We actually make quite a bit in the US, though most of it is high-end stuff that we're not going to buy at Walmart. Much of the animosity toward unions has nothing to do with poor working conditions or "dirt wages" - honestly, if they stopped there, everybody would love them, myself included. The problem with American unions is that, back in the '30s, they got in bed with big business through the Wagner Act and created a bureaucratic nightmare that was explicitly meant to ensure that those who had jobs would be paid handsomely, while the larger companies could use the power of collective bargaining to bankrupt their smaller competitors. So, instead of worrying about "poor working conditions", you had unions instituting wacky work rules that said that a worker had to be "certified" for a particular job (say, "Door Hinge Installer III"), and that was the only job they could be certified for. No door hinges to install that day? Well, that's where the "dirt wages" part kicks in - you still have to pay the worker to sit around and not install door hinges. Move the worker to somewhere where there's work to be done? Oh, he'd have to be re-certified for that, and that takes time... plus, he'd lose his Door Hinge III certification. Can't have that. The result was a system that crushed competition and ensured there was a class of unskilled workers making great wages and a class of unskilled workers making less than so-called "illegals" make here now.
But, hey, it worked great for about a generation. Then Europe and Japan started to re-industrialize after World War 2 - suddenly our big companies weren't the only big companies and the sandbox. Worse yet, the Europeans and Japanese actually maintained a healthy relationship between their employers and their unions, instead of the strangely antagonistic yet incestuous relationship that our companies maintained with our unions, and, at least outside of the UK, they weren't interested in copying our "model". Checkmate.
Would American businesses love it if we rolled labor laws back to reflect the norm in China? Possibly, but I think you'd be surprised by how few would be thrilled about it. Labor laws or no, we do have a nominally free press here that enjoys "exposing" things like poor working conditions, so it'd be bad PR to treat American workers like cattle. Plus, happier workers really do work better - the quality is higher, if absolutely nothing else. As bad as American cars are now, they're still a far sight better than anything China produces natively. Heck, Indiahas a stronger chance of breaking into the American market than China right now; in fact, Mahindra is a rather popular brand of tractors in the Midwest (yes, that Midwest) because they're durable and rugged. It's a little hard to make durable, rugged products of any complexity when your employees are too tired, depressed and ill to think.
I should know, I worked yard crew in college, about the time the immigration laws stopped being enforced the illegals who would work hard and cheaper put us all out of business.
Well... yes, that's kind of the point, isn't it? Look, it's absolutely true that many Americans would love to do factory work, especially in today's economic climate. Trouble is, at least until rather recently, most Americans that were "willing" to do factory work wanted to work half as hard as someone in China for five times the pay. I don't care how you slice it - that just isn't sustainable.
The good news is history has shown us that, over time, "developing" countries with underpaid labor usually turn into developed countries with modern pay structures, for better or worse. The Koreans are having nearly as bad of a time with their automotive unions as the US. The vaunted Japanese work ethic and company loyalty has been steadily eroding in the face of two decades of economic stagnation. Even Mexicans aren't half as poor as they used to be - in fact, Mexico's economy is the 11th largest in the world, and their GDP per person is in the top 1/3 of all countries worldwide. Granted, they're not rich - they're about the same economically as Eastern Europe - but they're certainly a far sight better than they used to be. Also keep in mind that the standard of living in the US is much higher materially than it ever was in the '50s, in no small part to various technological advances. Cars last longer than two or three years, so used cars are far more common, far safer, and far more reliable than they were back then. Food freshness and variety is vastly improved over anything the '50s dreamed up (they still thought frozen food was neat an novel). Housing is more expensive, but most new construction is also twice the size. Plus, we also have color TV, computers, and all that good stuff, and it's all affordable to just about everyone, especially if you put your toes in the used market.
Just hope and pray that Africa remains a disorganized, kleptocratic hellhole, otherwise we'll all just have to go through this again in another 20 years.
One thing that I think most people forget is that it's not like people are rounding up Taiwanese or Chinese peasants off the farm, shipping them to the cities, and telling them to start making iPads at gunpoint (well, not usually...). They're working in these factories because the alternatives are worse. It's the same reason people got off the farms and went to the cities in Europe and America during the Industrial Revolution - as bad as it was in the mines and the factories, and it was bad, it still beat the pants off of trying to subsist on the economics of farm life of the time.
And this is worse than accepting a much larger and more invasive armed mob imposing their will on you how, exactly? It's not like you don't have wars (bigger ones, even!) and gang violence with governments. It sounds like you're saying the problem with doing away with government is that someone may try to start one, but even if they succeed you're still no worse off than you were before.
Given a choice between an armed mob with absolutely zero accountability to those under its control and a "much larger and more invasive armed mob" that at least somewhat respects the idea of a limited, representative government based on laws, I'll go with the latter.
