Probably because sh-derivatives like bash are common on more operating systems that GNU/Linux, and because bash itself is frequently used on other Unix-like OSes. It is also the case that bash has been around for a long time, and there are a lot of bash scripts that IT guys have lying around that they would love to use on Windows.
One of the things that made Unix so powerful was that you only really had to understand 20 or so commands, which could be composed in arbitrary ways to get you the behavior you needed. I would guess that many of those 2300 commands are just hard-coded implementations of commonly used compositions of other commands, or that the same tasks could be accomplished by composition.
But I strongly feel that if the Linux folks would take a step back and acknowledge that it's no longer 1970, they'd see that have programs set up to pass objects around instead of text can be hugely beneficial.
The advantage here being...? It sounds like a cool feature, but what would I be doing where I would actually want to have object oriented programming in my shell?
Try bringing an Android tablet somewhere, and see how many people ask you where you got your iPad. People have come to associate tablet computers with Apple, so I think it is fair to say that as far as the public is concerned, the mindshare battle is over.
Yeah, it would be great if in 2061 I or my children were still receiving money for the work I am doing right now in 2011. Except that I am not a musician so that will probably not happen.
Scarcity was not viewed as a problem by the people who published books. They are not in business because they want to spread knowledge or enable learning, they are in business to make money. Thus, the elimination of scarcity is actually viewed as a bad thing, and they want to prop up the scarcity with the law.
Perhaps they wanted you to see the headline in the sidebar about an oil pipeline fire in Kenya that killed at least 100 people. You know, so that you'll be convinced that nuclear power is far more dangerous than any other form of energy.
There are about 200 people who use my department's network at any given time during the day, and maybe 50 at night. All the desktops have their filesystems mounted on NFS, and people routinely upload or download large datasets. Gigabit networking is not even fast enough for what we do (yet somehow we have trouble getting that much installed).
Ralph Nader has also question US domestic and foreign policy, but the Democrats did a bang-up job of ruining his reputation, so I suppose "in the public eye" is a stretch. Still, it is telling that two people who are at supposedly opposite ends of the spectrum are among the few who have the courage to stand up and say that our policies are not working and that we need reform (even if they disagree on what those reforms should be).
Uh...isn't the point of using public keys that you do not have to keep them secret to remain secure? If people uploaded their public keys to the compromised systems...how is that a problem?
What about someone who sacrifices their own life to save the lives of their children? What about soldiers who sacrifice their lives to save the lives of their unit? The promise of the afterlife may provide some comfort to someone who knows what they do will cost them their life, but it is not the only comfort or motivation for carrying out such a mission.
Well, I did say that the attacks targeted US foreign policy and globalization. All of the things you listed fit that mold -- Israel is the closest thing to a religious motivation, but Al Qaeda did not crash planes into Israeli buildings, crash a boat into an Israeli warship, or bomb Israeli embassies, nor did they attack specifically Jewish targets (they could have hijacked a small plane to crash into a famous synagogue in the US, it would not be hard -- the Truro synagogue is pretty close to LGA). It is not hard to understand why Iraq was included on their list -- Iraq never attacked the United States, but we invaded that nation and enforced sanctions that have been extremely harmful to its citizens, and on top of all of that, the same sort of things that we did to Osama bin Laden's group in Afghanistan were done to Saddam Hussein's government in Iraq: we give them weapons and training to fight our enemies, and then fail to provide them with assistance afterwards (or in the case of Iraq, when they use their weapons in was we do not agree with, we bomb them). Again, examine the choice of targets -- the World Trade Center (a symbol of globalization), the Pentagon (our military headquarters and a symbol of US military power), and the Capitol building (thankfully, this failed, but this is a symbol of US political power), as well as possible other non-religious targets.
Yes, it is easy to blame religion for these attacks, but looking at the two decades that led up to the attacks tells a different story. What did the US embassy in Kenya (where most citizens are Christian) have to do with Islamic law? All of the attacks attributed to Al Qaeda have, at least by all appearances, been political in nature, with religion playing a possible role in motivating suicide as part of the attack (yet I would not dismiss the idea that suicidal attacks may just be a facet of middle eastern culture, and I do not see a reason to believe that in the absence of religion, the attackers would not have been willing to commit suicide).
The terrorists wanted to strike US foreign policy and globalization. The policies the terrorists were trying to strike back against have been make even more aggressive following the attacks, and the US is continuing to push the globalization agenda. Claiming that the terrorists attacked us because of our freedoms is complete nonsense -- they would have attacked us just the same if we had been the USSR (in fact, Osama bin Laden had once fought against the USSR in Afghanistan, an episode that may have had something to do with his hatred for the USA).
