There are countries which perform better than the US while still spending less than the US government already spends. You'd be better looking at New Zealand, the UK and Australia to see what works.
Just out of curiosity, do those countries spend less in an absolute sense or in a proportional sense? Because the populations of New Zealand, the UK, and Australia combined are barely 18% of the US population. Odds are low they'd be paying more money than the US in an absolute sense to pay for far fewer than 1/5 the citizens of the US.
'This concept is called sousiveillance ("watching from below" as opposed to surveillance "watching from above"). The general idea is that the people collectively monitor themselves, rather like Wikipedia. It is often advocated by cyborg/wearable PC enthusiasts.'
Thanks for the terminology. I was thinking more like monitoring the people with the nightsticks, though. After all, the government ideally ought be accountable to its "beneficiaries"; what better way to get started than making a publicly-accessible place for people to see what the agents of their government are doing?
"I think policemen need cameras in their hats/helmets. Now someone could actually watch the watchers - just so long as the people watching the camera footage aren't corrupt themselves."
Yeah, good luck with that. Seriously. I have nothing against Linux but the fanboism is really starting to stink up the place. Do you honestly think that the Windows user who can't be bothered to download Linux is going to jump at the chance to buy a machine with it on? At least with the download Joe Sixpack has a Windows disk to fall back on if Linux turns out to be something that he simply doesn't want. With the Dell offer he's either going to have to put up with an OS that he was already too lazy to download or he's going to have to go Windows on a retail basis. Guess what kind of bitching and moaning that's going to cause.
Wouldn't it be the opposite? Someone who can't be bothered to download the half-gig.iso's, burn them, install them, and possibly configure the newly installed OS so it actually works correctly on their hardware might like the idea of having all that done for them so they get a sqeaky-clean install that works out of the box?
Are we simplistic automata, unable to think of anything our genes themselves do not define? A natural tendency for our brains to arrive at the conclusion of a supernatural deity dooms nobody to that particular conclusion, in the same way that the natural tendency of the visual cortex to pick out faces in things that are not actually faces does not doom anybody to concluding that they really are faces and that that cloud really is winking at them.
...if that's the case, how did it just happen to 'evolve' its way into the dna?
I could venture that the people who happened to be just crazy enough to believe in it were conferred some kind of survival advantage superior to those who didn't believe in it. It's been proposed that the divine right of kings was just another manifestation of a possible survival advantage of belief in supernatural deities- groups of people who were all independent-minded and had no concept of submission to authority didn't tend to stick together well, but humans themselves don't tend to survive well in a vacuum without other people. Go 40 miles away from any kind of town or human settlement, break your foot, and you'll know exactly what I mean when I say humans survive better when other people are around. Groups that got cowed into obeying some form of human authority that they perceived was backed up by some wrathful god stuck together better and therefore survived better than groups that didn't have any mechanism of sticking together.
Then again, maybe the supernatural deities just helped out the ones who believed in them:).
He also started another mailing list thread called "Core Values" which I'll let you find in the mailing list index, which I've linked to already (albeit anchored to the beginning of "Goodbye, Fedora").
"This is an age-old question, and one that will never be answered, I'm afraid. Is it better to give up privacy rights for the sake of better communication and collaboration between law enforcement agencies?"
Um, no, it was answered a long time ago by a fella by name of Benjamin Franklin.
Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
A government's only legitimate purpose is in protecting your rights and there's something wrong when it starts trying to justify the erosion of those very rights to ease their protection. I suppose they think that a smaller target is harder to hit.
"My hometown was one of (if not the) first test markets for Clearwire. It's decent I guess, but cuts in and out occasionally. There's a competing company in town now (Xanadoo) offering the same technology with none of the contract garbage. --Josh"
I do find that when the connection cuts out, a quick ifdown eth0 && ifup eth0 works a treat.
Really, the biggest advantage of Clearwire is that there aren't any installation costs.
Microsoft did do something similar in the past. Windows 3.1 (AFAIR) would check if it was running on top of DR-DOS, and if so would randomly fail.
A couple of corrections:
1. The "Microsoft Genuine Compatibility" check was only distributed in a public beta of Windows 3.x, not in a final product.
2. It never actually did anything but pop up a warning telling the user that they were using an unsupported operating system and that it would probably be less stable because of it. The idea was to make the user nervous about using DR-DOS and go out and buy MS-DOS.
I've got Diabetes II. Really, you *don't* need drugs to treat it. It sounds clichéd, but exercise, a good diet, and (if it's your thing) supplements like garlic and cinnamon and you'll be fine.