If you really think a large, representative government is "no worse" and "more invasive" than an armed mob, I suggest you read up on Latin American history during the '80s (especially Nicaragua), or look into the gang conflicts occurring in the East Congo. Put another way, I guarantee you that even the worst behaved police force in the United States rapes far fewer little girls and recruits far fewer drugged up child soldiers than the best behaved armed mob in Africa.
This is a straw-man. We're anarchists, not pacifists. There is a difference between employing aggression—coercion against non-aggressors—and using proportional defensive force against someone who has already shown themselves to be an aggressor. The key is reciprocation; those who murder forfeit their self-ownership, those who steal forfeit their alienable property, etc. Proportional punishment is not aggression, and can be carried out without any "local legal monopoly on force".
By who? Who gets to decide what's "proportional" or not? In many states, if somebody attacks you with a knife, you're not allowed to defend yourself with a gun - it's not "proportional". It sounds silly, but there is a certain amount of logic to it. For that matter, how do you guarantee that the potential murder actually *murdered* someone? How do you "voluntarily" collect evidence? How do you exercise due process? It's there for a reason, after all - as bad as police justice is, vigilante justice is infinitely worse.
Right there with you. In the absence of government and its local legal monopoly on force, you're basically at the mercy of the first armed mob that shows up in your neighborhood and imposes their will on you. Competition in the exercise of force is, depending on the scale, either called "war" or "gang violence" - either way, while it's certainly "destructive", it's the antithesis of "creative".
The reason I lumped the libertarians in with the minarchists and anarchists is because most minarchists and anarchists I know lump themselves in with libertarians, then verbally spars with any libertarian that dares to call themselves a "libertarian" if they think it's a little difficult to get a murderer to "voluntarily" respect any laws or society, so we should probably have an organization in place that "coerces" murderers into surrendering their rights so they'll stop murdering people.
"Really want" includes things you think you need for survival: food, shelter, work. No one is obligated to provide you with any of that; if they choose to offer it to you they have an absolute right to impose whatever conditions they want. Of course you are free to reject their conditions, but they are equally free to keep their property.
True. On the other hand, nobody is allowed to coerce me into acquiring such things from a particular source of their choosing, nor are they allowed to use their property to coerce me into accepting onerous conditions that I would not voluntarily choose to accept in a non-collusive environment. Contrary to what many libertarians and (an/min)archists think, government isn't the only source of coercion in the world. If most landlords in an area decide together to charge high rents and provide no maintenance, I either have to accept that or move somewhere else. Trouble is, moving requires resources that nobody is obligated to provide for me - at the very least, I need a way to get to another town, which means I'll need transportation for myself. If all of my money is going into rent, however, that's going to be rather difficult to pull off, especially if I'm not within walking distance of another town or if I'm incapable of walking long distances. Furthermore, if I actually have property of my own in this dystopian town (furniture, computer, whatever) that I might actually want to keep, I'm either going to need to find a way to transport that or "voluntarily" surrender it to my landlord.
Philosophically, this is somewhat similar to someone putting a gun to your spouse's head and saying, "Either you spouse gets it or your child gets it. Who do you choose?" Sure, you're not being "coerced" into making a particular choice - you're certainly just as "free" to choose to kill your spouse or your child. On the other hand, you are being coerced into making a false choice to begin with by the person holding the gun. Similarly, having to choose between one rat-infested hovel with $2000/month rents and another, slightly less rat-infested hovel with $2050/month rents because the landlords made sure that was everybody's choice is a false choice.
Things start to get tricky, even from a libertarian/(min/an)archistic standpoint, when you're in either a monopolistic or monopsonistic environment (i.e. the number of buyers or sellers is constrained) or any other circumstance under which you're in a position where there's a clear imbalance of power.
For example, in a fully free market (one in which there are no constraints on contracts), all landlords want maximum rents with minimal investment. Now, in theory, some landlords would become slumlords while other landlords would run nice, well-maintained places at reasonable rents - those who behaved nicely would have tenants while those who didn't would not. Trouble is, in many housing markets, housing is constrained, either due to resource shortages (water, usually) or geography (too many mountains, too wide of a river, can't build any higher, etc.). In these markets, any quantity of housing will be consumed, regardless of condition - consequently, a landlord will fill their units whether they charge reasonable rents or not, whether they assume basic maintenance or not, whether they keep their rent rates stable or not, whether they respect their tenants' privacy or not, and so on. Most urban areas discovered this the hard way in the early 20th century, which led to a ton of legislation meant to curb the worst of the abuses; some of it (limits on what a landlord can enforce in a rental contract) worked better than others ('hard' rent controls).
