Does the US killing babies in Vietnam and Fallujah count for nothing in your moral sewer, you right wing piece of shit?
Oh, but, you see, USA went to Vietnam to stop communists from beginning massacres there. The problem is, when you do such things, people die, so you hope really hard that less innocent people will die from your effort to stop genocidal ideologues than the amount that would die in the hands of those same genocidal ideologues were they left alone.
In Vietnam, for instance, the moment the counter-culture lobby succeeded and USA give up on the war, the Russia-financed communists become free to do whatever they wanted. And as a result, in the following years 3 million people were massacred in the region, including half the population of Cambodia. Would these 3 million innocents have died hadn't the USA left Vietnam to appease the home anti-war movement? I bet not.
By the way, I never read or heard any of the counter-culture leaders of the time asking that the still alive relatives of the massacred innocents pardoned them for they efforts to bring USA home. Would you?
Now, Fallujah is an entirely different matter. So, please let's not confuse both subjects.
1 GB per account x 200k customers x 3 (redundancy) = 600 TB.
500 GB hard drive = $150 retail.
$150 * 600 TB / 500 GB = $180k.
$180k / 200k customers = $0.90 per customer A SINGLE TIME.
WHAT THE HELL?!? If you charged your customers $0.50 per month for the service, you could be INCREASING the space available to them by 500 MB per month, and still profit while doing so! And that's considering OVERPRICED RETAIL prices, not the huge discounts manufactures would give you. AND that's ignoring the fact that you wouldn't have to provide the whole space upfront, but increase it only so far as the actual usage increased.
There's no excuse for your ISP to not be providing your customers AT LEAST 1 GB. 60 MB is a joke.
And lynx is obviously contraband software as it bypasses all Javascript or Flash "protection" of websites.
Actually, you probably have a point here. Can someone confirm whether, under the DMCA, disabling JavaScript, or even explaining how to do it, might be considered "a device that bypasses content protection"? If it is, I wonder how much time it'll take for JavaScript to be mandatorily (?) both enabled and undisableable (?) in web browsers...
and all that wacky stuff since then- printing press, antibiotics, the internet, a mistake? i just want to know if you are a harmless romantic or a deluded wackjob
Neither. For you to recognize the good there was in one age has no relation whatsoever with you denying the good there is in another. Notice that saying the Middle Ages was "bad" while the Modern Age is "good" is the same error, just inverted. Take the good from them all, reject the bad from them all, and you end up with the best possible outcome.
By the way, this is what "conservatism" actually means. Not to conserve anything just because it's old, but to conserve that which works well, while still replacing that which doesn't. Any self-labeled progressive thinks exactly the same. The divergence lies in the list of what must be conserved and what must be replaced, not on the abstract principle, agreed by both, that some things must remain while others must change.
of course none of this has to do with feudal europe though, but you get my point now: this system the spanish brought over to the places they colonized was not miraculously invented on a boat along the way. it was borrowed outright from feudal europe
This surely isn't the case. The Modern (notice the word) states invented lots and lots of very original things. This was one among them.
furthermore, are you going in any way say that the renaissance, and therefore the death of feudalism, was not powered by the printing press?
It was, but not in the sense you mean. What the arrival of the printing press brought was the nobles beginning to become literate. And with their literacy also came funny political, as they become more and more aware of what an empire (think Ancient Rome) was, and how little power they in comparison actually had.
When people think about the Renaissance, they usually focus on the good things, such as the new sciences that appeared at the time. But they forget that the Renaissance, and the Modernity brought by it, was also the time when colonialism started, when black slave traffic developed, when the racist ideology was devised and developed, when the Inquisition started persecuting thousands of people, when wars stopped being something where nobles killed each other and started becoming matters that embraced whole populations, and so on and so forth. The printing press brought tons or marvels, but it also opened the door to tons of negative potentialities, one of which being that of the Philippines you talk about.
but surely you don't discount the value of illiteracy in keeping a serf a serf
Or a noble a noble. Don't forget that in Ancient Rome, and even Ancient Greece, one might be a literate and still a slave, while another was completely devoid reading skills and of any intellectual achievement, but still be a free man and a citizen with political power.
