I agree that entitlement spending has to be reset on a sustainable path.
Social Security actually contributes more money the federal budget than it takes away! About US$160 billion annually now, ramping down to zero in 2018. Unfortunately, our esteemed Congresspersons on both sides of the aisle keep using the Social Security surplus to pay for general fund expenditures. Otherwise the deficit wouldn't be $400 billion a year - it would be glaringly obvious that it's $600 billion a year and that the folks managing the budget are passing the bill onto the future.
The state's actually could do with more federal spending, as spending cuts in medicare, medicaid, etc. have shifted the financial burden over to the states that do not raise nearly the tax revenue the Fed's do.
We'll all end up paying the bill as prices increase, interest rates increase, and growth stagnates and real wages decline (as they must if we're in a global labor market). Traditional 1970's style stagflation; which is preferable to 1930's style recession.
After they signed an agreement with OnStar and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Google can now track private vehicles willing to be part of a car pool in this era of $5 gal gasoline. Registered users can offer or receive rides and collect or provide instantaneous electronic payments for their cost of the ride, minus a few percent for the new consortium.
And now, as far as upper management is concerned, I'm the one that is behind schedule.
You could cure this by taking some time to update your PM on your progress.
You know those ludicrous bullets that get phrased like
1 p.m - 2 p.m. - Meet with Stakeholders to develop plan
2 p.m. - 3 p.m. - Write implementation plan
3 p.m. - 4 p.m. - Direct key players to implement plan in time for 8 am followup meeting tomorrow
where "plan" could just as well be "solve the oil crisis", "achieve world peace" given the unrealistic glossing over of the details.
Put together a memo with the key points, then describe in a paragraph the hurdles that make "load new software" more of a problem than they realize. Give them choices of approaches, with time estimates, include warnings of possible complications, and recommend a course of action. If they buy-in, great. But at least they get educated about issues. While they persist in ignorance, they'll just inadvertantly make your life miserable.
I just can't understand why someone running what is apparently a popular site would ever keep logs for more than a very short amount of time?
Along the same lines, have you noticed that most companies now have an explicit official policy on information and records retention? Old emails will be deleted after 30 days, 1 year, etc.
The obvious reason is to avoid legal liability (Microsoft's emails) and embarrassment (Monica Lewinsky).
[Regarding this particular case: if the FBI is on a bona fide investigation of criminal activity and the courts have issued an order directing compliance with the investigation and this is NOT some post "Patriot Act" "sneak-n-peak" fishing expedition action exempt from judicial oversight then go ahead and provide law enforcement with what specific information they need and nothing else.]
The trade deficit is not a very large part of GDP.
Despite the impressive size of US GDP, around US$10 trillion annually, the trade deficit is still a much larger percentage of GDP than any other nation's trade deficit. About 6% last year. About US$5 per day per U.S. resident.
If I were to take out loans constituting 6% of my annual income each year, it wouldn't take too many years before I'd declare bankruptcy. [Or not anymore, since Congress recent timely action to make personal bankruptcy laws much more stringent (unless you're wealthy and can afford a lawyer to help you through the loopholes:)].
I used to admire the Republican party for its advocacy of sound, prudent fiscal policy. There's scant of that anymore. The USA is in a powerdive and we're set to auger in as a result of current policies.
Really? the govt exist to endorse one form of software over another?
Any market which naturally degenerates into a monopoly is a good place for the government to regulate or become a service provider or to set standards. Computer operating systems have become an "essential facility", just as electric lines running a certain voltage, roads, or last mile phone line service to homes.
Brazil's citizens are still free to go out and purchase a copy of Microsoft Windows and install it on their PCs if they find the value proposition attractive over the FOSS that "comes with their PC".
Personally, I don't find the supposed heavy hand of Brazilian government any more distasteful than the exercise of Microsoft's excessive marketplace power in other countries over the past couple of decades. The United States Department of Justice showed it could not stand up to MS and the EU is taking its time to do so. Bravo to Brazil for having the balls to do it!
