has been, but has warming ever been this fast?
Keep in mind that the average temperatures have risen several centigrades during the last century. In the arctic 3 to 4 degrees Celsius during last 50 years, rest of the world about half of that. In the past this degree of change has probably took thousands of years in which ecosystem has had time to adapt. Earth has had multiple mass exctinctions due to changes in climate (killing off up to 90% of all species), the current one we are into is just much faster than ever before. How warm will it get this time?
There have been some improvements since they've started facing anti-trust suits, and there are more OS-free and free-OS computers coming from the big manufacturers, but it's still hard to find a solid laptop without paying for Windows. I'm sure you're going to claim otherwise, and I'd appreciate links. I may go laptop shopping in the near future, and right now the only reliable Linux laptops I'm aware of come from System76.
Good luck.
AFAIK all laptops that are sold by big manufactureres with linux or without OS are still going to profit MS as the OEMs are billed per machine sold. So whenever you buy a laptop from companies like IBM (Lenovo), HP, Dell, etc. (windows or not) you end up paying to MS. Also it's very likely that OEM will charge you extra for removing windows or installing linux on it.
I had to pay for Windows XP that came with my Thinkpad X41, even if I had no intention to use it. They simply told me that it's not possible to get refund of it as it's integral part of the product. When I got the machine I plugged it to a temporary DHCP server and netbooted the Debian installer PXE. (X41 doesn't have optical/floppy drives)
Get an IBM ("Lenovo"). Suspend and wakeup work perfectly well on my x41 (running Linux).
Also being an X41 owner I can confirm that. It takes 3 seconds to suspend to RAM (S3 mode) and 4 seconds to wake up. (running debian etch) Everything comes out of suspend reliably. Power lasts well over a week when suspended (i havent tried longer yet). All of the power management features in the hardware seem to work as designed and allow lot of customization thru linux sysfs, devfs and drivers. In short, ACPI support is perfect.
I think it has a lot to do with the fact that almost all of X41's internal hardware is made by Intel (graphics chip, CPU, Wi-Fi, USB controller and so forth...). It's Intel employees who are responsible of much of linux' ACPI code.
I've got a Thinkpad T43 and about a third of the time it fails to come out of hibernation. Either it freezes on the "resuming windows" screen or I get a BSOD about "invalid queue" or something.
Your Thinkpad is blue because wind eyes make it cold inside.
My X41 sleeps and hibernates happily with Debian.
(word window comes from old norse vindauga, wind eye. hole in the wall which wind blows thru.)
I'm going to Gentoo - unless someone can tell a relative noob how to easily update the kernel to 2.6.18!! (yes I realize 'easily update the kernel' is an oxymoron)
As long as you keep your old kernel installed, there's nothing to lose.
I use debian so put sudo in appropriate places if you don't have a root account enabled and use some creativity replacing the [ ]s. (the [kernel.org] tag is a slashdot "feature" so just ignore it) Remember that if you roll your own kernel you generally wont be able to use nvidia or ati binary driver packages from ubuntu (or debian) repos, but have to install ones from manufacturer's site instead.
Though with Larry the Cow you can have lots of fun fiddling with USE flags and waiting for emerge -uavDN world to complete.;) (half kidding, im an occasional gentoo user myself)
I think that the most commonly accepted theory is that the Finns are descendant from the Mongolian Huns who conquered a lot of Asia and Eastern Europe.
Finnish has been spoken in finland atleast about 3000 years, long before Huns (which actually invaded middle and southern europe in 4th century, never scandinavia).
If any "european" people would be related to Huns it would be Turks (which originate from same area in central asia). Together cooperating with Huns were also some southern fenno-ugric tribes (in addition to mongolian, tungusian, caucasian, turkish and iranian ones), but this has more to do with the fact that Huns needed allies and steppe warriors from areas under their rule.
Fenno ugric languages closely related to finnish (closer than sàmi or estonian) can and could be found in northern russia, but most of population has been russianized during the last century.
Well. Those drivers aren't loaded unless you have the hardware.
Now if you're worried about having unused modules or larger kernel hogging more disk space...
