Generally speaking, when revolutions come, they don't tend to fare particularly well for the intellectual class (i.e. those that would read Slashdot). Honestly, I'd rather have a reasonably pacified populace than have to wonder if that guy in the trailer park down the street is coveting my "decadent and bourgeoisie" Kia.
The trouble with making elections fully publicly funded is that you then need a way to determine how the public funds are disbursed. If you base it on previous results, the incumbent will always have an advantage. If you give equally to all candidates, you'll end up with hundreds of candidates for each race (keep in mind we don't have runoffs in the US). If you give only to certain candidates that you think might be "viable", you're then going to have to define what "viable" means - odds are, this will tick off third parties and prevent candidates like John Anderson or Ross Perot from gaining a foothold.
Keep in mind that, at the moment, corporations actually have less ability to directly contribute to a campaign than unions do. With a corporation, only people within the corporation may individually contribute (usually CEOs and the like). Unions, which are also a collective body of individuals, may contribute to campaigns directly. Of course, this also happens to include public sector unions - whether you think that's a good idea or a bad idea probably depends on your perspective, your thoughts on how much (or little) of a conflict of interest it might be for public sector unions to attempt to influence hiring and wage policies through the election process, and your general political inclination.
You actually hit the nail on the head - we don't believe that certain political systems will somehow change people. Instead, we assume that the people in government are just as prone to collusion and bribery as your average capitalist. The difference between most capitalists and the government, however, is that people can choose whether to do business with a capitalist or not.
Active Directory tends to complicate things, though you can use NTBackup or Windows Backup (depending on your Server version) to kind of keep things somewhat under control there. Even then, though, restoring AD from backup using NTBackup is not a particularly fun or, in my experience, reliable proposition. Plus, this doesn't even dig into the rest of a server's system state (in theory, if it's backed up right via NTBackup, you might be able to restore the whole thing without reinstalling every piece of software - good luck!) or attempting a brick-level backup of Exchange.
It really is phenomenal how much effort Microsoft forces you to go through just to back up their servers. These days, I just go with image-based software for server backups - they seem to do a far more reliable job of getting Windows servers back up in a hurry than file-level products (which Robocopy + NTBackup would qualify as). But, that's just me, and I primarily deal with smallish networks, so I'm not entirely sure how well that scales.
Nah, he has a rule on his pirated ISA box running pirated Windows Server that checks for warez traffic and sends him an alert if it picks anything up. Since he hasn't picked up a thing, he clearly is doing things right!
What's really fun about them is that we only get to see the total tax that's assessed on the product, not how it's broken down (local, county, state), so the whole "you will see how much the tax is" argument kind of becomes moot after a while. Then again, we don't have a national sales tax or VAT - it's all assessed depending on what city you live in, what taxes are being assessed by the county, and what the state wants to shave off while it's there. Then there's the issue of what's taxable (most states don't tax food, for example).
As an average North American, and thus being possessed of geography skills above that of the average European troll, I can assure you that the "continent" of America is, in fact, composed of one continent and ONE EXTRA CONTINENT FOR NO EXTRA CHARGE!
True, which is why DOSBox has troubles implementing it. Since DOSBox has to run on operating systems that do, in fact, get in the middle of things and, more often than not, explicitly forbid applications from doing everything themselves, they have to come up with ways to make it appear to the DOS application that it's getting its way 100% of the time while, in reality, letting the underlying OS maintain all of the control. The reason FreeDOS is useful in these situations is because, as an operating system, it can just behave as DOS originally did, so there's no need to implement or maintain a shim between the DOS application and whatever is really underneath.
The one weakness, however, is that, since most of those applications took care of everything themselves, that means the applications frequently did things in very specifically hardware-dependent ways (think WordPerfect printer drivers), which can really put a damper on attempts to get DOS applications to function correctly on newer hardware.
