If you are donating something to a charity, you only get to write off the actual cost to you, not the retail cost. Of course, this isn't even a charity, it's China, so it doesn't matter.
And they get to write off the actual cost anyway -- any business expenses are deducted from gross revenue. Not that it matters anyway, MS hardly pays any taxes.
The only left wing radio I can think of is National Public Radio and it only stays in business because of the US Taxpayer
The other left-wing radio (much more left) would be Pacifica, but they've been having troubles lately (both money and internal politics, I believe). Of course, all college and community radio tends to be quite left.
It isn't fair to say NPR only stays in business because of the taxpayer (unless you include all radio stations, because of free spectrum). It's maybe 10, 20% of funding now... I can't remember exactly (they always give the number during pledge drives, but it's been a while). I think something like 60% of funding comes from individual members. At least at the local station level -- the money then sifts its way up to NPR itself. The rest comes from corporate funding and grants, I believe.
That public radio keeps going mostly by pledges is really a quite inspiring model for web content... even Salon's subscription marketing looks more like a pledge drive than an exchange of goods. Too bad Salon couldn't quite pull it off -- they didn't have the modest beginnings that public radio had, though, and it took radio a long time to get where it is.
Not to mention no good Christian should stand for it either... I mean I Pledge Allegiance to the Flag seems clearly contradictory to the false idol commandment. I know Jehovah's Witnesses won't pledge allegiance, and I believe a number of other fundamentalist Christians believe similarly.
The radios are businesses, and they can play what they like, so they play what is in their shareholders interests to play.
The radio stations are given airspace (that belongs to the public) on the assumption that they are providing some public good (which is not necessarily exclusive with their own profit).
If they are receiving payola then they are playing only advertising on their station -- some commercials are extended, stealth commercials to boost CD sales, but advertising nonetheless. That is clearly not in the public interest. There is not enough radio spectrum to go around, and pure-advertisement stations should be culled.
There's nothing wrong with demanding that government-supported companies take into account the public good. However, when they are publically traded (and thus required to satisfy the shareholders demand for profit), the only way to get such companies to act in the public good is through coercion (regulation).
The above poster says that violence will be necessary to get your point across.
Do not misquote me. Confrontation of the powers that be is required -- at this point, even mere attendence is seen as confrontational. This will be met with violence, which is unfortunate, but it is not up to the protesters how the police will act.
The sixties were very violent. Obviously you weren't part of the protests at the time. What about the riots? The Democratic Convention? Kent State? I wasn't alive at the time, but it's pretty damned obvious their was a lot of violence.
Sure, after it's all done people put a different perspective to it -- but the critiques then were exactly like they are now. Your rosy pictures don't match up with history.
So what should they do? Have candlelight vigils? Send letters to their representatives?
I've been to nice, peaceful protests, and they are a joke. You get a permit to stand in some park cut off from anyone and the only way you inconvenience the system is that they have to pay extra for all the police they get to cordon you off. It's a big waste of time. But it's peaceful and doesn't get in anyone's way.
In my experience the protesters usually do not start the violence. But the protesters are confrontational. You must be confrontational in some way if you want to have a real protest -- that's what it means to have a protest. Otherwise it's just a parade. Civil rights protesters did not ask the government for a permit to do a sit in. Gandhi did not cooperate with the police. The protesters in these cases may have been nonviolent, but the protests themselves were often very violent.
I know you would rather people not protest -- if it's a real protest it will likely disrupt your life. But stop being a fucking whiner! These issues are bigger than your fucking day to day life. These issues are more important than a few windows that might get broken in the chaos. This is what protest looks like, and either say you are against protest altogether, or accept that it has to come to your town eventually.
I'm sorry if I'm attacking you, but at a certain point it really pisses me off when people are so petty. This isn't a soccer match, the protests are about real things. And these protests have meant something -- for one, it's meant that the leaders of the 8 most important countries are having a clandestine meeting in the wilderness. That doesn't happen because of a letter-writing campaign.
Business licenses aren't much of a privlege. It would be wrong to grant or revoke licenses without clear rules and due process. They should not be a significant barrier to business.
Running a business is even less of a privilege. In many fields, you can run a business simply by saying you are doing so (and later filling out appropriate tax forms). If someone is paying you, and you are not their employee, you've just started running a business. (Maybe it's harder in other countries, but thankfuly this is all easy in the US)
A corporation is a privilege, as it gives you extra rights and protections. You don't need a corporation to run a business.
