"That sounds suspiciously close to Marx's brain-dead "labor theory of value"."
No, it's fucking Econ 101.
"The value of anything is determined by its buyers and sellers. "
No, the PRICE is determined by buyers and sellers.
Look, guy, let me put it a different way. Here's an example: you go in to Wal-Mart and buy an apple for, say $0.25. Then you go across the street to the Piggly-Wiggly and buy an identical apple for $0.35.
Does one of those two apples have more VALUE to you than the other? No. It is only the PRICE that is different.
I don't think we disagree on content, just on what might have been meant by Andy's post. Especially considering exactly what you said for the reasons you said, making claims of impossibility would indeed be silly.
But this is also what I wrote above. It depends on what you mean by "well".
All *I* meant was that it was possible to make it run well in hardware. If he meant something else, well, fine.
"Also remember that an algorithm isn't just running on any old bit of hardware it's running on a modern CPU with lots of special instructions with a gigantic RAM attached to it and potentially some other peripherals for special functions."
You're merely reinforcing my point. There is somewhere between little and no reason to believe that custom hardware could not run the algorithm better.
As for the word "well", it is open to interpretation. It is certainly possible to make it run well. I would say that "well" is not the right word. It just might not be easy to do it.
"But it's not a good payment network if the value of the payment are not stable."
You're making the same mistake most people make (and the market is making) in regard to the economics of Bitcoin.
In economics, VALUE and PRICE are two different things! The "price" is what it sells for on the market. The "value" is, in general terms, approximately the cost of production and distribution. Since the cost of distribution for Bitcoin is very low, near zero, then the VALUE is approximately equal to the cost of production.
This has nothing to do with the swings in the PRICE of Bitcoin on Wall Street. I mean it should, but apparently it hasn't. Which means: investor beware, you're in an irrational market.
This is how Wall Street destroys some of our best toys. Time to send them home.
"Some C algorithms may never transfer well into a hardware implementation."
This is a fundamentally silly thing to say.
Hardware can be made to implement ANY functioning software. It might not be easy, but it is pretty much by definition possible. It's already running on hardware... it would be very rare indeed for it to not be possible to translate it into even more-efficient hardware, since the hardware it's running on now is general-purpose.
"You are either overestimating the environmental impact of a rocket, or way, way, way underestimating the environmental impact of mining on Earth."
Not necessarily true. What was the rocket fuel? Hydrogen or hydrazine? What was the oxidizer? Oxygen or something else? If it's a solid rocket, what is the propellant? APCP plus HMX or RDX? Butadiene? These aren't necessarily so environmentally friendly.
"Get to orbit, and you're nearly done. The amount of fuel you'll expend getting to an asteroid is just a few extra percent on top of what it took to get to orbit."
But you're neglecting to account for the fact that the last few % you refer to take a LOT more rocket to get there, not just a few % more rocket. That few % extra fuel, from earth to orbit, is PAYLOAD. Add payload, you need to add even more fuel. Add more fuel, you need to add more rocket to hold it. Add more rocket, you need even more fuel...
"I found his criticism to be mellodramatic and uneven."
If anybody is in a position to compare, he is.
"What galls me most is that he criticized the Obama admin. for questioning his generals hard and not accepting their pat answers. Like we're supposed to feel bad when a General in charge of a war gets his feelings hurt?"
No, he didn't. He criticized Obama for being suspicious of his generals. That's a different thing.
"I *expect* strict oversight of the men making the direct decisions about wars, especially the double-boondoggles of Iraq and Afghanistan that Obama was given."
After hundreds of years of experience with bureaucracies, we know micromanagement doesn't work. Obama's place is to make policy decisions, not to stuff his hands down their underwear to read the label.
And Gates was critical of Petraus. Where is the argument?
"Where was Gates's keen eye there? Did he admit *any* actual mistakes?"
Considering that he was discussing two presidential administrations, why should he be admitting to mistakes? He wasn't talking about himself at all. If you asked him about himself, maybe he would admit to mistakes. But that wasn't the subject under discussion.
All in all, Gates' description fits with what I've read from just about everybody else: the Obama administration is even worse, in most ways, than the Bush administration was, and Obama himself is a suspicious, self-indulgent, narcissistic man.
"Hardly "rarely needed" and "within the current coldsnap" either, if you live somewhere, where the weather gets below -10C(14F), a block heater will help you immensely. Especially with the self-programmable timers, for a normal auto."
I have lived in such an area most of my life. Very few people have or use block heaters.
I repeat: I didn't say they weren't useful. I stated that they are rarely NEEDED.