I get a little annoyed at the "Illness? Take a pill!" attitude I see so much of today.
"Hitler started with an idea, slavery started with an idea, so it is good that this was stopped in time."
The solution to these "ideas"? Crimestop!
Alright, so it's not like the fellow was having any revolutionary thoughts to help free the masses (in fact, he was sort of talking about the exact opposite), but come on. Stopping ideas at their root because you don't agree with them is too reminiscent of Oceania.
"Are we talking about people who need to see what other people are saying they'll do so that they know what they should, themselves, do with their vote when the time comes?
*sheep sounds*"
I don't know about you, but I'm interested in seeing how candidates are doing in the eyes of the public.
When one tracks an animal or a person, one typically starts from the last known certainty. "It was here, maybe yesterday."
Why don't we have the same expectations with all this investigation of origins? Why does everyone seem to be starting with some "In the beginning..." belief?
They didn't start with it. They did exactly as you suggest- They started from observations that things are receding from one another, and then just extrapolated that straight back through time so that everything wound up at a single point.
Where is the hierarchy of this knowledge? Is there a database which gets updated when some part is expanded or falsified?
There isn't a "hierarchy of knowledge"- but that doesn't mean there's no way to determine if a theory makes sense and fits the data. Most scientists just stick to the theories that make sense and fit the greatest range of data, but there *are* heretics- see MOND.
I'm not an advocate of Creationism, but they DO make one point that should sink in... There is no mechanism for maintaining the pedigree of scientific information.
Experiments don't work anymore?
We say that the speed of light is a constant in all frames of reference.How was that measured? What assumptions did those measurements depend upon?
Take a science history course. That was never "measured", It was implicit in Maxwell's theory of light, which has fit the data for over 100 years. Einstein expanded on it with the Special Theory of Relativity, which has also fit the data for just over 100 years. If an assumption leads to theories that have 100 years of data backing them up, the odds become small that it's incorrect.
If I think I've come up with something which defies the laws of physics (like a perpetual motion machine or something), how do I find out which experimental results it would seem to contradict?
You wouldn't contradict the experimental results. You'd contradict the *theory*. And if you know of a phenomenon that seemingly defies the laws of physics, you'd better damn well know *which* law it might violate, because nobody but crackpots will trust your conclusion that a law is wrong if you don't even know what the law *is*.
There is a need for a comprehensive, multilingual database of theories, experimental results, and their interdependencies.
Today is the 2nd of September. Edgy Eft is scheduled for release "in October 2006".
That's about 60 days maximum to go from a 2nd alpha... to beta... to release. Isn't that a bit optimistic? Particularly for a release that is developer driven and packed with candy.
Well, feature freeze is in 5 days, so the only things coming through the pipeline in those two months are bugfixes/security patches.
And even if it's not good enough, they can always fall back on "It's edgy eft! What are you complaining about?"
As a general FYI, Edgy Final should be out on the 26th of October, barring disaster or pushbacks.
"Well, the fact is that the mac laptops (I never had a desktop) are easily made to silent boot (set volume to zero), silent reboot/restart. Other posters have mentioned scripts you can setup to automatically mute when shutting down, and unmute once booted. So anyway, I silent mac laptop is a current reality and MS is not copying apple on this score."
Yeah, but I won't stop bitching about it until you can actually set it to not play at all- instead of just silently. It's just a little silly to me, I guess, to be unable to just fix the root problem and set it to not play at all.
"Talk about branding for the sheer point of making people associate your brand with irritation."
Yup. Sort of like Mac's startup sound. I don't get why they don't allow you to configure that startup sound away. Making it unchangeable only alienates that many more members of your audience and doesn't alienate your current users. I can't imagine a Mac user switching to Windows or Linux because Apple made it so you could turn off the annoying startup sound.
Slashdot Mirror
So UK alone is pretty close to 20%. Perhaps we should discuss socialised mathematics education too?
;).
I bet it was the fact that I was exhausted when I made that estimate. The fact that I can't even remember how I got that number is telling.
I was privately educated, by the way
There are countries which perform better than the US while still spending less than the US government already spends. You'd be better looking at New Zealand, the UK and Australia to see what works.
Just out of curiosity, do those countries spend less in an absolute sense or in a proportional sense? Because the populations of New Zealand, the UK, and Australia combined are barely 18% of the US population. Odds are low they'd be paying more money than the US in an absolute sense to pay for far fewer than 1/5 the citizens of the US.