However, your underlying point that there is no guarantee or right to make a profit, and that remains true.
It doesn't relate to college life, really, but someone entering college is just the right age to most appreciate this book:
Ecodefense: A Field Guide To Monkeywrenching. Very subversive, in today's climate following suggestions in the book is likely to get you in a lot of trouble (since the distinction between terrorism and sabotage is lost on those who value property as much as life, and choose to see all subversive acts as Evil).
And it isn't just a list of stupid, dangerous, destructive shit like the Anarchist Cookbook, and it's not just a guide to mischief or pranks. It has a point -- a guide to doing aggressive direct action. There's way to much pointless crap out there, and college is a time when you should cast off a lot of that stuff (or decide what really matters and what doesn't). Not everyone does that, but hey, you can give her a nudge:)
In case you haven't noticed, the default settings for the Linux ext[23] filesystems is to allocate one inode per 4096 or 8192 bytes of disk space. Which happens to be pretty much the size of an average E-mail message. So, in other words, you are unlikely to run out of inodes before you run out of disk space, since both are going to be used up pretty much at the same clip.
This doesn't make sense to me, at least not as presented. You are going to run out of inodes at exactly the same time you run out of disk space, because they are one and the same thing. In fact, I believe all the inodes are created when you create your filesystem, all space is mapped to an inode (though of course one file can use multiple inodes).
The issue is not the waste of inodes, but the waste of diskspace because the smallest file chunk is one inode worth of space. It's usually said that if you have 4k inodes, you'll lost 2k (on average) per file. This is not really correct, because inodes themselves take up space -- I remember reading a paper somewhere many years ago where they estimated that most users would find 4k inodes better than smaller values, because in normal file distributions the space you save with the smaller inode is less than the space of the increased number of inodes themselves. However, this would lead one to believe you should have really big inodes and really big files, and then you'll be very efficient.
But really, none of this should be given much weight until someone does a statistical analysis of just how inefficient a one-mail-per-file system is. It might not be significant, or it might be insignificant compared to storing base64 messages, or it may be insignificant compared to the benefits of compression. It's bad form to optimize before profiling, and the many-file inefficiency concerns feel like they are more based on intuition and less on fact. But then, someone must have studied it, so maybe not.
I've been studying WebDAV, and have been excited about how it presents a network storage that seems much more general than a typical filesystem-based metaphor -- kind of making the dynamicism of web applications available at a lower level to the OS.
What is intriguing here, is that the level of granularity that you talk about with ReiserFS would map well with WebDAV. Running mod_dav for Apache is fine, but unexciting -- the underlying filesystem storage that Apache is so closely tied to is awkward and lacks good granularity and flexibility. But with a more powerful filesystem, it could go much further.
In a lot of monolithic client-server architectures, I see systems created where the OS is insignificant -- just a dumb layer of hardware compatibility. You dump all the data in one file, with internal structure you define yourself. You almost always do your own permission structure -- traditional Unix permissions are worthless in most new domains (IMHO). All you need is a socket interface and a disk interface, everything else you write yourself.
This is a shame, really, because you are reimplementing things the OS should be doing... but OS design is stagnant. Maybe that's fine, but I don't even see much ambition among Linux kernel programmers (or BSD or other Unices)... they're working off an old model that is fine at what it does, but not helpful for new systems. They don't seem to mind that they are being made more and more insignificant... maybe that's good, they aren't holding onto power or being territorial, but it really is true that there isn't much innovation there. (There is innovation in non-kernel applications, mind you, just not much in the kernel or most basic libraries like libc)
It's nice to hear ReiserFS people are thinking about real progress, not just little tweaks.
I absolutely love my Kinesis keyboard too. It's one of the few times I might write in with one of those dorky "Your Product Changed My Life" letters to Kinesis, but it's probably better that I write that letter here.
But you said all the stuff about how it helps RSI -- I'd add that it is also just a really good keyboard. It looks funny, and it'll bug anyone who casually tries to use your computer, but once you get used to the keyboard you'll like it for more than just ergonomics.
They keyboard only has the keys you really need, without the arrow pad and keypad hanging off the side -- this makes it usable on your lap, and much more compact than Natural keyboards (even a bit more compact than normal keyboards). It's a similar set of keys to the Happy Hacker keyboard. The two sides are separated a fare distance, which does make it a larger than the HH keyboard. I haven't heard good things about the touch pads you can put in the middle -- a nice idea, but perhaps poor implementation (or maybe touch pads just naturally suck).
