The President didn't, but the Justice Department did, and by the policy of "the buck stops here" the president is at some point responsible. Problem is that the first series of "gunwalking" operations started under Bush. So, AC isn't a "bigoted coward" unless he or she is of neither African or Caucasian descent. And I don't know where the cowardice comes in, unless you're referring to posting as AC, in which case I totally agree. Except for the general tone of your reply, which seems sort of, I don't know, bitter and stupid.
I mean, obviously, moving is your best option. Cities are loud places. Although a city with 350k is pretty small, if you're living in the center of the place, you're going to have to deal with noise. If you haven't gotten used to it yet (which is kind of surprising, really), your long-term solution is to save up some money until you can afford to move to the 'burbs, or out to the country. Or to a smaller town.
That said, I lived in a bigger city (600k or so) in a bad neighborhood (so there were cars and sirens all night) for a little while. Heavy drapes help, with the added benefit that people can't see in your windows. Sirens are made to be heard, so you might have a hard time really insulating yourself from them, but as for just general road noise and city sounds, I'd move your office into an internal room, i.e. one that doesn't have any windows, and that preferably has rooms with doors between it and the outside. As others have said, you could certainly install double- or triple-pane windows, but at that point you're better off spending the money on a down payment on a house or condo somewhere other than the busiest part of the city. Plants, bookshelves, basically stuff to get in the way and create more surfaces between the windows and you seem to be somewhat effective in reducing sound. Also, since you won't be able to get rid of the sound, you might try doing stuff like leaving the tv or radio on in the background, just as a low-cost "white-noise" alternative.
But, really, the core issue here is not how thick your windows need to be to live in the middle of an urban area and not hear anything. It's why you would locate yourself somewhere that you're not going to be able to work, or, the way it sounds, live comfortably. I don't know what you do for a living, but, if cost is an issue, a long-term solution might be to relocate to a cheaper area nearby, where you're still close enough to meet with clients in the city if need be, but you're not in a noisy area. Based on where you're posting and what you're posting, I'm assuming you're not a glass blower or a mime or anything, so I'd also point out that the wonder of telecommuting is that you can do it from quite far away...
I disagree, but I'm much closer to your opinion than the two hopeless fanboys that posted earlier.
Full disclosure, I use Linux in a professional environment. We use it to run wifi hardware, and in LAMP configurations for websites. Personally, I have used Linux off and on for the past six years, and Windows since it existed.
For the combination of low resource overhead and stability, Linux (CentOS in our case) beat Windows hands-down for the hardware that we sell to clients. We need something that will act as a router, bridge, or access point, so we need it to stay up and running for as long as possible. We don't upgrade hardware often, so as long as it works when it's installed it'll probably be fine, and we don't need to update the OS for the same reason.
In all other regards, Linux has been at best something that we can work around, and at worst a hindrance.
In 2012, being limited to a command line is archaic and counter-productive, so a user should be able to accomplish most if not all tasks from within a GUI. We can argue about command line interfaces and how 1337sauce they are all day, but the fact that all serious OSs on the market, including Linux, incorporate GUIs tends to indicate that moving away from command lines considered a good move by people that design and develop operating systems. It might be faster for people who are used to it to live in the command line, but the overwhelming majority of users want GUIs that provide all the functionality they need, and people who are in the business of making operating systems respond to this. And, overall, if the GUI is well-designed, it's generally more efficient than the command line. My opinion, yes, but I'll argue it all day.
Any security gains in Linux (and there certainly are) are mitigated by the obscurity of the system itself. Yes, you can batten down a Linux installation to a level of security you don't see with MS if you know what you're doing. The problem is that you have to have a high level of comfort and expertise with the OS to see these benefits; you can realize at least base-line security on a Windows machine without having to know anything about IPTABLES. It's like the classic martial arts dilemma: Chinese boxing might be superior to all other martial arts, but it takes decades to achieve mastery; a student of Krav Maga or jujitsu can become competent in a few years.
At our office I and another person write the documentation. With Open Office, we ran into formatting issues that, frankly, made it impossible to produce a professional-looking document. Even the person who'd been doing the documentation before, who is a self-described "Linux guy", admitted that he'd reached the limits of what could be done with OOo, and recommended I use Wine to install Office. This required that I switch distros, because CentOS doesn't support the latest version of Wine, which was required to install Office 2010 (a copy of which had already been purchased for a previous employee). Admittedly, the alternative was to install some flavor of Windows on a VM, but that would've required buying a license; I work at a very small company where cost is always an issue. Eventually, after some tweaking, I got Wine to install Office and launch it reliably, although there are stability issues.
As a gamer, too, I can speak to Wine and Linux in home applications. Yes, some games run under Wine. Certainly not all, and not even most. Also, big releases, especially multiplayer games, remain the province of Windows. It's changing, slowly, and Steam going to Linux is a promising development, but a PC running Windows remains the best platform for gaming. And, sure, you can run a VM, but then you're adding to hardware requirements that new releases already stretch on most PCs.