"No it's not the "right amount" it's the proper type, and the proper mixture, and corrosive state of the antifreeze, not to mention the right level. Which is double true for closed loop systems."
Oh, for Christ's sake. Are you arguing for the sake of arguing, or what? None of this contradicts with what I stated earlier. If you want to have an argument, why don't you go argue with somebody who disagrees with you? You might find it more fulfilling.
"And prevent damage to the engine itself, since the vast majority of vehicles don't pump oil before starting, increasing viscosity even a small amount reduces wear."
I am aware of what they are good for. I wrote that they were rarely "needed". It was my understanding that the whole context of this was the big "cold snap". And unless the weather is very cold, research I read a long time ago, when engines did not last as long as they do now, said that the cost of using a block heater is probably greater than the costs associated with the wear on engines that otherwise occurs. For a normal automobile, that is.
I also stated that you needed to have the "right" amount of antifreeze in your coolant. So... I am not sure I understand. Are you arguing with me? If so, about what?
"The most often used languages are C++, Java, C#, PHP, Javascript, Objective C. All of these look a lot like C."
Huh? Obviously the C-based languages do. I'm not an idiot.
As for the others, I dispute this very much. PHP "resembles" C? In what universe? And Java? Hardly.
"About the only most commonly used languages that don't are SQL and Visual Basic."
Nonsense. Look at what the most commonly used languages are today. (And anybody who tries to use SQL as a "general purpose" language probably IS an idiot.)
What about Lisp? What about Pascal (Delphi)? What about Python or Ruby?
And as for "popularity", you have to take that graph with a grain of salt. Github might be a decent indicator of popularity, but Stack Overflow is a weak one, if at all. All THAT traffic is about problems. The number of problems with a language, I daresay, is only a weak indicator of its popularity. I mean ActionScript? Really? Who in their right mind would include ActionScript as among the most "popular" languages?
Yes, you are correct. It was the NA merger that was the turning point, not Intel. Still, the point is that it was the corporate takeovers that hurt these products.
And I agree... cryptography shouldn't rely on the fact that most people won't go on a treasure hunt to find the key.
" also learned the bigger part of x86 assembly from Peter Norton's book."
Man, I had forgotten about that book. I didn't learn assembly from it (I did that in school) but I had it as a reference. Just recently, as I was going through things in storage, I donated it to a local charity. I haven't done any x86 assembly in a very long time.
Block heaters are great, often especially if you want to put them on a timer, to make starting easier. But they are rarely needed except where the thermometer routinely goes below 0 degrees F.
Keep the right amount of antifreeze in your coolant, occasionally use a little bit of Heet in your gas (unless it already has ethanol in it), and you're good to go in most parts of the U.S.
"The biggest failure of the Constitution is that the Supremes can say that 'red is green,' and the only remedy is revolution. It's also a matter of the Feds deciding what the Feds can do."
No, this too is incorrect.
Probably the biggest historical sources for the true meaning of the Constitution lies in the ratification debates, etc... where you see what the Founders actually said those words meant.
The Supreme Court was not intended to be the "last word" on Constitutionality. It was only supposed to rule on whether what the other branches of government did. It was acknowledged that the States themselves (since it was their own power that they were "delegating" to the central government) would retain their positions as "the ultimate arbiters" of whether the government acted according to "the Constitutional mandate" that gave it power in the first place.
This is the basis for "state nullification" of Federal law. You can read about it in particular in Madison's "Report of 1800" before the Virginia legislature. In regard to the Supreme Court, he wrote the following (in which "the parties" he refers to are the States, and the "compact" is the agreement between them, i.e., the Constitution):
"But it is objected that the judicial authority is to be regarded as the sole expositor of the Constitution in the last resort; and it may be asked for what reason the declaration by the General Assembly, supposing it to be theoretically true, could be required at the present day and in so solemn a manner.
"On this objection it might be observed, first, that there may be instances of usurped power which the forms of the Constitution would never draw within the control of the judicial department; secondly, that if the decision of the judiciary be raised above the authority of the sovereign parties to the Constitution, the decisions of the other departments, not carried by the forms of the Constitution before the judiciary, must be equally authoritative and final with the decisions of that department. But the proper answer to the objection is, that the resolution of the General Assembly relates to those great and extraordinary cases in which all the forms of the Constitution may prove ineffectual against infractions dangerous to the essential rights of the parties to it. The resolution supposes that dangerous powers not delegated may not only be usurped and executed by the other departments, but that the judicial department also may exercise or sanction dangerous powers beyond the grant of the Constitution; and consequently that the ultimate right of the parties to the Constitution to judge whether the compact has been dangerously violated must extend to violations by one delegated authority as well as by another, by the judiciary as well as by the executive or the legislature.