I find I type with considerably more accuracy and speed using the keyboard. On both sides of the keyboard, the keys are in a little crater of sorts, so your hands sit naturally in the correct position -- you don't have to find the correct position, it's just natural. They home row keys also feel different, but not because of little nobs on them (which become irritating), they are just shaped slightly different. You are forced to touch-type properly, but that can be a good thing. It is, however, quite bad for hunting and pecking of any sort -- you can't type one-handed at all, even typing in one-key commands is annoying. Again, more casual computer users will be annoyed, serious programmers won't find this a big compromise -- you'll find you end up touch-typing even single key commands, and being able to fall directly into the home position makes this no big deal.
I can also touch-type numbers quite easily, because the keys are not staggered like on most keyboards. 4 is directly above F, 5 above G, etc. Since there's no keypad, this is nice (there's a keypad you can toggle on, but it's poorly implemented -- the toggle key is unreliable, there's no non-sticky toggle, and you can't type space while the keypad is turned on). On the subject of gripes, Escape is also a crappy little key (as is F1, Print Screen, and others, but that's okay because they are hardly ever used. Escape shouldn't be in that group). I imagine vi users might find this particularly unpleasant (though with xmodmap you can fix it -- maybe mapping Insert to Escape).
And, while gaming is not something someone with RSI should be doing much of;), the keyboard can be both good and bad. For games with fixed key mappings (like most strategy games) you'll want a normal keyboard to swap in. For first-person shooters, the keyboard is great. You can reliably hit about 16 keys with one hand without any mistakes, and there's about five keys you can hit with your thumb while you are still completely free with the rest of you hand (for jumping, ducking, changing weapons, etc).
So, great keyboard, highly recommended even to people without very bad RSI (if they are serious typers, and other people don't use their computer). It has a few flaws, but you can probably fix them with xmodmap if they really bother you. It's expensive, but it's good quality and I've had mine for years with no problems.
Musicians definitely get RSI. My SO, who's a potter, has also had problems with RSI (traditional throwing wheel setups don't lead to good posture, and you tend to put leverage on your wrists). But back problems are still probably more common than wrist problems.
I've known metalsmiths who've had problems as well -- mostly ones who have done a lot of raising (using a hammer for hours at a time). In many kinds of art, to be a serious professional (or even aspiring professional) you have to spend a lot of time, and be somewhat obsessive and willing to do highly repetetive work. And you have to do it accurately, which I think makes people's muscles more tense (as compared to a more relaxed repetetive movement like walking).
Perhaps similar to musicians, artists talk about this among themselves more than would imagine. Talking to someone outside of your field about the myriad of uninteresting dangers specific to your field is a good way to bore people, so you should be thankful you don't know the specifics:)
Justice Clarence Thomas had an even more serious conflict of interest which violated federal law. His wife, Virginia Lamp Thomas, was (and is) gathering and processing applications for the Bush cabinet. Perversely, a Bush spokesman implied the charges were nothing more than veiled sexism. "Like many professional women, Mrs. Thomas should not be judged by her spouse," he said.
Mrs. Thomas, a former Republican Congressional aide, works for the Heritage Foundation (www.heritage.org). The conservative think-tank first made its first real mark in 1981 when it's Mandate for Leadership was adopted as the "bible" of the incoming Reagan Administration. Since then, the Heritage Foundation has been a cornerstone of Republican presidencies, strongly influencing everything from domestic policy to national security to the very structure of the government itself.
It also happens to enjoy a revolving-door relationship with US intelligence. Its Board of Trustees includes: Richard Mellon Scaife, the right-wing billionaire and Reagan-era propagandist who has personally bankrolled most of the "Clinton Scandal" industry; Holland H. Coors, beer heiress and trustee of the Adolph Coors Foundation, which helped fund the Contra war; Midge Dector, former chair of the anti-communist Committee for a Free World; and Frank Shakespeare, who served as Reagan's ambassador to the Vatican during the Lodge scandal, and director of Radio Free Europe.
In her own job at the Heritage Foundation, Mrs. Thomas has solicited resumes "for transition purposes" from the government oversight committees of Congress. By press time, no fewer than eight of Bush's top cabinet designees have worked for or have ties to the Heritage Foundation.