Another, more apocryphal but potentially more illuminating example, would be if there was only one grocery store in a remote town and it required all shoppers to register with it as part of a "Buyer's Club" before shopping there. One of the conditions of the "Buyer's Club" contract is a clause that forbids the shopper from shopping at another grocery store for a fixed period (say, five years). Since the store is the only source of groceries in this town, you either must "consent" to these onerous terms, albeit strongly under duress, or you must possess the resources and education necessary to produce sufficient food for yourself and your family. If you try to start a competing grocery outlet, you won't have customers - all of your potential customers were effectively forced to agree to avoid your store under penalty of law.
The goal of modern contract law, at least as far as reform goes, is to make sure that both parties going into a contract are on equal footing, meaning they both share the same capacity to benefit from the contract and the same ability to avoid entering a contract if they find it to be too onerous. If I have to do business with you in order to survive (have food on my table, have a roof over my head, get to work, etc.), there's no good free market reason why you wouldn't maximize your benefit from any dealings with me, nor is there anything I can do about it.
I call mine a "flash drive". It's "plug-and-play" compatible and can be inserted and removed from compatible ports smoothly and easily. Unfortunately, since it uses a FAT file system, it's rather prone to corruption; proper mounting and dismounting procedure minimizes this somewhat. On the other hand, if small and fast is the way of the future, it's several generations ahead of the curve!
By referencing the patenting of tetrahedrons, you have violated US Patent #12345678, which covers "a method of referencing the hypothetical patenting of a tetrahedron or other geometrical shape for the purposes of subject matter illumination." I demand royalties and I have a judge in East Texas that says you will pay them.
Huh. Well, the ones we have at work are the "Compaq Business Desktops" that they've been cranking out for years ("dc"-series), so that might have something to do with it.
I know the AC is trolling, so I'll tell a semi-related story instead...
A few years back, the IT services company I was working for at the time hired this kid that thought he was hot stuff. One of the first things he asked all of us was, "So, what services should I turn off in Windows for our customers so their machines will run better?" Now, I knew that gamers like to turn off various unnecessary Windows services to improve performance - obviously, if you're not in an Active Directory environment, you don't need the AD-related services running 24/7 (Computer Browser, Net Logon, etc.). Trouble was, all of our customers actually were in an AD environment - gamer-tuning Windows services for performance would break their networks in about 3.2 seconds. Of course, even if that weren't the case, it's not like any of that would help Excel or Word launch any faster, so it would be a waste of time either way.
Because we're not talking about Win98->Win 7. Instead, we're functionally talking about the equivalent of, say, Win XP SP2->SP3, only someone somewhere got it in their head (Linus) that the Linux driver API should be allowed to freely change every year or two and, if anybody has a problem with that, it's because "they don't care about open drivers" and "you should let the kernel maintainers write the drivers anyway because they know the kernel better than you". That's a bit different from "I expect VDI drivers to work 15 years after they were written". Because of the constant flux of the Linux driver API, you periodically get major hardware breakage - hardware that worked just fine using an open driver in, say, 2.6.25 will break in 2.6.26 because somebody forgot to replace quietly deprecated SA_* calls with equivalent IRQF_* calls, for example, and, if the maintainer for that particular driver is gone, well, you're just out of luck.
Gosh, if only manufacturers would release schematics for their hardware, we wouldn't have any problems./sarcasm
We have a bunch of HPs in the office that I thought had this problem too. However, it turns out HP hides the VT-X enable flag under the Security Options in the BIOS (I can only imagine how that makes any sense, but whatever), at least on their desktop machines. Could be worth a look.
I'm sure it's just a typo, but just to clarify: *OpenSUSE* is trying to incorporate usability features into Linux. Kubuntu is for the smug superiority set that don't realize there are actually good KDE-based distributions out there.
Right. They're based on the same model as Facebook - the customers are the ones paying the bills and the users are the "product" they're selling to the customers.
This story is long on how college is not paying off.. but conveniently neglects the fact that those without college are even worse off.
Sometimes. It depends. Here's the thing - if you're talking about whether or not college pays off when you're choices are, say, becoming a 1L lawyer or becoming a lumberjack, yes, being a 1L lawyer certainly pays better. However, not everyone is making those sorts of choices, nor are they realistically in a position to do so. Since the USA doesn't really support vocational training (nobody wants to be the one that tells a parent, "Hey, your son/daughter just isn't right for college" - it's bad politics), there are a ton of students floating into four year programs that not only have no idea what they're doing there, they don't have the skills to succeed at any major. For these students, college is just an added expense. They're not going to increase their earning potential by taking remedial math or "How to write a basic four paragraph essay" English classes that they weren't any good at during high school and certainly won't get better at now that they're older; what they will do, however, is saddle themselves with more student loans than anyone with their skill set will ever be able to pay off. What this guy is saying is that, instead of encouraging them to saddle themselves with debt that they don't have the skills to pay off, we'd be better off if we encouraged them to find something they actually are good at, even if it doesn't require formal academic training, and help them make some money at that instead.
