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Comment Re:Give my my SysVInit (Score 1) 118

That makes complete sense

It does. One thing I noticed back in the day during the big switcheroo is that my Arch laptop (eee 900) started to boot slower when systemd came in. Maybe they fixed that now, this was a while ago but it did not live up to the hype and even its own rationale in that regard originally.

So I'm not saying the reasons behind systemd were poor, but the implementation left something to be desired, it was quite buggy originally (it's mostly been beaten into shape), and quite a lot of it is just really mediocre and opinionated.

Does it work? Mostly. Does it do some stuff that was painful under sysv? Sure. It is good software? Not really.

Comment Re:Industrial scale [percolation?] (Score 1) 73

A coffee snob? Just the human to ask in lieu of an AI (which will just tell me whatever it thinks I want to here).

I've been wondering whatever happened to percolated coffee. I'm guessing it tastes bad, but I didn't start drinking coffee until decades after I last saw a percolator.

Comment Re:Oops! [What could possibly go wrong?] (Score 1) 59

Okay, I think you deserve the Funny mod but I also think it was a weak FP.

Yeah, my Subject is worse, but... The thing that is going wrong is that we are all part of a mad experiment. Some of the people doing the experiment do have good intentions, but the Waymo robotaxi that tries to follow that road... Well, you know where that road goes.

But it's a much bigger problem that the humans controlling the various flavors of the experiment have only one intention: MORE MONEY. They already have more money than any human needs or can possibly use, but they need more money ASAP. I personally rate Thiel and Musk as the top poster children for that madness.

And what is the main experiment? Daily exposure to alien intelligence that too often seems smarter than we are. Not difficult to seem smarter than me in the robotaxi case since I was never a great driver. I'm even remembering a tractor accident in a construction area... Which reminded me of a truck accident involving construction stuff...

Comment Re:Real problems need better solutions (Score 1) 289

Along the lines of the response I might have written if the reply you are replying to was more substantive and cohesive. The inline response format basically lacks sincerity and is mostly used these years to break things out of context in search of cutting responses to "win" the "argument". I only noted one area of possible agreement that might have justified an attempt to respond. I think he [young? MIPSPro with an 8-digit ID] was saying "We can't get there from here", and we would probably agree that "there" is some sort of better place and "here" is the status quo, but the underlying philosophies remain completely incompatible... Dare I say incommensurable? In particular I didn't detect much comprehension of my ideas or any requests for clarification. Rather it sounded like he thought it was a chance to grind his axe and you identified the Libertarian axe.

Comment Re:Quirks (Score 1) 73

What is this devilry?

Never seen one before! Is that basically a filter coffee thing with the filter around all sides for convenience?

My main filter (it's the one at work) is one of these:

https://www.nisbets.co.uk/novo...

It takes a rather large paper filter. Less convenient for one cup, but it'll crank out 12, and keep them warm while cranking out 12 more.

Comment Re:Make it stop (Score 1) 82

Lower cost but not lower risk.

Why are people so I'm live with it? It's worked pretty well so far. Turns out global warming is the massive elephant in the room and will be fast now destructive than all the nuclear accidents including Chernobyl, the weapons ones and everything put together times 100. And all the major economies with lower carbon footprints have substantial nuclear energy in the mix.

Germany is the worst of all the comparable European states.

They are the worst in terms of absolute numbers and the worst in terms of improvement.

What they appear to have is a very good PR campaign based on unrealised future promises.

Is the future nuclear? Probably not too a major extent but to dismiss the efficacy up to now you kind of have to dismiss carbon dioxide as a big problem.

Comment Real problems need better solutions (Score 1) 289

Didn't strike me as a productive FP branch. 'Nuff said.

Back to the story. Seems like a really stupid idea. The destruction of the middle class is a long-term problem. Not going to fix it with a one-time bandage. So let's pretend Slashdot is still a place where solutions can get serious consideration, though my memories of such days are so old as to be dubious. (How many editors where there back then? Down to the last one now...)

The current tax systems seem to favor greedy monopolists. How about pro-freedom taxation in competition with pro-greedom anti-freedom taxation?

One of my (too many) fantasies would be a progressive tax on profits linked to market share and niche dominance. Determining problematic monopolies could use various metrics, but here are three examples: (1) Lack of customer choice, (2) Inability of new competitors to enter the market, and (3) Lack of freedom of employees to move to a competing company. There should be a delay before the higher rates kick in, thus rewarding innovation, but the natural path to higher retained earnings after that time should involve splitting your great company into two or more competing companies. Don't think of it as a tax on success, but rather as a mechanism to make sure the good ideas get propagated into more companies.

A few minor thoughts: One is that mergers that reduce freedom should get no delay time, but should immediately trigger tax rate escalations. Another involves the case of natural monopolies (often related to network effects), where one solution approach would be to use some of the tax revenue to regulate the natural monopoly while funding research into ways to break the natural monopoly.

Your better ideas are quite welcome. Also questions triggered by my poor writing. Unfortunately I anticipate less welcome responses, if any.

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Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon. -- Epigrams in Programming, ACM SIGPLAN Sept. 1982

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