perl is alive an well. i have perl scripts written some 20 years ago that just work. i can not say this about python where you need to updated and update and update 2.4, 2.5, 2.6, 3.0 and ... so this means it needs less people to maintain the perl scripts then the python scripts. hopefully with python3 python is mature enough to not break compatibility with existing software all that often. still i think going with perl is a good and save choice.

this is the main point: rough guesstimate: about half of the jobs we have now are useless or harmful. that is: they do not produce something that is useful for us but only something that is useful within the capitalist system - most often to create artificial demand for something that otherwise would not be needed. a few example: advertising: only has one product: our discontent with what we have. or take planed obsolescence. most goods could easily be much more durable. and then there is "defense" and war. the easy way to create now jobs: bomb a country into oblivion so that you need to build it up from scratch. and then there is gambling and "financial products". etc.. with the ecologic footprint most products have: it would be much better if the people working in those jobs would get payed without creating useless crap. and the ratio of useless jobs vs. useful ones can only increase with more automation... this is why we need an UBI.

people say this is not new: since 150+ years we see exponential growth in productivity and still we still have a 40h work week and almost full employment. where does the extra productivity go? and will this trend continue?

1.) marx hints in the manifesto what happens with the overproduction: it creates a crisis within capitalism. "In these crises there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity—the epidemic of over-production." capitalism has learnt do deal with this but to some degree the mechanisms are still the same as 150years ago. creating extra demand via advertising. destroying the existing production. war. legally limiting access. e.g. via so called "intellectual property". as a more permanent solution: capitalism in former centuries had the opportunity to expand into other continents. but this is gone. and there is a limit to aggressive advertising. the "best" method to get rid of access production today is via war. works twice: you need weapons and you do need to rebuild what has been destroyed.

2.) so if we are not able to limit the excess productivity by shorting labour hours and installing basic income then what we will see is heading to is war and destruction. if you look today: most jobs are in areas that are useless or harmful to society: advertising (an industry that creates dissatisfaction), financial products creating fictional capital and of course war. also most products could last much longer then they do..etc.. also think of the ecological footprint of the useless crap.

3.) so if we do not want to wake up in an even more distyopian world we better make sure that we compensate the productivity gains with working less hours and demanding more money and fighting for a universal basic income..

100% agree. its already in the manifesto: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm

.. In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity — the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property

it is the vibration of the quartz crystal that generates the clock frequency.... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_clock#Mechanism

the real problem is that this "half-state" gives you the worst of both sides...so we should go forward and have more integration and a simpler system with one central parliament... mond

we run our 320 core cluster on debian squeeze. infiniband support out of the box. the gridengine is a mater of apt.-get install. comes with tons of scientific sofware.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_equivalent_dose from the article:

Bananas are radioactive—But they aren't a good way to explain radiation exposure. When you eat a banana, your body's level of Potassium-40 doesn't increase. You just get rid of some excess Potassium-40. The net dose of a banana is zero.

and

Many common artificial radioisotopes are categorically more dangerous than the type of radioisotope naturally in bananas, even if the equivalent dose (Sv) is reported as the same. Nuclear power accidents tends to release radioiodine, which is known to be especially dangerous to children because it concentrates in the thyroid gland. Other radioisotopes may accumulate in the lung. The dose from potassium in bananas is less harmful because it is distributed more evenly throughout the body, and does not accumulate.

i might loose some carma points for pointing this out on a /., though.

i think the default is that it runs 5000 rounds of that hash for your passwords. if you are really paranoid like me then put something like this in your /etc/pam.d/common-passwd
password required pam_unix.so nullok obscure min=8 max=20 sha512 rounds=250000
this needs a few seconds on a 2.5Ghz AMD. so you should be safe against dictionary attacks as long has your password is not 12345678 or april1

http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_pri_per_cap-crime-prisoners-per-capita

• no 1 United States: 715 per 100,000 people
• no 2 Russia: 584 per 100,000 people
• ...
• no 91 Italy: 100 per 100,000 people
• no 93 Germany: 96 per 100,000 people
• ...
• no 126 Japan: 54 per 100,000 people
• ...

...you insensitive clod.

Government operates by forcibly taking money from one person and giving it to another person or organization

where of course you assume that the person who had the money in the first place really deserved to have it. but a lot of persons today earn money without doing any useful work (e.g. they work for advertisment - creating artificial needs) or by doing harmful work (creating weapons, destroying the environment, etc...) or doing no work at all (just cashing in on their portfolio). the reason why some can earn a lot of money for nothing is in our system of society. this is an artificial system of laws and rules and it allows some to take the money from other persons without giving them anything useful in return.

so taking the money from people that have that money because of some artificial rules by an other rule (the tax system) is just one way to try to compensate the many faults of the capitalist system.....

mond