It can be fun compiling your own kernel, but it's hardly necessary today. Im currently running on stock debian 2.6.16-2-686 kernel. Unefficient? I can't really tell the difference.
I do agree that sooner or later many will compile and/or configure their own kernel. Maybe due to hardware which needs a kernel driver that is missing from pre-compiled one and not available as module or maybe due to special environment (like handheld systems with low storage space). It's nice to have such flexibility.
I think Debian is heading no where. In a couple of years, the distro will be legacy, probably continued by a couple of die-hard hackers.
Ubuntu has direction.
I switched to Debian testing from Ubuntu about a year ago and im very happy with it.
Bundled approach of Ubuntu isn't for me because I want to choose apps that I need. Every Ubuntu release is branched off from Debian testing. So saying that Ubuntu is going forward while Debian isn't doesn't make much sense.
Both have their target audience. It's good we have the choice.
Instead of reading 1984 again maybe you would consider reading Yevgeny Zamyatin's "We" (1920)?
It is the first major dystopian novel and you'll be suprised how heavily 1984 was influenced by it.
V-2 reached 80km altitude on normal launches (from where it was pointed down towards target) and 189km during test launch. Where does the space begin?:)
It was not coincidence that Von Braun led the Apollo program.
Isn't it alarming that probably over half of all teenagers are criminals according to your legistlation? What do you want to do, lock em up? Make them pay for RIAA? Laws are ought to be made to serve the public (not few select individuals) so situation where such share of citizens would be criminals is absurd.
Im pretty sure that the percentage who copy CDs and DVDs from they friends is much higher than 58% who consider it legal. Here in finland it's prolly something like 99.9%. Back in my school days everyone copied cassettes and CDs. Most of kids bought music of bands they really liked and copied the rest. Have to wonder why the music industry didn't die in 80s or 90s.;)
I'm also hoping this extends to over ThinkPads in some form. I have the T60 (similar but an ATI graphics adapter) and would like some of these features when I run SLED 10. I'm particularly interested in getting power management similar to what we get in Windows, with full suspend mode support, better special key support, etc.
In my experience hardware in ThinkPads (atleast centrino ones) is very well supported on linux. I have a Thinkpad x41 running Debian testing and everything except HDAPS works. Linux driver for HD protection through APS accelerometer exists, but it needs recompiling the kernel. There was a slashdot article just few days ago about using it for knock commands. http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/0 7/30/1710201&from=rss
All special keys work. http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/How_to_get_special_k eys_to_work As for power management; CPU throttling, suspend to ram (fine since 2.6.16), hibernate, hd power management, wifi power management and radio soft power switch all work.
It was an anti-communist rag written with characters shallow and plot weak even by science fiction standards. If you think I'm being superior just because I think that book is no better than its contemporary critics held it to be, well, then you may want to rethink your position.
I think 1984 is just rewrite of Evgeni Zamiatin's "We".(written in 1920) "We" was supposed to be critic aimed towards new soviet state, but got banned in USSR. Orwell must have acquired copy of this book as similarity to his 1984 is striking.
Mac OS/X will then compete directly with Windows, and though it's faster, more stable and more secure, Windows has that whole 90%+ market share thing going for it.
I wonder where people get the idea that OSX is fast. Apple marketing?
Most benchmarks that i've seen seem to indicate the opposite. http://sekhon.berkeley.edu/macosx/
Even my X41 Thinkpad with it's Pentium M 1.6GHz running debian testing with stock kernel does time echo "scale=5000; 4*a(1)" | bc -l faster (1m9s) than MacBook Pro 2GHz running OSX (1m18s). The very same MacBook Pro does (0m52s) when running linux.
Not very good benchmarks I know, but i'd like to see some prove that OSX does anything faster than windows or linux.
Even socialists need some time to ruin the economy of a country with natural resources as rich as that of Sweden, country unscarred by war, and one not participating in arms race of Cold War. But they still manage to do it: After war Sweden was 3rd country with best GDP per capita. Now it's 19th and still falling
So how about Finland?
-Fought two wars against USSR in WW2.