Or maybe they're taught, and forget, because the general culture doesn't place any importance on proper use of language.
As an American, I am able to refute this point categorically.
You might be misled into thinking that American language is expressed in terms of these squiggly little Latin alphabet characters. English is just a second language to most of us Americans.
No sirree, we've graduated to a new and better form of expression, something that we call "teevee".
Pardon my hazy understanding of the subtle issues surrounding Java and.NET, but isn't the major problem not so much about the JVM or the CLR, but all the libraries that applications written in either C# (Windows forms) or Java (com.sun.whatever) tend to use?
Well, that , and that either "standard" is subject to change without notice due either to paranoid-possesiveness "No we won't define an ISO" (Sun) or to gorilla-sized "We are the standard despite the stinkin' standards bodies" (MS).
This is a perfect example of why groups of people should not be allowed to exert political influence, and how unions can turn bad (since, in their basic form (group bargaining for employment benefits), a union is a great thing).
I'd be more broad minded in my criticism.
Yes, unions can act badly, creating this obvious market inefficiency due to their aggregated power in the labor-selling marketplace.
But, just as concentrated power in the labor market can be bad, there are at least as many if not more examples of where market dominance by corporations cause inherent inefficiencies in the free market system.
The most efficient system is where there aer large numbers of buyers and sellers of labor (or anything else). As the number of either decreases, then one or the other side are in a position to take advantage of the market for their own gain, be they unions or employers.
In my world, the intersecting set of employees and stockholders would be much larger than it is today.
It takes a relatively low admin (person) time and a high computer time to keep it up to date which is much better than systems that need a medium part of my own time.
From what I understand, though, the low marginal costs of maintaining a Gentoo system are offset by the high initial cost in learning how things work, setting things up, etc. compared to other distributions.
I'm inclined to try Gentoo one of these days when I get several days free to do this, till then I'll limp along with Fedora Core and yum.
No, I think MS makes the outermost exposed surface of Windows shiny and reasonable to new users.
Where it gets ugly is a few cm below the surface and far above the kernel of the OS where they must do triple backflips to attempt to meet the backwards compatibility with older interfaces and behavior.
Those interfaces, of course, are devilishly difficult.
Just imagine the sacred kernel priests at MS encountering directives from high marketing about what the OS has to do in terms of backwards behavior and, yes, current levels of obfuscation are a test of your ability and a hindrance to monster competitors seeking the gold in our dungeon.
They probably ask to be killed rather than be party to such such defilement.
By consumers you would mean, say, impoverished academics or people from the third world who would compare this to "Real Windows" and conclude that however good it might be and however much it might do, even unto the utmost 98% of what they need, that it would be nicer and more convenient to just pirate "Real Windows" and use that.
IOW, Windows Lite is facing exactly the same barrier that Linux is facing.
Yes, it has been pretty dull around here after all the party lovers left the Last Odd Day for more than a millenium celebration that occurred here more than 5 years ago.
So is there a special geek catalog where you can select gifts for those special anniversaries in your life, such as living to 1 Saturnian orbital period, living the half-life of some radioisotope, or some other time marker that would not seem provincial to extra-terrestrials (earth_orbits%10 only means a lot to us humans).
I know very few computer users who are for the RIAA/MPAA/MSFT/GOV metroplex.
I know a lot more computer users who don't know jack, but do want to see that video of Michael Jackson, Brittney, etc. and will follow the helpful wizard into the path of *AA compliance for their "computer".
For a large enterprise a fork IS a bad thing...This is definitely an area where MS has the upper hand
This has always confused me: the lengths to which most large organization IT departments will do triple backward somersaults to upgrade to the latest service pack, to upgrade from 2K to XP, to upgrade to 2003, upgrading Office, etc.
Corporate IT life is essentially a harried chase after what is one MS fork after another on their own product line, either to avoid a security vulnerability or to eliminate some backwards compatibility.