I know it's sort of de rigeur to hate Windows if you like Linux, but it's not the 1990s. Linux has come a long way, especially Ubuntu, and I think the argument can be made that some distros are no longer "hobbyist" OSs, but Windows remains the authoritative PC operat
1a.) In what way does advertisement encourage over-consumption beyond what would be caused by non-paid information from, for instance, a review website? And what proof do you have that people are more inclined to purchase anything (not more inclined to purchase one product over another, but inclined to buy something at all) because they've seen an advertisement? Keep in mind that these ads will be targeted based on search information the user enters. If I'm searching for "best espresso machines" I'm probably in the market, so I'm already going to buy something.
1b.) The term "over-consumption" is heavily loaded. How much consumption is "too much", and who decides what that figure is? In a market economy, consumption is what drives growth; if you have a problem with consumption, it's probably (and this isn't meant as a dig or insult) because you have a problem with markets. Talking about something called "over-consumption" is a tell that you're probably coming from a Marxist/socialist background, and so you're gonna have a problem with anything to do with markets, private commerce, or consumption.
2.) Ads don't increase prices, nor does consumption. Ads don't influence price, they influence demand. Vendors or producers determine price. The impetus is for price to be set in such a way that it's worth it to produce product X, and people are willing to buy all the product X that gets produced at price X. So, as demand increases, the price increases only if production doesn't also increase. Given that it makes sense to produce more in order to sell more, most rational producers will try to produce more if possible.
3.) Ads don't create privacy issues unless the information that you submit is linked to personally-identifiable information. Granted, at that point, you're trusting the search provider to do the right thing, which doesn't always happen. But, again, the issue here isn't that ads threaten privacy, it's that the technology used to deliver tailored results can potentially be a threat to privacy. Any time that search results are tailored, or, more broadly, user experiences are tailored based on personal information, users have to decide whether the benefits outweigh the risks. That's a decision that users have to make regardless of advertisements.
4.) Charging a price for Ubuntu is, IMO, a more serious violation of FOSS than ads are regarding privacy.
I'm not saying that I love advertisements. I turn them off or block them. But, I'm just saying that ads aren't the bogeyman that you're portraying.
Government regulation is fully capable of creating monopoly and oligarchy, and that, in fact, is what history shows us. Case in point: any socialist nation. Shit, as much as I like Doctor Who, the BBC. And, as much as the idea of big scary companies frightens you, at least you have the option to not use that companies service or product in a free market. You can choose a competing company, or a competing product. If the government controls that service or product, and forbids competition, then you've got no option. And I'm talking about the United States, too. Because any major corporation that holds a monopoly or even dominant market share of any service or product that you care to name I can point to a subsidy, tax loophole, and/or special legal category that the government has allowed which lets that company hold a monopoly.
Don't look at the US and say that free markets don't work, because we don't have a free market.
I know, we're such assholes for not responding to government subsidized monopolies by saying, "Well, what can you do? That's how the pseudo-free market works!" It's just like how the Iraqi elections under Hussein resulted in his winning 99% of the popular vote, thus proving that democracy is impossible and hopelessly broken.
Did they overlook the $1 mil for a cab medallion? Because, speaking from the DMV (DC, Maryland, Virginia, for non-natives), that was the first thing we picked up on. Apparently, NYC has so much money that only rich people can own cabs. Because you can get a smartphone for way less than an NYC cab medallion. I don't know what it's like up there, but, everywhere else, smartphones aren't limited to "rich people".
Whenever articles like this come out, I laugh. It reminds me of the "House of the Future!" stuff from the 50s, the sort of bizarre futurism that the Fallout series lampoons so well. The idea that people will start eating mealworms because hamburgers go up to $20 a pop in five years is just silly. You'll just see what we're seeing now, which is a combination of subtle changes in diet caused by everything from socioeconomics to health concerns.
Look at the trends today: buying local, aquaculture, sustainable agriculture, "alternative" meats such as goat, eating more varied proteins (swapping meat out for legumes). Collectively, these factors are pretty significant, and help avoid the alarmist dystopia the BBC is predicting.
I think population, particularly settlement patterns, is a more significant problem.
PC gamers use PCs because they can upgrade hardware components easily. Macs have always been "black boxes" for the most part, have focused on proprietary hardware, and have generally approached gaming as a secondary priority, if a priority at all. Linux, however, will run on a PC, and supports a wider range of gaming-oriented hardware than Apple OSs ever have.
People don't buy Macs for gaming; they own Macs and then want to play a particular game. To make the switch, they have to spend more money (to get a copy of Bootcamp and Windows, for example). People who own PCs run either Windows or Linux; to switch from Windows to Linux is free. If you only run Windows to play games, you can dump Windows and run Steam in Linux without incurring any additional cost. Not so with Mac. So, comparing the Mac market to a potential Linux market is apples and oranges, really.
I second that. Rage on its own merits was a mediocre AAA FPS with a buggy launch and consolitis. As a monument to Johm Carmack's overinflated view of his own relevance to gaming in general, it was and continues to be extremely telling. Linux isn't commercially viable for game designers because the market isn't there, and the market isn't there because developers don't make games for it. Valve stepping up and bringing Steam to Linux has the potential to cut that particular Gordian knot. Frankly, Valve is big and relevant enough to do it; Carmack doesn't have the juice to do it if he wanted to anymore.
I don't know, but if I see I guy coming in through the Exit door in body armor, and I'm an off-duty or plain clothes cop, and he hucks a canister, I'm gonna say something. And, yeah, if there's a guy shooting in a theater in a cloud of smoke, I'll shoot at the muzzle flare. It's better than the alternative, obviously.