In all seriousness, I loved cities when I was single. They were busy, everything was near everything, I could hang out with my friends - good times. Then I had a kid. Suddenly, being in an area that actually quiets down before 10 was a priority. Being able to afford an apartment that can actually fit two adults and a kid became a priority. Having some green space for the kid to play in became a priority (public parks are okay). Being in an area where the kid can step outside semi-unsupervised and not go into full-on panic mode became a priority. Though some cities are better than others at meeting that list of criteria, suburbia, for all its faults, was practically designed around providing just that.
Exactly! The correct solution is to go to a flea market, find an old computer, put it in her room, install OpenBSD on it, throw Apache, MySQL and PHP on top of that, install Drupal, install the Calendar and Date modules, set up DynDNS to point to her new calendar server, sync her cell phone to the server using iCal, and make sure that you both have user accounts on the machine so you can both keep track of each other. I mean, duh.:-)
The biggest problem that I have with nationalized health care is that it effectively guarantees that we're stuck with paying for health care using the insurance model for the rest of our days. The trouble with insurance is that, in theory, less money is supposed to be spent than is put in. This guarantees that there will always be profiteering and "waste" - that's why insurance works. If we didn't already legislate the insurance model so thoroughly already, market-based innovations like interest-bearing health savings accounts might be able to take a better hold.
In an ideal world, I'd like to see all health care spending be tax deductible. If my employer wants to spend money on insurance for me, great. If my employer wants to put money in an interest-bearing health account, like a 401k or something similar, so much the better, provided it's portable from job to job. Heck, if my employer just pays my bills directly - sweet! Let them earn their tax credit either way, and if I choose to do the same, well, let's encourage that, too. It'll never happen, though, especially if this bill gets passed. Besides, all of the market-based innovation in payment methods in the world isn't going to change one basic, simple fact:
Health care is scarce.
There is a finite supply of people willing and capable of being doctors and, due to generational constraints (fewer people in the younger generations than during the Boomer generations), there are fewer and fewer of them than there used to be. Meanwhile, more and more people are consuming more and more health care. This isn't just a case of the Baby Boomers getting older, though that's a big part of it. The other part is that the health care industry can do far more than it could in, say, 1950. In 1930, if you had an infection, they gave you sulfates and told you to start praying. Nowadays, we have books that list nothing but types of antibiotics. We can transplant organs, cure most kinds of cancer if we catch it soon enough, cure nearly any imaginable infection, and on and on and on. If I get an ingrown toenail now, I see a doctor (possibly even a podiatrist - specialist rates!). If I got an ingrown toenail in 1930, I probably would have grabbed a bottle of whiskey and a pocketknife. Simply put, the health care industry can provide far more services than it could years ago, increasing demand, while also seeing fewer and fewer people willing to provide the services. As long as that dynamic is true, it won't matter how we pay for health care. If we try to make it cheap, there will be increased scarcity, which means longer waits for procedures. If we try to make it plentiful, such that nobody has to wait, it will be expensive. That's just the way it is.
If you really want to make health care affordable, you need to loosen up who provides non-emergency health care. This might involve getting nurses involved, but they're nearly as scarce as doctors right now. This might involve robots - heck, Japan's been playing with them in health care for years. This might involve computerized quizzes - fill in some blanks (I have the sniffles but I don't have a fever) and receive a diagnosis (You have a cold or mild allergies). In short, think of it sort of like IT. You don't need to throw a CCNA or MCITP/MCSE at every infected workstation - why should you throw a doctor at every minor ailment? Yeah, I know - when you're holding a hammer, every problem looks like a nail, but there's some wisdom here.
In the end, no matter how you shuffle the cards around, it will never change the fact that, as long as health care is as scarce as it is (and there's no reason to suggest it won't be anytime soon), it will be expensive, one way or another. There isn't a Republican or Democrat sponsored piece of legislation in the world that will ever change that.
That's what I'm thinking, too. Also, make sure conflict detection is turned on. Serving DHCP isn't particularly processor-intensive, so I doubt it'll matter much if you're hosting it from your *NIX boxes or from your Cisco equipment.