Taken one step further, as long as you have a {black,white}board in front of the class, why not use that to support your lectures and have the students copy down notes?
Young students in developing nations are probably more receptive to personal, face-to-face instruction anyway (as are most of us). I used to avoid textbooks as much as possible when I was younger, relying instead on attention to what the teacher said and some amount of innate intelligence.
Also, your students would gain in note taking skills at the same time that you develop a good introductory computer skills class. Those note taking skills are probably at least as important as the computer skills.
FWIW, I commend you strongly on your current vocational choice. What you're doing makes a difference and is one of the few glimmers of hope and light in an otherwise crazy world. I wish a greater fraction of my tax dollars were going the Peace Corps.
As long as you want either all 32 or 64Bit libs. APT still can't handle multilib installs.
Running Fedora Core 3 on x86_64 I'm not convinced that Fedora has this multi-library 64/32 problem completely resolved either.
Releasing a 64 bit OS is not difficult at all under Linux; it's been around since the Alpha days. What's hard is managing the transition environment where multiple environments need to co-exist on the same platform at the same time.
they never imagined such an invasive government to be technically possible.
Nor did they ever imagine that corporations would rise to such an influential position in society, exercising power over government itself and have the ability to intrude into the lives of ordinary citizens to a degree that would have made past tyrants envious.
We live in a "free" society where you're completely free to choose between peeing into a cup or starving.
Last time I checked it still isn't a crime to disassemble your own property
In the Land of Free and Home of Brave® it could be a crime. My limited understanding of the DMCA suggests I can't use DeCSS in my own house in the USA to look at the DVD I just bought with my own money because it would "circumvent a copyright protection device".
[I wish they'd just concentrate on enforcement of actual instances of copyright infringment such as copying and distributing for a profit or, better, on reforming copyright legislation to make the protections of a more limited duration rather than contriving an morally-bankrupt technical solution (DMCA) to a social problem.
Pretty much everthing the public sees in the news has been purchased already, either by advertisiers that pay for maximum number of eyeballs (and if that requires tailoring what gets shown as "news", then so be it), or indirectly (any news that could conceivably offend large numbers of people, people with power/money, gets dropped).
These days, if you really want to find out what's going on you need to go talk to numerous sources first-hand if you don't want to see the world through someone else's agenda (me and my sources have enough agendas between us already we don't need any 3rd party injecting theirs).
The natural urge is to bar membership to this community to perpetuate the elitism, greatly harming new user adoption.
Sometimes. But untrue at least two-fold.
First, much of the FOSS community is genuinely interested in helping people to use FOSS, regardless of their abilities. The majority, in all likelihood. It's only a small fraction of FOSS users with some intelligence and more than a few personal insecurities that belittle the attempts of others to learn FOSS software.
Second, there's always the cachet associated with doing what's new and what's cool and what's not common. There are some who will actively seek to learn FOSS for the same reasons that they have the latest PDA gadget. The community grows in size somewhat because of these new members who usually delight in "explaining the mysteries of the universe" to co-workers, friends, the girl cashiering at the grocery store, etc.
The biggest problem is that enterprise wide deployments are the last frontier for Linux (and even that is rapidly being colonized). In the old days people complained about lack of desktop environments, lack of hardware support, lack of embedded processor support, etc. a whole lot of features which have faded in importance.
That's why the last battle will be the one for a distributed global authentication and authorization system, something which takes a while for the FOSS to come up with the standards and the implementation of an agreeable system. The established players (MS, Sun, etc) will just distribute their solution as part of their distribution.
Slashdot Mirror
Not at all.
You just have to be on the lookout for important stories that have a profound impact on Nerddom,
I can't begin to tell you the tragedy of what happened to the unsuspecting herds of nerds that were not up to date on this important news item.
I agree that entitlement spending has to be reset on a sustainable path.