Despite all this, Mrs. Thomas sternly told the NY Times, "There is no conflict here." She explained that because she "rarely discusses" Court matters with her husband, there was no reason for Justice Thomas to recuse himself from the landmark Bush cases.
But again, the federal statutes are crystal clear that it is the relationship itself and not whether any "discussions" take place that determines when a justice is required to recuse himself. Despite the clear-cut violation, of course, Justice Thomas heard the case and voted with the majority in favor of his wife's ultimate patron.
So, to summarize: I don't know how much money she was making. But she was making money from a highly political job, where Bush's presidency would have a considerable impact. As someone else pointed out, Scalia's son was in a similar position.
That Thomas and Scalia should have recused themselves is absolutely obvious to me. And I don't say that just that it's Bush involved and I dislike him (as an aside, I never liked Gore either). The fact is that the court acted disgracefully in a very important ruling. You can't forget that -- it's not just the effect of the ruling, but that they have revealed that on truly tough cases (not just subtle, but personally tough for those Justices) they will not act fairly. They do not deserve respect, and they do not deserve to be given the benefit of the doubt. They only deserve that when there is no evidence to the contrary, but evidence has been presented, and we need to look at the evidence whenever it's present.
(Besides this, the volunteer premise is false: Bush's campaign was flush with money. What may have appeared to be volunteer work seldom was. Lots of people worked on that campaign for purely monetary reasons. Get-out-the-vote door-to-door campaigners were being done by employees. Phone soliciters were payed. Everyone was on the payrole. It was not some grassroots campaign done by true supporters. It was a corporate campaign, from top to bottom, for a corporate president. Sure, it had the appearance of legitimacy, but corporations learned to fake that a long time ago.)
Disney can't bribe them with money for their reelections, but it can bribe the Justices with money for their pockets. It's already been done -- Thomas' wife worked on the Bush campaign (no doubt a lucrative job) and he was a deciding vote in Bush v. Gore.
That he didn't recuse himself shows a very serious lack of integrity among the Justices. Who knows what conflict of interest they'll allow next?
Slashdot is primarily a news site, which should try to be as unbiased as possible in that which it reports to the world, they shouldn't ignore something just because some people might not like it. That's censorship - which the news is supposed to oppose above all else.
I agree that it is a sticky issue to not spread a bit of news because of its associations. OTOH, this article is just an ad... Gaming News is hardly real news, by even the most forgiving definition of news. The gaming publishing industry also has close to no journalistic integrity, so places that link to them have every reason to discriminate when the original sources choose not to. I'm not saying such not-really-news shouldn't be posted at all... but because of the entirely superfluous nature of the article, there's no journalistic requirement to post it. It's fluff, and it's an outright promotion of Blizzard's product. And again, that would still be fine, except that Blizzard is a bad company.
This isn't important news, and Slashdot would be no worse if this particular article wasn't posted.
People are talking about sending in letters say, "I will not buy your products". That's nice, that's good even, but we all know Blizzard won't pay a huge amount of attention to a few of these. They would pay much more attention to Slashdot editors forwarding this post to them and saying they would have posted it, except that Blizzard is violating basic standards of conduct in the treatment of bnetd. Bad corporations don't deserve free advertising, and putting in a small note about bnetd does not make this any less of an advertisement.
I think banning Nazism doesn't address the biggest problem of the Nazi era. Fascism and racism have been led with many flags, it can speak to many different people in different ways.
There's all this effort fighting the last battle, fighting against people who are all dead, who lost the war, whose plans have been revealed for what they are, who have been judged by all humanity. That's easy. It's anachronistic -- I can see why young people feel unjustly burdened by a guilt for actions they did not do.
If Germany wants to do something, it should fight the next battle, not the one that came before. If you are worried about Neo-Nazis beating up immigrants, maybe you should ask why the government that wants to suppress the Neo-Nazis won't give those immigrants citizenship, even when they were born in Germany and lived their entire lives there. You should wonder about all the Germans who are thinking the same things, but wouldn't act in the same way -- there are more of them than there are Nazis.
Even if you want to address Nazism, you could do it a whole lot better than banning material. I've heard that there's a very common personal mythology among Germans that parents and grandparents harbored Jews or otherwise resisted the Nazis, even though almost none of them did. Their parents probably wouldn't claim to if asked, but then it's probably easiest for people not to ask -- you are apparently not supposed to talk of such things, by rule of law. Do people admit that the only real resistence to the Nazis were the Communists (radicals at that)? Probably not, but I suppose that's incidental. It's more important to realize that there was not nearly enough resistence.