Fortunately, at least in an AD environment, you can pull this off using GPO-based software restrictions. Unfortunately, Samba 3 doesn't support GPOs, and Samba 4 isn't quite done yet. That said, if it can be done via GPO, it can probably be done via the registry if you can figure out what keys they're munging, and once you figure that out, you can write startup batch scripts that can make the necessary changes to the registry for you.
Another vote against Symantec, especially their latest version of Endpoint Protection - I understand they've cleaned up a lot of the problems from when v11 was originally released, but I'm not about to take a second chance at it. Also, I've found that the enterprise version of AVG 8 isn't much better than Symantec as far as "works out of the box" and "doesn't turn workstations into slow piles of mush".
There's actually a really good reason for this - until fairly recently, there was no clear-cut way to make a wiki using Drupal. Wikitools only recently came out of beta - if it works as well as advertised, it would be a good one-stop solution.
Alternatively, you can patch one together using Pathauto, Diff (note, it's in alpha), Token, and a few others. In many respects, working with Drupal kind of reminds me of working with *nix - it can do some neat stuff on its own, but if you really want it to do anything particularly fun or useful, you're going to have to string together a series of "modules" that each do, you hope, one thing and one thing well. If you're really clever, you can do some really impressive stuff this way, especially if you know what you're doing with Views and the CCK. However, it's not exactly "user-friendly", in that you have to know precisely what you want to do and, just as importantly, precisely which tools you plan on using to make what you want to do a reality.
So THAT'S why IRC and Usenet haven't caught on among the masses! If we can find some way to integrate free and open source software with free and open source sex, it truly will be the year of the Linux desktop!
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm... Windows: Tactics could be entertaining. It would come with a new cmdlet: get-monopoly.
Generally speaking, when revolutions come, they don't tend to fare particularly well for the intellectual class (i.e. those that would read Slashdot). Honestly, I'd rather have a reasonably pacified populace than have to wonder if that guy in the trailer park down the street is coveting my "decadent and bourgeoisie" Kia.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of retarded jokes! I wonder if it would run Linux...
The kind of web app that needs to track federal spending five years after the checks have already cashed.
The trouble with making elections fully publicly funded is that you then need a way to determine how the public funds are disbursed. If you base it on previous results, the incumbent will always have an advantage. If you give equally to all candidates, you'll end up with hundreds of candidates for each race (keep in mind we don't have runoffs in the US). If you give only to certain candidates that you think might be "viable", you're then going to have to define what "viable" means - odds are, this will tick off third parties and prevent candidates like John Anderson or Ross Perot from gaining a foothold.
Keep in mind that, at the moment, corporations actually have less ability to directly contribute to a campaign than unions do. With a corporation, only people within the corporation may individually contribute (usually CEOs and the like). Unions, which are also a collective body of individuals, may contribute to campaigns directly. Of course, this also happens to include public sector unions - whether you think that's a good idea or a bad idea probably depends on your perspective, your thoughts on how much (or little) of a conflict of interest it might be for public sector unions to attempt to influence hiring and wage policies through the election process, and your general political inclination.
You actually hit the nail on the head - we don't believe that certain political systems will somehow change people. Instead, we assume that the people in government are just as prone to collusion and bribery as your average capitalist. The difference between most capitalists and the government, however, is that people can choose whether to do business with a capitalist or not.
You're right - he'll need IP over Avian Carriers in such an environment. It's not fast, but it's mighty easy to log.
Active Directory tends to complicate things, though you can use NTBackup or Windows Backup (depending on your Server version) to kind of keep things somewhat under control there. Even then, though, restoring AD from backup using NTBackup is not a particularly fun or, in my experience, reliable proposition. Plus, this doesn't even dig into the rest of a server's system state (in theory, if it's backed up right via NTBackup, you might be able to restore the whole thing without reinstalling every piece of software - good luck!) or attempting a brick-level backup of Exchange.
It really is phenomenal how much effort Microsoft forces you to go through just to back up their servers. These days, I just go with image-based software for server backups - they seem to do a far more reliable job of getting Windows servers back up in a hurry than file-level products (which Robocopy + NTBackup would qualify as). But, that's just me, and I primarily deal with smallish networks, so I'm not entirely sure how well that scales.
