I agree fully, a while back my district had a politician that would run polls for nearly every issue that came up and would even vote against his preference if there was a strong feeling from his constituency. He was branded a flip-flop politician, which I thought was pretty unfair. I personally felt that asking those whom you represent what they think you should say and acting on that information is what a good representative should be doing.
Conversely, in my state (Colorado) the Senate President, John Morse (D) did TV interviews and spoke with other legislative Democrats about the importance of "not listening to the ugliness" when it appeared that some of his gun control proposals were extremely unpopular. He pushed them forward anyway. He narrowly won his seat last time (thanks to a 3rd party) and roughly half of those who voted in the last election signed petitions to trigger a recall against him (only 25% was required). It now looks like he and another state senator are probably going to be recalled after he pushed his party to ignore the public.
Weren't there lawsuits filed against Google and Yahoo! in the USA and EU for them turning over data on Chinese dissidents to China's Government. Yes, China's Government may be abusive, but it was required under Chinese law. Why is it important for Google to adhere to Germany's laws but not to China's laws? If Germany's privacy laws require Google to do things that violate America's FISA laws, who's to say who has primacy? If anything, the fact that the majority of Google's servers are in America probably means American law will hold more sway.
So the Nobel Peace Prize = "I HATE AMERICA" Prize.
Not really. It's meant to be a prize for making the world more peaceful. Giving it to Obama was nuts, and it's now not clear if this prize has any point any more.
Obama is hardly the most "nuts" of all of them. They gave it to him basically because they didn't like Bush. Obama, of course, immediately proceeded to escalate the War on Terror.
Most recently, they awarded it to the European Union, apparently to show that they still have a sense of humor. This award was, of course, presented right after Greece went bankrupt, the Euro became more and more devalued & Brits began clamoring more and more for their promised EU referendum and UKIP, the 3rd party, center-right, Euro-secessionist, "British Tea Party" won a huge number of seats on British local governments. Like the Tories in the UK, Germany's Angela Merkel may very well have her own "UKIP problem" since a center-right Euroskeptic party seems to be making a bid to peel off enough votes from her center-right coalition in the upcoming election to deny her a majority. We'll see how that turns out.
Of course, the Nobel Prize committee also famously opted to give Al Gore a Nobel Peace Prize for his movie about his book about his slideshow. The alternative was to give it to a lady who smuggled Jewish kids out of a Nazi camp but who cares about that?
Former President Carter was given a prize. Apparently his anti-Semitic comments about Israel didn't bother the committee, nor did his disastrous foreign policy record as President.
Kofi Annan was given a prize whilst his son was stealing from the UN's oil for food program. I guess crime does pay.
Perhaps the most "interesting" choice for a Peace Prize was Yasser Arafat, a terrorist who organized numerous attacks and bombings against Israel. He briefly agreed to a ceasefire. He was given the prize. Attacks resumed shortly after.
Also of note, who has not received a Peace Prize. No doubt, in the second half of the 20th century there was no greater threat to peace than the USSR. Nobody contributed more to the downfall of the USSR than Pope John Paul II, US President Ronald Reagan and UK Prime Minister Margret Thatcher. With Mrs. Thatcher's death earlier this year, all three of them have died without receiving a Nobel Prize for their great contributions to peace. JFK never was awarded a prize for negotiating a peaceful resolution to the Cuban Missile Crisis. Winston Churchill never received a Prize for preserving democracy and standing (at first, largely alone) against Hitler's forces. FDR or the French Resistance would've also made good candidates for their actions during WWII.
Edward Snowden has done nothing but cause international tension, precisely the opposite of what a recipient of the prize should be. I have a better alternative: Malala Yousafzai. She is a 16 year old Pashton girl who has been campaigning in Pakistan and Afghanistan for the right of girls to attend school and to learn to read. She has also been a vocal advocate for the rights of women and children around the world. The Taliban nearly killed her a while back but she has continued to speak out for the rights of the oppressed. By contrast, Snowden handed over American military secrets to China and Russia.
the IRS, which I am legally required to report almost every detail of my private financial life to every year. Whenever we hear about how invasive the NSA or other government snooping programs are, I instinctively compare them to the IRS and most of them pale by comparison.
The NSA logs who I call, but not the contents. They log who I email, but not the contents (or so they say). The Post Office logs who I am sending and receiving packages from but not the contents (aside from making sure they don't give off radiation or appear hazardous). The NSA still requires a warrant issued by a FISA Court to actually look at any one individual or to tap communications if they believe it involves an American. Their data mining programs mostly just look for patterns. It's also not clear about whether or not the NSA looks at much data concerning Americans since it appears as though their primary goal was to monitor foreign communications that were routed through equipment in the USA.