Being passive and mainstream didn't help last time around, and whatever the next trial is being passive and mainstream won't help then either.
Someone to come in and create a stable goverment (that will not starve opponents).
I don't mean to nit-pick, but I find it unlikely that someone can come in and create a stable government that is anything more than despotism. A valid government has to be made up of the people it governs. Outside influence seldom seems to be a positive force.
I was watching a PBS documentary on this, and I found it quite interesting that one of the major spies (at least that was uncovered) was a man who wasn't ideologically aligned with the Soviets, but rather felt that it was essential to have a balance of power in the world.
I forgot his name... I don't believe he was ever convicted of anything (the information he knew was too useful and all that).
I must admit, while I don't particularly like that India and Pakistan have nuclear weapons, I'm glad at least that they both have them. I can't imagine nuclear weapons being used, except when only one party in a conflict has them.
(1) Because a good ethical system (think Categorical Imperative) includes consistency in applying rules. The BSA would never accept their rules applied to themselves: imagine a Software Consulting Association sending audit letters out checking for late payments to consultants. If you've paid a consultant more than 30 days late, you get fined 150,000% of the daily rate.
Implement that retroactively, and us consultants would own the world (sadly, 30 days is quick payment)
I think what schools need isn't good applications, but good systems. There's lots of toys, but current systems aren't set up for the schooling environment very well.
People aren't even using what's available -- RevRDist, for instance, is a great tool for any Mac lab, but schools don't use it that much. What you could do with Linux goes a lot further.
The real problems I see are the horrible reliability of school networks. Kids still store their work on floppies, the absolute worst storage device currently available. The likelyhood of losing your work is a major disincentive to putting in effort.
Also, you often only have a short amount of time to do different projects, spread out over a
week or over the day. If there's a lot of effort to get setup and to put away your work, it takes a lot of time. It would be nice if the teacher could tell kids to finish up 2 minutes before they had to stop, instead of 10. Something like VNC could make that possible.
Of course, laptops make a lot of this stuff possible as well. I don't know what system maintenence is like for schools where the students all have laptops. The decay of a Windows system is bad enough for adults, and I imagine children would be apt to futz around with their systems even more... Linux could still have a lot to offer, even if it's to move a lot of the software off the unreliable laptops and onto the reliable server.
Wow... Dillo lacks some serious features (cookies?)... but it sure is fast. I don't know what people are talking about with Mozilla or Galeon being fast. I mean, they are complete, but they sure aren't fast.
If you know some PHP and MySQL, you're ready to do some independent work making a website. It's not that hard... find someone you know who wants to make a website, and go to it. Maybe a public website, maybe ecommerce or something, maybe an intranet for a small business. But you need a connection with the person, you won't be able to sell yourself in the wider marketplace.
You might have to do it for little money, or for free, or maybe negotiate something with the person -- for instance, if you are doing an ecommerce site, you might do it for a commision on what gets sold on the site. That way the person has nothing to lose. Or you might want to set it up for them, and then charge them for maintenance (if you feel more confident about your ability than they do -- again, they'll only have to pay for it if they like it). You're looking for experience, so you should expect to make relatively little for your time investment.
If it goes really well, you might find yourself being self-employed, doing programming for people who can't hire someone full time for their programming needs (this happens more often for web development than other programming). If not, you should have some good portfolio work to present someplace for a new job. Your new job may not be a programming job, but hopefully it can be a job that can become a programming job (where your current one can't, it seems). System administration jobs tend that direction, for instance.
You should stop being so paternalistic and conservative. The attitude of your response shows you romanticize poverty, and mistake powerlessness for aestheticism.
Slashdot Mirror
And they get to write off the actual cost anyway -- any business expenses are deducted from gross revenue. Not that it matters anyway, MS hardly pays any taxes.
It isn't fair to say NPR only stays in business because of the taxpayer (unless you include all radio stations, because of free spectrum). It's maybe 10, 20% of funding now... I can't remember exactly (they always give the number during pledge drives, but it's been a while). I think something like 60% of funding comes from individual members. At least at the local station level -- the money then sifts its way up to NPR itself. The rest comes from corporate funding and grants, I believe.