Nah, he has a rule on his pirated ISA box running pirated Windows Server that checks for warez traffic and sends him an alert if it picks anything up. Since he hasn't picked up a thing, he clearly is doing things right!
What's really fun about them is that we only get to see the total tax that's assessed on the product, not how it's broken down (local, county, state), so the whole "you will see how much the tax is" argument kind of becomes moot after a while. Then again, we don't have a national sales tax or VAT - it's all assessed depending on what city you live in, what taxes are being assessed by the county, and what the state wants to shave off while it's there. Then there's the issue of what's taxable (most states don't tax food, for example).
As an average North American, and thus being possessed of geography skills above that of the average European troll, I can assure you that the "continent" of America is, in fact, composed of one continent and ONE EXTRA CONTINENT FOR NO EXTRA CHARGE!
RIP, Billy Mays. RIP.
True, which is why DOSBox has troubles implementing it. Since DOSBox has to run on operating systems that do, in fact, get in the middle of things and, more often than not, explicitly forbid applications from doing everything themselves, they have to come up with ways to make it appear to the DOS application that it's getting its way 100% of the time while, in reality, letting the underlying OS maintain all of the control. The reason FreeDOS is useful in these situations is because, as an operating system, it can just behave as DOS originally did, so there's no need to implement or maintain a shim between the DOS application and whatever is really underneath.
The one weakness, however, is that, since most of those applications took care of everything themselves, that means the applications frequently did things in very specifically hardware-dependent ways (think WordPerfect printer drivers), which can really put a damper on attempts to get DOS applications to function correctly on newer hardware.
So, they're basically the North Korea of the tech world? Interesting... I wonder if Mr. McBride is "ronery"?
Wow... I think there's a web site dedicated to people like you. Tell me, do you own a television?
In all seriousness, I loved cities when I was single. They were busy, everything was near everything, I could hang out with my friends - good times. Then I had a kid. Suddenly, being in an area that actually quiets down before 10 was a priority. Being able to afford an apartment that can actually fit two adults and a kid became a priority. Having some green space for the kid to play in became a priority (public parks are okay). Being in an area where the kid can step outside semi-unsupervised and not go into full-on panic mode became a priority. Though some cities are better than others at meeting that list of criteria, suburbia, for all its faults, was practically designed around providing just that.
Exactly! The correct solution is to go to a flea market, find an old computer, put it in her room, install OpenBSD on it, throw Apache, MySQL and PHP on top of that, install Drupal, install the Calendar and Date modules, set up DynDNS to point to her new calendar server, sync her cell phone to the server using iCal, and make sure that you both have user accounts on the machine so you can both keep track of each other. I mean, duh. :-)
The biggest problem that I have with nationalized health care is that it effectively guarantees that we're stuck with paying for health care using the insurance model for the rest of our days. The trouble with insurance is that, in theory, less money is supposed to be spent than is put in. This guarantees that there will always be profiteering and "waste" - that's why insurance works. If we didn't already legislate the insurance model so thoroughly already, market-based innovations like interest-bearing health savings accounts might be able to take a better hold.
In an ideal world, I'd like to see all health care spending be tax deductible. If my employer wants to spend money on insurance for me, great. If my employer wants to put money in an interest-bearing health account, like a 401k or something similar, so much the better, provided it's portable from job to job. Heck, if my employer just pays my bills directly - sweet! Let them earn their tax credit either way, and if I choose to do the same, well, let's encourage that, too. It'll never happen, though, especially if this bill gets passed. Besides, all of the market-based innovation in payment methods in the world isn't going to change one basic, simple fact:
Health care is scarce.
