Oh come on, this one is easy. You give the cosmonauts a trigger that they can use once they land. When they use the trigger, it pops the TOPs off of the retro-rockets and the rest of the propellant burns upward. Then the capsule looks like a big, Fourth of July fountain. But since they are Russians, I guess it would have to be a May Day fountain? Maybe they can just partner with the Chinese, since those guys make all of the fireworks anyway.
I read the article and looked at the benchmarks and thought to myself, I should pay $20 and just get the Nvidia 250 card. It beats the rest of the cards and only costs $20 more. I'm sure there are other people who read the same article and thought, "I can get nearly the same performance and spend $20 less."
Sad but true. Those are just the big murders that made the news. A lot of local murders don't even get coverage because in most places there are simply so many of them that telling people about all of them would cause a panic. I hope that one day, sooner or later, the public wakes up and starts demanding self responsibility again. As things stand right now, the police are simply there to clean up after the fact.
Not only does it show superiority, it also shows intelligence to walk away from a debate you're obviously on the losing side of. Congratulations on thinking you're projecting the image of yourself that you want others to see, even if most of us can see right through it.
Thanks for your optimism that one day I might grow up. That's rather generous of you. Perhaps you might one day yourself join the rest of us in reality. I am in no way justifying the parasitic behavior that you speak of. I simply recognize that parasites exist, and no matter how much I might like that they don't, they will always be there. There will always be fleas and ticks. There will always be bacteria and germs. If nature itself gives us parasites, what makes you think that we can reach a higher level of social well being that excludes the very foundations that life is built upon? To put it another way, there are certain interactions that are built into the experience that we call life. They will always be. Things will always be built up and destroyed. There will always be opposing forces acting upon each other. In fact, the more you attempt to resist the inescapable reality of that, the more difficult your life will be.
When I read what you write, I feel like I'm back in college having a conversation with some kid who just took a logic class, but hasn't yet spent enough time in reality. You seem to be caught in a dualistic, either/or thought paradigm. You posit that "someone who believes in meaning... is creating something that serves their survival." Then after doing that, you go on to imply that what I wrote some how excludes creating things that enhances the ability to survive.
You see, I can fully believe that the world is full of parasites and that the default human behavior involves domination and survival. At the same time, I can practice martial arts and meditation, and also train others to walk the same path that I am on so that they can be better equipped to deal with the unpleasant aspects of life. I can realize that thoughts of utopian societies free from religion and narrow minded individuals is wasted energy. You see, I'm a big fan of focus on the moment and dealing with reality one second at a time. At the same time, I also realize that our actions are cumulative and it is important to focus our energies on creating positive, lasting results.
I see where you are coming from. I've read all of your replies in this thread. I understand that you are encouraging people to embrace their humanity, and that encouragement probably comes from wanting people to recognize oneness. You probably want people to work together, and to support each other and to reach the realization that our humanity is entwined with those around us. I get it. However, I think that you're the one who has some growing up to do. You seem to feel that you are superior to the "parasites". You aren't. You've simply made other choices. You don't seem to accept others who aren't as all accepting of your humanity based approach. Don't worry, you'll grow up someday.
You rail against religion being so bad, yet apparently fail to consider that everyone makes what they believe are the best choices for themselves at any given time. Nobody decides, "Hey, I'm going to screw myself over right now." Everyone believes that they are doing good for themselves. Just as you believe that the world should move beyond religion, I'm sure that Catholic cardinals and Christian pastors and Taoist priests all believe that they are onto something and want to share it with others because they think the world will be a better place when people follow their way of doing things. Everyone who picks up a religion does so because it helps them make sense of life. On some level it sooths the mind and puts the pieces in place. For some people, there isn't a world beyond religion because the religion gives the world a framework for them to understand "everything". There will always be "religion", just as there will always be violence, and love and compassion and greed. Grow up. Accept it. Life will be a lot easier that way.