Do you live in the DC area? I do. I remember exactly what happened with Occupy. They camped out in a park for months, pissing off people who actually live here and being a general nuisance. Most of them had no idea what they were demonstrating for. Some did, but they were radicals who didn't exactly represent most of the DC area, much less the United States at large. They were left alone for months, until the stink got so bad (and they'd assaulted enough locals) that the police finally ran them off. They're still in DC, mind you, just not in the same parks. They were not totally peaceful, nor were they totally unarmed. They'd left their homes months prior, and many of them are what you'd call professional protesters. We don't want them here, but they won't leave.
I have my own opinions about guns, which I suspect differ from yours, but that's what I know about Occupy.
I've recently been put in a position where I've had to do development and administration using solely FOSS software. It's awful. It can be done, and done well, but there are cost systems that make the process much easier and more efficient. From a practical standpoint, I would prefer not to have to use FOSS. I'm being intentionally vague, but suffice it to say that I'm mostly using command line stuff, running CentOS. Most of my time is spent figuring out how to use the environment. Some of that time is spent trying to get a version of Wine running that will let me install Office 2010 so that I can rewrite a manual. Yes, I'm aware of OOo, and I've used it, and it's not capable of doing what I need it to do, frankly.
I'm painting with a broad brush here, and I know it, but my issue with FOSS has and continues to be that there isn't enough attention paid to the UI. It's unnecessarily difficult to do very basic things that users need to do. Installing necessary software (and yes, I'm aware of security considerations), copying and pasting, and basic productivity. I can do all of these things from the command line, and do, but it's faster in a GUI. I'm aware that I'm going to be crucified for this, but Windows does this so much better it's not even funny.
Prior to needing to do all my development on a Linux box, I'd been ambivalent about FOSS; now, I'm sold on paid software, frankly. While the capabilities may be there (and that's arguable), it's still a hobby environment. I can't afford to spend two hours figuring out how to do twenty minutes of development when I also have other responsibilities. I say that to say this: if Steam can bring paid software to Linux, God bless them. Maybe it'll get the Linux communities to start thinking about moving past the dedicated audience and the hobby crowd.
but if this was being purchased for scurrilous reasons, couldn't Iranian intelligence go to, say, anywhere else to buy an iPad? I know that the employee is bound by Apple rules, but still. How much of this is Iranian vs. Iranian beef? Or, I'm sorry, Persian vs. Iranian beef?
That's not a coherent explanation, it's a list of things. What did you mean?
That's as coherent as it gets. Capitalism is an economic system wherein private interests own all capital, i.e. means of production. Means of production are things like tools, factories, etc., basically any durable good that is used to manufacture something else for profit. The definition doesn't get much simpler without losing some accuracy, so if you're having a hard time with it you might read a bit of basic economics.
Capitalism is based upon the selfish desire to make money.
Centrally-controlled socialist economies can also be based on the "selfish desire to make money." After all, they use the power of law and their ability to enforce laws with violence to remain the dominant (or only) economic actor. I always think it's funny that people see corporations as big, evil, monolithic robber-barons, but have no problem with an entire government controlling your access to resources with tanks and assault rifles. I mean, do you think your one vote has more impact on your happy smileville socialist government than my spending or not spending money on something has on a company?
There's also the issue of sovereignty and enforcement. A state can't remain a state and abdicate sovereignty at the same time, and a key element of sovereignty is the sole legitimate right to the use of force. In order for an entire state to be subject to a law made by another entity, it would by default had to have relinquished its own sovereignty to the entity in question. That's why the UN doesn't actually make "laws"; a law implies enforcement, and the UN lacks the authority to enforce anything.
That's different than states using violence or other forms of compulsion to force other states to comply with agreements or treaties. A sovereign has a positive right to use force to compel a subject entity to follow laws it has established, and the subject has an obligation to adhere to laws passed by the sovereign. Other obligations may at times outweigh the citizenship duty, but it's way up there. On the other hand, the highest responsibility a state has is to 1. maintain sovereignty, and 2. protect its citizens. International agreements always fall below that in terms of ethical force.
So, yeah, in addition to the UDHR (which is a little bit of a misnomer, because not everyone on Earth, let alone the Universe, signed) not being ratified by Congress, the strength of the binds that hold any country to a treaty or agreement are tenuous at best.
Well, Chris Dodd was implicated in a lot of sketchy business involving the subprime mortgage stuff. A lot of conflict of interest type things that seem to happen pretty often in Congress. Like he took a bunch of money from Fannie and Freddie, then trumpeted how financially healthy they were, right before they had to be entirely taken over by the Fed. He had some kind of involvement with Countrywide Financial, he had some tie to Bear-Stearns, and there was some flap about the AIG bailout, the details of which I don't recall. But, basically, during his time in Congress he had a lot of ties to a lot of financial institutions that have been under scrutiny for being awful, and he himself has benefited from these ties in ways that look at least a little bit sleazy. Granted, that could describe a lot of Congress, but that's the deal with him in particular. He's been a little bit of a scumbag well before he left Congress, and it's no surprise he remains a bit of a scumbag.