There is a finite supply of people willing and capable of being doctors and, due to generational constraints (fewer people in the younger generations than during the Boomer generations), there are fewer and fewer of them than there used to be. Meanwhile, more and more people are consuming more and more health care. This isn't just a case of the Baby Boomers getting older, though that's a big part of it. The other part is that the health care industry can do far more than it could in, say, 1950. In 1930, if you had an infection, they gave you sulfates and told you to start praying. Nowadays, we have books that list nothing but types of antibiotics. We can transplant organs, cure most kinds of cancer if we catch it soon enough, cure nearly any imaginable infection, and on and on and on. If I get an ingrown toenail now, I see a doctor (possibly even a podiatrist - specialist rates!). If I got an ingrown toenail in 1930, I probably would have grabbed a bottle of whiskey and a pocketknife. Simply put, the health care industry can provide far more services than it could years ago, increasing demand, while also seeing fewer and fewer people willing to provide the services. As long as that dynamic is true, it won't matter how we pay for health care. If we try to make it cheap, there will be increased scarcity, which means longer waits for procedures. If we try to make it plentiful, such that nobody has to wait, it will be expensive. That's just the way it is.
If you really want to make health care affordable, you need to loosen up who provides non-emergency health care. This might involve getting nurses involved, but they're nearly as scarce as doctors right now. This might involve robots - heck, Japan's been playing with them in health care for years. This might involve computerized quizzes - fill in some blanks (I have the sniffles but I don't have a fever) and receive a diagnosis (You have a cold or mild allergies). In short, think of it sort of like IT. You don't need to throw a CCNA or MCITP/MCSE at every infected workstation - why should you throw a doctor at every minor ailment? Yeah, I know - when you're holding a hammer, every problem looks like a nail, but there's some wisdom here.
In the end, no matter how you shuffle the cards around, it will never change the fact that, as long as health care is as scarce as it is (and there's no reason to suggest it won't be anytime soon), it will be expensive, one way or another. There isn't a Republican or Democrat sponsored piece of legislation in the world that will ever change that.
Fox releases the video as part of their new "When Balloons Attack" series?
That's what I'm thinking, too. Also, make sure conflict detection is turned on. Serving DHCP isn't particularly processor-intensive, so I doubt it'll matter much if you're hosting it from your *NIX boxes or from your Cisco equipment.
Fortunately, at least in an AD environment, you can pull this off using GPO-based software restrictions. Unfortunately, Samba 3 doesn't support GPOs, and Samba 4 isn't quite done yet. That said, if it can be done via GPO, it can probably be done via the registry if you can figure out what keys they're munging, and once you figure that out, you can write startup batch scripts that can make the necessary changes to the registry for you.
Another vote against Symantec, especially their latest version of Endpoint Protection - I understand they've cleaned up a lot of the problems from when v11 was originally released, but I'm not about to take a second chance at it. Also, I've found that the enterprise version of AVG 8 isn't much better than Symantec as far as "works out of the box" and "doesn't turn workstations into slow piles of mush".
There's actually a really good reason for this - until fairly recently, there was no clear-cut way to make a wiki using Drupal. Wikitools only recently came out of beta - if it works as well as advertised, it would be a good one-stop solution.
Alternatively, you can patch one together using Pathauto, Diff (note, it's in alpha), Token, and a few others. In many respects, working with Drupal kind of reminds me of working with *nix - it can do some neat stuff on its own, but if you really want it to do anything particularly fun or useful, you're going to have to string together a series of "modules" that each do, you hope, one thing and one thing well. If you're really clever, you can do some really impressive stuff this way, especially if you know what you're doing with Views and the CCK. However, it's not exactly "user-friendly", in that you have to know precisely what you want to do and, just as importantly, precisely which tools you plan on using to make what you want to do a reality.
Pi, in homage to the original Latin name of one of the more obvious substances that frequently bonded with Aquarium: "Piscis".
Ladies and gentlemen... MinuteMaidFedExTostitosium!
So THAT'S why IRC and Usenet haven't caught on among the masses! If we can find some way to integrate free and open source software with free and open source sex, it truly will be the year of the Linux desktop!
No, but it has an impressive list of objects. You just have to remember to feed class functions a pointer to your stroke count.