Violence exists for a reason. It can only be minimized with further violence and the threats of punishment. There will always be violent members of any species. Those members of the species serve to further the evolution of the species as a whole. Without the threat of death, evolution slows down. There are people who will always be driven to compete and to push the boundries and to horde and to crawl to the top. Those people drive the evolution of society. Those people push others to come up with new, intelligent ways to deal with them. Often times, dealing with those people has absolutely nothing to do with intelligence and everything to do with simple being more violent than they are. Intelligence only gets a person so far when they are faced with someone who has no moral qualms with inflicting physical harm upon them.
I'd posit that it shows a lack of intelligence to not accept that evil exists in the world. An intelligent person realizes that reality comprises all aspects of potential behaviors and outcomes. Without the contrast of evil, good loses meaning. Without light, dark has no meaning. Evil will always happen just as good will always happen. As a human being, you decide how to act. As an intelligent person, you have to realize that you cannot expect others to act the way that you think they should. They will do what they will do. Whether or not you will accept their actions when those actions come into conflict with your way of life rests on your shoulders. What you call cynicism, I call reality.
We can do better. We can also do worse. As one person wakes up and eats a healthy breakfast before exercising, their neighbor might wake up, smoke some weed and drink a soda. When one person goes to work and earns a paycheck, another person might pick up a firearm and commit armed robbery. Where as one person might sell water purification systems, another person might sell crack cocaine.
It seems to me like these stories are an open invitation to start hacking Chinese systems. If I were a kid who was interested in hacking systems, I'd be scanning whole swaths of Chinese IP blocks. If I were a bit more sophisticated, I'd probably be searching for Chinese companies doing business in America (like a lot of the shipping companies). That is probably a bit more dangerous though because of the whole Homeland Security implications. There seems to be a meme going around that China is the biggest pirate of Microsoft software. If that is true, there have to be a bunch of un/under-patched systems over there. Have at them.
We've borrowed so much money from them, what better way to wipe the debt than to wipe them out?
There is a much easier way to deal with the debt. The United States drops the Dollar and replaces it with the Amero. You see, we owe the Chinese dollars. With the dollar gone, we don't owe them anything. Of course the Federal Reserve will be more than happy to convert their dollars into Ameros for them. As a bonus for the Chinese, they will be able to spend their new Ameros in Canada AND Mexico in addition to the United States. What a great deal, huh?
On a related note, I've been seeing more and more Coke from Mexico here in Southern California. The Mexican Coke is made with real sugar and not HFCS. It tastes a lot better and these days the only time I will drink a soda is if it is Mexican Coke. There's definitely a market for the product, but because of the way Coke is setup, they can't get away from HFCS. I'm sure that there are numerous contracts in place that stipulate they have to use HFCS in their product. I'd like to think that Coke will see the errors of their ways and start making Coke with regular sugar here in America. More than likely, they will just start to sue retailers that are selling the Mexican Coke in an effort to protect the HFCS manufacturers.
So what you're saying is that if I lease space from a hosting company that has my VM on a system with a DQ35 board, I can jump from my VM into any other VMs that happen to be on the same box?
It has been my experience that most Windows apps are not very well written. There are very few that do not require the user to have Administrator equivalent access to the machine.
What I foresee happening is that as businesses need to bring new functionality into the organization, open source can make some inroads. For example the organization that I am working for developed a need for some version control software. I tossed Subversion onto an Ubuntu box and rolled out TortoiseSVN via group policy to the clients. Although Subversion can run on Windows, there wasn't any need to pay for Windows licenses when Linux gets the job done. In situations like that, Linux will continue to grow. For new businesses that are starting up, Linux will continue to grow as people getting started on a shoe string budget look to do things as inexpensively as possible. Those are places where Linux can grow. I don't see many organizations rushing to rip and replace what they have in favor of Linux. That sort of thinking just does not make any sense in a business environment where things are already working well.