By comparison, the IRS demands that I log everything I do financially and turn it over to them. If I make any mistakes, I can be prosecuted and potentially jailed for it. If the NSA misses a call I make, nobody is the wiser. If I forget that I'm no longer able to make a certain deduction, I face harsh penalties.
The NSA's generally pretty tight and there haven't been all that many cases of clear illegality. A lot of what the NSA does and how the FISA courts actually work is in a grey area, so I don't know what to think. By contrast, the IRS has frequently been at the center of many scandals.
Income taxes were legalized by the 16th amendment in 1913. Up until then, we didn't have Federal income taxes save for a couple of brief periods such as during the Civil War. During the 30's the first huge IRS scandal broke. The IRS was allegedly used by FDR's administration to harass political opponents. Most notably, Andrew Mellon, Treasury Secretary under the Harding, Coolidge and Hoover Administrations, was subject to baseless tax investigations. Senator Huey Long, a potential challenge from the left of FDR, also faced harassment. JFK and LBJ allegedly also had an IRS that liked to target political critics like the John Birch Society. Article 2 Section 1 of the articles of impeachment of Richard Nixon accused Nixon of having the IRS investigate people on his "enemies list". While Clinton was in office, a few conservative outfits like the Heritage Foundation allegedly faced "unusual" audits, though true hard evidence of wrongdoing never surfaced. Similar story with Bush. Several liberal outfits claimed Bush's IRS was pestering them, though the IRS actually appears to have audited more right leaning organizations than left leaning ones. Now we get to Obama's huge spat over the IRS. The IRS has admitted to clear discrimination against conservative groups, effectively squashing the Tea Party's activities throughout most of the 2014 election cycle. The IRS is also alleged to have turned over confidential donor information from an organization opposed to gay marriage to one supporting gay marriage so that gay marriage proponents could harass their opponents. A Supreme Court case during the civil rights era in which Alabama demanded the NAACP's donors so that they could be harassed clearly shows the IRS' behavior was illegal. How involved (if at all) the President and his staff are in all of this remains to be seen, but it is clear, given it's history, that if there's any government agency to be worried about, it's the IRS and not the NSA or Post Office.
The GPU of the Pi is as powerful as the GPU of the original XBox. The CPU, however, is as fast as a Pentium II (I forget what MHz rating).
The GPU has all sorts of issues though, namely due to the crappy binary only drivers (ugh, yeah, even the Pi has that problem). The Pi uses a broadcom SOC while the Xbox uses a weird nVidia card that Linux never really supported quite right with any drivers.
The CPU on the Pi clocks to 700 mhz but can easily be overclocked. Running at 800 mhz rarely causes problems. Running up to 1 Ghz may cause issues occasionally if you've got a weak USB power charger but the Pi will perform surprisingly well for lightweight task at 1 GHz. By contrast, the original Xbox had a 733 mhz CPU. Remember though, the Pi uses an ARM chip while the Xbox used a custom CPU that was sort of a cross between a Celeron and a Pentium III.
The Pi has a few other features the Xbox lacked. It uses USB 2.0 while the Xbox used USB 1.1 (the controllers were basically modified 1.1 ports. You could easily splice controller cables and USB extension cables together and if you plugged flash drives in the Xbox saw them as memory cards). The Pi also sports HDMI. The Xbox only had 64 MB of RAM while the Pi has 512 MB.
Because Linux distros typically don't phone home at any point during installation or operation,
Bullshit excuse. They do request updates, don't they? Its not hard to tell who's using your Linux distro when they come to you for patches.
If a company with 1000 seats downloads Ubuntu once and uses that single download to install it on all 1000 PCs, while the business next door has all ten of its users download Mint to install on their own desktops then Mint appears to be ten times as popular as Ubuntu.
Yes, if you picked a particular 5 millisecond period and just used that as a basis for all of your extrapolation, but when you look at it on average, that sort of thing doesn't matter.
Not all of the companies log who's been using their apt or rpm update servers. Also, much like WSUS on Windows, a company using Linux desktops might very well decide to mirror its updates to save on bandwidth. That is, have one server check for updates, have the clients all download updates from said server.
It's also worth noting ChromeOS is Linux based and considering the Chromebook has been a best seller on Amazon, I wonder if we count that as a Linux distro. Not to mention android.
Too bad the phrase doesn't hold up to time, because Debian has been getting incredibly easy to install, with pretty much everything except "non-free" drivers working at first boot... but yeah, it is a good phrase that historically has some truth to it.
Well, Debian's easy to install if you want it to be. If you're a masochist, you can still do network based installs and menu driven installs if you want to. There's also still the option of downloading 51 disc images if you want to.
You do realize you can kill that little "feature" with one apt command right? Unlike most forms of adware, this one doesn't really fight you when you remove it.
I do have one prediction: fewer Swiss companies will go public. I doubt existing publicly owned Swiss companies will go private since that can sometimes be hard to do, not to mention expensive. Yet I certainly imagine there will be a few CEO's who refuse to take their company public. This new law might provide the "perverse incentive" for a company's executive to intentionally try to deter investment.