-Wasn't part of Marshall Plan
-Paid war reparations worth 300 million USD (in 1938 price level) to USSR.
Society is structured very similarly to Sweden. Because of highly progressive taxation (from 15% to 60% depending of your income.) wealth is spread evenly and quality social services are available (education, heathcare, etc.) Most of people are willing to pay these taxes because it makes possible for them to live in stable, wealthy and safe society.
Lately income differences have been slowly increasing in Finland (probably same happens in Sweden too) and there has been some tax cuts for rich. I blame the globalization and big businesses, which are getting too much control over decicion makers. So the trend is for worse IMHO. Opposite to your conclusion it was social democracy which built the wellfare and it's globalization and lobbying which is going to destroy it.
Scandinavians, unlike you, have mostly positive experiences of social democracy. Can you point out some country with low government control (no progressive taxation, no social services), which manages to archive such balanced and well off societies?
Slashdot Mirror
I have very similar views as you do, but I find this belief that you describe very rewarding in itself. There is no higher reason or goal in life, there is nothing important in itself unless we give it a value. Such belief gives an individual a freedom to construct it's own values. At any moment we can decide what we life for - it's only for us to decide - since there is no higher reason for our existence.
Also I find thought of eternal life (or afterlife, whatever) scary to say at least and I'm so happy it makes no sense. I could say that life itself is the ultimate reason for me. Belief in temporary nature of my life makes it easier to enjoy all the little things around me, which otherwise I might forget. Should I fear death? Death, total inexistence, nothing... how could I fear nothing? Whenever I (my conciousness) exist I'm alive.
By international standards, the United States has an unusually low level of intergenerational mobility: our parents' income is highly predictive of our incomes as adults. Intergenerational mobility in the United States is lower than in France, Germany, Sweden, Canada, Finland, Norway and Denmark. Among high-income countries for which comparable estimates are available, only the United Kingdom had a lower rate of mobility than the United States.
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2006/04/b1579981.html
When you've got things right, wealth of parents doesn't correlate noticeably with future wealth of their kids. Scandinavia (or almost any place in developed world) is lot closer to it than the US, actually I think kids from less wealthy families are doing better since they put that little extra value to monetary wealth and are willing to study harder and with clearer focus.
Free (tax sponsored) and good quality education, so that you get all the education you want without personal monetary investment is the key that would make the playing field level for everyone. Better education benefits everyone in the society (well, maybe not the filthy rich types) so it is a very sensible investment.
Is there any sensible reason to care about moderations? It's something that has escaped me,
but I'm relatively new here so maybe someone could elaborate.
I guess the patterns that you noticed were something entirely different. Looking hard enough we begin seeing things.
What speech recognition software does Eee PC 701 use?
I'm asking as I couldn't find it mentioned anywhere. It seems and sounds like something that would be fun to launch apps with on my Thinkpad X41.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0aK3PVacIXc
Well...atleast we don't have slums around here (yet) and it's not like people who earn more would actually do more work (and thus produce more), often quite contrary.
There can be other motivators for innovation (when you have _enough_ income to begin with) than money, like happiness. Shitloads of money wont buy it, but altruism might well do so. Sharing IS benefical to society as whole, no matter what your multimillionaire overlords might want you to believe.
PS. I'm not saying things are perfect here and they are surely going for worse (mainly because politicians are beginning to favor big business instead of public as whole). Just from my POV - seeing the slow but gradual change here in finland - I consider social democratic market economy better for society as whole than straight out capitalism.
The question is not how much warmer it has been, but has warming ever been this fast?
Keep in mind that the average temperatures have risen several centigrades during the last century. In the arctic 3 to 4 degrees Celsius during last 50 years, rest of the world about half of that. In the past this degree of change has probably took thousands of years in which ecosystem has had time to adapt. Earth has had multiple mass exctinctions due to changes in climate (killing off up to 90% of all species), the current one we are into is just much faster than ever before. How warm will it get this time?
From: http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/
"World Wind lets you experience Earth terrain in visually rich 3D, just as if you were really there."
I am not here... really.