The really fun cases, however, are the ones that do have some skills, but refuse to apply them practically. I'm talking about the "I'm going to rack up $100k+ in student loans pursuing a Women's Studies grad degree" types, or, worse yet, the "I'm going to change majors eight times, stay in college pursuing a B* in something, and rack up $100k in student loan debt" crowd (being apocryphal here, but you get the idea). With these people, we're basically paying them to avoid personal responsibility and maturity. Trouble is, though we'd love to filter them out, we're in a democracy and they vote too - if we're going to pay for Sally's Civil Engineering degree, we also have to pay for Cindy's Real Life Avoidance degree because, if we don't, neither Cindy nor her doting parents are going to vote to subsidize Sally's CE degree. This guy is saying, quite rightly, that this state of affairs is utterly ridiculous. Unfortunately, since we do live in a democracy, we're pretty much stuck with it until a majority of the people decide to apply some sense and stop supporting such shenanigans.
Don't get me wrong - I agree with your take. Trouble is, they wouldn't do that sort of thing if it didn't work. The honest truth is that a lot of people donate sporadically or impulsively to non-profit organizations for various reasons (family member comes up to them for some fund-raising activity, usually). Consequently, the non-profit can send a notice to remind the person that, hey, they donated to the non-profit in the past - would they like to do it again? Most of the time, the answer is "no", but it's yes often enough where they more than make back any money they put into the campaign, and certainly make more net than they would've made if they sat around and waited for the occasional check to float through.
Civi isn't bad, though it does have a few quirks. To start with, you're probably hosting it on a web server somewhere, which means rolling out either Joomla or Drupal to host it - this means you need someone and something that can handle that, which is only trivial on Slashdot forums. Also, credit card processing is a little wonky, especially if you use a semi-supported gateway (Auth.net recurring transactions, last I checked, weren't supported). That said, it's hard to argue about the price.
HFS+ didn't support case sensitivity until 10.3; even now, it's not turned on by default because there are still quite a few programs out there that count on it being only case-preserving. That said, you can create a case-sensitive HFS+ (HFSX) volume in Mac OS X if such is your pleasure.
It probably wouldn't have been like Britain, at least not for a while - Nicholas II was definitely "old school" as far as monarchs went and had zero desire to share power with anyone. The German Empire was closer to a constitutional monarchy than Russia was going into World War 1 and, thanks to Wilhelm II's idolization of the military, was basically a military dictatorship with a "representative" rubber-stamping committee in the Reichstag.
That said, Russia's military probably would've been in better shape going into '39 under Tsarist rule than it was under Stalin. Russia's military was undergoing a modernization program (increased mechanization, greater operational staff independence, etc.) going into World War 1 that was a few years from completion. If World War 1 started in 1917 instead of 1914, Germany wouldn't have had a poorly organized, slowly mobilizing, poorly equipped army of peasants on its eastern frontier - it would've had an impossibly large, well-equipped professional army backed by a relatively modern infrastructure (Russia was working on getting their railroads up to international spec, among other things) bearing down on it instead and Germany knew it. That's part of the reason Moltke and the rest of the German General Staff were in such a hurry to start World War 1; their window of opportunity, rather small to begin with, was closing fast. Instead of completing the modernization program, though, Russia's military was quickly chewed to shreds by the Germans (note that the Russian military, poorly run as it was, easily handled the Austro-Hungarians without serious issue), devoured what was left of itself during the October Revolution and its aftermath, then re-adopted the grand Russian tradition of promoting officers based on political considerations instead of tactical merit under Stalin; granted, Nicholas II wasn't much better than Stalin on that front, but at least he didn't make a regular habit of killing large portions of his General Staff whenever he came down with a case of the "vapors". Similarly, Tsarist Russia's economy wouldn't have had to suffer through the pre-NEP "War Communism" economy, nor through Stalin's abandonment of the NEP and the Holomodor. Of course, some of the resulting gains would've undoubtedly been lost in the Great Depression, but millions of displaced Ukrainian peasants probably wouldn't have starved.
Long story short, Nicholas II's "divine" leadership would almost certainly have been no worse for Russia and its military than Stalin's leadership ultimately proved to be.
Also, the "tanks on horseback" bit is actually a magnificent bit of Nazi propaganda - like most militaries of the time, horses were used for reconnaissance and scouting. Don't forget that small, inexpensive, reliable all-terrain vehicles were a rather recent development; full scale production of the Kübelwagen didn't begin until 1940 and the Jeep didn't enter production until 1941.