I'm not sure how I feel about this. On one hand, a publicly held company is, ultimately, the property of its shareholders. On the other hand, I question whether or not it is good to establish such a potentially adversarial situation between the shareholders and the CEO and some of the incentives this sets up might pose problems down the line. I would suggest people on both sides of this debate wait and see how this law plays out before suggesting such a law be enacted stateside.
I'm so happy to see this project's back from the dead. I'll once again be able to make use of super-old PC's. I hope somebody updates the Xbox release called X-DSL someday. It was made for modded Xboxes and it's the only distro that ever really worked well on them.
Who wouldn't want a grant like that? There's absolutely no possibility of accountability. The notions are so vague and there's so many different views, even among the same religion, about what an afterlife would be like that you can't really be proven wrong. Basically, they weaseled their way into $5 mill with no chance of being asked for results.
The rational for the creation of the Department of Energy was to reduce U.S. dependence on foreign energy supplies. The thing is, since the establishment of the Department of Energy, the U.S. has become significantly more dependent on foreign energy supplies..
Yeah, if by foreign supplies you mean Canada and Mexico. People seem to think the USA buys a lot of oil from the middle east but this just isn't true. Nearly all of the oil America uses comes from North America, Oil is fungible though, so it doesn't matter all that much where the oil we Americans are using comes from since oil is bought and sold on the global market and prices are dictated by global supply and demand. Cheap natural gas provides an alternative to compete with oil and that is bound to be a good thing, not to mention it's also cleaner.
Sadly, I doubt that'll deter the eco-freakos. My little town of Erie, Colorado makes a lot of money from gas. A group called "Erie Rising" has been harrassing the town constantly over fracking. The thing that gets me is most of this group's membership and funding doesn't come from Erie. It's biggest donors seem to be in New York and Pennsylvania. I wish they'd leave my little town alone.
As a college student myself (and one who is not particularly good at math), I know full and well that math is necessary and, indeed, some algebra is necessary but at some point the issue of relevance must come into play. I'm a computer technician by trade, not a programmer, a technician. I aim to go into system administration. I might need the occasional bits of basic algebra, but thus far, I have yet to encounter any scenario where I've wished I had a better grasp of logarithmic equations.
The article suggest that perhaps applied uses of mathematics and statistics might be more useful and I totally agree with that assertion. There are plenty of good jobs out there where you don't need to know polynomial equations. I'm not convinced that every Kindergarten teacher needs to know matrices or that every real estate agent needs a firm grasp of conics. I do feel that many American's would benefit from more statistics in lieu of more algebra. Like many Americans, I would much rather be able to understand how variations in market volatility might affect my return on investment than devote more time to inverse functions.
Wake me when the US voting system actually gives a third party a chance to play any role.
Wake me up when 3rd parties aren't run by crazy people more concerned with ideology than governing. The wonderful thing about our plurality based system is that it pretty much guarantees there will be two parties that have to spend most of their efforts appealing to moderate voters while radicals are shut out. The electoral college reinforces this since the most moderate voters in the most moderate states can make or break an election. I'd much rather have two centrist parties fight for a majority than see a moderate party end up with a plurality and having to enter into a coalition government with a communist or neofascist party. Multiparty systems can leave radical parties that have relatively few seats with far more power than is healthy simply because they have enough to sway the balance of power.
America's governing system was established with a bias towards moderation and divided in a way that promotes gridlock. A party that has the House may not have the Senate or Presidency. A party that has all three might be obstructed if they don't have 60/100 votes in the Senate by a minority party's filibuster. The Supreme Court can reign in Congressional overstep and is largely immune to sudden shifts in public opinion. Even if a party has all of the federal government under its thumb it still is limited by Constitutional protections and in addition to the horizontal division of power our government has vertical divisions of power (that is the 10th Amendment and other provisions divide power between the federal and state governments). Most states have similar checks and balances and have to have cooperation with local and regional governments on some matters.
This gridlock gets criticized because it makes it hard to get something done by the mere whims of a majority but that is why America has done so well. Radical changes are impossible and our government is more evolutionary than revolutionary. In parliamentary systems a Prime Minister will seldom have any trouble getting whatever he wants through parliament since he has a majority or at least a majority coalition and party discipline is strict because breaking with your party can lead to a disillusion of parliament. In America, members of congress will periodically break with their party and having a majority may procedurally ensure a party can block whatever it doesn't want (for example, the House Rules Committee is always dominated by the majority and can put procedural limits on an unwanted bill to make it impossible to pass), but a majority cannot always get everything it wants.