Honestly, if the Pirate Party could pay off his mortgage, he'd probably scupper the MPAA. The nice thing about people who can be bought is that they can be bought by anyone.
That prohibits the establishment of one form of religion over another, but not the promotion of religion in general. The actual phrasing is something like "blah blah blah shall make no law regarding the establishment of a religion, or the free exercise thereof", and then there's something about not requiring a religious test for public office, but that's it. There's no separation of religion and state, per se, just a prohibition against the favoring of one religion over another.
I'm not just being argumentative, either. That's the reasoning behind the government being involved in marriage legislation, school prayer, giving tax exemptions to religious institutions, etc. People forget sometimes that the reason most of the early colonists came to this country, at least in the mid-Atlantic and New England, was because they wanted to practice their particular religion freely, and in some cases establish communities where their religion would be able to exclude all others.
This all day. I'm a freelance writer, and I couldn't live without Word. I don't know how it is in other parts of the world, but I've only ever worked for American clients, and, aside from one who wanted RTFs, they all want DOC or DOCX. I used OOo for a little bit out of a combination of contrariness and poverty, and I remember spending too much time wrestling with formatting, and then losing all the formatting when I saved it as a DOC file.
And I don't know if this applies universally, but the days of a room full of typesetters are long gone. Yeah, your copy is going to be formatted by a copy editor or layout editor if you're working with a fairly large publisher, but they still want it to be as close to their end formatting as possible. They'll be using InDesign or Quark to do the layout, or they'll have some CMS that they use for online. In either case, they'll be expecting a standard format so that there are no hiccups when it's imported.
And, particularly if you're freelance, the editing is going to be removing text and some light formatting. If they've got to spend more than two minutes proofreading, they're not buying your piece. Which means they'll expect a standard format (Times, Courier, or sometimes Arial, 12 pt, double-spaced, 1" margins) so they can breeze through it, and they'll want a DOC file so that their copy of Word will open it without any issues. Because I guarantee you they'll be using Word 2003, or maybe 2007 if they had a really good couple of years.
Noam Chomsky as a linguist? Incomparable. Like Newton, Einstein, and Hawking to physics, all rolled into one. Even beyond linguistics, the stuff this guy has done has rippled through everything from psychology to computer science. He's a legend.
Noam Chomsky as a political theorist? Bit of a whack-a-doo. Sort of lives out on the socialist/anarchist fringe. Likes to be outrageous, a little bit of a bomb-thrower. Like other people who spend a lot of time in the theoretical world, he tends to oversimplify foreign policy, international political economy, and economics in order to promote his own views "logically," while glossing over or missing entirely facts that don't quite fit his framework. He's kind of found his unifying theory for the world, and it's sort of a labor-oriented anarcho-communist struggle against authority, tradition, and convention. I struggle with Chomsky because there are a lot of things that he says with which I agree, and there are some things he says with which I disagree but can understand and respect his views, but then there are things that he says that are just tinfoil hat, howl-at-the-moon loopy.
All of this is my opinion, of course. I'm sure a lot of people find Chomsky's political beliefs totally reasonable. But when he said that Obama ordering the hit on bin Laden was equivalent to al Qaeda attacking George W. Bush's "compound" (his words, and I believe it's called a "ranch"), killing him, and dumping his body in the sea, he just sounded like a crazy old man to me, desperate to be seen as a "dangerous, radical outsider." He actually compared Bush to the Nazis, and claimed that Bush was responsible for all of the sectarian conflict in the Middle East. Funny that the equivalence wasn't between Obama (who signed off on the hit) and bin Laden, but not terribly shocking considering the source. That's pretty much textbook Chomsky. He tends to view anything that a Western, 1st world power does as sinister, fascist, and immoral, while unconditionally embracing any non-Western, developing nations regardless of the deeds (or misdeeds) of their governments. It's a shame that he doesn't apply the same intellectual rigor to his political views, but, whatever. Any time something can be crammed into the radical revolutionary narrative, he's on board, facts or morality be damned.
As a matter fact, I'd be curious to hear what his thoughts on Syria are.
You're either thinking of a line from the Declaration of Independence: "...that all men are created equal..." or the "Equal Protection" clause of the 14th Amendment, which basically just says that a state has to apply all of its laws to all of its citizens equally. So you can vote for or against someone based on their race, and you can talk as much trash about their race as you like. It's just that a state can't pass a law that doesn't apply equally to all people in the state. Naturally, it's a broad clause that gets debated and interpreted all over the place, but it usually has to do with race and sex, and sometimes in obscure instances to corporations (since they're "people" for some legal purposes).
The religion bit is just that the government can't establish an official religion. The actual separation of church and state doesn't AFAIK have an actual basis in the Constitution, and is sort of an outgrowth of stuff Thomas Jefferson was writing about at the time. That winds up meaning that you can't make laws regarding a particular religion, because that can be interpreted as the government establishing a particular religion or religions as authorized. But, I'm pretty sure that if a progressive tax doesn't violate the 14th, then a law against a particular religion wouldn't, either.
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The President didn't, but the Justice Department did, and by the policy of "the buck stops here" the president is at some point responsible. Problem is that the first series of "gunwalking" operations started under Bush. So, AC isn't a "bigoted coward" unless he or she is of neither African or Caucasian descent. And I don't know where the cowardice comes in, unless you're referring to posting as AC, in which case I totally agree. Except for the general tone of your reply, which seems sort of, I don't know, bitter and stupid.
