they transform his life-time into working-time

I would love to be a fly on the wall when the ghost of proletariats-future explains to Karl how "now trending in the proletariat zeitgeist of the year 2015" is incessant chatter about why there's still so little content available in 4k.

Karl: What's 4k?

Ghost [glancing furtively at iWatch appointment calendar]: Ahhhh, we have a little bit of catching up to do, don't we? How about we just leave that unanswered for now and call it a night?

Anyone who doesn't bother to understand how a 401(k) works deserves the penalties they get.

Aside from being the reincarnation of Marie Antoinette, you're probably one of those guys who mainly eats berries, nuts, and seeds because the paleolithic digestive system has not yet caught up with modern living.

I suggest you pack a copy of the American tax code dealing with the 401(k) into a time machine (if it will fit) and t-fax it back to Leibniz or Goethe or Voltaire or Darwin for a second opinion concerning it's common-man sex appeal.

OS X on the Mac has FAR more chance of attracting interest from Joe Consumer than Linux does.

You would think, and then Apple decides to solder the RAM onto the Mac Mini and the Mini I can buy today configured as close to identical to my buddy's Mac Mini from several years ago (quad core i7, SSD, upgraded to 16 GB) costs half a grand CAD more today than it did then.

Because of this stupid speed bump, the small office where I'm presently working went back to Windows in a recent IT refresh after we had all pretty much convinced ourselves to make the collective jump to OS X.

Maybe we could have made the initial outlay work at 8 GB per machine instead of 16 GB (saving ourselves CAD $240 per machine) but then we would have ended up with boxes permanently capped at 8 GB.

If we were certain out company would double in size over the next two years, we could have handed the RAM-crippled Mac Minis off to junior staff and brought in another wave of less-crippled Minis at that time for the regulars.

Wouldn't it all have been so simple if we had an Apple-like certainty concerning our future staffing levels and revenue growth?

Just think, we could have used the Mini as a corporate status symbol to keep new employees in their proper place, instead of having a culture where an employee says "hey, I need to test drive all these memory heavy apps to get my work done, can we rush out and get me some fat sticks at a fair street price?" (In our shop, we tend to run beefy compute on actual servers, which is where we'll spend the money saved on the client side.)

No wait!

Using RAM-crippled hand-me-downs could have negative impact on corporate culture. I know! We'll give everyone an identical, over-speced OS X mini tower so no-one complains.

No wait, second edition!

We'll get a pickup truck full of cheap-ass used Windows 7 boxes with four memory slots each and treat them as interchangeable and disposable. Then when we're back in a revenue-positive situation, we'll take a look at the post-Skylake landscape to see whether Apple has regained its sanity.

Contrary to what you believe, its not meant to replace RAM, its meant to replace spinning rust.

Try turning your technology map right side up.

The word "the" is a notorious trickster.

They say "running away from the consequences" when what they really mean is "running away from one particular set of consequences where we get all the photo ops wearing the stick".

The problem with this image is that greater society doesn't usually hand the stick to men wearing B&W, pin-stiped, double-breasted pygamas. He who breaks the law finds the stick slippery.

The consequences is presently enduring are already pretty unpleasant: notoriety he can never live down, and de facto house arrest without so much as a landlord-tenant act to protect his interests.

I'd also suggest that his marriage, family, and career prospects are not what they once were.

Of course, the vast majority of the American population would jump at the chance to throw over marriage, family, and career for the least chance to stick it to The Man, so we better add another heaping helping of grim before all hell breaks loose.

COW filesystems would have no problem with that scenario, especially when they have dynamic block sizes.

What file system do you have in mind? It's certainly not ZFS.

Furthermore, supporting dynamic block size poses real problems for efficient random access. For this reason, almost all file systems support fixed-size payload blocks, and only provide for dynamic on-disk storage size after compression.

If you have any clue what you're talking about, this file system technology is news to me.

yet most people somehow attribute to "whore" a worse meaning

Somehow?

Our market-value vigilance over who is zooming whom dates back a good six-million years.

Nowadays we get more upset when someone unworthy buys a home on our street, but the underlying sentiments were once the same.

This modern "whore" make-over as a small proprietor with high integrity is primarily a byproduct of dense urbanization, where there's an infinite number of fish in the sea to whitewash our old instincts—instincts pre-dating fire, language, cities, and agriculture.

"Somehow" you sound like you just fell off the turnip truck, five minutes ago.

That is, the Australian government has $498 billion to spend on whatever, but Walmart gives most of its $468 billion on suppliers.