Social Security actually contributes more money the federal budget than it takes away! About US$160 billion annually now, ramping down to zero in 2018. Unfortunately, our esteemed Congresspersons on both sides of the aisle keep using the Social Security surplus to pay for general fund expenditures. Otherwise the deficit wouldn't be $400 billion a year - it would be glaringly obvious that it's $600 billion a year and that the folks managing the budget are passing the bill onto the future.
The state's actually could do with more federal spending, as spending cuts in medicare, medicaid, etc. have shifted the financial burden over to the states that do not raise nearly the tax revenue the Fed's do.
We'll all end up paying the bill as prices increase, interest rates increase, and growth stagnates and real wages decline (as they must if we're in a global labor market). Traditional 1970's style stagflation; which is preferable to 1930's style recession.
500,000 pixels, you mean...
Sure.
But wouldn't all the /. readers pointing green laser pointers at the satellite be arrested by the authorities as bad pixels?
Goldman Sachs was right; a super-spike in oil prices to over US$100 bbl was not ony was possible but it has had far-reaching consequences for the economy and our culture.
After they signed an agreement with OnStar and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Google can now track private vehicles willing to be part of a car pool in this era of $5 gal gasoline. Registered users can offer or receive rides and collect or provide instantaneous electronic payments for their cost of the ride, minus a few percent for the new consortium.
And now, as far as upper management is concerned, I'm the one that is behind schedule.
You could cure this by taking some time to update your PM on your progress.
You know those ludicrous bullets that get phrased like
- 1 p.m - 2 p.m. - Meet with Stakeholders to develop plan
- 2 p.m. - 3 p.m. - Write implementation plan
- 3 p.m. - 4 p.m. - Direct key players to implement plan in time for 8 am followup meeting tomorrow
where "plan" could just as well be "solve the oil crisis", "achieve world peace" given the unrealistic glossing over of the details.Put together a memo with the key points, then describe in a paragraph the hurdles that make "load new software" more of a problem than they realize. Give them choices of approaches, with time estimates, include warnings of possible complications, and recommend a course of action. If they buy-in, great. But at least they get educated about issues. While they persist in ignorance, they'll just inadvertantly make your life miserable.
I just can't understand why someone running what is apparently a popular site would ever keep logs for more than a very short amount of time?
Along the same lines, have you noticed that most companies now have an explicit official policy on information and records retention? Old emails will be deleted after 30 days, 1 year, etc.
The obvious reason is to avoid legal liability (Microsoft's emails) and embarrassment (Monica Lewinsky).
[Regarding this particular case: if the FBI is on a bona fide investigation of criminal activity and the courts have issued an order directing compliance with the investigation and this is NOT some post "Patriot Act" "sneak-n-peak" fishing expedition action exempt from judicial oversight then go ahead and provide law enforcement with what specific information they need and nothing else.]
The trade deficit is not a very large part of GDP.
Despite the impressive size of US GDP, around US$10 trillion annually, the trade deficit is still a much larger percentage of GDP than any other nation's trade deficit. About 6% last year. About US$5 per day per U.S. resident.
If I were to take out loans constituting 6% of my annual income each year, it wouldn't take too many years before I'd declare bankruptcy. [Or not anymore, since Congress recent timely action to make personal bankruptcy laws much more stringent (unless you're wealthy and can afford a lawyer to help you through the loopholes:)].
I used to admire the Republican party for its advocacy of sound, prudent fiscal policy. There's scant of that anymore. The USA is in a powerdive and we're set to auger in as a result of current policies.
Really? the govt exist to endorse one form of software over another?
Any market which naturally degenerates into a monopoly is a good place for the government to regulate or become a service provider or to set standards. Computer operating systems have become an "essential facility", just as electric lines running a certain voltage, roads, or last mile phone line service to homes.
Brazil's citizens are still free to go out and purchase a copy of Microsoft Windows and install it on their PCs if they find the value proposition attractive over the FOSS that "comes with their PC".
Personally, I don't find the supposed heavy hand of Brazilian government any more distasteful than the exercise of Microsoft's excessive marketplace power in other countries over the past couple of decades. The United States Department of Justice showed it could not stand up to MS and the EU is taking its time to do so. Bravo to Brazil for having the balls to do it!