I mean, obviously, moving is your best option. Cities are loud places. Although a city with 350k is pretty small, if you're living in the center of the place, you're going to have to deal with noise. If you haven't gotten used to it yet (which is kind of surprising, really), your long-term solution is to save up some money until you can afford to move to the 'burbs, or out to the country. Or to a smaller town.
That said, I lived in a bigger city (600k or so) in a bad neighborhood (so there were cars and sirens all night) for a little while. Heavy drapes help, with the added benefit that people can't see in your windows. Sirens are made to be heard, so you might have a hard time really insulating yourself from them, but as for just general road noise and city sounds, I'd move your office into an internal room, i.e. one that doesn't have any windows, and that preferably has rooms with doors between it and the outside. As others have said, you could certainly install double- or triple-pane windows, but at that point you're better off spending the money on a down payment on a house or condo somewhere other than the busiest part of the city. Plants, bookshelves, basically stuff to get in the way and create more surfaces between the windows and you seem to be somewhat effective in reducing sound. Also, since you won't be able to get rid of the sound, you might try doing stuff like leaving the tv or radio on in the background, just as a low-cost "white-noise" alternative.
But, really, the core issue here is not how thick your windows need to be to live in the middle of an urban area and not hear anything. It's why you would locate yourself somewhere that you're not going to be able to work, or, the way it sounds, live comfortably. I don't know what you do for a living, but, if cost is an issue, a long-term solution might be to relocate to a cheaper area nearby, where you're still close enough to meet with clients in the city if need be, but you're not in a noisy area. Based on where you're posting and what you're posting, I'm assuming you're not a glass blower or a mime or anything, so I'd also point out that the wonder of telecommuting is that you can do it from quite far away...
Really, cause I know a guy who tries to make pithy jabs at the US but can't manage to spell "imperial" or "Liberia" correctly.
Oh, and if you love the TSA so much why don't you marry it, etc.
Careful, that sounded dangerously close to not jumping on the bandwagon.
I disagree, but I'm much closer to your opinion than the two hopeless fanboys that posted earlier.
Full disclosure, I use Linux in a professional environment. We use it to run wifi hardware, and in LAMP configurations for websites. Personally, I have used Linux off and on for the past six years, and Windows since it existed.
For the combination of low resource overhead and stability, Linux (CentOS in our case) beat Windows hands-down for the hardware that we sell to clients. We need something that will act as a router, bridge, or access point, so we need it to stay up and running for as long as possible. We don't upgrade hardware often, so as long as it works when it's installed it'll probably be fine, and we don't need to update the OS for the same reason.
In all other regards, Linux has been at best something that we can work around, and at worst a hindrance.
In 2012, being limited to a command line is archaic and counter-productive, so a user should be able to accomplish most if not all tasks from within a GUI. We can argue about command line interfaces and how 1337sauce they are all day, but the fact that all serious OSs on the market, including Linux, incorporate GUIs tends to indicate that moving away from command lines considered a good move by people that design and develop operating systems. It might be faster for people who are used to it to live in the command line, but the overwhelming majority of users want GUIs that provide all the functionality they need, and people who are in the business of making operating systems respond to this. And, overall, if the GUI is well-designed, it's generally more efficient than the command line. My opinion, yes, but I'll argue it all day.
Any security gains in Linux (and there certainly are) are mitigated by the obscurity of the system itself. Yes, you can batten down a Linux installation to a level of security you don't see with MS if you know what you're doing. The problem is that you have to have a high level of comfort and expertise with the OS to see these benefits; you can realize at least base-line security on a Windows machine without having to know anything about IPTABLES. It's like the classic martial arts dilemma: Chinese boxing might be superior to all other martial arts, but it takes decades to achieve mastery; a student of Krav Maga or jujitsu can become competent in a few years.
At our office I and another person write the documentation. With Open Office, we ran into formatting issues that, frankly, made it impossible to produce a professional-looking document. Even the person who'd been doing the documentation before, who is a self-described "Linux guy", admitted that he'd reached the limits of what could be done with OOo, and recommended I use Wine to install Office. This required that I switch distros, because CentOS doesn't support the latest version of Wine, which was required to install Office 2010 (a copy of which had already been purchased for a previous employee). Admittedly, the alternative was to install some flavor of Windows on a VM, but that would've required buying a license; I work at a very small company where cost is always an issue. Eventually, after some tweaking, I got Wine to install Office and launch it reliably, although there are stability issues.
As a gamer, too, I can speak to Wine and Linux in home applications. Yes, some games run under Wine. Certainly not all, and not even most. Also, big releases, especially multiplayer games, remain the province of Windows. It's changing, slowly, and Steam going to Linux is a promising development, but a PC running Windows remains the best platform for gaming. And, sure, you can run a VM, but then you're adding to hardware requirements that new releases already stretch on most PCs.
I know it's sort of de rigeur to hate Windows if you like Linux, but it's not the 1990s. Linux has come a long way, especially Ubuntu, and I think the argument can be made that some distros are no longer "hobbyist" OSs, but Windows remains the authoritative PC operat
Excuse me while I play devil's advocate.