Actually, the shell is older than the band you think it's named after - the Korn shell dates back to the early '80s. Since I personally date back to the early '80s myself, I can't provide much first-hand experience on the utility of its shell compared to its contemporaries, but my understanding of its place in history is that it combined some of the nicer features of the C shell (command history being the big one) with the syntax of the Bourne shell. Whether that's a good thing or not depends on whether you want all of your scripts to use C-style syntax or not, I suppose.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a little more complicated than that...
We actually make quite a bit in the US, though most of it is high-end stuff that we're not going to buy at Walmart. Much of the animosity toward unions has nothing to do with poor working conditions or "dirt wages" - honestly, if they stopped there, everybody would love them, myself included. The problem with American unions is that, back in the '30s, they got in bed with big business through the Wagner Act and created a bureaucratic nightmare that was explicitly meant to ensure that those who had jobs would be paid handsomely, while the larger companies could use the power of collective bargaining to bankrupt their smaller competitors. So, instead of worrying about "poor working conditions", you had unions instituting wacky work rules that said that a worker had to be "certified" for a particular job (say, "Door Hinge Installer III"), and that was the only job they could be certified for. No door hinges to install that day? Well, that's where the "dirt wages" part kicks in - you still have to pay the worker to sit around and not install door hinges. Move the worker to somewhere where there's work to be done? Oh, he'd have to be re-certified for that, and that takes time... plus, he'd lose his Door Hinge III certification. Can't have that. The result was a system that crushed competition and ensured there was a class of unskilled workers making great wages and a class of unskilled workers making less than so-called "illegals" make here now.
But, hey, it worked great for about a generation. Then Europe and Japan started to re-industrialize after World War 2 - suddenly our big companies weren't the only big companies and the sandbox. Worse yet, the Europeans and Japanese actually maintained a healthy relationship between their employers and their unions, instead of the strangely antagonistic yet incestuous relationship that our companies maintained with our unions, and, at least outside of the UK, they weren't interested in copying our "model". Checkmate.
Would American businesses love it if we rolled labor laws back to reflect the norm in China? Possibly, but I think you'd be surprised by how few would be thrilled about it. Labor laws or no, we do have a nominally free press here that enjoys "exposing" things like poor working conditions, so it'd be bad PR to treat American workers like cattle. Plus, happier workers really do work better - the quality is higher, if absolutely nothing else. As bad as American cars are now, they're still a far sight better than anything China produces natively. Heck, India has a stronger chance of breaking into the American market than China right now; in fact, Mahindra is a rather popular brand of tractors in the Midwest (yes, that Midwest) because they're durable and rugged. It's a little hard to make durable, rugged products of any complexity when your employees are too tired, depressed and ill to think.
Well... yes, that's kind of the point, isn't it? Look, it's absolutely true that many Americans would love to do factory work, especially in today's economic climate. Trouble is, at least until rather recently, most Americans that were "willing" to do factory work wanted to work half as hard as someone in China for five times the pay. I don't care how you slice it - that just isn't sustainable.
The good news is history has shown us that, over time, "developing" countries with underpaid labor usually turn into developed countries with modern pay structures, for better or worse. The Koreans are having nearly as bad of a time with their automotive unions as the US. The vaunted Japanese work ethic and company loyalty has been steadily eroding in the face of two decades of economic stagnation. Even Mexicans aren't half as poor as they used to be - in fact, Mexico's economy is the 11th largest in the world, and their GDP per person is in the top 1/3 of all countries worldwide. Granted, they're not rich - they're about the same economically as Eastern Europe - but they're certainly a far sight better than they used to be. Also keep in mind that the standard of living in the US is much higher materially than it ever was in the '50s, in no small part to various technological advances. Cars last longer than two or three years, so used cars are far more common, far safer, and far more reliable than they were back then. Food freshness and variety is vastly improved over anything the '50s dreamed up (they still thought frozen food was neat an novel). Housing is more expensive, but most new construction is also twice the size. Plus, we also have color TV, computers, and all that good stuff, and it's all affordable to just about everyone, especially if you put your toes in the used market.
Just hope and pray that Africa remains a disorganized, kleptocratic hellhole, otherwise we'll all just have to go through this again in another 20 years.
One thing that I think most people forget is that it's not like people are rounding up Taiwanese or Chinese peasants off the farm, shipping them to the cities, and telling them to start making iPads at gunpoint (well, not usually...). They're working in these factories because the alternatives are worse. It's the same reason people got off the farms and went to the cities in Europe and America during the Industrial Revolution - as bad as it was in the mines and the factories, and it was bad , it still beat the pants off of trying to subsist on the economics of farm life of the time.
Given a choice between an armed mob with absolutely zero accountability to those under its control and a "much larger and more invasive armed mob" that at least somewhat respects the idea of a limited, representative government based on laws, I'll go with the latter.