"However true therefore it may be that the judicial department is, in all questions submitted to it by the forms of the Constitution, to decide in the last resort, this resort must necessarily be deemed the last in relation to the authorities of the other departments of the government; not in relation to the rights of the parties to the constitutional compact, from which the judicial as well as the other departments hold their delegated trusts. On any other hypothesis, the delegation of judicial power would annul the authority delegating it; and the concurrence of this department with the others in usurped powers might subvert forever, and beyond the possible reach of any rightful remedy, the very Constitution which all were instituted to preserve."
In other words: (A) the Federal government (of which the Supreme Court is a part) was never intended to be able to decide its own power, (B) the Supreme Court is no more immune to power grabbing than anybody else, and therefore (C) the States would retain the power to nullify the Feds when they overstepped.
States have been using this power for over 200 years. In very recent year
Slashdot Mirror
"That sounds suspiciously close to Marx's brain-dead "labor theory of value"."
No, it's fucking Econ 101.
"The value of anything is determined by its buyers and sellers. "
No, the PRICE is determined by buyers and sellers.
Look, guy, let me put it a different way. Here's an example: you go in to Wal-Mart and buy an apple for, say $0.25. Then you go across the street to the Piggly-Wiggly and buy an identical apple for $0.35.
Does one of those two apples have more VALUE to you than the other? No. It is only the PRICE that is different.
I don't give people my exact location on /.
I've had some problems with people getting just a bit too interested in details about me. I am sure you understand.
I don't think we disagree on content, just on what might have been meant by Andy's post. Especially considering exactly what you said for the reasons you said, making claims of impossibility would indeed be silly.
But this is also what I wrote above. It depends on what you mean by "well".
All *I* meant was that it was possible to make it run well in hardware. If he meant something else, well, fine.
It wasn't about "better". GP's comment was that it couldn't be made to run "well". It certainly can be made to run well.
*I* was the one who said it wouldn't necessarily be "easy."
"Also remember that an algorithm isn't just running on any old bit of hardware it's running on a modern CPU with lots of special instructions with a gigantic RAM attached to it and potentially some other peripherals for special functions."
You're merely reinforcing my point. There is somewhere between little and no reason to believe that custom hardware could not run the algorithm better.
As for the word "well", it is open to interpretation. It is certainly possible to make it run well. I would say that "well" is not the right word. It just might not be easy to do it.
"But it's not a good payment network if the value of the payment are not stable."
You're making the same mistake most people make (and the market is making) in regard to the economics of Bitcoin.
In economics, VALUE and PRICE are two different things! The "price" is what it sells for on the market. The "value" is, in general terms, approximately the cost of production and distribution. Since the cost of distribution for Bitcoin is very low, near zero, then the VALUE is approximately equal to the cost of production.
This has nothing to do with the swings in the PRICE of Bitcoin on Wall Street. I mean it should, but apparently it hasn't. Which means: investor beware, you're in an irrational market.
This is how Wall Street destroys some of our best toys. Time to send them home.
Well, "far" is relative. I'm not that close, either.
I didn't say it didn't happen. But you have to admit that it's pretty rare, where many people are.
I'm not that far from Great Falls, myself.
"Some C algorithms may never transfer well into a hardware implementation."
This is a fundamentally silly thing to say.
Hardware can be made to implement ANY functioning software. It might not be easy, but it is pretty much by definition possible. It's already running on hardware... it would be very rare indeed for it to not be possible to translate it into even more-efficient hardware, since the hardware it's running on now is general-purpose.
"You are either overestimating the environmental impact of a rocket, or way, way, way underestimating the environmental impact of mining on Earth."
Not necessarily true. What was the rocket fuel? Hydrogen or hydrazine? What was the oxidizer? Oxygen or something else? If it's a solid rocket, what is the propellant? APCP plus HMX or RDX? Butadiene? These aren't necessarily so environmentally friendly.
"Get to orbit, and you're nearly done. The amount of fuel you'll expend getting to an asteroid is just a few extra percent on top of what it took to get to orbit."
But you're neglecting to account for the fact that the last few % you refer to take a LOT more rocket to get there, not just a few % more rocket. That few % extra fuel, from earth to orbit, is PAYLOAD. Add payload, you need to add even more fuel. Add more fuel, you need to add more rocket to hold it. Add more rocket, you need even more fuel...