That's the least comprehension of "whatever" I've ever seen. But you're not first. It's a 100,000-way tie.

The vast majority of government expenditures are written into law, and the benefits go right back to the same people who provided the revenues. A government enjoys great discretion in how it expends, but not much discretion at all concerning what it expends upon.

Certainly in the circular flow, the government's "friends" skim a lot of cream. And why shouldn't they? They're all upstanding businessmen (and businesswomen) engaged in the profit motive, possessed of the oldest, most conservative, barnyard business model:

1) Pick winning horse.
2) Milk cow.

No, you have Margaret Wente of the Globe and Mail, so I think consider the source is alive and well.

She's the Alfred E. Neuman of why the bees collapsed in the first place. What, me worry?

In this very article, she's right up there with Ronald Reagan saying "Trees cause more pollution than automobiles do."

Do trees pollute the atmosphere?

In hot weather, trees release volatile organic hydrocarbons including terpenes and isoprenes - two molecules linked to photochemical smog. In very hot weather, the production of these begins to accelerate.

True, but it's all part of a long-term biological equilibrium that didn't seem horrible until after industrial-scale human pollution was added to the mix as a driving factor. I don't recall Cicero damning the trees.

Here's Wente:

The biggest threats to bees appear to be natural pathogens and varroa mites.

Once again, natural pathogens which the bees have presumably been contending with for thousands of years. I also don't recall Cicero orating on missing bees, or Shelley's ode to a collapsed colony.

If there was a forcing factor, it was probably the dang pesticide, which after all was explicitly designed to kill insects, selectively if possible, but that might be easier said that done.

Her entire piece is written in distractor mode, touching on who is cranky with whom laced with speculation about nefarious or misguided agendas, while she can't even bother herself to distinguish (possible) industrial forcing terms from established biological baselines.

Yes, indeed, consider the source.

The GPL style started having fights in the early 1980s as soon as it came into existence.

You think a license invented with the express agenda to become the one true license might spark controversy right at the outset? Who would have guessed?

I've always liked the GPL (v3 not as much). And I've always hated the notion that it was anything more just another license.

The reality is that others might choose to behave in thousands of different ways, the vast majority of which should be none of my business.

The art of regulation is to limit specific freedoms in order to grease other freedoms. In a free market economy, the principle purpose of (good) regulation is to ensure that ever venture has a graceful failure mode (i.e. that a bad aftermath of bad decision making doesn't effectively socialize risk). The secret of the free market is the graceful failure mode. Nice try, GreedCorp, sorry it didn't work out for you, please play again (uh, no, we're not dipping into the public purse to clean up your mess, but we will be pursuing your former stakeholders to accomplish the same.).

I swing towards a libertarian position on the issue of the GPL. I don't see any necessary reason to inflate the concept of "freedom" to include this additional public good.

Futhermore, the concept of "software" as distinct from other forms of property never worked for me. Information is a spectrum for all of us, from the most personal to the least personal. Software lives all across that spectrum.

Footnote

90% of everything is crap. Regulation is no different, here. The problem is that bad regulation has the power of law, and is a harder class of crap to prudently ignore.

What needs to happen politically is that regulation needs to have a test suite. When regulation starts to fail items in the test suite, the courts should become leery about imposing sanctions. The constitution (in countries who pay any attention to the ones they have) already functions as a kind of last-resort test suite, but I think we can do better.

In fact, perhaps legislation should begin by writing the test suite before they write the legislation itself. Even better if there is a separation of electoral term.

The unofficial official FreeBSD security posture: two layers, where the outer layer has a singular purpose in life.

Protecting sshd using spiped

Like many system administrators, I used to restrict access to port tcp/22 on most of my servers based on source IP address; this provided some protection from "zero-day" exploits against OpenSSH, as well as eliminating the annoying "log spam" caused by brute force attacks. This worked fine as long as I always connected from the same location, but heading off to conferences meant that I needed to either tunnel SSH connections over other SSH connections or make temporary changes to my firewall rules.

I let my Linux Mint desktop slide way out of the support envelop while I waited for PC-BSD to become a viable replacement. I had a single FreeBSD machine running ZFS as my server, which had been rock solid, but I'd never run a BSD desktop before. Then in a single week it was "BSD everywhere" on my home network.

I embrace change on my own terms (which is not change caused by the Gnome developers becoming bored of their own architecture, or Canonical deciding that tablets are the new shit). PC-BSD features boot environments. This amounts to an "undo" key for your operating system. Batch patch? Nuke the fucker.

I can temporize for years, then jump in with both boots if the time seems right.