If you really think a large, representative government is "no worse" and "more invasive" than an armed mob, I suggest you read up on Latin American history during the '80s (especially Nicaragua), or look into the gang conflicts occurring in the East Congo. Put another way, I guarantee you that even the worst behaved police force in the United States rapes far fewer little girls and recruits far fewer drugged up child soldiers than the best behaved armed mob in Africa.
By who? Who gets to decide what's "proportional" or not? In many states, if somebody attacks you with a knife, you're not allowed to defend yourself with a gun - it's not "proportional". It sounds silly, but there is a certain amount of logic to it. For that matter, how do you guarantee that the potential murder actually *murdered* someone? How do you "voluntarily" collect evidence? How do you exercise due process? It's there for a reason, after all - as bad as police justice is, vigilante justice is infinitely worse.
Right there with you. In the absence of government and its local legal monopoly on force, you're basically at the mercy of the first armed mob that shows up in your neighborhood and imposes their will on you. Competition in the exercise of force is, depending on the scale, either called "war" or "gang violence" - either way, while it's certainly "destructive", it's the antithesis of "creative".
The reason I lumped the libertarians in with the minarchists and anarchists is because most minarchists and anarchists I know lump themselves in with libertarians, then verbally spars with any libertarian that dares to call themselves a "libertarian" if they think it's a little difficult to get a murderer to "voluntarily" respect any laws or society, so we should probably have an organization in place that "coerces" murderers into surrendering their rights so they'll stop murdering people.
I know - weird, right?
True. On the other hand, nobody is allowed to coerce me into acquiring such things from a particular source of their choosing, nor are they allowed to use their property to coerce me into accepting onerous conditions that I would not voluntarily choose to accept in a non-collusive environment. Contrary to what many libertarians and (an/min)archists think, government isn't the only source of coercion in the world. If most landlords in an area decide together to charge high rents and provide no maintenance, I either have to accept that or move somewhere else. Trouble is, moving requires resources that nobody is obligated to provide for me - at the very least, I need a way to get to another town, which means I'll need transportation for myself. If all of my money is going into rent, however, that's going to be rather difficult to pull off, especially if I'm not within walking distance of another town or if I'm incapable of walking long distances. Furthermore, if I actually have property of my own in this dystopian town (furniture, computer, whatever) that I might actually want to keep, I'm either going to need to find a way to transport that or "voluntarily" surrender it to my landlord.
Philosophically, this is somewhat similar to someone putting a gun to your spouse's head and saying, "Either you spouse gets it or your child gets it. Who do you choose?" Sure, you're not being "coerced" into making a particular choice - you're certainly just as "free" to choose to kill your spouse or your child. On the other hand, you are being coerced into making a false choice to begin with by the person holding the gun. Similarly, having to choose between one rat-infested hovel with $2000/month rents and another, slightly less rat-infested hovel with $2050/month rents because the landlords made sure that was everybody's choice is a false choice.
Luckily there's also Windows "Small Battleship Edition" (perfect for battle cruisers and the like) and Windows "Carrier Edition" (CE).
Things start to get tricky, even from a libertarian/(min/an)archistic standpoint, when you're in either a monopolistic or monopsonistic environment (i.e. the number of buyers or sellers is constrained) or any other circumstance under which you're in a position where there's a clear imbalance of power.
For example, in a fully free market (one in which there are no constraints on contracts), all landlords want maximum rents with minimal investment. Now, in theory, some landlords would become slumlords while other landlords would run nice, well-maintained places at reasonable rents - those who behaved nicely would have tenants while those who didn't would not. Trouble is, in many housing markets, housing is constrained, either due to resource shortages (water, usually) or geography (too many mountains, too wide of a river, can't build any higher, etc.). In these markets, any quantity of housing will be consumed, regardless of condition - consequently, a landlord will fill their units whether they charge reasonable rents or not, whether they assume basic maintenance or not, whether they keep their rent rates stable or not, whether they respect their tenants' privacy or not, and so on. Most urban areas discovered this the hard way in the early 20th century, which led to a ton of legislation meant to curb the worst of the abuses; some of it (limits on what a landlord can enforce in a rental contract) worked better than others ('hard' rent controls).
Another, more apocryphal but potentially more illuminating example, would be if there was only one grocery store in a remote town and it required all shoppers to register with it as part of a "Buyer's Club" before shopping there. One of the conditions of the "Buyer's Club" contract is a clause that forbids the shopper from shopping at another grocery store for a fixed period (say, five years). Since the store is the only source of groceries in this town, you either must "consent" to these onerous terms, albeit strongly under duress, or you must possess the resources and education necessary to produce sufficient food for yourself and your family. If you try to start a competing grocery outlet, you won't have customers - all of your potential customers were effectively forced to agree to avoid your store under penalty of law.