The big difference that I've seen comes down to the applications. Most of the discussion of Linux versus Windows seems to focus on the "Office" programs and the server itself, with the occassional discussion of an Exchange killer thrown in. I will agree that a lot of small businesses can get away with Linux, so long as they are only doing office work. It seems like application software for Windows covers a lot of niche markets. I used to do consulting for a few CPA firms. They all used Thomson applications and as far as I know, there isn't a Linux equivalent. (http://cs.thomsonreuters.com/support/reference/sysinfo.aspx#os). A lot of small businesses that handle their own payroll and time keeping use Khronos. Although Kronos supports Linux for the server, they only support Windows clients (http://www.kronos.com/Industry/SMB-Solutions/Time/Time-Essentials-Specs.aspx). A lot of small businesses can't afford a full time book keeper, so they need an accountant to come in once a month to take care of the book keeping. 95% of the accountants out there are going to expect the business to be running Quickbooks.
The OSS world still needs to re-invent a lot of wheels to gain mass market acceptance. Being able to apt-get an MP3 player isn't the same as being able to apt-get a human resources application, or a CRM program. On the other hand, a lot of "enterprise" apps are migrating into the cloud and SalesForce comes to mind instantly. Apps like that are nearly platform agnostic and will be a real threat to Microsoft as bandwidth becomes cheaper and redundant connections become more affordable for businesses.
You're spreading FUD about not being able to get bug fixes out of Microsoft. If you actually pay the God awful support price (It was $395 per call last I checked), and they find a bug in the system while diagnosing your problem, they will write a patch. Every once in a while you can come across a knowledgebase article on Microsoft's site with a link to a hotfix. There will be a big disclaimer that says something to the effect of, "This hotfix is not regression tested. Only apply this hotfix if you are experiencing the exact issue described in the article." In some cases you actually have to call support (for free) to get an unlock code to open the hotfix archive. Microsoft wants to make sure that people aren't just arbitrarily grabbing hotfixes off the site and throwing them at problems in production environments. Those hotfix are released as a result of customers calling in with problems. I know because I called in with a problem with the Exchange 2000 MTA that required a hotfix. I could be having delusional memories here, but I think that Microsoft even refunded the cost of the call because it turned out to be a problem with their software.
What you've framed as a negative consiquence, I see a positive result. If enough blackmailing goes back and forth between the parties when the reigns of power shift every couple of years, sooner or later one of two things are going to happen. In an ideal world, people would realize that they are going to be held accountable eventually and that would result in fewer corrupt, blackmailable people in positions of power. We all know that won't happen. The second effect that could happen is that those in power will scrap the program because they are tired of getting bitten in the ass by it.
For almost as long as civilization has been around, people have been waging war to gain prosperity. From the empires back in the day waging war in the "New World", to the United States waging war in Iraq to control the resources, there isn't a shortage of examples of humans waging war for profit.
"Prosperity for war." does not make any sense. Perhaps if you were to consider using, "Generating prosperty FROM war." you might be onto something closer to proper English.
It's time to use Lynx for all nefarious web browsing. On another note, it would be interesting to see some packet captures of CIPAV installing itself. I wonder if you could develop signatures for Snort or other IDS/IPS systems to recognize CIVAP installs.
As I was posting, I thought to myself, "Someone is going to say how ten minutes isn't enough time." Then I thought, "I should say thirty minutes. But then someone will say thirty minutes is too much time." In the end I figured that anyone on/. would be able to consider that ten minutes was completely arbitrary, and that the meta-point was that companies can set a time that works for their environment.
I've suggested plenty of improvements over the years... Upgrades to hardware and software, power-saving measures, new ways to organize our information... Frankly, unless it directly and immediately supports the money-making activities of the business nobody is interested. Doesn't matter how much money it would make/save in the long run.
And then of course what ends up happening is that the company hires somebody into a senior executive position. That person then says, "At the last place I worked, we did X this way. Why aren't you doing that here? It is so much better." All of a sudden, the X that you happened to suggest three years ago is now a priority. Nobody even remembers that you suggested it three years. When you get done implementing it, the new hire gets the credit.
The truth is that in IT when you save a bunch of electricity for the company it will probably be premises that gets all the credit. When you improve the accounting tools then the accountants get a bonus for working harder. Someone is always eating the lunch you earned and you're just a cost centre no one has figured out how to offshore yet.