It's one of the worst things about computing culture that we still collectively tolerate: the notion that capability upgrades are welded at the hip to work flow "innovation". Install a new OS, you're guaranteed to get a mixture of both.

I'd vastly prefer the tick-tock model as practised by Intel (or the alternating new airframe / new engine model as practised by Boeing) where releases that muck with the established user interface change no underlying features / capabilities at all (so the only reason anyone installs the GUI refactor release is because you actually want to partake in the bling rebinding).

Hopefully BSD won't someday lose its mind like Linux did, in which your trusty tighty-whities suddenly becomes a full-body support corset (with no-one asked). Personally, I can handle the change from tighty-whities to rc.d boxer shorts just fine, thank you very much.

Do we really want the advertising revenue stream to disappear for content developers and for all internet content to be behind paywalls?

If we view advertising as a net negative burden on cognition and productivity (there's scientific literature to support this view), and explicit, informed choice as a net human asset (there's virulent ideology to support this view), I'd have to say "yes".

The wheel-house of our lizard brain appears to be managing our past and future sexual entanglements. I personally suspect it doesn't do much else well at all. It used to have other valuable functions, but these have all been subverted. Dracula, modern society's founding mythology of lizard brain vs alluring predator, has now brought us the Twilight franchise.

Paywall or tweewall, name your poison.

from people being employed in the areas had nothing to do with more people going to hospitals

The proper experimental control is to take three regions that went from no fracking to fracking, and three other regions that went from no fracking-like revenue to a fracking-similar amount of fracking-like revenue so as to match the upticks in net employment.

Obviously for natural experiments, this is not always easy to pull off (and your detractors will necessarily claim you didn't succeed no matter how far you go).

So why don't you just cut to the chase and declare that all natural experiments are moist excrement? Is there any standard for a controlled natural experiment you'd actually accept? From the structure of your comment I suspect not, as you never once mention the caliber of controls actually used (which is, for maximal troll-seed efficiency, entirely beneath the notice of those who reject the entire category).

Done right, I view this as a form of agile econometrics. First you see what clears the fence under modest controls, before gold-plating round two.

On the other side, blanket cynicism is a crutch of the anti-progressive mindset.

But I suspect that your browser set the character encoding as ISO-8859-1 in its headers.

Drawing an inference from the not-fact that the top of the batting order in every Wikipedia FAQ does not include how to set your user agent to send the right encoding header, I'd suggest that Slashdot's long-disabled Unicode support fell far short of the mark in the first place. (2005 just called. It wants to dissolve its de facto clue-stick monopoly.)

I authored a CJK word processor that ran under MS-DOS in the 1980s and early 1990s. Two of our linguists did our own in-house unification that ended up not so different than Unicode which came later.

At the time that Unicode came out, our largest customer groups were embassies, diplomats (Snowden-style), and other academic linguists (with a strong representation from the Brigham Young young-adult diaspora). Maybe 40% of our new customers in the early 1990s were still running turbo XTs, 286s, and 386 castrati (16 MHz SX of the 16-bit bus resurrected). It takes a long time for the wallet of a dusty academic sinologist to recover from dolling out $5000 in 1985 (true story, many times over). 20-year-old Mormon missionaries where not especially flush, either.

Imagine this as your early-adopter power-user-base for the newly ratified Unicode 1.0 Asian language support.

Many people at the time running Windows 3.11 were running in 4 MB. Multilingual software remained stuck in this grotesquely underpowered rut until the P54 was introduced in the mid-nineties.

It's not just the print and display fonts that were a burden to the software of the day, but the mere Unicode code point tables themselves. 256 KB of code-point mapping tables was the rough equivalent of Google grabbing another 256 MB to process-isolate another browser tab (4 MB then, 4 GB now).

Of course, one can code up a bespoke compression method and clever language subset overlays. I'm sure we invested more man-hours in bespoke compression methods and clever data overlays than Zuckerberg invested in coding up The Facebook, original edition.

It's probably a good thing that Unicode was rushed to fruition, however broken it now appears to be twenty-five years later, before the first release of NCSA Mosaic. Otherwise, Unicode might have been cobbled together Brendan Eich in a succession of 4 a.m. coding binges the week after he pounded out JavaScript.

It's funny that this bug involves typesetting mathematics. If any software was broken with respect to Asian character support, it was surely the original TeX—paragon of infinite breakage that we all now know it to be.

Back in the mid-to-late eighties, the very idea of sprinkling Asian fonts into math display mode would have been delegated to the savant sibling sequestered in Lamport's sound-proof attic.