Except that there is no reason to think that in the absence of religion, the attackers would not have been willing to commit suicide. When I said "small part," I meant that it may have been part of the reason the attackers committed suicide, not that it was the only reason. The fighter pilot sent after United 93 was also instructed to commit suicide, without any religious motivation.
Blaming the attacks on religion is a bit misguided. The attackers were trying to fight against US foreign policies and globalization -- look at their choice of targets (a major global financial center, the US military headquarters, and various US government targets that were thankfully missed). Religion may have been played a small part in convincing the attackers to commit suicide, but the motivation for the attacks themselves was political.
The Internet is loaded with ways for people to distract themselves and find escape. Take that away, and people are both angry about losing their distractions and have a bunch of free time to talk to each other and to look around at the various ways their government mistreats them.
I always wonder why all the gold bugs aren't talking about instating an oil standard. Oil really has intrinsic value, because it can be used to do work.
Oil would be a terrible currency because people would simply burn their money -- it would be hard to keep money in circulation. You might as well ask why we don't use a cattle standard, an apple standard, or a water standard.
Proponents of the gold standard generally have a problem with the idea that banks and governments can arbitrarily adjust the amount of currency in circulation. They want the amount of currency in circulation to be upper bounded by the amount of some natural resource, but deep down they know that a resource that has widespread industrial use would be a poor choice. Gold is fairly arbitrary as a currency -- there are plenty of other scare elements that have few industrial uses that would be just as useful.
Personally, I prefer currency that has absolutely no industrial use -- and digital currency is the closest technology that we have right now (the "industrial use" is really just the bandwidth and CPU time expended on executing digital cash protocols). Unfortunately, Bitcoin tries too hard to turn digital cash into something like gold, which is a generally bad idea since it implies that Bitcoin tokens must actually become larger over time (this is a property of all secure digital cash systems; however, most other digital cash systems get around this by allowing a central authority to issue new tokens, which can be exchanged for old tokens -- a "currency refreshing" process, similar to how paper currency is burned and replaced). What is really needed is a widespread deployment of digital cash issued by governments and central banks, with guaranteed parity with the national currency; unfortunately, most governments hate the idea of being unable to track their citizens' financial dealings, and there is little motivation for such a system to be deployed.
Gold has an intrinsic value as a material for various technological uses
This accounts only for a small fraction of its market value.
its use as a currency
The use of gold as a currency does not stem just from its scarcity; it is also a result of gold having very few industrial uses. If gold had important industrial uses centuries ago, I doubt it would have been used as currency, since people would simply take gold coins and gold bars and use them for whatever industrial purpose they had -- and so money would have been taken out of circulation. Gold's scarcity can actually become a problem if gold is used as a currency in a society that does has a growing population, if that society cannot find a way to accumulate more gold.
Amazon has a presence in every internet connected household in California. Anyone with an internet connection can go to http://amazon.com/ make a purchase and have it delivered to their home in California.
Actually, the courts have already ruled on this issue:
Quill Corp. went even further than Amazon -- people actually installed Quill's software on their computers to check the inventory. The real question that needs to be answered here is to what extend the physical location of Amazon's subsidiaries affects the legal ability of the state of California to impose a tax on Amazon itself.
It could be argued that you are a bit responsible for what your computer does
Except that computers connected to the Internet are sometimes taken over by malware that causes the computers to do things outside of the control of their owners. There was a case a while back where a guy was accused of downloading child pornography, and it was discovered that it was actually malware that did the downloading. Is it really that far-fetched to think that some hacker who wants to download music without getting sued would use a botnet to hide his activities?
Except that California is not limiting themselves to taxing the subsidiary, they want to tax Amazon proper simply because there is a subsidiary that operates in California.
The question is really whether or not Amazon's subsidiaries' presence in California implies that Amazon has a presence in California. California has every right to tax those subsidiaries, and I doubt anyone would really question that. However, California also wants to tax Amazon proper, claiming that the subsidiaries establish a presence in California; Amazon disagrees, and to be honest I agree with Amazon's point of view on this. It's unfortunate that California is so cash-strapped, but it is not Amazon's fault and Amazon is not piggy bank for broke states.
Slashdot Mirror
Probably because sh-derivatives like bash are common on more operating systems that GNU/Linux, and because bash itself is frequently used on other Unix-like OSes. It is also the case that bash has been around for a long time, and there are a lot of bash scripts that IT guys have lying around that they would love to use on Windows.