I would imagine that any specimens that had self-sterilization as a trait would have a hard time perpetuating that particular trait ;).
'This concept is called sousiveillance ("watching from below" as opposed to surveillance "watching from above"). The general idea is that the people collectively monitor themselves, rather like Wikipedia. It is often advocated by cyborg/wearable PC enthusiasts.'
Thanks for the terminology. I was thinking more like monitoring the people with the nightsticks, though. After all, the government ideally ought be accountable to its "beneficiaries"; what better way to get started than making a publicly-accessible place for people to see what the agents of their government are doing?
"I think policemen need cameras in their hats/helmets. Now someone could actually watch the watchers - just so long as the people watching the camera footage aren't corrupt themselves."
How about a live webcam?
Yeah, good luck with that. Seriously. I have nothing against Linux but the fanboism is really starting to stink up the place. Do you honestly think that the Windows user who can't be bothered to download Linux is going to jump at the chance to buy a machine with it on? At least with the download Joe Sixpack has a Windows disk to fall back on if Linux turns out to be something that he simply doesn't want. With the Dell offer he's either going to have to put up with an OS that he was already too lazy to download or he's going to have to go Windows on a retail basis. Guess what kind of bitching and moaning that's going to cause.
.iso's, burn them, install them, and possibly configure the newly installed OS so it actually works correctly on their hardware might like the idea of having all that done for them so they get a sqeaky-clean install that works out of the box?
Wouldn't it be the opposite? Someone who can't be bothered to download the half-gig
Are we simplistic automata, unable to think of anything our genes themselves do not define? A natural tendency for our brains to arrive at the conclusion of a supernatural deity dooms nobody to that particular conclusion, in the same way that the natural tendency of the visual cortex to pick out faces in things that are not actually faces does not doom anybody to concluding that they really are faces and that that cloud really is winking at them.
...if that's the case, how did it just happen to 'evolve' its way into the dna?
:).
I could venture that the people who happened to be just crazy enough to believe in it were conferred some kind of survival advantage superior to those who didn't believe in it. It's been proposed that the divine right of kings was just another manifestation of a possible survival advantage of belief in supernatural deities- groups of people who were all independent-minded and had no concept of submission to authority didn't tend to stick together well, but humans themselves don't tend to survive well in a vacuum without other people. Go 40 miles away from any kind of town or human settlement, break your foot, and you'll know exactly what I mean when I say humans survive better when other people are around. Groups that got cowed into obeying some form of human authority that they perceived was backed up by some wrathful god stuck together better and therefore survived better than groups that didn't have any mechanism of sticking together.
Then again, maybe the supernatural deities just helped out the ones who believed in them
Michael Shermer proposed it in 2000. There's nothing new about the idea that belief in a supernatural creator is hardwired.
He's responded a few times already.
/ 2007-February/thread.html#01006
/ 2007-February/msg01060.html / 2007-February/msg01082.html / 2007-February/msg01097.html / 2007-February/msg01118.html
Here's the actual mailing list thread: https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list
Here are ESR's responses from that particular thread:
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list
He also started another mailing list thread called "Core Values" which I'll let you find in the mailing list index, which I've linked to already (albeit anchored to the beginning of "Goodbye, Fedora").
"This is an age-old question, and one that will never be answered, I'm afraid. Is it better to give up privacy rights for the sake of better communication and collaboration between law enforcement agencies?"
Um, no, it was answered a long time ago by a fella by name of Benjamin Franklin.
Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
A government's only legitimate purpose is in protecting your rights and there's something wrong when it starts trying to justify the erosion of those very rights to ease their protection. I suppose they think that a smaller target is harder to hit.
"My hometown was one of (if not the) first test markets for Clearwire. It's decent I guess, but cuts in and out occasionally. There's a competing company in town now (Xanadoo) offering the same technology with none of the contract garbage. --Josh"
I do find that when the connection cuts out, a quick ifdown eth0 && ifup eth0 works a treat.
Really, the biggest advantage of Clearwire is that there aren't any installation costs.
Diebold: No, really, your honor! We weren't rigging your election, we're just incompetent! *Points to insecure ATMs*
:).
Sorry if that sounds a little trollish, but it really is what I first thought of when I read the headline
Microsoft did do something similar in the past. Windows 3.1 (AFAIR) would check if it was running on top of DR-DOS, and if so would randomly fail.
A couple of corrections:
1. The "Microsoft Genuine Compatibility" check was only distributed in a public beta of Windows 3.x, not in a final product.