In my view the lack of 3rd parties is probably a plus since it promotes stability. If we could fix anything about our electoral system, I'd want US House and State Legislative seats to be drawn by independent bodies with strict rules and for term limits to be applied to members of Congress. Gerrymandering means most members of congress are in seats virtually guaranteed to be "safe" and can only be defeated by being primaried by a member of their own party who claims they aren't representing the party accurately enough. It also makes many members of Congress and state legislatures virtually immune to public scrutiny since most of them simply cannot be defeated and it can leave elected officials without clear communities of interest to represent. Term limits would guarantee someone won't be endlessly re-elected simply by virtue of name recognition and will ensure seniority doesn't grant uncompetitive parts of the country such ridiculous amounts of power. We are one of the few countries in the world that uses a winner take all system and still allows for politicians to pick their own voters. Reform is slowly emerging though. Arizona, Iowa, New Jersey and a few other states put independent commissions in charge though many are still prone to partisan agendas. In 2008 California, a state that is perhaps one of the least competitive in the nation due
Nah, the board just evolved. As the electorate gets more worried about the future of their kids who might not be able to compete in the global marketplace, the board members who adopted a more pro-science stance prospered..
Somehow I doubt a differing view held by some on the theory of evolution has all that much economic impact.
Some things need learning. Like finding the structure of the DNA, develop self-assembled structures, optimize carbon nanotube growth, develop drugs that can cross the BBB, design multicore CPUs, discover the inner workings of mitochondria etc.
Yes, and nobody is suggesting everybody drop out, just those who already have ideas and are participating in this experiment.
Part of the problem with the world today is that too many things are viewed only through the lens of "is it useful in business".
I would say quite the opposite. I think colleges these days still focus on electives and simply being present there for 4 years. I would much rather do something productive then sit around gazing at my navel in some stupid philosophy class.
That's why we have a representative democracy rather than a pure democracy. The Founding Fathers knew all too well not to trust the reasoning abilities of the "common man"
Many of our states have a mix of the two. It has been a disaster for California but here in Colorado it hasn't been all that bad. In about half the states voters can directly enact legislation by initiative and even more local governments have such processes in place.
Here in Colorado about 5% of voters can sign a petition to initiate a law or amend the state constitution. Voters have enacted a balanced budget amendment, a law requiring voter approval for all tax hikes (known as the Taxpayer Bill of Rights or TABOR), term limits, and a whole host of other legislation. Our state legislature is extremely weak but we still have a functional system of government. I would never want initiatives at the national level, but keeping the common man involved in some way or another is a good idea.
And, no, it hasn't always been that way. There have been times historically the situation was similar, but it hasn't always been that way.
The reason businesses both big and small are ever increasingly intertwined with politics is because government is getting ever increasingly bigger. Remarkably little was spent on lobbying when the federal government spent a tiny fraction of the GDP since it was largely irrelevant. Businesses don't have any agenda beyond remaining profitable. There is nothing wrong with the desire for profits, but if we task the federal government with such vast regulatory power don't be surprised when businesses lobby.
If the government can declare something "illegal" and pressure private companies to not do business with a particular entity... does it really matter if they can "make no law" abridging freedom of speech? Isn't the first amendment completely worthless?
The first amendment covers the right to protest and express ideas, not the right to steal classified documents. The Supreme Court has never declared the constitution to be a suicide pact.
Without network neutrality, big companies like Microsoft, Google and Apple can pay ISPs to put their sites on the premium tier so that you get fast access to them, while poor startups and normal people with brilliant ideas will be relegated to the slower tier.
There is nothing stopping this right now besides antitrust, but I still don't see it happening.
I've even seen concern about ISPs one day offering packages a la cable TV - you can get Google, Yahoo and MSN with the basic package but then you'd have to add a sports/tech/music/etc. package to access those sites. It's not even limited to websites. ISPs could grant you HTTP access with the basic package and then you'd have to add FTP, NNTP, VOIP and other "value add" services".
To a limited extent some of that exist or has.Some web providers used to offer discounted e-mail and browsing only packages (often they had time limits as well). Many ISPs also block ports when a really bad worm or exploit relies on them and few others are using them. Most ISPs will also start blocking certain protocols if they suspect a PC is spreading an infection or spam. Some also allow for "network wide" parental controls for customers that want them. Basically DNS listings are redirected on these to block sites similar to how the host file or a filter can do it locally. Some throttle bittorrent during periods of high demand. I favor this since the alternative is paying more for access so that better connection speeds can be reached or enduring a far slower connection when gaming. I see absolutely nothing wrong with any of these "non-neutral" actions so long as I, the customer, can be made aware of them. I am far more concerned about the prospect of regulation of the internet. The cure seems likely to be far worse than the disease. Anti-trust laws are sufficient to stop anti-competitive practices.
If something like this makes the front page at slashdot, what's next? Roswell aliens, JFK Conspiracy theories, how about the 9/11 conspiracy saying the fed's were behind everything? Is it possible to have the slightest bit of editorial standards at this website?