1a.) In what way does advertisement encourage over-consumption beyond what would be caused by non-paid information from, for instance, a review website? And what proof do you have that people are more inclined to purchase anything (not more inclined to purchase one product over another, but inclined to buy something at all) because they've seen an advertisement? Keep in mind that these ads will be targeted based on search information the user enters. If I'm searching for "best espresso machines" I'm probably in the market, so I'm already going to buy something.
1b.) The term "over-consumption" is heavily loaded. How much consumption is "too much", and who decides what that figure is? In a market economy, consumption is what drives growth; if you have a problem with consumption, it's probably (and this isn't meant as a dig or insult) because you have a problem with markets. Talking about something called "over-consumption" is a tell that you're probably coming from a Marxist/socialist background, and so you're gonna have a problem with anything to do with markets, private commerce, or consumption.
2.) Ads don't increase prices, nor does consumption. Ads don't influence price, they influence demand. Vendors or producers determine price. The impetus is for price to be set in such a way that it's worth it to produce product X, and people are willing to buy all the product X that gets produced at price X. So, as demand increases, the price increases only if production doesn't also increase. Given that it makes sense to produce more in order to sell more, most rational producers will try to produce more if possible.
3.) Ads don't create privacy issues unless the information that you submit is linked to personally-identifiable information. Granted, at that point, you're trusting the search provider to do the right thing, which doesn't always happen. But, again, the issue here isn't that ads threaten privacy, it's that the technology used to deliver tailored results can potentially be a threat to privacy. Any time that search results are tailored, or, more broadly, user experiences are tailored based on personal information, users have to decide whether the benefits outweigh the risks. That's a decision that users have to make regardless of advertisements.
4.) Charging a price for Ubuntu is, IMO, a more serious violation of FOSS than ads are regarding privacy.
I'm not saying that I love advertisements. I turn them off or block them. But, I'm just saying that ads aren't the bogeyman that you're portraying.
In a word: bullhockey.
Government regulation is fully capable of creating monopoly and oligarchy, and that, in fact, is what history shows us. Case in point: any socialist nation. Shit, as much as I like Doctor Who, the BBC. And, as much as the idea of big scary companies frightens you, at least you have the option to not use that companies service or product in a free market. You can choose a competing company, or a competing product. If the government controls that service or product, and forbids competition, then you've got no option. And I'm talking about the United States, too. Because any major corporation that holds a monopoly or even dominant market share of any service or product that you care to name I can point to a subsidy, tax loophole, and/or special legal category that the government has allowed which lets that company hold a monopoly.
Don't look at the US and say that free markets don't work, because we don't have a free market.
I know, we're such assholes for not responding to government subsidized monopolies by saying, "Well, what can you do? That's how the pseudo-free market works!" It's just like how the Iraqi elections under Hussein resulted in his winning 99% of the popular vote, thus proving that democracy is impossible and hopelessly broken.
Did they overlook the $1 mil for a cab medallion? Because, speaking from the DMV (DC, Maryland, Virginia, for non-natives), that was the first thing we picked up on. Apparently, NYC has so much money that only rich people can own cabs. Because you can get a smartphone for way less than an NYC cab medallion. I don't know what it's like up there, but, everywhere else, smartphones aren't limited to "rich people".
Whenever articles like this come out, I laugh. It reminds me of the "House of the Future!" stuff from the 50s, the sort of bizarre futurism that the Fallout series lampoons so well. The idea that people will start eating mealworms because hamburgers go up to $20 a pop in five years is just silly. You'll just see what we're seeing now, which is a combination of subtle changes in diet caused by everything from socioeconomics to health concerns.
Look at the trends today: buying local, aquaculture, sustainable agriculture, "alternative" meats such as goat, eating more varied proteins (swapping meat out for legumes). Collectively, these factors are pretty significant, and help avoid the alarmist dystopia the BBC is predicting.
I think population, particularly settlement patterns, is a more significant problem.
PC gamers use PCs because they can upgrade hardware components easily. Macs have always been "black boxes" for the most part, have focused on proprietary hardware, and have generally approached gaming as a secondary priority, if a priority at all. Linux, however, will run on a PC, and supports a wider range of gaming-oriented hardware than Apple OSs ever have.
People don't buy Macs for gaming; they own Macs and then want to play a particular game. To make the switch, they have to spend more money (to get a copy of Bootcamp and Windows, for example). People who own PCs run either Windows or Linux; to switch from Windows to Linux is free. If you only run Windows to play games, you can dump Windows and run Steam in Linux without incurring any additional cost. Not so with Mac. So, comparing the Mac market to a potential Linux market is apples and oranges, really.
I second that. Rage on its own merits was a mediocre AAA FPS with a buggy launch and consolitis. As a monument to Johm Carmack's overinflated view of his own relevance to gaming in general, it was and continues to be extremely telling. Linux isn't commercially viable for game designers because the market isn't there, and the market isn't there because developers don't make games for it. Valve stepping up and bringing Steam to Linux has the potential to cut that particular Gordian knot. Frankly, Valve is big and relevant enough to do it; Carmack doesn't have the juice to do it if he wanted to anymore.
So does that make you a supporter? How about a promoter?