One thing isn't directly linked to the other. And even Medieval serfdom wasn't something easy to understand by our standards. For example, if a serf was in trouble with his feudal lord, he could, if he so wished, pack his things, walk into another feud, swear allegiance to that feudal lord, and his new lord was obliged to accept him. Or even walk into church lands and simply stay there. Furthermore, if he so wished he could make a trip (pilgrimage) from one extreme of Europe (say, England) up to Jerusalem and back (on foot of course), all the while not spending a dime, since churches and monasteries would gladly provide him night stay and food for free. And in terms of work, he worked up to 16-hours a day, yes, but only for six months. The other six, around and including winter, he had nothing to do, except maybe repair a bridge here or a pool there. Can you compare that with nowadays 2 weeks of vacation per year?
Medieval Europe is as much an alien culture to us as current tribal life in regions of Africa. Using modern parameters to understand it is an excellent way to not understand it.
World of Warcraft has an "Ignore Player" feature for a reason. You ignore him, you'll never, ever, read anything coming from him again.
And for "physical" abuse (for example, entering a guild meeting and ruining the photo), one can open a ticket to a game master and have him deal with the annoying player. Not that this is much fast, but it's nevertheless available.
fedualism (sic) depended in part on the ignorance of the serfs, the inability to read. when they were freed form this ignorance due to the sudden cheap and wide availability of the printed word
Where have you learned such an historical absurdity?!? In Medieval Europe, both nobles and serfs didn't know how to read! In particular, it was considered shameful for a noble to know it because such a "womanly" job was thought unfit for a warrior. And this is quite literal: women, at least noble ones, used to learn reading because it was their job to put some culture in (future warrior) children's heads.
In the rare cases where a serf or noble actually wanted to learn how to read, he would talk to his local priest, which usually was one of the few persons, if not the only one, in the feud able to do so, be given classes, and over time also become a priest, since that was usually the only "job" for which reading had any use. There were no restrictions on this, and anyone interested could do so.
The "pop-medieval" we see in movies and narrative books isn't historically accurate by any stretch of imagination. Learn to distinguish one from the other.
So is working for an entrepreneur. There are also all the employees who became broke and jobless because their employer's risks did not pay off. All of the risk, none of the potential for reward.
Wrong. When you have a standard job, you know you'll be making a fixed amount per month. You think you might be making more, but you figure you also might be making less, or getting mixed results. Talk to anybody that works by himself without being either an business owner nor a salary man, and he will tell you it is indeed more risky: some months you make more, some you make less, some you even make none.
Then, there's also the matter of what the businessman work itself is worth. Because the notion that the only thing he does is to "explore" the "surplus value" from his workers is idiotic XIX century over-simplification. His personal ability is this: he is good at organizing people. And the more skilled he is on organizing, the more he earns from this organizing. Thus, contrary to Marx's belief (yes, this is the word), he isn't "taking from" people's work force, he's "adding to" it, because when those workers work in unorganized ways they produce less than when they do so under the organization and direction that he (that specific business owner) figured as optimal or, at least, better. His organizational work "adds value" to the work of the group, and from this "added value": a) all his workers profit due to increased salaries (compared to what they would earn if the business didn't exist and they had to work autonomously); b) he profits, by getting his personal share of the added value, in direct proportion to how much it's all due to him; c) and the business gets expanded, by reinvesting.
Remove the organizational abilities of businessmen, or replace it with the very different kind of organizational abilities that political agents have, and this optimization with its added valuation goes away. The result you verify for yourself on all countries that foolishly attempted it in the last century, or even those who are still attempting it, all of whom didn't care to understand what "work" actually is.
Why are people who do not understand what they are making decisions about the ones making the decisions?
Basically, because they're the ones willing to take risks, while most of those who are knowledgeable on some subject usually prefer stable and less risky positions.
Nothing, in principle, prevents the knowledgeable ones from also becoming risk takers and either succeed or fail by doing so. Also, those who do so have huge chances of becoming successful, provided they also devote time to develop the specific skills required from a decision maker. But most simply don't follow this path.
my linux experience is next to nil and I don't have a spare machine to learn on
Why? Just install the free VMware Player, then download and run a pre-built image. Or install the also free VMware Server, download an image CD and try installing it from scratch inside an empty virtual machine. It's a good and risk-free way to learn.