Failing that, I want an article saying Roswell aliens killed JFK and caused 9/11.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree fully, a while back my district had a politician that would run polls for nearly every issue that came up and would even vote against his preference if there was a strong feeling from his constituency. He was branded a flip-flop politician, which I thought was pretty unfair. I personally felt that asking those whom you represent what they think you should say and acting on that information is what a good representative should be doing.
Conversely, in my state (Colorado) the Senate President, John Morse (D) did TV interviews and spoke with other legislative Democrats about the importance of "not listening to the ugliness" when it appeared that some of his gun control proposals were extremely unpopular. He pushed them forward anyway. He narrowly won his seat last time (thanks to a 3rd party) and roughly half of those who voted in the last election signed petitions to trigger a recall against him (only 25% was required). It now looks like he and another state senator are probably going to be recalled after he pushed his party to ignore the public.
Weren't there lawsuits filed against Google and Yahoo! in the USA and EU for them turning over data on Chinese dissidents to China's Government. Yes, China's Government may be abusive, but it was required under Chinese law. Why is it important for Google to adhere to Germany's laws but not to China's laws? If Germany's privacy laws require Google to do things that violate America's FISA laws, who's to say who has primacy? If anything, the fact that the majority of Google's servers are in America probably means American law will hold more sway.
If I remember right, that new porn law means he'll have to have an iPod condom right?
So the Nobel Peace Prize = "I HATE AMERICA" Prize.
Not really. It's meant to be a prize for making the world more peaceful. Giving it to Obama was nuts, and it's now not clear if this prize has any point any more.
Obama is hardly the most "nuts" of all of them. They gave it to him basically because they didn't like Bush. Obama, of course, immediately proceeded to escalate the War on Terror.
Most recently, they awarded it to the European Union, apparently to show that they still have a sense of humor. This award was, of course, presented right after Greece went bankrupt, the Euro became more and more devalued & Brits began clamoring more and more for their promised EU referendum and UKIP, the 3rd party, center-right, Euro-secessionist, "British Tea Party" won a huge number of seats on British local governments. Like the Tories in the UK, Germany's Angela Merkel may very well have her own "UKIP problem" since a center-right Euroskeptic party seems to be making a bid to peel off enough votes from her center-right coalition in the upcoming election to deny her a majority. We'll see how that turns out.
Of course, the Nobel Prize committee also famously opted to give Al Gore a Nobel Peace Prize for his movie about his book about his slideshow. The alternative was to give it to a lady who smuggled Jewish kids out of a Nazi camp but who cares about that?
Former President Carter was given a prize. Apparently his anti-Semitic comments about Israel didn't bother the committee, nor did his disastrous foreign policy record as President.
Kofi Annan was given a prize whilst his son was stealing from the UN's oil for food program. I guess crime does pay.
Perhaps the most "interesting" choice for a Peace Prize was Yasser Arafat, a terrorist who organized numerous attacks and bombings against Israel. He briefly agreed to a ceasefire. He was given the prize. Attacks resumed shortly after.
Also of note, who has not received a Peace Prize. No doubt, in the second half of the 20th century there was no greater threat to peace than the USSR. Nobody contributed more to the downfall of the USSR than Pope John Paul II, US President Ronald Reagan and UK Prime Minister Margret Thatcher. With Mrs. Thatcher's death earlier this year, all three of them have died without receiving a Nobel Prize for their great contributions to peace. JFK never was awarded a prize for negotiating a peaceful resolution to the Cuban Missile Crisis. Winston Churchill never received a Prize for preserving democracy and standing (at first, largely alone) against Hitler's forces. FDR or the French Resistance would've also made good candidates for their actions during WWII.
Edward Snowden has done nothing but cause international tension, precisely the opposite of what a recipient of the prize should be. I have a better alternative: Malala Yousafzai. She is a 16 year old Pashton girl who has been campaigning in Pakistan and Afghanistan for the right of girls to attend school and to learn to read. She has also been a vocal advocate for the rights of women and children around the world. The Taliban nearly killed her a while back but she has continued to speak out for the rights of the oppressed. By contrast, Snowden handed over American military secrets to China and Russia.
The NSA logs who I call, but not the contents. They log who I email, but not the contents (or so they say). The Post Office logs who I am sending and receiving packages from but not the contents (aside from making sure they don't give off radiation or appear hazardous). The NSA still requires a warrant issued by a FISA Court to actually look at any one individual or to tap communications if they believe it involves an American. Their data mining programs mostly just look for patterns. It's also not clear about whether or not the NSA looks at much data concerning Americans since it appears as though their primary goal was to monitor foreign communications that were routed through equipment in the USA.