It's also based on the assumption that the IT department doesn't setup Wake On LAN to wake the PCs up 10 minutes before people start showing up for work.
I'm going to end up in Portland Oregon. My grand parents moved there right after the war and I have a lot of family in the area. The last time I went up there to visit I decided that I wanted to live there full time.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh come on, this one is easy. You give the cosmonauts a trigger that they can use once they land. When they use the trigger, it pops the TOPs off of the retro-rockets and the rest of the propellant burns upward. Then the capsule looks like a big, Fourth of July fountain. But since they are Russians, I guess it would have to be a May Day fountain? Maybe they can just partner with the Chinese, since those guys make all of the fireworks anyway.
I read the article and looked at the benchmarks and thought to myself, I should pay $20 and just get the Nvidia 250 card. It beats the rest of the cards and only costs $20 more. I'm sure there are other people who read the same article and thought, "I can get nearly the same performance and spend $20 less."
Sad but true. Those are just the big murders that made the news. A lot of local murders don't even get coverage because in most places there are simply so many of them that telling people about all of them would cause a panic. I hope that one day, sooner or later, the public wakes up and starts demanding self responsibility again. As things stand right now, the police are simply there to clean up after the fact.
Not only does it show superiority, it also shows intelligence to walk away from a debate you're obviously on the losing side of. Congratulations on thinking you're projecting the image of yourself that you want others to see, even if most of us can see right through it.
Thanks for your optimism that one day I might grow up. That's rather generous of you. Perhaps you might one day yourself join the rest of us in reality. I am in no way justifying the parasitic behavior that you speak of. I simply recognize that parasites exist, and no matter how much I might like that they don't, they will always be there. There will always be fleas and ticks. There will always be bacteria and germs. If nature itself gives us parasites, what makes you think that we can reach a higher level of social well being that excludes the very foundations that life is built upon? To put it another way, there are certain interactions that are built into the experience that we call life. They will always be. Things will always be built up and destroyed. There will always be opposing forces acting upon each other. In fact, the more you attempt to resist the inescapable reality of that, the more difficult your life will be.
When I read what you write, I feel like I'm back in college having a conversation with some kid who just took a logic class, but hasn't yet spent enough time in reality. You seem to be caught in a dualistic, either/or thought paradigm. You posit that "someone who believes in meaning ... is creating something that serves their survival." Then after doing that, you go on to imply that what I wrote some how excludes creating things that enhances the ability to survive.
You see, I can fully believe that the world is full of parasites and that the default human behavior involves domination and survival. At the same time, I can practice martial arts and meditation, and also train others to walk the same path that I am on so that they can be better equipped to deal with the unpleasant aspects of life. I can realize that thoughts of utopian societies free from religion and narrow minded individuals is wasted energy. You see, I'm a big fan of focus on the moment and dealing with reality one second at a time. At the same time, I also realize that our actions are cumulative and it is important to focus our energies on creating positive, lasting results.
I see where you are coming from. I've read all of your replies in this thread. I understand that you are encouraging people to embrace their humanity, and that encouragement probably comes from wanting people to recognize oneness. You probably want people to work together, and to support each other and to reach the realization that our humanity is entwined with those around us. I get it. However, I think that you're the one who has some growing up to do. You seem to feel that you are superior to the "parasites". You aren't. You've simply made other choices. You don't seem to accept others who aren't as all accepting of your humanity based approach. Don't worry, you'll grow up someday.
You rail against religion being so bad, yet apparently fail to consider that everyone makes what they believe are the best choices for themselves at any given time. Nobody decides, "Hey, I'm going to screw myself over right now." Everyone believes that they are doing good for themselves. Just as you believe that the world should move beyond religion, I'm sure that Catholic cardinals and Christian pastors and Taoist priests all believe that they are onto something and want to share it with others because they think the world will be a better place when people follow their way of doing things. Everyone who picks up a religion does so because it helps them make sense of life. On some level it sooths the mind and puts the pieces in place. For some people, there isn't a world beyond religion because the religion gives the world a framework for them to understand "everything". There will always be "religion", just as there will always be violence, and love and compassion and greed. Grow up. Accept it. Life will be a lot easier that way.