Then, once you become confident enough, use a live CD to repartition your hard disk (nowadays this can be done without data loss), setting 20 or 30 GB free at the end, and install Linux there. This is a good way to learn how to make it work with your own hardware, while allowing you to go back to Windows whenever you need. I'm here, and now spend 90% of my time in Linux, only once a week loading Windows.
The 3rd step (which I'm approaching) is to remove Windows entirely and go full Linux. Unless you need Windows for games, of course, then you can keep a small leisure partition. Otherwise, you can always have a Windows virtual machine inside your Linux for those rare moments you must run some Windows-only software.
These days, lack of a 2nd machine surely isn't a reason for not learning, or at least playing around, with Linux.
I suspect more than a few slashdotters think that "the private sector does a better job at most things than the government.." The private sector is maximizing their revenues by enforcing its ownership rights and NOW it's a problem?
Yes, because they're using the government to maximize their revenues. When libertarians and classic liberals defend the private sector, this is only so far as it remains something private. The moment the government aligns itself with someone, it's not a private deal anymore, thus becoming, by definition, unjust and immoral.
Don't forget that, with all the international blocks being formed over the last decades, which then merge into greater blocks, which then merge into even greater blocks, and so on and so forth into the future, we're approaching a One World Government. Where do we (or our grandsons) run to when all countries have become states of a single, unique global country, with all of humanity having to obey the exact same set of federal laws? To Mars?:(
At $89/year for individual usage I surely won't use this thing. Someone please warn me when free (as in beer) and free (as in speech) version is released. Preferably as WordPress, TypePad, Joomla and Firefox extensions, with (also doubly free) grammatical rules for more than just the English language.
It's interesting to note that the word "school" comes from the ancient Greek word "schole", meaning "leisure". The idea back then was simple, and all but forgot nowadays: that people only actually learn those subjects they're interested in.
If the school system was made such that, past the very basic knowledge needed for socially functioning, children were able to deepen only on that which they show interest and have talent, the whole experience would be way more rewarding for all those involved. If later in life someone developed interest in an intellectual matter he didn't care before, then, and only then, it's time for her to engage in learning it properly.
Normal modern day school is flawed because it tries to teach everyone everything. The result is almost everyone, except for those who do actually have interest in everything, feeling bored and unmotivated. Instead of leisure, school becomes work, and a hated one at that.
I wonder how many of the people here complaining about this do personally refuse purchasing any "Made in China" goods. Because, you know, all Chinese companies are partially owned by the Chinese government itself, and an awful number of them employ slave (yes, slave) labor.
I myself am pretty much against what the Chinese government does to their citizens, but when faced with the question "How do I extend my paycheck to cover the whole month?" it's very difficult to say "No!" to Chinese products. Maybe not all, but surely many Google shareholders face similar questions.
The only solution for these dilemmas would be for Western governments as a whole to take action. Individuals like you, me and, yes, Google shareholders, simply don't have the power to make anything happen.
When these texts compare bits to qubits, they use to say that the former has two possible values (1 and 0) while the later has an additional superposition state. This makes sense when you consider the bit as pure information. But AFAIK then we're comparing apples to oranges, since qubits are physical entities, while bits are logical ones. IMHO, a more correct comparison would be between qubits and electrical gates, which are bits' physical counterparts. And, guess what? Gates actually have 3 states too (0, 1, and Z), even deriving their name from this.
Since I come from an electronics background I cannot help myself but to think on qubits' super-imposed 3rd state as an improvement over good old Z. Maybe I'm wrong in doing this, but at least it makes the whole subject a little more intuitive for me.
I'd love to see this, provided it wasn't for every level, but only for "key" levels.
For example, WoW has a lot of very nice dungeons suited rougly for level brackets (10-19, 20-29, 30-39 etc.). It would be amazing if, to be able to pass from, say, 39 to 40, you had to have the best gear available from the dungeons in the 30-39 bracket, then join a groups of other 4 player in the same situation (no players with higher levels allowed) for you all to complete a very difficult quest, and once it was completed, you all would receive level 40.