By comparison, the IRS demands that I log everything I do financially and turn it over to them. If I make any mistakes, I can be prosecuted and potentially jailed for it. If the NSA misses a call I make, nobody is the wiser. If I forget that I'm no longer able to make a certain deduction, I face harsh penalties.
The NSA's generally pretty tight and there haven't been all that many cases of clear illegality. A lot of what the NSA does and how the FISA courts actually work is in a grey area, so I don't know what to think. By contrast, the IRS has frequently been at the center of many scandals.
Income taxes were legalized by the 16th amendment in 1913. Up until then, we didn't have Federal income taxes save for a couple of brief periods such as during the Civil War. During the 30's the first huge IRS scandal broke. The IRS was allegedly used by FDR's administration to harass political opponents. Most notably, Andrew Mellon, Treasury Secretary under the Harding, Coolidge and Hoover Administrations, was subject to baseless tax investigations. Senator Huey Long, a potential challenge from the left of FDR, also faced harassment. JFK and LBJ allegedly also had an IRS that liked to target political critics like the John Birch Society. Article 2 Section 1 of the articles of impeachment of Richard Nixon accused Nixon of having the IRS investigate people on his "enemies list". While Clinton was in office, a few conservative outfits like the Heritage Foundation allegedly faced "unusual" audits, though true hard evidence of wrongdoing never surfaced. Similar story with Bush. Several liberal outfits claimed Bush's IRS was pestering them, though the IRS actually appears to have audited more right leaning organizations than left leaning ones. Now we get to Obama's huge spat over the IRS. The IRS has admitted to clear discrimination against conservative groups, effectively squashing the Tea Party's activities throughout most of the 2014 election cycle. The IRS is also alleged to have turned over confidential donor information from an organization opposed to gay marriage to one supporting gay marriage so that gay marriage proponents could harass their opponents. A Supreme Court case during the civil rights era in which Alabama demanded the NAACP's donors so that they could be harassed clearly shows the IRS' behavior was illegal. How involved (if at all) the President and his staff are in all of this remains to be seen, but it is clear, given it's history, that if there's any government agency to be worried about, it's the IRS and not the NSA or Post Office.
The GPU of the Pi is as powerful as the GPU of the original XBox. The CPU, however, is as fast as a Pentium II (I forget what MHz rating).
The GPU has all sorts of issues though, namely due to the crappy binary only drivers (ugh, yeah, even the Pi has that problem). The Pi uses a broadcom SOC while the Xbox uses a weird nVidia card that Linux never really supported quite right with any drivers.
The CPU on the Pi clocks to 700 mhz but can easily be overclocked. Running at 800 mhz rarely causes problems. Running up to 1 Ghz may cause issues occasionally if you've got a weak USB power charger but the Pi will perform surprisingly well for lightweight task at 1 GHz. By contrast, the original Xbox had a 733 mhz CPU. Remember though, the Pi uses an ARM chip while the Xbox used a custom CPU that was sort of a cross between a Celeron and a Pentium III.
The Pi has a few other features the Xbox lacked. It uses USB 2.0 while the Xbox used USB 1.1 (the controllers were basically modified 1.1 ports. You could easily splice controller cables and USB extension cables together and if you plugged flash drives in the Xbox saw them as memory cards). The Pi also sports HDMI. The Xbox only had 64 MB of RAM while the Pi has 512 MB.
Because Linux distros typically don't phone home at any point during installation or operation,
Bullshit excuse. They do request updates, don't they? Its not hard to tell who's using your Linux distro when they come to you for patches.
If a company with 1000 seats downloads Ubuntu once and uses that single download to install it on all 1000 PCs, while the business next door has all ten of its users download Mint to install on their own desktops then Mint appears to be ten times as popular as Ubuntu.
Yes, if you picked a particular 5 millisecond period and just used that as a basis for all of your extrapolation, but when you look at it on average, that sort of thing doesn't matter.
Not all of the companies log who's been using their apt or rpm update servers. Also, much like WSUS on Windows, a company using Linux desktops might very well decide to mirror its updates to save on bandwidth. That is, have one server check for updates, have the clients all download updates from said server.
It's also worth noting ChromeOS is Linux based and considering the Chromebook has been a best seller on Amazon, I wonder if we count that as a Linux distro. Not to mention android.
Too bad the phrase doesn't hold up to time, because Debian has been getting incredibly easy to install, with pretty much everything except "non-free" drivers working at first boot... but yeah, it is a good phrase that historically has some truth to it.
Well, Debian's easy to install if you want it to be. If you're a masochist, you can still do network based installs and menu driven installs if you want to. There's also still the option of downloading 51 disc images if you want to.
You do realize you can kill that little "feature" with one apt command right? Unlike most forms of adware, this one doesn't really fight you when you remove it.
I'm not sure how I feel about this. On one hand, a publicly held company is, ultimately, the property of its shareholders. On the other hand, I question whether or not it is good to establish such a potentially adversarial situation between the shareholders and the CEO and some of the incentives this sets up might pose problems down the line. I would suggest people on both sides of this debate wait and see how this law plays out before suggesting such a law be enacted stateside.