Violence exists for a reason. It can only be minimized with further violence and the threats of punishment. There will always be violent members of any species. Those members of the species serve to further the evolution of the species as a whole. Without the threat of death, evolution slows down. There are people who will always be driven to compete and to push the boundries and to horde and to crawl to the top. Those people drive the evolution of society. Those people push others to come up with new, intelligent ways to deal with them. Often times, dealing with those people has absolutely nothing to do with intelligence and everything to do with simple being more violent than they are. Intelligence only gets a person so far when they are faced with someone who has no moral qualms with inflicting physical harm upon them.
I'd posit that it shows a lack of intelligence to not accept that evil exists in the world. An intelligent person realizes that reality comprises all aspects of potential behaviors and outcomes. Without the contrast of evil, good loses meaning. Without light, dark has no meaning. Evil will always happen just as good will always happen. As a human being, you decide how to act. As an intelligent person, you have to realize that you cannot expect others to act the way that you think they should. They will do what they will do. Whether or not you will accept their actions when those actions come into conflict with your way of life rests on your shoulders. What you call cynicism, I call reality.
We can do better. We can also do worse. As one person wakes up and eats a healthy breakfast before exercising, their neighbor might wake up, smoke some weed and drink a soda. When one person goes to work and earns a paycheck, another person might pick up a firearm and commit armed robbery. Where as one person might sell water purification systems, another person might sell crack cocaine.
It seems to me like these stories are an open invitation to start hacking Chinese systems. If I were a kid who was interested in hacking systems, I'd be scanning whole swaths of Chinese IP blocks. If I were a bit more sophisticated, I'd probably be searching for Chinese companies doing business in America (like a lot of the shipping companies). That is probably a bit more dangerous though because of the whole Homeland Security implications. There seems to be a meme going around that China is the biggest pirate of Microsoft software. If that is true, there have to be a bunch of un/under-patched systems over there. Have at them.
There is a much easier way to deal with the debt. The United States drops the Dollar and replaces it with the Amero. You see, we owe the Chinese dollars. With the dollar gone, we don't owe them anything. Of course the Federal Reserve will be more than happy to convert their dollars into Ameros for them. As a bonus for the Chinese, they will be able to spend their new Ameros in Canada AND Mexico in addition to the United States. What a great deal, huh?
On a related note, I've been seeing more and more Coke from Mexico here in Southern California. The Mexican Coke is made with real sugar and not HFCS. It tastes a lot better and these days the only time I will drink a soda is if it is Mexican Coke. There's definitely a market for the product, but because of the way Coke is setup, they can't get away from HFCS. I'm sure that there are numerous contracts in place that stipulate they have to use HFCS in their product. I'd like to think that Coke will see the errors of their ways and start making Coke with regular sugar here in America. More than likely, they will just start to sue retailers that are selling the Mexican Coke in an effort to protect the HFCS manufacturers.
So what you're saying is that if I lease space from a hosting company that has my VM on a system with a DQ35 board, I can jump from my VM into any other VMs that happen to be on the same box?
..run on...
Oh, nevermind.
It has been my experience that most Windows apps are not very well written. There are very few that do not require the user to have Administrator equivalent access to the machine.
What I foresee happening is that as businesses need to bring new functionality into the organization, open source can make some inroads. For example the organization that I am working for developed a need for some version control software. I tossed Subversion onto an Ubuntu box and rolled out TortoiseSVN via group policy to the clients. Although Subversion can run on Windows, there wasn't any need to pay for Windows licenses when Linux gets the job done. In situations like that, Linux will continue to grow. For new businesses that are starting up, Linux will continue to grow as people getting started on a shoe string budget look to do things as inexpensively as possible. Those are places where Linux can grow. I don't see many organizations rushing to rip and replace what they have in favor of Linux. That sort of thinking just does not make any sense in a business environment where things are already working well.