Then the content you produce has as its "value" the number of hours you spent on them. But hours != money. There is no direct translation that goes from a concrete quantity (hours, energy, materials etc.) to a given quantity of money. This means that, whatever you do, its monetary value is only what others are willing to pay for it, not a single dime more. If they're willing to pay $0, it's worth $0, and that's it. Then, how much is your intellectual production worth? Since anything that can become infinite "supplyable" approaches $0 value pretty fast, the answer is simply: whatever you can make from it between the instant you started doing it and the moment it's value has decreased to $0.
Copyright and patent laws are attempts to distort the basic economic laws governing intellectual production so that these can keep being a source of income for a longer-than-natural period of time. Remove these governmental interferences and in short time the free market readjusts the values to what they should have been since the beginning.
The Cuban government also has a prison in Guantanamo, near the American one. Search the Internet on what happens there. Compare to what happens on the American version. Then come talk to me how America is evil.
And no, I'm not American and I don't live on USA. But I wish I could.
The one thing that makes me stay with WoW: the LoTRO developer has chosen to completely forbid anyone from outside of a designed geographic region to purchase its local version and play there, no matter what. And if they released LoTRO in Brazil? Nope, sorry. I don't like playing games with other Brazilians. So, if the developer doesn't want my money to play on the US server, I won't pay him any money at all. It his loss, not mine.
Slashdot Mirror
In Vietnam, for instance, the moment the counter-culture lobby succeeded and USA give up on the war, the Russia-financed communists become free to do whatever they wanted. And as a result, in the following years 3 million people were massacred in the region, including half the population of Cambodia. Would these 3 million innocents have died hadn't the USA left Vietnam to appease the home anti-war movement? I bet not.
By the way, I never read or heard any of the counter-culture leaders of the time asking that the still alive relatives of the massacred innocents pardoned them for they efforts to bring USA home. Would you?
Now, Fallujah is an entirely different matter. So, please let's not confuse both subjects.
Let's see:
1 GB per account x 200k customers x 3 (redundancy) = 600 TB.
500 GB hard drive = $150 retail.
$150 * 600 TB / 500 GB = $180k.
$180k / 200k customers = $0.90 per customer A SINGLE TIME.
WHAT THE HELL?!? If you charged your customers $0.50 per month for the service, you could be INCREASING the space available to them by 500 MB per month, and still profit while doing so! And that's considering OVERPRICED RETAIL prices, not the huge discounts manufactures would give you. AND that's ignoring the fact that you wouldn't have to provide the whole space upfront, but increase it only so far as the actual usage increased.
There's no excuse for your ISP to not be providing your customers AT LEAST 1 GB. 60 MB is a joke.
By the way, this is what "conservatism" actually means. Not to conserve anything just because it's old, but to conserve that which works well, while still replacing that which doesn't. Any self-labeled progressive thinks exactly the same. The divergence lies in the list of what must be conserved and what must be replaced, not on the abstract principle, agreed by both, that some things must remain while others must change.
Do you remember what I said about "pop-medieval" not being history? Yep, it still applies.
When people think about the Renaissance, they usually focus on the good things, such as the new sciences that appeared at the time. But they forget that the Renaissance, and the Modernity brought by it, was also the time when colonialism started, when black slave traffic developed, when the racist ideology was devised and developed, when the Inquisition started persecuting thousands of people, when wars stopped being something where nobles killed each other and started becoming matters that embraced whole populations, and so on and so forth. The printing press brought tons or marvels, but it also opened the door to tons of negative potentialities, one of which being that of the Philippines you talk about.Or a noble a noble. Don't forget that in Ancient Rome, and even Ancient Greece, one might be a literate and still a slave, while another was completely devoid reading skills and of any intellectual achievement, but still be a free man and a citizen with political power.