Or maybe they're taught, and forget, because the general culture doesn't place any importance on proper use of language.
As an American, I am able to refute this point categorically.
You might be misled into thinking that American language is expressed in terms of these squiggly little Latin alphabet characters. English is just a second language to most of us Americans.
No sirree, we've graduated to a new and better form of expression, something that we call "teevee".
Pardon my hazy understanding of the subtle issues surrounding Java and .NET, but isn't the major problem not so much about the JVM or the CLR, but all the libraries that applications written in either C# (Windows forms) or Java (com.sun.whatever) tend to use?
Well, that , and that either "standard" is subject to change without notice due either to paranoid-possesiveness "No we won't define an ISO" (Sun) or to gorilla-sized "We are the standard despite the stinkin' standards bodies" (MS).
Hey, at least be glad you have an acceptable password!
I can't get any application to accept my password, which starts out with about 5 or 6 carriage return 0x0a and linefeed 0x0d characters!
And this after I reluctantly abandoned the troublesome Control-S 0x13 character that kept freezing up my terminal window.
This is a perfect example of why groups of people should not be allowed to exert political influence, and how unions can turn bad (since, in their basic form (group bargaining for employment benefits), a union is a great thing).
I'd be more broad minded in my criticism.
Yes, unions can act badly, creating this obvious market inefficiency due to their aggregated power in the labor-selling marketplace.
But, just as concentrated power in the labor market can be bad, there are at least as many if not more examples of where market dominance by corporations cause inherent inefficiencies in the free market system.
The most efficient system is where there aer large numbers of buyers and sellers of labor (or anything else). As the number of either decreases, then one or the other side are in a position to take advantage of the market for their own gain, be they unions or employers.
In my world, the intersecting set of employees and stockholders would be much larger than it is today.
It takes a relatively low admin (person) time and a high computer time to keep it up to date which is much better than systems that need a medium part of my own time.
From what I understand, though, the low marginal costs of maintaining a Gentoo system are offset by the high initial cost in learning how things work, setting things up, etc. compared to other distributions.
I'm inclined to try Gentoo one of these days when I get several days free to do this, till then I'll limp along with Fedora Core and yum.
It's what's run on top that's wrong
No, I think MS makes the outermost exposed surface of Windows shiny and reasonable to new users.
Where it gets ugly is a few cm below the surface and far above the kernel of the OS where they must do triple backflips to attempt to meet the backwards compatibility with older interfaces and behavior.
Those interfaces, of course, are devilishly difficult.
Just imagine the sacred kernel priests at MS encountering directives from high marketing about what the OS has to do in terms of backwards behavior and, yes, current levels of obfuscation are a test of your ability and a hindrance to monster competitors seeking the gold in our dungeon.
They probably ask to be killed rather than be party to such such defilement.
By consumers you would mean, say, impoverished academics or people from the third world who would compare this to "Real Windows" and conclude that however good it might be and however much it might do, even unto the utmost 98% of what they need, that it would be nicer and more convenient to just pirate "Real Windows" and use that.
IOW, Windows Lite is facing exactly the same barrier that Linux is facing.
Yes, it has been pretty dull around here after all the party lovers left the Last Odd Day for more than a millenium celebration that occurred here more than 5 years ago.
So is there a special geek catalog where you can select gifts for those special anniversaries in your life, such as living to 1 Saturnian orbital period, living the half-life of some radioisotope, or some other time marker that would not seem provincial to extra-terrestrials (earth_orbits%10 only means a lot to us humans).
I know very few computer users who are for the RIAA/MPAA/MSFT/GOV metroplex.
I know a lot more computer users who don't know jack, but do want to see that video of Michael Jackson, Brittney, etc. and will follow the helpful wizard into the path of *AA compliance for their "computer".
This has always confused me: the lengths to which most large organization IT departments will do triple backward somersaults to upgrade to the latest service pack, to upgrade from 2K to XP, to upgrade to 2003, upgrading Office, etc.
