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Comment perl (Score 1) 390

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.

Comment most jobs are already useless or harmful (Score 2) 456

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.

Comment where does all the extra productivity go? (Score 1) 409

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..

Comment Re:It's called "Capitalism" (Score 2) 674

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

Comment Night trips (Score 1) 648

Forget working or web surfing while the car drives you somewhere... why even be conscious and have to remember the time it takes to get somewhere?

I want self-driving sleeper cars.

Everywhere within 8 hours drive would be just a night's sleep away. Get off work on Friday, sleep, wake up in some mid-point town with a dozen friends from different cities, party for the weekend, as I sleep Sunday night the car gets me back to where I work.

Numerous social and economic knock-on effects follow from self-driving sleeper cars.

NASA

U.S. In Danger of Losing Earth-Observing Satellite Capability 258

New submitter crazyjj writes "As reported in Wired, a recent National Research Council report indicates a growing concern for NASA, the NOAA, and USGS. While there are currently 22 Earth-observing satellites in orbit, this number is expected to drop to as low as six by the year 2020. The U.S. relies on this network of satellites for weather forecasting, climate change data, and important geologic and oceanographic information. As with most things space and NASA these days, the root cause is funding cuts. The program to maintain this network was funded at $2 billion as recently as 2002, but has since been scaled back to a current funding level of $1.3 billion, with only two replacement satellites having definite launch dates."

Comment In the words of one of my inspirations... (Score 1) 1521

"Good night, and good luck..."

Don't like the new layout, the editors screw up far too often, the polls have become eerily akin to the marketing polls that pop up from time to time in the right column on Facebook, and my list of complaints goes on - but for all of that, I stick around because at its heart Slashdot has been one tech geek's blog about stuff he finds interesting. With Rob gone though, I honestly don't know how much longer I'll be reading. Emo as it sounds, CmdrTaco is the heart of this place, and without him there is the very real possibility that it will become (even more of) a shell of what it once was. For now I'm gonna dutifully keep my homepage set to "http://slashdot.org" in Opera and Firefox, and hope it stays that way. We'll see.

Rob, thanks for all those years of doling out news for us nerds; as much as we all whine and bitch, I think I can safely speak for the majority when I say that in the end we still appreciate it. To conclude, only two words exist that adequately express the solemnity and gravity of this event:

OMG!!! PONIES!!11

Comment Banana equivalent dose (Score 2, Informative) 256

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.

Comment for the paranoid: sha512 rounds=250000 (Score 1) 409

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
Image

Oregon To Let Students Use Spell Check on State Exams 235

Starting in 2011, the Oregon Department of Education will let students spell check their work before submitting state exams. From the article: "The move is supposed to help the assessments focus less on typos and more on their writing skills. 'We are not letting a student's keyboarding skills get in the way of being able to judge their writing ability,' said state Superintendent Susan Castillo. 'As we're using technology to improve what we're doing with assessments as a nation, we believe that spell check will be one of those tools.'"

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