One thing isn't directly linked to the other. And even Medieval serfdom wasn't something easy to understand by our standards. For example, if a serf was in trouble with his feudal lord, he could, if he so wished, pack his things, walk into another feud, swear allegiance to that feudal lord, and his new lord was obliged to accept him. Or even walk into church lands and simply stay there. Furthermore, if he so wished he could make a trip (pilgrimage) from one extreme of Europe (say, England) up to Jerusalem and back (on foot of course), all the while not spending a dime, since churches and monasteries would gladly provide him night stay and food for free. And in terms of work, he worked up to 16-hours a day, yes, but only for six months. The other six, around and including winter, he had nothing to do, except maybe repair a bridge here or a pool there. Can you compare that with nowadays 2 weeks of vacation per year?
Medieval Europe is as much an alien culture to us as current tribal life in regions of Africa. Using modern parameters to understand it is an excellent way to not understand it.
World of Warcraft has an "Ignore Player" feature for a reason. You ignore him, you'll never, ever, read anything coming from him again.
And for "physical" abuse (for example, entering a guild meeting and ruining the photo), one can open a ticket to a game master and have him deal with the annoying player. Not that this is much fast, but it's nevertheless available.
In the rare cases where a serf or noble actually wanted to learn how to read, he would talk to his local priest, which usually was one of the few persons, if not the only one, in the feud able to do so, be given classes, and over time also become a priest, since that was usually the only "job" for which reading had any use. There were no restrictions on this, and anyone interested could do so.
The "pop-medieval" we see in movies and narrative books isn't historically accurate by any stretch of imagination. Learn to distinguish one from the other.
Then, there's also the matter of what the businessman work itself is worth. Because the notion that the only thing he does is to "explore" the "surplus value" from his workers is idiotic XIX century over-simplification. His personal ability is this: he is good at organizing people. And the more skilled he is on organizing, the more he earns from this organizing. Thus, contrary to Marx's belief (yes, this is the word), he isn't "taking from" people's work force, he's "adding to" it, because when those workers work in unorganized ways they produce less than when they do so under the organization and direction that he (that specific business owner) figured as optimal or, at least, better. His organizational work "adds value" to the work of the group, and from this "added value": a) all his workers profit due to increased salaries (compared to what they would earn if the business didn't exist and they had to work autonomously); b) he profits, by getting his personal share of the added value, in direct proportion to how much it's all due to him; c) and the business gets expanded, by reinvesting.
Remove the organizational abilities of businessmen, or replace it with the very different kind of organizational abilities that political agents have, and this optimization with its added valuation goes away. The result you verify for yourself on all countries that foolishly attempted it in the last century, or even those who are still attempting it, all of whom didn't care to understand what "work" actually is.
Nothing, in principle, prevents the knowledgeable ones from also becoming risk takers and either succeed or fail by doing so. Also, those who do so have huge chances of becoming successful, provided they also devote time to develop the specific skills required from a decision maker. But most simply don't follow this path.
Then, once you become confident enough, use a live CD to repartition your hard disk (nowadays this can be done without data loss), setting 20 or 30 GB free at the end, and install Linux there. This is a good way to learn how to make it work with your own hardware, while allowing you to go back to Windows whenever you need. I'm here, and now spend 90% of my time in Linux, only once a week loading Windows.
The 3rd step (which I'm approaching) is to remove Windows entirely and go full Linux. Unless you need Windows for games, of course, then you can keep a small leisure partition. Otherwise, you can always have a Windows virtual machine inside your Linux for those rare moments you must run some Windows-only software.
These days, lack of a 2nd machine surely isn't a reason for not learning, or at least playing around, with Linux.
Don't forget that, with all the international blocks being formed over the last decades, which then merge into greater blocks, which then merge into even greater blocks, and so on and so forth into the future, we're approaching a One World Government. Where do we (or our grandsons) run to when all countries have become states of a single, unique global country, with all of humanity having to obey the exact same set of federal laws? To Mars? :(
At $89/year for individual usage I surely won't use this thing. Someone please warn me when free (as in beer) and free (as in speech) version is released. Preferably as WordPress, TypePad, Joomla and Firefox extensions, with (also doubly free) grammatical rules for more than just the English language.
It's interesting to note that the word "school" comes from the ancient Greek word "schole", meaning "leisure". The idea back then was simple, and all but forgot nowadays: that people only actually learn those subjects they're interested in.