That public radio keeps going mostly by pledges is really a quite inspiring model for web content... even Salon's subscription marketing looks more like a pledge drive than an exchange of goods. Too bad Salon couldn't quite pull it off -- they didn't have the modest beginnings that public radio had, though, and it took radio a long time to get where it is.
Not to mention no good Christian should stand for it either... I mean I Pledge Allegiance to the Flag seems clearly contradictory to the false idol commandment. I know Jehovah's Witnesses won't pledge allegiance, and I believe a number of other fundamentalist Christians believe similarly.
If they are receiving payola then they are playing only advertising on their station -- some commercials are extended, stealth commercials to boost CD sales, but advertising nonetheless. That is clearly not in the public interest. There is not enough radio spectrum to go around, and pure-advertisement stations should be culled.
There's nothing wrong with demanding that government-supported companies take into account the public good. However, when they are publically traded (and thus required to satisfy the shareholders demand for profit), the only way to get such companies to act in the public good is through coercion (regulation).
Sure, after it's all done people put a different perspective to it -- but the critiques then were exactly like they are now. Your rosy pictures don't match up with history.
I've been to nice, peaceful protests, and they are a joke. You get a permit to stand in some park cut off from anyone and the only way you inconvenience the system is that they have to pay extra for all the police they get to cordon you off. It's a big waste of time. But it's peaceful and doesn't get in anyone's way.
In my experience the protesters usually do not start the violence. But the protesters are confrontational. You must be confrontational in some way if you want to have a real protest -- that's what it means to have a protest. Otherwise it's just a parade. Civil rights protesters did not ask the government for a permit to do a sit in. Gandhi did not cooperate with the police. The protesters in these cases may have been nonviolent, but the protests themselves were often very violent.
I know you would rather people not protest -- if it's a real protest it will likely disrupt your life. But stop being a fucking whiner! These issues are bigger than your fucking day to day life. These issues are more important than a few windows that might get broken in the chaos. This is what protest looks like, and either say you are against protest altogether, or accept that it has to come to your town eventually.
I'm sorry if I'm attacking you, but at a certain point it really pisses me off when people are so petty. This isn't a soccer match, the protests are about real things. And these protests have meant something -- for one, it's meant that the leaders of the 8 most important countries are having a clandestine meeting in the wilderness. That doesn't happen because of a letter-writing campaign.
Running a business is even less of a privilege. In many fields, you can run a business simply by saying you are doing so (and later filling out appropriate tax forms). If someone is paying you, and you are not their employee, you've just started running a business. (Maybe it's harder in other countries, but thankfuly this is all easy in the US)
A corporation is a privilege, as it gives you extra rights and protections. You don't need a corporation to run a business.
However, your underlying point that there is no guarantee or right to make a profit, and that remains true.
And it isn't just a list of stupid, dangerous, destructive shit like the Anarchist Cookbook, and it's not just a guide to mischief or pranks. It has a point -- a guide to doing aggressive direct action. There's way to much pointless crap out there, and college is a time when you should cast off a lot of that stuff (or decide what really matters and what doesn't). Not everyone does that, but hey, you can give her a nudge :)
The issue is not the waste of inodes, but the waste of diskspace because the smallest file chunk is one inode worth of space. It's usually said that if you have 4k inodes, you'll lost 2k (on average) per file. This is not really correct, because inodes themselves take up space -- I remember reading a paper somewhere many years ago where they estimated that most users would find 4k inodes better than smaller values, because in normal file distributions the space you save with the smaller inode is less than the space of the increased number of inodes themselves. However, this would lead one to believe you should have really big inodes and really big files, and then you'll be very efficient.
But really, none of this should be given much weight until someone does a statistical analysis of just how inefficient a one-mail-per-file system is. It might not be significant, or it might be insignificant compared to storing base64 messages, or it may be insignificant compared to the benefits of compression. It's bad form to optimize before profiling, and the many-file inefficiency concerns feel like they are more based on intuition and less on fact. But then, someone must have studied it, so maybe not.
What is intriguing here, is that the level of granularity that you talk about with ReiserFS would map well with WebDAV. Running mod_dav for Apache is fine, but unexciting -- the underlying filesystem storage that Apache is so closely tied to is awkward and lacks good granularity and flexibility. But with a more powerful filesystem, it could go much further.