The goal of modern contract law, at least as far as reform goes, is to make sure that both parties going into a contract are on equal footing, meaning they both share the same capacity to benefit from the contract and the same ability to avoid entering a contract if they find it to be too onerous. If I have to do business with you in order to survive (have food on my table, have a roof over my head, get to work, etc.), there's no good free market reason why you wouldn't maximize your benefit from any dealings with me, nor is there anything I can do about it.
Sounds awfully coercive to me.
I call mine a "flash drive". It's "plug-and-play" compatible and can be inserted and removed from compatible ports smoothly and easily. Unfortunately, since it uses a FAT file system, it's rather prone to corruption; proper mounting and dismounting procedure minimizes this somewhat. On the other hand, if small and fast is the way of the future, it's several generations ahead of the curve!
By referencing the patenting of tetrahedrons, you have violated US Patent #12345678, which covers "a method of referencing the hypothetical patenting of a tetrahedron or other geometrical shape for the purposes of subject matter illumination." I demand royalties and I have a judge in East Texas that says you will pay them.
Huh. Well, the ones we have at work are the "Compaq Business Desktops" that they've been cranking out for years ("dc"-series), so that might have something to do with it.
I know the AC is trolling, so I'll tell a semi-related story instead...
A few years back, the IT services company I was working for at the time hired this kid that thought he was hot stuff. One of the first things he asked all of us was, "So, what services should I turn off in Windows for our customers so their machines will run better?" Now, I knew that gamers like to turn off various unnecessary Windows services to improve performance - obviously, if you're not in an Active Directory environment, you don't need the AD-related services running 24/7 (Computer Browser, Net Logon, etc.). Trouble was, all of our customers actually were in an AD environment - gamer-tuning Windows services for performance would break their networks in about 3.2 seconds. Of course, even if that weren't the case, it's not like any of that would help Excel or Word launch any faster, so it would be a waste of time either way.
The kid didn't last a month.
Because we're not talking about Win98->Win 7. Instead, we're functionally talking about the equivalent of, say, Win XP SP2->SP3, only someone somewhere got it in their head (Linus) that the Linux driver API should be allowed to freely change every year or two and, if anybody has a problem with that, it's because "they don't care about open drivers" and "you should let the kernel maintainers write the drivers anyway because they know the kernel better than you". That's a bit different from "I expect VDI drivers to work 15 years after they were written". Because of the constant flux of the Linux driver API, you periodically get major hardware breakage - hardware that worked just fine using an open driver in, say, 2.6.25 will break in 2.6.26 because somebody forgot to replace quietly deprecated SA_* calls with equivalent IRQF_* calls, for example, and, if the maintainer for that particular driver is gone, well, you're just out of luck.
/sarcasm
Gosh, if only manufacturers would release schematics for their hardware, we wouldn't have any problems.
We have a bunch of HPs in the office that I thought had this problem too. However, it turns out HP hides the VT-X enable flag under the Security Options in the BIOS (I can only imagine how that makes any sense, but whatever), at least on their desktop machines. Could be worth a look.
I'm sure it's just a typo, but just to clarify: *OpenSUSE* is trying to incorporate usability features into Linux. Kubuntu is for the smug superiority set that don't realize there are actually good KDE-based distributions out there.
Right. They're based on the same model as Facebook - the customers are the ones paying the bills and the users are the "product" they're selling to the customers.
The cloud. I mean, is there anything the cloud can't do?!
Wait - you mean wealth creation is more important to economic growth and well-being than just keeping people busy? Unpossible!
Sometimes. It depends. Here's the thing - if you're talking about whether or not college pays off when you're choices are, say, becoming a 1L lawyer or becoming a lumberjack, yes, being a 1L lawyer certainly pays better. However, not everyone is making those sorts of choices, nor are they realistically in a position to do so. Since the USA doesn't really support vocational training (nobody wants to be the one that tells a parent, "Hey, your son/daughter just isn't right for college" - it's bad politics), there are a ton of students floating into four year programs that not only have no idea what they're doing there, they don't have the skills to succeed at any major. For these students, college is just an added expense. They're not going to increase their earning potential by taking remedial math or "How to write a basic four paragraph essay" English classes that they weren't any good at during high school and certainly won't get better at now that they're older; what they will do, however, is saddle themselves with more student loans than anyone with their skill set will ever be able to pay off. What this guy is saying is that, instead of encouraging them to saddle themselves with debt that they don't have the skills to pay off, we'd be better off if we encouraged them to find something they actually are good at, even if it doesn't require formal academic training, and help them make some money at that instead.