I think he might've been talking about running Linux on VMWare Fusion. It can run any x86/x86-64 OS. It's not limited to Windows.
I'm so happy to see this project's back from the dead. I'll once again be able to make use of super-old PC's. I hope somebody updates the Xbox release called X-DSL someday. It was made for modded Xboxes and it's the only distro that ever really worked well on them.
Who wouldn't want a grant like that? There's absolutely no possibility of accountability. The notions are so vague and there's so many different views, even among the same religion, about what an afterlife would be like that you can't really be proven wrong. Basically, they weaseled their way into $5 mill with no chance of being asked for results.
The rational for the creation of the Department of Energy was to reduce U.S. dependence on foreign energy supplies. The thing is, since the establishment of the Department of Energy, the U.S. has become significantly more dependent on foreign energy supplies. .
Yeah, if by foreign supplies you mean Canada and Mexico. People seem to think the USA buys a lot of oil from the middle east but this just isn't true. Nearly all of the oil America uses comes from North America, Oil is fungible though, so it doesn't matter all that much where the oil we Americans are using comes from since oil is bought and sold on the global market and prices are dictated by global supply and demand. Cheap natural gas provides an alternative to compete with oil and that is bound to be a good thing, not to mention it's also cleaner.
Sadly, I doubt that'll deter the eco-freakos. My little town of Erie, Colorado makes a lot of money from gas. A group called "Erie Rising" has been harrassing the town constantly over fracking. The thing that gets me is most of this group's membership and funding doesn't come from Erie. It's biggest donors seem to be in New York and Pennsylvania. I wish they'd leave my little town alone.
As a college student myself (and one who is not particularly good at math), I know full and well that math is necessary and, indeed, some algebra is necessary but at some point the issue of relevance must come into play. I'm a computer technician by trade, not a programmer, a technician. I aim to go into system administration. I might need the occasional bits of basic algebra, but thus far, I have yet to encounter any scenario where I've wished I had a better grasp of logarithmic equations.
The article suggest that perhaps applied uses of mathematics and statistics might be more useful and I totally agree with that assertion. There are plenty of good jobs out there where you don't need to know polynomial equations. I'm not convinced that every Kindergarten teacher needs to know matrices or that every real estate agent needs a firm grasp of conics. I do feel that many American's would benefit from more statistics in lieu of more algebra. Like many Americans, I would much rather be able to understand how variations in market volatility might affect my return on investment than devote more time to inverse functions.
Wake me when the US voting system actually gives a third party a chance to play any role.
Wake me up when 3rd parties aren't run by crazy people more concerned with ideology than governing. The wonderful thing about our plurality based system is that it pretty much guarantees there will be two parties that have to spend most of their efforts appealing to moderate voters while radicals are shut out. The electoral college reinforces this since the most moderate voters in the most moderate states can make or break an election. I'd much rather have two centrist parties fight for a majority than see a moderate party end up with a plurality and having to enter into a coalition government with a communist or neofascist party. Multiparty systems can leave radical parties that have relatively few seats with far more power than is healthy simply because they have enough to sway the balance of power.
America's governing system was established with a bias towards moderation and divided in a way that promotes gridlock. A party that has the House may not have the Senate or Presidency. A party that has all three might be obstructed if they don't have 60/100 votes in the Senate by a minority party's filibuster. The Supreme Court can reign in Congressional overstep and is largely immune to sudden shifts in public opinion. Even if a party has all of the federal government under its thumb it still is limited by Constitutional protections and in addition to the horizontal division of power our government has vertical divisions of power (that is the 10th Amendment and other provisions divide power between the federal and state governments). Most states have similar checks and balances and have to have cooperation with local and regional governments on some matters.
This gridlock gets criticized because it makes it hard to get something done by the mere whims of a majority but that is why America has done so well. Radical changes are impossible and our government is more evolutionary than revolutionary. In parliamentary systems a Prime Minister will seldom have any trouble getting whatever he wants through parliament since he has a majority or at least a majority coalition and party discipline is strict because breaking with your party can lead to a disillusion of parliament. In America, members of congress will periodically break with their party and having a majority may procedurally ensure a party can block whatever it doesn't want (for example, the House Rules Committee is always dominated by the majority and can put procedural limits on an unwanted bill to make it impossible to pass), but a majority cannot always get everything it wants.