I don't know, but if I see I guy coming in through the Exit door in body armor, and I'm an off-duty or plain clothes cop, and he hucks a canister, I'm gonna say something. And, yeah, if there's a guy shooting in a theater in a cloud of smoke, I'll shoot at the muzzle flare. It's better than the alternative, obviously.
Do you live in the DC area? I do. I remember exactly what happened with Occupy. They camped out in a park for months, pissing off people who actually live here and being a general nuisance. Most of them had no idea what they were demonstrating for. Some did, but they were radicals who didn't exactly represent most of the DC area, much less the United States at large. They were left alone for months, until the stink got so bad (and they'd assaulted enough locals) that the police finally ran them off. They're still in DC, mind you, just not in the same parks. They were not totally peaceful, nor were they totally unarmed. They'd left their homes months prior, and many of them are what you'd call professional protesters. We don't want them here, but they won't leave.
I have my own opinions about guns, which I suspect differ from yours, but that's what I know about Occupy.
I've recently been put in a position where I've had to do development and administration using solely FOSS software. It's awful. It can be done, and done well, but there are cost systems that make the process much easier and more efficient. From a practical standpoint, I would prefer not to have to use FOSS. I'm being intentionally vague, but suffice it to say that I'm mostly using command line stuff, running CentOS. Most of my time is spent figuring out how to use the environment. Some of that time is spent trying to get a version of Wine running that will let me install Office 2010 so that I can rewrite a manual. Yes, I'm aware of OOo, and I've used it, and it's not capable of doing what I need it to do, frankly.
I'm painting with a broad brush here, and I know it, but my issue with FOSS has and continues to be that there isn't enough attention paid to the UI. It's unnecessarily difficult to do very basic things that users need to do. Installing necessary software (and yes, I'm aware of security considerations), copying and pasting, and basic productivity. I can do all of these things from the command line, and do, but it's faster in a GUI. I'm aware that I'm going to be crucified for this, but Windows does this so much better it's not even funny.
Prior to needing to do all my development on a Linux box, I'd been ambivalent about FOSS; now, I'm sold on paid software, frankly. While the capabilities may be there (and that's arguable), it's still a hobby environment. I can't afford to spend two hours figuring out how to do twenty minutes of development when I also have other responsibilities. I say that to say this: if Steam can bring paid software to Linux, God bless them. Maybe it'll get the Linux communities to start thinking about moving past the dedicated audience and the hobby crowd.
...like Contra, Rush N' Attack, Combat, and Ikari Warriors. Sad that today's games are so obsessed with violence and the military.
but if this was being purchased for scurrilous reasons, couldn't Iranian intelligence go to, say, anywhere else to buy an iPad? I know that the employee is bound by Apple rules, but still. How much of this is Iranian vs. Iranian beef? Or, I'm sorry, Persian vs. Iranian beef?
That's not a coherent explanation, it's a list of things. What did you mean?
That's as coherent as it gets. Capitalism is an economic system wherein private interests own all capital, i.e. means of production. Means of production are things like tools, factories, etc., basically any durable good that is used to manufacture something else for profit. The definition doesn't get much simpler without losing some accuracy, so if you're having a hard time with it you might read a bit of basic economics.
Capitalism is based upon the selfish desire to make money.
Centrally-controlled socialist economies can also be based on the "selfish desire to make money." After all, they use the power of law and their ability to enforce laws with violence to remain the dominant (or only) economic actor. I always think it's funny that people see corporations as big, evil, monolithic robber-barons, but have no problem with an entire government controlling your access to resources with tanks and assault rifles. I mean, do you think your one vote has more impact on your happy smileville socialist government than my spending or not spending money on something has on a company?
There's also the issue of sovereignty and enforcement. A state can't remain a state and abdicate sovereignty at the same time, and a key element of sovereignty is the sole legitimate right to the use of force. In order for an entire state to be subject to a law made by another entity, it would by default had to have relinquished its own sovereignty to the entity in question. That's why the UN doesn't actually make "laws"; a law implies enforcement, and the UN lacks the authority to enforce anything.
That's different than states using violence or other forms of compulsion to force other states to comply with agreements or treaties. A sovereign has a positive right to use force to compel a subject entity to follow laws it has established, and the subject has an obligation to adhere to laws passed by the sovereign. Other obligations may at times outweigh the citizenship duty, but it's way up there. On the other hand, the highest responsibility a state has is to 1. maintain sovereignty, and 2. protect its citizens. International agreements always fall below that in terms of ethical force.
So, yeah, in addition to the UDHR (which is a little bit of a misnomer, because not everyone on Earth, let alone the Universe, signed) not being ratified by Congress, the strength of the binds that hold any country to a treaty or agreement are tenuous at best.
Well, Chris Dodd was implicated in a lot of sketchy business involving the subprime mortgage stuff. A lot of conflict of interest type things that seem to happen pretty often in Congress. Like he took a bunch of money from Fannie and Freddie, then trumpeted how financially healthy they were, right before they had to be entirely taken over by the Fed. He had some kind of involvement with Countrywide Financial, he had some tie to Bear-Stearns, and there was some flap about the AIG bailout, the details of which I don't recall. But, basically, during his time in Congress he had a lot of ties to a lot of financial institutions that have been under scrutiny for being awful, and he himself has benefited from these ties in ways that look at least a little bit sleazy. Granted, that could describe a lot of Congress, but that's the deal with him in particular. He's been a little bit of a scumbag well before he left Congress, and it's no surprise he remains a bit of a scumbag.