AFAIK all laptops that are sold by big manufactureres with linux or without OS are still going to profit MS as the OEMs are billed per machine sold. So whenever you buy a laptop from companies like IBM (Lenovo), HP, Dell, etc. (windows or not) you end up paying to MS. Also it's very likely that OEM will charge you extra for removing windows or installing linux on it.
I had to pay for Windows XP that came with my Thinkpad X41, even if I had no intention to use it. They simply told me that it's not possible to get refund of it as it's integral part of the product. When I got the machine I plugged it to a temporary DHCP server and netbooted the Debian installer PXE. (X41 doesn't have optical/floppy drives)
Get an IBM ("Lenovo"). Suspend and wakeup work perfectly well on my x41 (running Linux).
Also being an X41 owner I can confirm that. It takes 3 seconds to suspend to RAM (S3 mode) and 4 seconds to wake up. (running debian etch) Everything comes out of suspend reliably. Power lasts well over a week when suspended (i havent tried longer yet). All of the power management features in the hardware seem to work as designed and allow lot of customization thru linux sysfs, devfs and drivers. In short, ACPI support is perfect.
I think it has a lot to do with the fact that almost all of X41's internal hardware is made by Intel (graphics chip, CPU, Wi-Fi, USB controller and so forth...). It's Intel employees who are responsible of much of linux' ACPI code.
I've got a Thinkpad T43 and about a third of the time it fails to come out of hibernation. Either it freezes on the "resuming windows" screen or I get a BSOD about "invalid queue" or something.
Your Thinkpad is blue because wind eyes make it cold inside.
My X41 sleeps and hibernates happily with Debian.
(word window comes from old norse vindauga, wind eye. hole in the wall which wind blows thru.)
If you want something more recent, then you have to head to kernel.org, download the source and roll your own.
# apt-get install kernel-package build-essential libncurses5-dev
# cd
# wget ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/linux-
# tar xjvf linux-2.6.18.1.tar.bz2
# cd
# make menuconfig
# make clean
# make-kpkg --append-to-version -[whatever] --initrd kernel_image
# make-kpkg --append-to-version -[whatever] --initrd modules_image
# cd
# ls
# dpkg -i [lookupthefilenames].deb
Reboot and hope it works.
I use debian so put sudo in appropriate places if you don't have a root account enabled and use some creativity replacing the [ ]s. (the [kernel.org] tag is a slashdot "feature" so just ignore it) Remember that if you roll your own kernel you generally wont be able to use nvidia or ati binary driver packages from ubuntu (or debian) repos, but have to install ones from manufacturer's site instead.
Though with Larry the Cow you can have lots of fun fiddling with USE flags and waiting for emerge -uavDN world to complete.
Damn! Slahsdot ate my link! :E
l a/bl_kalevala.htm
Another try:
http://altreligion.about.com/library/texts/kaleva
*will use the preview next time*
Here is illustrated Kalevala for those interested: (sorry about the clutter)
Finnish has been spoken in finland atleast about 3000 years, long before Huns (which actually invaded middle and southern europe in 4th century, never scandinavia).
If any "european" people would be related to Huns it would be Turks (which originate from same area in central asia). Together cooperating with Huns were also some southern fenno-ugric tribes (in addition to mongolian, tungusian, caucasian, turkish and iranian ones), but this has more to do with the fact that Huns needed allies and steppe warriors from areas under their rule.
Fenno ugric languages closely related to finnish (closer than sàmi or estonian) can and could be found in northern russia, but most of population has been russianized during the last century.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8
Well. Those drivers aren't loaded unless you have the hardware.
Now if you're worried about having unused modules or larger kernel hogging more disk space...
It can be fun compiling your own kernel, but it's hardly necessary today. Im currently running on stock debian 2.6.16-2-686 kernel. Unefficient? I can't really tell the difference.
I do agree that sooner or later many will compile and/or configure their own kernel. Maybe due to hardware which needs a kernel driver that is missing from pre-compiled one and not available as module or maybe due to special environment (like handheld systems with low storage space). It's nice to have such flexibility.