The big difference that I've seen comes down to the applications. Most of the discussion of Linux versus Windows seems to focus on the "Office" programs and the server itself, with the occassional discussion of an Exchange killer thrown in. I will agree that a lot of small businesses can get away with Linux, so long as they are only doing office work. It seems like application software for Windows covers a lot of niche markets. I used to do consulting for a few CPA firms. They all used Thomson applications and as far as I know, there isn't a Linux equivalent. (http://cs.thomsonreuters.com/support/reference/sysinfo.aspx#os). A lot of small businesses that handle their own payroll and time keeping use Khronos. Although Kronos supports Linux for the server, they only support Windows clients (http://www.kronos.com/Industry/SMB-Solutions/Time/Time-Essentials-Specs.aspx). A lot of small businesses can't afford a full time book keeper, so they need an accountant to come in once a month to take care of the book keeping. 95% of the accountants out there are going to expect the business to be running Quickbooks.
The OSS world still needs to re-invent a lot of wheels to gain mass market acceptance. Being able to apt-get an MP3 player isn't the same as being able to apt-get a human resources application, or a CRM program. On the other hand, a lot of "enterprise" apps are migrating into the cloud and SalesForce comes to mind instantly. Apps like that are nearly platform agnostic and will be a real threat to Microsoft as bandwidth becomes cheaper and redundant connections become more affordable for businesses.
You're spreading FUD about not being able to get bug fixes out of Microsoft. If you actually pay the God awful support price (It was $395 per call last I checked), and they find a bug in the system while diagnosing your problem, they will write a patch. Every once in a while you can come across a knowledgebase article on Microsoft's site with a link to a hotfix. There will be a big disclaimer that says something to the effect of, "This hotfix is not regression tested. Only apply this hotfix if you are experiencing the exact issue described in the article." In some cases you actually have to call support (for free) to get an unlock code to open the hotfix archive. Microsoft wants to make sure that people aren't just arbitrarily grabbing hotfixes off the site and throwing them at problems in production environments. Those hotfix are released as a result of customers calling in with problems. I know because I called in with a problem with the Exchange 2000 MTA that required a hotfix. I could be having delusional memories here, but I think that Microsoft even refunded the cost of the call because it turned out to be a problem with their software.
What you've framed as a negative consiquence, I see a positive result. If enough blackmailing goes back and forth between the parties when the reigns of power shift every couple of years, sooner or later one of two things are going to happen. In an ideal world, people would realize that they are going to be held accountable eventually and that would result in fewer corrupt, blackmailable people in positions of power. We all know that won't happen. The second effect that could happen is that those in power will scrap the program because they are tired of getting bitten in the ass by it.
For almost as long as civilization has been around, people have been waging war to gain prosperity. From the empires back in the day waging war in the "New World", to the United States waging war in Iraq to control the resources, there isn't a shortage of examples of humans waging war for profit.
"Prosperity for war." does not make any sense. Perhaps if you were to consider using, "Generating prosperty FROM war." you might be onto something closer to proper English.
It's time to use Lynx for all nefarious web browsing. On another note, it would be interesting to see some packet captures of CIPAV installing itself. I wonder if you could develop signatures for Snort or other IDS/IPS systems to recognize CIVAP installs.
The word you are looking for is propensity.
As I was posting, I thought to myself, "Someone is going to say how ten minutes isn't enough time." Then I thought, "I should say thirty minutes. But then someone will say thirty minutes is too much time." In the end I figured that anyone on /. would be able to consider that ten minutes was completely arbitrary, and that the meta-point was that companies can set a time that works for their environment.
And then of course what ends up happening is that the company hires somebody into a senior executive position. That person then says, "At the last place I worked, we did X this way. Why aren't you doing that here? It is so much better." All of a sudden, the X that you happened to suggest three years ago is now a priority. Nobody even remembers that you suggested it three years. When you get done implementing it, the new hire gets the credit.
This should be moderated "+5 The Truth Hurts".
It's also based on the assumption that the IT department doesn't setup Wake On LAN to wake the PCs up 10 minutes before people start showing up for work.
I'm going to end up in Portland Oregon. My grand parents moved there right after the war and I have a lot of family in the area. The last time I went up there to visit I decided that I wanted to live there full time.