One of the things that made Unix so powerful was that you only really had to understand 20 or so commands, which could be composed in arbitrary ways to get you the behavior you needed. I would guess that many of those 2300 commands are just hard-coded implementations of commonly used compositions of other commands, or that the same tasks could be accomplished by composition.
But I strongly feel that if the Linux folks would take a step back and acknowledge that it's no longer 1970, they'd see that have programs set up to pass objects around instead of text can be hugely beneficial.
The advantage here being...? It sounds like a cool feature, but what would I be doing where I would actually want to have object oriented programming in my shell?
Try bringing an Android tablet somewhere, and see how many people ask you where you got your iPad. People have come to associate tablet computers with Apple, so I think it is fair to say that as far as the public is concerned, the mindshare battle is over.
Yeah, it would be great if in 2061 I or my children were still receiving money for the work I am doing right now in 2011. Except that I am not a musician so that will probably not happen.
Keep copyright where it belongs: a regulation on businesses. It makes no difference what the term is if they leave home users alone.
Scarcity was not viewed as a problem by the people who published books. They are not in business because they want to spread knowledge or enable learning, they are in business to make money. Thus, the elimination of scarcity is actually viewed as a bad thing, and they want to prop up the scarcity with the law.
...and the publishing industry hates them.
Perhaps they wanted you to see the headline in the sidebar about an oil pipeline fire in Kenya that killed at least 100 people. You know, so that you'll be convinced that nuclear power is far more dangerous than any other form of energy.
There are about 200 people who use my department's network at any given time during the day, and maybe 50 at night. All the desktops have their filesystems mounted on NFS, and people routinely upload or download large datasets. Gigabit networking is not even fast enough for what we do (yet somehow we have trouble getting that much installed).
Ralph Nader has also question US domestic and foreign policy, but the Democrats did a bang-up job of ruining his reputation, so I suppose "in the public eye" is a stretch. Still, it is telling that two people who are at supposedly opposite ends of the spectrum are among the few who have the courage to stand up and say that our policies are not working and that we need reform (even if they disagree on what those reforms should be).
Uh...isn't the point of using public keys that you do not have to keep them secret to remain secure? If people uploaded their public keys to the compromised systems...how is that a problem?
What about someone who sacrifices their own life to save the lives of their children? What about soldiers who sacrifice their lives to save the lives of their unit? The promise of the afterlife may provide some comfort to someone who knows what they do will cost them their life, but it is not the only comfort or motivation for carrying out such a mission.
Well, I did say that the attacks targeted US foreign policy and globalization. All of the things you listed fit that mold -- Israel is the closest thing to a religious motivation, but Al Qaeda did not crash planes into Israeli buildings, crash a boat into an Israeli warship, or bomb Israeli embassies, nor did they attack specifically Jewish targets (they could have hijacked a small plane to crash into a famous synagogue in the US, it would not be hard -- the Truro synagogue is pretty close to LGA). It is not hard to understand why Iraq was included on their list -- Iraq never attacked the United States, but we invaded that nation and enforced sanctions that have been extremely harmful to its citizens, and on top of all of that, the same sort of things that we did to Osama bin Laden's group in Afghanistan were done to Saddam Hussein's government in Iraq: we give them weapons and training to fight our enemies, and then fail to provide them with assistance afterwards (or in the case of Iraq, when they use their weapons in was we do not agree with, we bomb them). Again, examine the choice of targets -- the World Trade Center (a symbol of globalization), the Pentagon (our military headquarters and a symbol of US military power), and the Capitol building (thankfully, this failed, but this is a symbol of US political power), as well as possible other non-religious targets.
Yes, it is easy to blame religion for these attacks, but looking at the two decades that led up to the attacks tells a different story. What did the US embassy in Kenya (where most citizens are Christian) have to do with Islamic law? All of the attacks attributed to Al Qaeda have, at least by all appearances, been political in nature, with religion playing a possible role in motivating suicide as part of the attack (yet I would not dismiss the idea that suicidal attacks may just be a facet of middle eastern culture, and I do not see a reason to believe that in the absence of religion, the attackers would not have been willing to commit suicide).
The terrorists wanted to strike US foreign policy and globalization. The policies the terrorists were trying to strike back against have been make even more aggressive following the attacks, and the US is continuing to push the globalization agenda. Claiming that the terrorists attacked us because of our freedoms is complete nonsense -- they would have attacked us just the same if we had been the USSR (in fact, Osama bin Laden had once fought against the USSR in Afghanistan, an episode that may have had something to do with his hatred for the USA).