The really fun cases, however, are the ones that do have some skills, but refuse to apply them practically. I'm talking about the "I'm going to rack up $100k+ in student loans pursuing a Women's Studies grad degree" types, or, worse yet, the "I'm going to change majors eight times, stay in college pursuing a B* in something, and rack up $100k in student loan debt" crowd (being apocryphal here, but you get the idea). With these people, we're basically paying them to avoid personal responsibility and maturity. Trouble is, though we'd love to filter them out, we're in a democracy and they vote too - if we're going to pay for Sally's Civil Engineering degree, we also have to pay for Cindy's Real Life Avoidance degree because, if we don't, neither Cindy nor her doting parents are going to vote to subsidize Sally's CE degree. This guy is saying, quite rightly, that this state of affairs is utterly ridiculous. Unfortunately, since we do live in a democracy, we're pretty much stuck with it until a majority of the people decide to apply some sense and stop supporting such shenanigans.
Don't get me wrong - I agree with your take. Trouble is, they wouldn't do that sort of thing if it didn't work. The honest truth is that a lot of people donate sporadically or impulsively to non-profit organizations for various reasons (family member comes up to them for some fund-raising activity, usually). Consequently, the non-profit can send a notice to remind the person that, hey, they donated to the non-profit in the past - would they like to do it again? Most of the time, the answer is "no", but it's yes often enough where they more than make back any money they put into the campaign, and certainly make more net than they would've made if they sat around and waited for the occasional check to float through.
It's annoying, but it's life.
Civi isn't bad, though it does have a few quirks. To start with, you're probably hosting it on a web server somewhere, which means rolling out either Joomla or Drupal to host it - this means you need someone and something that can handle that, which is only trivial on Slashdot forums. Also, credit card processing is a little wonky, especially if you use a semi-supported gateway (Auth.net recurring transactions, last I checked, weren't supported). That said, it's hard to argue about the price.
HFS+ didn't support case sensitivity until 10.3; even now, it's not turned on by default because there are still quite a few programs out there that count on it being only case-preserving. That said, you can create a case-sensitive HFS+ (HFSX) volume in Mac OS X if such is your pleasure.
sudo apt-get -t steam install foo
Man, that'd be sweet...
It probably wouldn't have been like Britain, at least not for a while - Nicholas II was definitely "old school" as far as monarchs went and had zero desire to share power with anyone. The German Empire was closer to a constitutional monarchy than Russia was going into World War 1 and, thanks to Wilhelm II's idolization of the military, was basically a military dictatorship with a "representative" rubber-stamping committee in the Reichstag.
That said, Russia's military probably would've been in better shape going into '39 under Tsarist rule than it was under Stalin. Russia's military was undergoing a modernization program (increased mechanization, greater operational staff independence, etc.) going into World War 1 that was a few years from completion. If World War 1 started in 1917 instead of 1914, Germany wouldn't have had a poorly organized, slowly mobilizing, poorly equipped army of peasants on its eastern frontier - it would've had an impossibly large, well-equipped professional army backed by a relatively modern infrastructure (Russia was working on getting their railroads up to international spec, among other things) bearing down on it instead and Germany knew it. That's part of the reason Moltke and the rest of the German General Staff were in such a hurry to start World War 1; their window of opportunity, rather small to begin with, was closing fast. Instead of completing the modernization program, though, Russia's military was quickly chewed to shreds by the Germans (note that the Russian military, poorly run as it was, easily handled the Austro-Hungarians without serious issue), devoured what was left of itself during the October Revolution and its aftermath, then re-adopted the grand Russian tradition of promoting officers based on political considerations instead of tactical merit under Stalin; granted, Nicholas II wasn't much better than Stalin on that front, but at least he didn't make a regular habit of killing large portions of his General Staff whenever he came down with a case of the "vapors". Similarly, Tsarist Russia's economy wouldn't have had to suffer through the pre-NEP "War Communism" economy, nor through Stalin's abandonment of the NEP and the Holomodor. Of course, some of the resulting gains would've undoubtedly been lost in the Great Depression, but millions of displaced Ukrainian peasants probably wouldn't have starved.
Long story short, Nicholas II's "divine" leadership would almost certainly have been no worse for Russia and its military than Stalin's leadership ultimately proved to be.
Also, the "tanks on horseback" bit is actually a magnificent bit of Nazi propaganda - like most militaries of the time, horses were used for reconnaissance and scouting. Don't forget that small, inexpensive, reliable all-terrain vehicles were a rather recent development; full scale production of the Kübelwagen didn't begin until 1940 and the Jeep didn't enter production until 1941.
Actually, the shell is older than the band you think it's named after - the Korn shell dates back to the early '80s. Since I personally date back to the early '80s myself, I can't provide much first-hand experience on the utility of its shell compared to its contemporaries, but my understanding of its place in history is that it combined some of the nicer features of the C shell (command history being the big one) with the syntax of the Bourne shell. Whether that's a good thing or not depends on whether you want all of your scripts to use C-style syntax or not, I suppose.