In a lot of monolithic client-server architectures, I see systems created where the OS is insignificant -- just a dumb layer of hardware compatibility. You dump all the data in one file, with internal structure you define yourself. You almost always do your own permission structure -- traditional Unix permissions are worthless in most new domains (IMHO). All you need is a socket interface and a disk interface, everything else you write yourself.
This is a shame, really, because you are reimplementing things the OS should be doing... but OS design is stagnant. Maybe that's fine, but I don't even see much ambition among Linux kernel programmers (or BSD or other Unices)... they're working off an old model that is fine at what it does, but not helpful for new systems. They don't seem to mind that they are being made more and more insignificant... maybe that's good, they aren't holding onto power or being territorial, but it really is true that there isn't much innovation there. (There is innovation in non-kernel applications, mind you, just not much in the kernel or most basic libraries like libc)
It's nice to hear ReiserFS people are thinking about real progress, not just little tweaks.
But you said all the stuff about how it helps RSI -- I'd add that it is also just a really good keyboard. It looks funny, and it'll bug anyone who casually tries to use your computer, but once you get used to the keyboard you'll like it for more than just ergonomics.
They keyboard only has the keys you really need, without the arrow pad and keypad hanging off the side -- this makes it usable on your lap, and much more compact than Natural keyboards (even a bit more compact than normal keyboards). It's a similar set of keys to the Happy Hacker keyboard. The two sides are separated a fare distance, which does make it a larger than the HH keyboard. I haven't heard good things about the touch pads you can put in the middle -- a nice idea, but perhaps poor implementation (or maybe touch pads just naturally suck).
I find I type with considerably more accuracy and speed using the keyboard. On both sides of the keyboard, the keys are in a little crater of sorts, so your hands sit naturally in the correct position -- you don't have to find the correct position, it's just natural. They home row keys also feel different, but not because of little nobs on them (which become irritating), they are just shaped slightly different. You are forced to touch-type properly, but that can be a good thing. It is, however, quite bad for hunting and pecking of any sort -- you can't type one-handed at all, even typing in one-key commands is annoying. Again, more casual computer users will be annoyed, serious programmers won't find this a big compromise -- you'll find you end up touch-typing even single key commands, and being able to fall directly into the home position makes this no big deal.
I can also touch-type numbers quite easily, because the keys are not staggered like on most keyboards. 4 is directly above F, 5 above G, etc. Since there's no keypad, this is nice (there's a keypad you can toggle on, but it's poorly implemented -- the toggle key is unreliable, there's no non-sticky toggle, and you can't type space while the keypad is turned on). On the subject of gripes, Escape is also a crappy little key (as is F1, Print Screen, and others, but that's okay because they are hardly ever used. Escape shouldn't be in that group). I imagine vi users might find this particularly unpleasant (though with xmodmap you can fix it -- maybe mapping Insert to Escape).
And, while gaming is not something someone with RSI should be doing much of ;), the keyboard can be both good and bad. For games with fixed key mappings (like most strategy games) you'll want a normal keyboard to swap in. For first-person shooters, the keyboard is great. You can reliably hit about 16 keys with one hand without any mistakes, and there's about five keys you can hit with your thumb while you are still completely free with the rest of you hand (for jumping, ducking, changing weapons, etc).
So, great keyboard, highly recommended even to people without very bad RSI (if they are serious typers, and other people don't use their computer). It has a few flaws, but you can probably fix them with xmodmap if they really bother you. It's expensive, but it's good quality and I've had mine for years with no problems.
Perhaps similar to musicians, artists talk about this among themselves more than would imagine. Talking to someone outside of your field about the myriad of uninteresting dangers specific to your field is a good way to bore people, so you should be thankful you don't know the specifics :)
That Thomas and Scalia should have recused themselves is absolutely obvious to me. And I don't say that just that it's Bush involved and I dislike him (as an aside, I never liked Gore either). The fact is that the court acted disgracefully in a very important ruling. You can't forget that -- it's not just the effect of the ruling, but that they have revealed that on truly tough cases (not just subtle, but personally tough for those Justices) they will not act fairly. They do not deserve respect, and they do not deserve to be given the benefit of the doubt. They only deserve that when there is no evidence to the contrary, but evidence has been presented, and we need to look at the evidence whenever it's present.