If the school system was made such that, past the very basic knowledge needed for socially functioning, children were able to deepen only on that which they show interest and have talent, the whole experience would be way more rewarding for all those involved. If later in life someone developed interest in an intellectual matter he didn't care before, then, and only then, it's time for her to engage in learning it properly.
Normal modern day school is flawed because it tries to teach everyone everything. The result is almost everyone, except for those who do actually have interest in everything, feeling bored and unmotivated. Instead of leisure, school becomes work, and a hated one at that.
I wonder how many of the people here complaining about this do personally refuse purchasing any "Made in China" goods. Because, you know, all Chinese companies are partially owned by the Chinese government itself, and an awful number of them employ slave (yes, slave) labor.
I myself am pretty much against what the Chinese government does to their citizens, but when faced with the question "How do I extend my paycheck to cover the whole month?" it's very difficult to say "No!" to Chinese products. Maybe not all, but surely many Google shareholders face similar questions.
The only solution for these dilemmas would be for Western governments as a whole to take action. Individuals like you, me and, yes, Google shareholders, simply don't have the power to make anything happen.
When these texts compare bits to qubits, they use to say that the former has two possible values (1 and 0) while the later has an additional superposition state. This makes sense when you consider the bit as pure information. But AFAIK then we're comparing apples to oranges, since qubits are physical entities, while bits are logical ones. IMHO, a more correct comparison would be between qubits and electrical gates, which are bits' physical counterparts. And, guess what? Gates actually have 3 states too (0, 1, and Z), even deriving their name from this.
Since I come from an electronics background I cannot help myself but to think on qubits' super-imposed 3rd state as an improvement over good old Z. Maybe I'm wrong in doing this, but at least it makes the whole subject a little more intuitive for me.
I'd love to see this, provided it wasn't for every level, but only for "key" levels.
For example, WoW has a lot of very nice dungeons suited rougly for level brackets (10-19, 20-29, 30-39 etc.). It would be amazing if, to be able to pass from, say, 39 to 40, you had to have the best gear available from the dungeons in the 30-39 bracket, then join a groups of other 4 player in the same situation (no players with higher levels allowed) for you all to complete a very difficult quest, and once it was completed, you all would receive level 40.
Too bad it's not done this way.
Then the content you produce has as its "value" the number of hours you spent on them. But hours != money. There is no direct translation that goes from a concrete quantity (hours, energy, materials etc.) to a given quantity of money. This means that, whatever you do, its monetary value is only what others are willing to pay for it, not a single dime more. If they're willing to pay $0, it's worth $0, and that's it. Then, how much is your intellectual production worth? Since anything that can become infinite "supplyable" approaches $0 value pretty fast, the answer is simply: whatever you can make from it between the instant you started doing it and the moment it's value has decreased to $0.
Copyright and patent laws are attempts to distort the basic economic laws governing intellectual production so that these can keep being a source of income for a longer-than-natural period of time. Remove these governmental interferences and in short time the free market readjusts the values to what they should have been since the beginning.
a) Copyright System: [ ] Market [x] Government
b) Patent System: [ ] Market [x] Government
c) DMCA: [ ] Market [x] Government
Hmm... no, you're wrong.Let's look closer:
c) DMCA Party: [ ] Republican (Bush Sr./Jr.) [x] Democratic (Bill Clinton) [ ] Libertarian (-)
Er... wrong again.
Just click que "From" column title. One click set it from A to Z, another from Z to A.
The Cuban government also has a prison in Guantanamo, near the American one. Search the Internet on what happens there. Compare to what happens on the American version. Then come talk to me how America is evil.
And no, I'm not American and I don't live on USA. But I wish I could.
Thank you for the update! Now I'll be able to try LoTRO to see whether I like it or not. It seems things can change for the good now and then. :)
The one thing that makes me stay with WoW: the LoTRO developer has chosen to completely forbid anyone from outside of a designed geographic region to purchase its local version and play there, no matter what. And if they released LoTRO in Brazil? Nope, sorry. I don't like playing games with other Brazilians. So, if the developer doesn't want my money to play on the US server, I won't pay him any money at all. It his loss, not mine.