Why do you think the Saturn 5 was so damned big?
"I found his criticism to be mellodramatic and uneven."
If anybody is in a position to compare, he is.
"What galls me most is that he criticized the Obama admin. for questioning his generals hard and not accepting their pat answers. Like we're supposed to feel bad when a General in charge of a war gets his feelings hurt?"
No, he didn't. He criticized Obama for being suspicious of his generals. That's a different thing.
"I *expect* strict oversight of the men making the direct decisions about wars, especially the double-boondoggles of Iraq and Afghanistan that Obama was given."
After hundreds of years of experience with bureaucracies, we know micromanagement doesn't work. Obama's place is to make policy decisions, not to stuff his hands down their underwear to read the label.
"In the case of General Petraus, he damn well needed to be questioned, disrespectfully even, because of this whole mess: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petraeus_scandal"
And Gates was critical of Petraus. Where is the argument?
"Where was Gates's keen eye there? Did he admit *any* actual mistakes?"
Considering that he was discussing two presidential administrations, why should he be admitting to mistakes? He wasn't talking about himself at all. If you asked him about himself, maybe he would admit to mistakes. But that wasn't the subject under discussion.
All in all, Gates' description fits with what I've read from just about everybody else: the Obama administration is even worse, in most ways, than the Bush administration was, and Obama himself is a suspicious, self-indulgent, narcissistic man.
Seriously. A plain old Safe Deposit Box, at a bank. (Not "Safety Deposit", that's a misnomer.)
You will likely have plenty of paperwork to tell you what bank you have. Further, you should have old bills for the box rental.
Also, Safe Deposit keys tend to look rather distinctive, and they are stamped with the number.
You seem to have missed SleazyRidr's point. We were discussing "widespread adoption". That generally comes some time AFTER "projects starting off".
I was speaking of the future. But even now, if they want lots of beta testers, pre-compiled binaries are still the way to get more people involved.
"I don't know if he's arguing with you but I will."
Why? Nothing YOU are saying there contradicts what I was saying, either.
"Antifreeze, will indeed, freeze."
Sure. The recommended mixture for automobiles will freeze. If you're in an area where it gets below -45 F.
The pure stuff doesn't freeze until it gets to about -74F. But good luck finding any. Or for that matter, finding a place that's -74F in the U.S.
"Hardly "rarely needed" and "within the current coldsnap" either, if you live somewhere, where the weather gets below -10C(14F), a block heater will help you immensely. Especially with the self-programmable timers, for a normal auto."
I have lived in such an area most of my life. Very few people have or use block heaters.
I repeat: I didn't say they weren't useful. I stated that they are rarely NEEDED.
"No it's not the "right amount" it's the proper type, and the proper mixture, and corrosive state of the antifreeze, not to mention the right level. Which is double true for closed loop systems."
Oh, for Christ's sake. Are you arguing for the sake of arguing, or what? None of this contradicts with what I stated earlier. If you want to have an argument, why don't you go argue with somebody who disagrees with you? You might find it more fulfilling.
"And prevent damage to the engine itself, since the vast majority of vehicles don't pump oil before starting, increasing viscosity even a small amount reduces wear."
I am aware of what they are good for. I wrote that they were rarely "needed". It was my understanding that the whole context of this was the big "cold snap". And unless the weather is very cold, research I read a long time ago, when engines did not last as long as they do now, said that the cost of using a block heater is probably greater than the costs associated with the wear on engines that otherwise occurs. For a normal automobile, that is.
I also stated that you needed to have the "right" amount of antifreeze in your coolant. So... I am not sure I understand. Are you arguing with me? If so, about what?
"The most often used languages are C++, Java, C#, PHP, Javascript, Objective C. All of these look a lot like C."
Huh? Obviously the C-based languages do. I'm not an idiot.
As for the others, I dispute this very much. PHP "resembles" C? In what universe? And Java? Hardly.
"About the only most commonly used languages that don't are SQL and Visual Basic."
Nonsense. Look at what the most commonly used languages are today. (And anybody who tries to use SQL as a "general purpose" language probably IS an idiot.)
What about Lisp? What about Pascal (Delphi)? What about Python or Ruby?
And as for "popularity", you have to take that graph with a grain of salt. Github might be a decent indicator of popularity, but Stack Overflow is a weak one, if at all. All THAT traffic is about problems. The number of problems with a language, I daresay, is only a weak indicator of its popularity. I mean ActionScript? Really? Who in their right mind would include ActionScript as among the most "popular" languages?
Yes, you are correct. It was the NA merger that was the turning point, not Intel. Still, the point is that it was the corporate takeovers that hurt these products.