2. It never actually did anything but pop up a warning telling the user that they were using an unsupported operating system and that it would probably be less stable because of it. The idea was to make the user nervous about using DR-DOS and go out and buy MS-DOS.
This is America; what do you expect, intelligent debate about the issues?
I've got Diabetes II. Really, you *don't* need drugs to treat it. It sounds clichéd, but exercise, a good diet, and (if it's your thing) supplements like garlic and cinnamon and you'll be fine.
I get a little annoyed at the "Illness? Take a pill!" attitude I see so much of today.
"Hitler started with an idea, slavery started with an idea, so it is good that this was stopped in time."
The solution to these "ideas"? Crimestop!
Alright, so it's not like the fellow was having any revolutionary thoughts to help free the masses (in fact, he was sort of talking about the exact opposite), but come on. Stopping ideas at their root because you don't agree with them is too reminiscent of Oceania.
"Are we talking about people who need to see what other people are saying they'll do so that they know what they should, themselves, do with their vote when the time comes? *sheep sounds*"
I don't know about you, but I'm interested in seeing how candidates are doing in the eyes of the public.
When one tracks an animal or a person, one typically starts from the last known certainty. "It was here, maybe yesterday."
Why don't we have the same expectations with all this investigation of origins? Why does everyone seem to be starting with some "In the beginning..." belief?
They didn't start with it. They did exactly as you suggest- They started from observations that things are receding from one another, and then just extrapolated that straight back through time so that everything wound up at a single point.
Where is the hierarchy of this knowledge? Is there a database which gets updated when some part is expanded or falsified?
There isn't a "hierarchy of knowledge"- but that doesn't mean there's no way to determine if a theory makes sense and fits the data. Most scientists just stick to the theories that make sense and fit the greatest range of data, but there *are* heretics- see MOND.
I'm not an advocate of Creationism, but they DO make one point that should sink in... There is no mechanism for maintaining the pedigree of scientific information.
Experiments don't work anymore?
We say that the speed of light is a constant in all frames of reference.How was that measured? What assumptions did those measurements depend upon?
Take a science history course. That was never "measured", It was implicit in Maxwell's theory of light, which has fit the data for over 100 years. Einstein expanded on it with the Special Theory of Relativity, which has also fit the data for just over 100 years. If an assumption leads to theories that have 100 years of data backing them up, the odds become small that it's incorrect.
If I think I've come up with something which defies the laws of physics (like a perpetual motion machine or something), how do I find out which experimental results it would seem to contradict?
You wouldn't contradict the experimental results. You'd contradict the *theory*. And if you know of a phenomenon that seemingly defies the laws of physics, you'd better damn well know *which* law it might violate, because nobody but crackpots will trust your conclusion that a law is wrong if you don't even know what the law *is*.
There is a need for a comprehensive, multilingual database of theories, experimental results, and their interdependencies.
Oh, please.
Today is the 2nd of September.
... to beta ... to release. Isn't that a bit optimistic? Particularly for a release that is developer driven and packed with candy.
Edgy Eft is scheduled for release "in October 2006".
That's about 60 days maximum to go from a 2nd alpha
Well, feature freeze is in 5 days, so the only things coming through the pipeline in those two months are bugfixes/security patches.
And even if it's not good enough, they can always fall back on "It's edgy eft! What are you complaining about?"
As a general FYI, Edgy Final should be out on the 26th of October, barring disaster or pushbacks.
Set it to whatever volume you want without messing with sound control manually: http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=195520&cid= 16021051. Add to his list, this one for PPC: http://www5e.biglobe.ne.jp/~arcana/StartupSound/in dex.en.html
:).
Thanks for the links. I'll be sure to take advantage of that
"Well, the fact is that the mac laptops (I never had a desktop) are easily made to silent boot (set volume to zero), silent reboot/restart. Other posters have mentioned scripts you can setup to automatically mute when shutting down, and unmute once booted. So anyway, I silent mac laptop is a current reality and MS is not copying apple on this score." Yeah, but I won't stop bitching about it until you can actually set it to not play at all- instead of just silently. It's just a little silly to me, I guess, to be unable to just fix the root problem and set it to not play at all.
"Talk about branding for the sheer point of making people associate your brand with irritation." Yup. Sort of like Mac's startup sound. I don't get why they don't allow you to configure that startup sound away. Making it unchangeable only alienates that many more members of your audience and doesn't alienate your current users. I can't imagine a Mac user switching to Windows or Linux because Apple made it so you could turn off the annoying startup sound.