Hey, speaking of rhetoric, the whole public school failing thing is rhetoric. Rhetoric produced by people in the name of FUD and school vouchers. (Also, if you think a $7,000 voucher is going to get little Joe Underprivileged in the same school as Billy Gates IV, you're out of your goddamn mind.)

But wait! Everybody knows that the public school system in this country is a dismal failure. Everybody says so and it's in the news constantly. Nooope. Everybody thinks it's *someone else's* public schools that suck. Actual approval parents have for their childs public school is quite high. You want to see the power of rhetoric though: here it is.

You're wasting your breath. Despite supposedly using Linux for three and a half years, he blames a Qt bug on POSIX and has such a hard time wrapping his head around the concept of multiple paste buffers that it's a "fundamental issue."

Linux has its fair share of problems and idiosyncrasies, but this guy is whining because the car has a weird third pedal and there's no D on the stick thingy between the seats. Not gonna get it.

Minor nitpick... fascist corporatism in this limited context is the opposite of syndicalism. It is an inherently top down economic model where government and corporate interest regulate labor and production. Syndicalism is by definition a bottom up model where trade unions and labor control production. I therefore assume you meant "statist collectivism."

I love your sig by the way, and my apologies for unleashing my inner pedant.

This is the first I've heard of it. Looks like a busy news day. I just checked the firehose and also learned that SCO is suing IBM, Jon Katz has strong, poorly written opinions about things he doesn't understand and high school graduation is COMING UP!!!!!!

But seriously, I hope they 'accidentally' delay things again and copies of the game just magically rain from the sky like on June 20th.

> Let's see. When I have a security or performance issue I can...

If you explicitly mention a security issue as a possibility and your first inclination is just to revert to an undoubtedly less-patched state, you do indeed really need to be paying [perhaps someone who isn't in] that stereotype. Even if it's just to keep your images properly updated.

Obviously you don't believe this applies to you, but my primary issue with this article is that it takes one set of a large industry (virtualization) and applies it to UNIX administration as a whole. That is ludicrous. Not only does it ignore that things can happen outside a virtualized instance (what happens when that security issue is on the hypervisor or dom0 or whatever your container-container calls itself?), but it ignores the obvious fact that there are still industries with customer facing servers, virtualized or not, with SLAs.

When you have four minutes of downtime a month, or even forty, before you start losing money rebooting (ESPECIALLY when the instances have to then boot), "oh just reimage it" isn't really an option. The fall of system administration indeed.

You think so? I know I lose some of my sanity every time I see him.

It is still definitely a safety interlock. You do not live in a vacuum and other people are made unsafe by the decision the device would prevent. The drunk driver is the magnetron, not the fat person, in your analogy. Driving drunk is not smoking weed in your basement; the rights of others are inherently affected.

Though I do generally agree with grandparent that the cost benefit analysis on this wouldn't work out.

ALERT! It turns out that you can disapprove of the status quo and still think another idea will either not improve, or even make things worse.

I think you'll find that everyone who complains about the status quo has some notion of how to improve upon it. Miraculously, some people have different notions on what that improvement should or should not cover and how or how it should not be implemented. Of course, if you'd prefer to be the jackass with The Right Answer, congratulations on your inherent ineffectiveness.

Jackass.

“Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.” --Dijkstra

I agree fundamentally with your premise that the field is innapropriately named, but it seems to me that "algorithm development" is unnecessarily pigeon-holing. I think that somewhat ignores areas of study related to but not covered in "algorithm development" such as grammars, compiler construction, some of the background to graph theory (though this is admittedly more algorithmic), etc.

I submit as an alternative "computational science" or even "computational mathematics." Get rid of the noun/thing, certainly, but keep it with math and sciences, because it is. "Algorithm development" would be more appropriate for engineering or trade school. I can't be the only /.er with a BS in CS that didn't want to be a career programmer.

Maybe I'm missing something, but I still don't see how the argument applies. Sure, if Comcast were shaking down Netflix, I could see how that would be a reasonable line of discussion, but they're not... they're shaking down a Tier 1. Level 3 is surely incurring the cost of the vast majority of the long-haul bandwidth, since, well, they're bloody Level 3.

Combine this with Comcast's profit statements, the rate at which their internet access products are growing in both subscribers and revenue per subscriber, their actual or near monopoly status in virtually all of their service area and, perhaps worst, the obvious fact that they offer competing services. That makes a nice recipe for this-is-just-greed, and it's really horrifying.

Article 1, Section 8, Clause 1.

If there's an immortality tax of "100% of your fertility" you can sign me up. (Though, if impotence and fertility are not fully separated by the IRS, I'll have some thinking to do.) :P

Incidentally, I believe Apple also co-developed the i7. I understand Steve Jobs went to one of those intel commercial shoots and told the actors that they should make a "more better processor, with like... multiple cores and more cache... and like... a laptop one too."

If you're interested, I have another concept where they should make some still faster processors, perhaps on a smaller manufacturing process. I think that'd be really awesome. Also, Apple should make a new phone at some point and maybe a music player with more storage. I'm innovating all over the place. I can't wait for my wikipedia article.

It makes me very, very happy to imagine that you had to actually log in, and type your username, just in order to drop in that quote. Insight and quasi-irony--you win the thread. :)

Well if if my blatantly sarcastic appeal to emotion was that obvious, I guess I'll take the printout of my post off the refrigerator. :(

Yeah, seriously. Nobody ever looks at the positives in this whole thing. Missing connecting flights while your girlfriend and/or mother gets groped by someone who is clearly qualified by the virtue of a high school diploma is a small price to pay for the convenience of hour-and-a-forty-five-minute lines for roller coasters suddenly seeming reasonable. They're exactly like safety doctors... brilliant analogy.