Except that there is no reason to think that in the absence of religion, the attackers would not have been willing to commit suicide. When I said "small part," I meant that it may have been part of the reason the attackers committed suicide, not that it was the only reason. The fighter pilot sent after United 93 was also instructed to commit suicide, without any religious motivation.
Blaming the attacks on religion is a bit misguided. The attackers were trying to fight against US foreign policies and globalization -- look at their choice of targets (a major global financial center, the US military headquarters, and various US government targets that were thankfully missed). Religion may have been played a small part in convincing the attackers to commit suicide, but the motivation for the attacks themselves was political.
Wouldn't the presence of the police be enough? Lot's of radio chatter...regardless of what they are actually saying...
The Internet is loaded with ways for people to distract themselves and find escape. Take that away, and people are both angry about losing their distractions and have a bunch of free time to talk to each other and to look around at the various ways their government mistreats them.
I always wonder why all the gold bugs aren't talking about instating an oil standard. Oil really has intrinsic value, because it can be used to do work.
Oil would be a terrible currency because people would simply burn their money -- it would be hard to keep money in circulation. You might as well ask why we don't use a cattle standard, an apple standard, or a water standard.
Proponents of the gold standard generally have a problem with the idea that banks and governments can arbitrarily adjust the amount of currency in circulation. They want the amount of currency in circulation to be upper bounded by the amount of some natural resource, but deep down they know that a resource that has widespread industrial use would be a poor choice. Gold is fairly arbitrary as a currency -- there are plenty of other scare elements that have few industrial uses that would be just as useful.
Personally, I prefer currency that has absolutely no industrial use -- and digital currency is the closest technology that we have right now (the "industrial use" is really just the bandwidth and CPU time expended on executing digital cash protocols). Unfortunately, Bitcoin tries too hard to turn digital cash into something like gold, which is a generally bad idea since it implies that Bitcoin tokens must actually become larger over time (this is a property of all secure digital cash systems; however, most other digital cash systems get around this by allowing a central authority to issue new tokens, which can be exchanged for old tokens -- a "currency refreshing" process, similar to how paper currency is burned and replaced). What is really needed is a widespread deployment of digital cash issued by governments and central banks, with guaranteed parity with the national currency; unfortunately, most governments hate the idea of being unable to track their citizens' financial dealings, and there is little motivation for such a system to be deployed.
Gold has an intrinsic value as a material for various technological uses
This accounts only for a small fraction of its market value.
its use as a currency
The use of gold as a currency does not stem just from its scarcity; it is also a result of gold having very few industrial uses. If gold had important industrial uses centuries ago, I doubt it would have been used as currency, since people would simply take gold coins and gold bars and use them for whatever industrial purpose they had -- and so money would have been taken out of circulation. Gold's scarcity can actually become a problem if gold is used as a currency in a society that does has a growing population, if that society cannot find a way to accumulate more gold.
Amazon has a presence in every internet connected household in California. Anyone with an internet connection can go to http://amazon.com/ make a purchase and have it delivered to their home in California.
Actually, the courts have already ruled on this issue:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quill_Corp._v._North_Dakota
Quill Corp. went even further than Amazon -- people actually installed Quill's software on their computers to check the inventory. The real question that needs to be answered here is to what extend the physical location of Amazon's subsidiaries affects the legal ability of the state of California to impose a tax on Amazon itself.
It could be argued that you are a bit responsible for what your computer does
Except that computers connected to the Internet are sometimes taken over by malware that causes the computers to do things outside of the control of their owners. There was a case a while back where a guy was accused of downloading child pornography, and it was discovered that it was actually malware that did the downloading. Is it really that far-fetched to think that some hacker who wants to download music without getting sued would use a botnet to hide his activities?
Except that California is not limiting themselves to taxing the subsidiary, they want to tax Amazon proper simply because there is a subsidiary that operates in California.
The question is really whether or not Amazon's subsidiaries' presence in California implies that Amazon has a presence in California. California has every right to tax those subsidiaries, and I doubt anyone would really question that. However, California also wants to tax Amazon proper, claiming that the subsidiaries establish a presence in California; Amazon disagrees, and to be honest I agree with Amazon's point of view on this. It's unfortunate that California is so cash-strapped, but it is not Amazon's fault and Amazon is not piggy bank for broke states.