(Besides this, the volunteer premise is false: Bush's campaign was flush with money. What may have appeared to be volunteer work seldom was. Lots of people worked on that campaign for purely monetary reasons. Get-out-the-vote door-to-door campaigners were being done by employees. Phone soliciters were payed. Everyone was on the payrole. It was not some grassroots campaign done by true supporters. It was a corporate campaign, from top to bottom, for a corporate president. Sure, it had the appearance of legitimacy, but corporations learned to fake that a long time ago.)
That he didn't recuse himself shows a very serious lack of integrity among the Justices. Who knows what conflict of interest they'll allow next?
People are talking about sending in letters say, "I will not buy your products". That's nice, that's good even, but we all know Blizzard won't pay a huge amount of attention to a few of these. They would pay much more attention to Slashdot editors forwarding this post to them and saying they would have posted it, except that Blizzard is violating basic standards of conduct in the treatment of bnetd. Bad corporations don't deserve free advertising, and putting in a small note about bnetd does not make this any less of an advertisement.
There's all this effort fighting the last battle, fighting against people who are all dead, who lost the war, whose plans have been revealed for what they are, who have been judged by all humanity. That's easy. It's anachronistic -- I can see why young people feel unjustly burdened by a guilt for actions they did not do.
If Germany wants to do something, it should fight the next battle, not the one that came before. If you are worried about Neo-Nazis beating up immigrants, maybe you should ask why the government that wants to suppress the Neo-Nazis won't give those immigrants citizenship, even when they were born in Germany and lived their entire lives there. You should wonder about all the Germans who are thinking the same things, but wouldn't act in the same way -- there are more of them than there are Nazis.
Even if you want to address Nazism, you could do it a whole lot better than banning material. I've heard that there's a very common personal mythology among Germans that parents and grandparents harbored Jews or otherwise resisted the Nazis, even though almost none of them did. Their parents probably wouldn't claim to if asked, but then it's probably easiest for people not to ask -- you are apparently not supposed to talk of such things, by rule of law. Do people admit that the only real resistence to the Nazis were the Communists (radicals at that)? Probably not, but I suppose that's incidental. It's more important to realize that there was not nearly enough resistence.
Being passive and mainstream didn't help last time around, and whatever the next trial is being passive and mainstream won't help then either.
(And since it's ontopic here, a recent Ted Rall cartoon, NYTimes, registration etc)
I forgot his name... I don't believe he was ever convicted of anything (the information he knew was too useful and all that).
I must admit, while I don't particularly like that India and Pakistan have nuclear weapons, I'm glad at least that they both have them. I can't imagine nuclear weapons being used, except when only one party in a conflict has them.
People aren't even using what's available -- RevRDist, for instance, is a great tool for any Mac lab, but schools don't use it that much. What you could do with Linux goes a lot further.
The real problems I see are the horrible reliability of school networks. Kids still store their work on floppies, the absolute worst storage device currently available. The likelyhood of losing your work is a major disincentive to putting in effort.
Also, you often only have a short amount of time to do different projects, spread out over a week or over the day. If there's a lot of effort to get setup and to put away your work, it takes a lot of time. It would be nice if the teacher could tell kids to finish up 2 minutes before they had to stop, instead of 10. Something like VNC could make that possible.
Of course, laptops make a lot of this stuff possible as well. I don't know what system maintenence is like for schools where the students all have laptops. The decay of a Windows system is bad enough for adults, and I imagine children would be apt to futz around with their systems even more... Linux could still have a lot to offer, even if it's to move a lot of the software off the unreliable laptops and onto the reliable server.
Wow... Dillo lacks some serious features (cookies?)... but it sure is fast. I don't know what people are talking about with Mozilla or Galeon being fast. I mean, they are complete, but they sure aren't fast.
You might have to do it for little money, or for free, or maybe negotiate something with the person -- for instance, if you are doing an ecommerce site, you might do it for a commision on what gets sold on the site. That way the person has nothing to lose. Or you might want to set it up for them, and then charge them for maintenance (if you feel more confident about your ability than they do -- again, they'll only have to pay for it if they like it). You're looking for experience, so you should expect to make relatively little for your time investment.
If it goes really well, you might find yourself being self-employed, doing programming for people who can't hire someone full time for their programming needs (this happens more often for web development than other programming). If not, you should have some good portfolio work to present someplace for a new job. Your new job may not be a programming job, but hopefully it can be a job that can become a programming job (where your current one can't, it seems). System administration jobs tend that direction, for instance.
You should stop being so paternalistic and conservative. The attitude of your response shows you romanticize poverty, and mistake powerlessness for aestheticism.