Corporate IT life is essentially a harried chase after what is one MS fork after another on their own product line, either to avoid a security vulnerability or to eliminate some backwards compatibility.
Roll your own is a great idea.
Taken one step further, as long as you have a {black,white}board in front of the class, why not use that to support your lectures and have the students copy down notes?
Young students in developing nations are probably more receptive to personal, face-to-face instruction anyway (as are most of us). I used to avoid textbooks as much as possible when I was younger, relying instead on attention to what the teacher said and some amount of innate intelligence.
Also, your students would gain in note taking skills at the same time that you develop a good introductory computer skills class. Those note taking skills are probably at least as important as the computer skills.
FWIW, I commend you strongly on your current vocational choice. What you're doing makes a difference and is one of the few glimmers of hope and light in an otherwise crazy world. I wish a greater fraction of my tax dollars were going the Peace Corps.
As long as you want either all 32 or 64Bit libs. APT still can't handle multilib installs.
Running Fedora Core 3 on x86_64 I'm not convinced that Fedora has this multi-library 64/32 problem completely resolved either.
Releasing a 64 bit OS is not difficult at all under Linux; it's been around since the Alpha days. What's hard is managing the transition environment where multiple environments need to co-exist on the same platform at the same time.
they never imagined such an invasive government to be technically possible.
Nor did they ever imagine that corporations would rise to such an influential position in society, exercising power over government itself and have the ability to intrude into the lives of ordinary citizens to a degree that would have made past tyrants envious.
We live in a "free" society where you're completely free to choose between peeing into a cup or starving.
Last time I checked it still isn't a crime to disassemble your own property
In the Land of Free and Home of Brave® it could be a crime. My limited understanding of the DMCA suggests I can't use DeCSS in my own house in the USA to look at the DVD I just bought with my own money because it would "circumvent a copyright protection device".
[I wish they'd just concentrate on enforcement of actual instances of copyright infringment such as copying and distributing for a profit or, better, on reforming copyright legislation to make the protections of a more limited duration rather than contriving an morally-bankrupt technical solution (DMCA) to a social problem.
In ten years
That's roughly how long I go between learning new languages, although it can speed up some with scripting languages, like VB or Python.
Is the era of free news content about to end?
The era of "free" news has never even started.
Pretty much everthing the public sees in the news has been purchased already, either by advertisiers that pay for maximum number of eyeballs (and if that requires tailoring what gets shown as "news", then so be it), or indirectly (any news that could conceivably offend large numbers of people, people with power/money, gets dropped).
These days, if you really want to find out what's going on you need to go talk to numerous sources first-hand if you don't want to see the world through someone else's agenda (me and my sources have enough agendas between us already we don't need any 3rd party injecting theirs).
The natural urge is to bar membership to this community to perpetuate the elitism, greatly harming new user adoption.
Sometimes. But untrue at least two-fold.
First, much of the FOSS community is genuinely interested in helping people to use FOSS, regardless of their abilities. The majority, in all likelihood. It's only a small fraction of FOSS users with some intelligence and more than a few personal insecurities that belittle the attempts of others to learn FOSS software.
Second, there's always the cachet associated with doing what's new and what's cool and what's not common. There are some who will actively seek to learn FOSS for the same reasons that they have the latest PDA gadget. The community grows in size somewhat because of these new members who usually delight in "explaining the mysteries of the universe" to co-workers, friends, the girl cashiering at the grocery store, etc.
The biggest problem is that enterprise wide deployments are the last frontier for Linux (and even that is rapidly being colonized). In the old days people complained about lack of desktop environments, lack of hardware support, lack of embedded processor support, etc. a whole lot of features which have faded in importance.
That's why the last battle will be the one for a distributed global authentication and authorization system, something which takes a while for the FOSS to come up with the standards and the implementation of an agreeable system. The established players (MS, Sun, etc) will just distribute their solution as part of their distribution.