Honestly, if the Pirate Party could pay off his mortgage, he'd probably scupper the MPAA. The nice thing about people who can be bought is that they can be bought by anyone.
That prohibits the establishment of one form of religion over another, but not the promotion of religion in general. The actual phrasing is something like "blah blah blah shall make no law regarding the establishment of a religion, or the free exercise thereof", and then there's something about not requiring a religious test for public office, but that's it. There's no separation of religion and state, per se, just a prohibition against the favoring of one religion over another.
I'm not just being argumentative, either. That's the reasoning behind the government being involved in marriage legislation, school prayer, giving tax exemptions to religious institutions, etc. People forget sometimes that the reason most of the early colonists came to this country, at least in the mid-Atlantic and New England, was because they wanted to practice their particular religion freely, and in some cases establish communities where their religion would be able to exclude all others.
This all day. I'm a freelance writer, and I couldn't live without Word. I don't know how it is in other parts of the world, but I've only ever worked for American clients, and, aside from one who wanted RTFs, they all want DOC or DOCX. I used OOo for a little bit out of a combination of contrariness and poverty, and I remember spending too much time wrestling with formatting, and then losing all the formatting when I saved it as a DOC file.
And I don't know if this applies universally, but the days of a room full of typesetters are long gone. Yeah, your copy is going to be formatted by a copy editor or layout editor if you're working with a fairly large publisher, but they still want it to be as close to their end formatting as possible. They'll be using InDesign or Quark to do the layout, or they'll have some CMS that they use for online. In either case, they'll be expecting a standard format so that there are no hiccups when it's imported.
And, particularly if you're freelance, the editing is going to be removing text and some light formatting. If they've got to spend more than two minutes proofreading, they're not buying your piece. Which means they'll expect a standard format (Times, Courier, or sometimes Arial, 12 pt, double-spaced, 1" margins) so they can breeze through it, and they'll want a DOC file so that their copy of Word will open it without any issues. Because I guarantee you they'll be using Word 2003, or maybe 2007 if they had a really good couple of years.
Noam Chomsky as a linguist? Incomparable. Like Newton, Einstein, and Hawking to physics, all rolled into one. Even beyond linguistics, the stuff this guy has done has rippled through everything from psychology to computer science. He's a legend.
Noam Chomsky as a political theorist? Bit of a whack-a-doo. Sort of lives out on the socialist/anarchist fringe. Likes to be outrageous, a little bit of a bomb-thrower. Like other people who spend a lot of time in the theoretical world, he tends to oversimplify foreign policy, international political economy, and economics in order to promote his own views "logically," while glossing over or missing entirely facts that don't quite fit his framework. He's kind of found his unifying theory for the world, and it's sort of a labor-oriented anarcho-communist struggle against authority, tradition, and convention. I struggle with Chomsky because there are a lot of things that he says with which I agree, and there are some things he says with which I disagree but can understand and respect his views, but then there are things that he says that are just tinfoil hat, howl-at-the-moon loopy.
All of this is my opinion, of course. I'm sure a lot of people find Chomsky's political beliefs totally reasonable. But when he said that Obama ordering the hit on bin Laden was equivalent to al Qaeda attacking George W. Bush's "compound" (his words, and I believe it's called a "ranch"), killing him, and dumping his body in the sea, he just sounded like a crazy old man to me, desperate to be seen as a "dangerous, radical outsider." He actually compared Bush to the Nazis, and claimed that Bush was responsible for all of the sectarian conflict in the Middle East. Funny that the equivalence wasn't between Obama (who signed off on the hit) and bin Laden, but not terribly shocking considering the source. That's pretty much textbook Chomsky. He tends to view anything that a Western, 1st world power does as sinister, fascist, and immoral, while unconditionally embracing any non-Western, developing nations regardless of the deeds (or misdeeds) of their governments. It's a shame that he doesn't apply the same intellectual rigor to his political views, but, whatever. Any time something can be crammed into the radical revolutionary narrative, he's on board, facts or morality be damned.
As a matter fact, I'd be curious to hear what his thoughts on Syria are.
You're either thinking of a line from the Declaration of Independence: "...that all men are created equal..." or the "Equal Protection" clause of the 14th Amendment, which basically just says that a state has to apply all of its laws to all of its citizens equally. So you can vote for or against someone based on their race, and you can talk as much trash about their race as you like. It's just that a state can't pass a law that doesn't apply equally to all people in the state. Naturally, it's a broad clause that gets debated and interpreted all over the place, but it usually has to do with race and sex, and sometimes in obscure instances to corporations (since they're "people" for some legal purposes).
The religion bit is just that the government can't establish an official religion. The actual separation of church and state doesn't AFAIK have an actual basis in the Constitution, and is sort of an outgrowth of stuff Thomas Jefferson was writing about at the time. That winds up meaning that you can't make laws regarding a particular religion, because that can be interpreted as the government establishing a particular religion or religions as authorized. But, I'm pretty sure that if a progressive tax doesn't violate the 14th, then a law against a particular religion wouldn't, either.