And I agree... cryptography shouldn't rely on the fact that most people won't go on a treasure hunt to find the key.
" also learned the bigger part of x86 assembly from Peter Norton's book."
Man, I had forgotten about that book. I didn't learn assembly from it (I did that in school) but I had it as a reference. Just recently, as I was going through things in storage, I donated it to a local charity. I haven't done any x86 assembly in a very long time.
And in most cases, you don't even need them.
Block heaters are great, often especially if you want to put them on a timer, to make starting easier. But they are rarely needed except where the thermometer routinely goes below 0 degrees F.
Keep the right amount of antifreeze in your coolant, occasionally use a little bit of Heet in your gas (unless it already has ethanol in it), and you're good to go in most parts of the U.S.
"The biggest failure of the Constitution is that the Supremes can say that 'red is green,' and the only remedy is revolution. It's also a matter of the Feds deciding what the Feds can do."
No, this too is incorrect.
Probably the biggest historical sources for the true meaning of the Constitution lies in the ratification debates, etc... where you see what the Founders actually said those words meant.
The Supreme Court was not intended to be the "last word" on Constitutionality. It was only supposed to rule on whether what the other branches of government did. It was acknowledged that the States themselves (since it was their own power that they were "delegating" to the central government) would retain their positions as "the ultimate arbiters" of whether the government acted according to "the Constitutional mandate" that gave it power in the first place.
This is the basis for "state nullification" of Federal law. You can read about it in particular in Madison's "Report of 1800" before the Virginia legislature. In regard to the Supreme Court, he wrote the following (in which "the parties" he refers to are the States, and the "compact" is the agreement between them, i.e., the Constitution):
"But it is objected that the judicial authority is to be regarded as the sole expositor of the Constitution in the last resort; and it may be asked for what reason the declaration by the General Assembly, supposing it to be theoretically true, could be required at the present day and in so solemn a manner.
"On this objection it might be observed, first, that there may be instances of usurped power which the forms of the Constitution would never draw within the control of the judicial department; secondly, that if the decision of the judiciary be raised above the authority of the sovereign parties to the Constitution, the decisions of the other departments, not carried by the forms of the Constitution before the judiciary, must be equally authoritative and final with the decisions of that department. But the proper answer to the objection is, that the resolution of the General Assembly relates to those great and extraordinary cases in which all the forms of the Constitution may prove ineffectual against infractions dangerous to the essential rights of the parties to it. The resolution supposes that dangerous powers not delegated may not only be usurped and executed by the other departments, but that the judicial department also may exercise or sanction dangerous powers beyond the grant of the Constitution; and consequently that the ultimate right of the parties to the Constitution to judge whether the compact has been dangerously violated must extend to violations by one delegated authority as well as by another, by the judiciary as well as by the executive or the legislature.
"However true therefore it may be that the judicial department is, in all questions submitted to it by the forms of the Constitution, to decide in the last resort, this resort must necessarily be deemed the last in relation to the authorities of the other departments of the government; not in relation to the rights of the parties to the constitutional compact, from which the judicial as well as the other departments hold their delegated trusts. On any other hypothesis, the delegation of judicial power would annul the authority delegating it; and the concurrence of this department with the others in usurped powers might subvert forever, and beyond the possible reach of any rightful remedy, the very Constitution which all were instituted to preserve."
In other words: (A) the Federal government (of which the Supreme Court is a part) was never intended to be able to decide its own power, (B) the Supreme Court is no more immune to power grabbing than anybody else, and therefore (C) the States would retain the power to nullify the Feds when they overstepped.
States have been using this power for over 200 years. In very recent year
"Norton is pretty bad right now."
Yes. It sure is. I stopped using it or recommending it about 2 years, more or less, after Symantec bought that company. That was a long time ago.
When it was actually being run by Peter Norton, it was great.
Time:
"You've served four Presidents. How bad is the discord in D.C.?"
Greenspan:
"Clearly the problem is with the Republican Party. If you make every issue uncompromisable, you cannot have laws."
This is just plain hilarious! The Republicans were trying to fight the same BAD things Greenspan talks about on that same page!
He's trying to have it both ways. No points.
"Greenspan was and is bought and owned by the banks."
I know this. How does that make me an idiot? I was pointing these things out to others... it's not something that came as a surprise to ME.
People should never forget that the Fed is a collection of private banks, and should never expect the Fed to actually act in their interest.
Spoonerism? That would make it "Sungian" or "Gunjian", whichever way you were looking at it. I don't see it.