In my view the lack of 3rd parties is probably a plus since it promotes stability. If we could fix anything about our electoral system, I'd want US House and State Legislative seats to be drawn by independent bodies with strict rules and for term limits to be applied to members of Congress. Gerrymandering means most members of congress are in seats virtually guaranteed to be "safe" and can only be defeated by being primaried by a member of their own party who claims they aren't representing the party accurately enough. It also makes many members of Congress and state legislatures virtually immune to public scrutiny since most of them simply cannot be defeated and it can leave elected officials without clear communities of interest to represent. Term limits would guarantee someone won't be endlessly re-elected simply by virtue of name recognition and will ensure seniority doesn't grant uncompetitive parts of the country such ridiculous amounts of power. We are one of the few countries in the world that uses a winner take all system and still allows for politicians to pick their own voters. Reform is slowly emerging though. Arizona, Iowa, New Jersey and a few other states put independent commissions in charge though many are still prone to partisan agendas. In 2008 California, a state that is perhaps one of the least competitive in the nation due
Nah, the board just evolved. As the electorate gets more worried about the future of their kids who might not be able to compete in the global marketplace, the board members who adopted a more pro-science stance prospered..
Somehow I doubt a differing view held by some on the theory of evolution has all that much economic impact.
Some things need learning. Like finding the structure of the DNA, develop self-assembled structures, optimize carbon nanotube growth, develop drugs that can cross the BBB, design multicore CPUs, discover the inner workings of mitochondria etc.
Yes, and nobody is suggesting everybody drop out, just those who already have ideas and are participating in this experiment.
Part of the problem with the world today is that too many things are viewed only through the lens of "is it useful in business".
I would say quite the opposite. I think colleges these days still focus on electives and simply being present there for 4 years. I would much rather do something productive then sit around gazing at my navel in some stupid philosophy class.
That's why we have a representative democracy rather than a pure democracy. The Founding Fathers knew all too well not to trust the reasoning abilities of the "common man"
Many of our states have a mix of the two. It has been a disaster for California but here in Colorado it hasn't been all that bad. In about half the states voters can directly enact legislation by initiative and even more local governments have such processes in place.
Here in Colorado about 5% of voters can sign a petition to initiate a law or amend the state constitution. Voters have enacted a balanced budget amendment, a law requiring voter approval for all tax hikes (known as the Taxpayer Bill of Rights or TABOR), term limits, and a whole host of other legislation. Our state legislature is extremely weak but we still have a functional system of government. I would never want initiatives at the national level, but keeping the common man involved in some way or another is a good idea.
And, no, it hasn't always been that way. There have been times historically the situation was similar, but it hasn't always been that way.
The reason businesses both big and small are ever increasingly intertwined with politics is because government is getting ever increasingly bigger. Remarkably little was spent on lobbying when the federal government spent a tiny fraction of the GDP since it was largely irrelevant. Businesses don't have any agenda beyond remaining profitable. There is nothing wrong with the desire for profits, but if we task the federal government with such vast regulatory power don't be surprised when businesses lobby.
If the government can declare something "illegal" and pressure private companies to not do business with a particular entity... does it really matter if they can "make no law" abridging freedom of speech? Isn't the first amendment completely worthless?
The first amendment covers the right to protest and express ideas, not the right to steal classified documents. The Supreme Court has never declared the constitution to be a suicide pact.
Without network neutrality, big companies like Microsoft, Google and Apple can pay ISPs to put their sites on the premium tier so that you get fast access to them, while poor startups and normal people with brilliant ideas will be relegated to the slower tier.
There is nothing stopping this right now besides antitrust, but I still don't see it happening.
I've even seen concern about ISPs one day offering packages a la cable TV - you can get Google, Yahoo and MSN with the basic package but then you'd have to add a sports/tech/music/etc. package to access those sites. It's not even limited to websites. ISPs could grant you HTTP access with the basic package and then you'd have to add FTP, NNTP, VOIP and other "value add" services".
To a limited extent some of that exist or has.Some web providers used to offer discounted e-mail and browsing only packages (often they had time limits as well). Many ISPs also block ports when a really bad worm or exploit relies on them and few others are using them. Most ISPs will also start blocking certain protocols if they suspect a PC is spreading an infection or spam. Some also allow for "network wide" parental controls for customers that want them. Basically DNS listings are redirected on these to block sites similar to how the host file or a filter can do it locally. Some throttle bittorrent during periods of high demand. I favor this since the alternative is paying more for access so that better connection speeds can be reached or enduring a far slower connection when gaming. I see absolutely nothing wrong with any of these "non-neutral" actions so long as I, the customer, can be made aware of them. I am far more concerned about the prospect of regulation of the internet. The cure seems likely to be far worse than the disease. Anti-trust laws are sufficient to stop anti-competitive practices.
Where's the profit in that?
Ritalin is widely available as a generic medication.
If something like this makes the front page at slashdot, what's next? Roswell aliens, JFK Conspiracy theories, how about the 9/11 conspiracy saying the fed's were behind everything? Is it possible to have the slightest bit of editorial standards at this website?
Failing that, I want an article saying Roswell aliens killed JFK and caused 9/11.