I switched to Debian testing from Ubuntu about a year ago and im very happy with it.
Bundled approach of Ubuntu isn't for me because I want to choose apps that I need. Every Ubuntu release is branched off from Debian testing. So saying that Ubuntu is going forward while Debian isn't doesn't make much sense.
Both have their target audience. It's good we have the choice.
Instead of reading 1984 again maybe you would consider reading Yevgeny Zamyatin's "We" (1920)?
It is the first major dystopian novel and you'll be suprised how heavily 1984 was influenced by it.
V-2 reached 80km altitude on normal launches (from where it was pointed down towards target) and 189km during test launch. Where does the space begin? :)
It was not coincidence that Von Braun led the Apollo program.
Isn't it alarming that probably over half of all teenagers are criminals according to your legistlation? What do you want to do, lock em up? Make them pay for RIAA? Laws are ought to be made to serve the public (not few select individuals) so situation where such share of citizens would be criminals is absurd.
;)
Im pretty sure that the percentage who copy CDs and DVDs from they friends is much higher than 58% who consider it legal. Here in finland it's prolly something like 99.9%. Back in my school days everyone copied cassettes and CDs. Most of kids bought music of bands they really liked and copied the rest. Have to wonder why the music industry didn't die in 80s or 90s.
In my experience hardware in ThinkPads (atleast centrino ones) is very well supported on linux. I have a Thinkpad x41 running Debian testing and everything except HDAPS works. Linux driver for HD protection through APS accelerometer exists, but it needs recompiling the kernel. There was a slashdot article just few days ago about using it for knock commands. http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/
All special keys work. http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/How_to_get_special_
It was an anti-communist rag written with characters shallow and plot weak even by science fiction standards. If you think I'm being superior just because I think that book is no better than its contemporary critics held it to be, well, then you may want to rethink your position.
I think 1984 is just rewrite of Evgeni Zamiatin's "We".(written in 1920) "We" was supposed to be critic aimed towards new soviet state, but got banned in USSR. Orwell must have acquired copy of this book as similarity to his 1984 is striking.
Mac OS/X will then compete directly with Windows, and though it's faster, more stable and more secure, Windows has that whole 90%+ market share thing going for it.
I wonder where people get the idea that OSX is fast. Apple marketing?
Most benchmarks that i've seen seem to indicate the opposite.
http://sekhon.berkeley.edu/macosx/
Even my X41 Thinkpad with it's Pentium M 1.6GHz running debian testing with stock kernel does time echo "scale=5000; 4*a(1)" | bc -l faster (1m9s) than MacBook Pro 2GHz running OSX (1m18s). The very same MacBook Pro does (0m52s) when running linux.
Not very good benchmarks I know, but i'd like to see some prove that OSX does anything faster than windows or linux.
Even socialists need some time to ruin the economy of a country with natural resources as rich as that of Sweden, country unscarred by war, and one not participating in arms race of Cold War. But they still manage to do it: After war Sweden was 3rd country with best GDP per capita. Now it's 19th and still falling
t _co.html
So how about Finland?
-Fought two wars against USSR in WW2.
-Wasn't part of Marshall Plan
-Paid war reparations worth 300 million USD (in 1938 price level) to USSR.
In 2004 finland was ranked as the worlds most competitive economy:
http://www.forumblog.org/blog/2004/10/finland_mos
Society is structured very similarly to Sweden. Because of highly progressive taxation (from 15% to 60% depending of your income.) wealth is spread evenly and quality social services are available (education, heathcare, etc.) Most of people are willing to pay these taxes because it makes possible for them to live in stable, wealthy and safe society.
Lately income differences have been slowly increasing in Finland (probably same happens in Sweden too) and there has been some tax cuts for rich. I blame the globalization and big businesses, which are getting too much control over decicion makers. So the trend is for worse IMHO. Opposite to your conclusion it was social democracy which built the wellfare and it's globalization and lobbying which is going to destroy it.
Scandinavians, unlike you, have mostly positive experiences of social democracy. Can you point out some country with low government control (no progressive taxation, no social services), which manages to archive such balanced and well off societies?