Take a paper airplane. Fold the trailing edge of both wings slightly (either up or down is fine, as long as both wings are folded in the same direction). Launch airplane. Gasp in amazement while your model of physics is obliterated as the plane repeatedly makes 180 degree course changes.
The principles that govern the plane's flight are no different than those that apply to a guided mortar shell.
Another illustrative example: Imagine the barrel of the howitzer is depressed 0.01 arcseconds from vertical (let's assume the howitzer is capable of doing this). It should now be fairly obvious that a guided shell would be able to make a 180 degree course correction.
Again, your original assertion is not based on the law of phyics, but rather poor assumptions about the range of the target and other factors.
Wrong. You are probably making the false assumption that the target is at the maximum range. A shell can easily have enough kinetic energy to correct for a 180 degree error in azimuth if the target is close enough.
What happens in big companies that holds people back? Too much micro-management? Too many meetings? Too much design by committee? Too much political infighting? Too much empire building and idea protecting?
What he means is that there is no legal definition of an 'SRI', and therefore no hard requirements that need to be met for the SRI label to be slapped onto a fund. This gives fund managers a basically unlimited amount of leeway, and turns 'Socially Responsible' into an effectively meaningless buzzword that has the added effect of lowering investor expectations.
Most SRI's, if you study them carefully, either exclude or target a very specific class of ventures. 'Non-evil' is just too broad and vague. This leads to things like funds labelled as a SRI choice because they contain no interests in tobacco and alchohol—a fact that will be loudly proclaimed in all brochures etc.—while quietly investing in a Chinese startup specializing in censorship tech. Another fund may be declared to be SR because it only invests in organic food production, ignoring the fact that the operations in question rely on slash-n-burn farming and/or legions of quasi-slave laborers working for pennies per day.
Also, I can't see how they can guarantee anything down to a single clock cycle, even with extremely hardware-specifc OS running the code. This is truly painful just to think about.
You can't really compare PCs to a console by directly comparing superficial hardware specs like clock speed. Just look at the PS2 for obvious examples.
E.g., do you see any 300mhz PCs with 32mb shared/4mb dedicated vid ram with a 150mhz graphics card playing games that look like FF12?
Pure hardware-hardware comparisons fail to account for the fact that you can optimize the living crap out of console games because you've got a well-defined static hardware target. It's not an exaggeration to say that you can push a console to play games that would otherwise require a PC with over an order of magnitude greater technical specs.
That's actually not as implausible as you'd think. You can use a technique similar to interferometry to derive a much higher resolution still shot from several frames of video.
If what you said was true large portions of the earth should be underwater every summer. Probably not, since one hemisphere's summer is the other's winter...
They only have to share the source if they distribute the software. If the usage is exclusively internal (almost always the case) then they have no obligation to release the source.
... the first lawyer for IBM/RedHat/Novell who cares enough will use article 6 of GPLv2 to declare the extra restrictions of GPLv3 invalid for the new version of the existing program.
That's not how it works. The copyright owner of project Foo can release ver. 1.0 under any license he/she wants to, and you must respect the terms of that license, even if vers. 0.0.01 - 1.0rc97 were under the 'GPLv2+any later revisions' license. Similarly, the developer of project Bar, which depends on Foo, can decide to exercise the 'any later revisions' clause and turn around and release his version of Foo v1.0rc97 (which need not even be modified at all) exclusively under GPLv3, and you cannot use his distribution of Foo under the terms of GPLv2.
Two points to remember here:
The owner of the copyright of the material in question is not subject to the terms of the GPL, even if he released his material under the terms of the GPL
The copyright owner may choose to include a modified license with exceptions to the GPL, such as the popular 'any later revisions' exception. These exceptions supercede the terms of the GPL.
Theft is already restricted. What you're doing is conflating the issue of legality/acceptability with that of enforcement.
'X is bad for freedom, and is therefore not acceptable' does not lead to 'Y restricts X, and is therefore acceptable' for all values of Y. To extend the GP's example scenario, forcing 1984-style surveillance on everyone would easily be the most successful deterrent to freedom-depriving activities—such as kidnapping—in history. That enforcement mechanism itself causes a net loss of freedom, however, so it would be considered to be unacceptable if the philosophical basis for a law against kidnapping was the issue of denial of freedom.
It is important to remember that enforcement mechanisms should not be exempt from being evaluated under the same philosophical framework as the activities they're designed to curtail. The FSF simply realized that a subset of DRM's functionality could be used to curtail copyright violations, but only at the expense of everyone's freedom, and that, for them, the scales were decidedly tipped in favor of everyone's freedom. In short, even though they do not condone copyright violations (hence their aggressive enforcement of the GPL), it does not necessarily follow that they endorse every enforcement mechanism that would help to prevent copyright violations, as the enforcement mechanism itself may violate the same principles as the offending act.
Linus Torvalds, on the other hand, does not necessarily agree with GPLv3 because he is not interested in the freedom of users, just the pragmatic issues that it would raise for developers. He and RMS basically approach (F)OSS from diametric opposites in that respect.
Yes, I can. Earning more does not significantly increase your need for health care, state education, etc., yet socialist policies require you to contribute progressively more to public works the more you earn. The reason, like I said, is that the philosophy behind socialism places more weight on the side of socioeconomic safety for all than socioeconomic freedom.
As for whether or not this translates into better circumstances in reality, take my personal situation as an anecdote. Neither of my parents holds a degree, and neither have ever held a job that paid higher than 150% of the minimum wage, despite the fact that my father has kept the same job for nearly 20 years. We live in a very poor area, and my HS was rated among the worst in the state—and rightly so. I'm currently earning my degree through a scholarship to Harvard. I'm taking some time off from school to help manage the family expenses, and can put far more of the $2000/week that I'm earning as an IT/resource management contractor to paying off family loans than I would have been able to in a more socialist country.
On the other hand, I had to study until 3am basically every night for the last 3 years of high school to make up for the non-education I was receiving from the state, and I regularly work 14 hour days right now. It's definitely not easy, and perhaps I should just kick back and relax a bit more like some of my friends, but at least here I have the option to work hard and see real returns.
I don't believe socialism to be evil—or even wrong—to be honest, it's just that as one of those people who are willing to work hard, I prefer to see proportional compensation for my efforts.
Most of what you say is true, but none of it really addresses my post. I'm well aware that socialism provides better average economic circumstances in return for less economic freedom. That is really the whole point of socialism, because it stems from a philosophy that tips the valuation scale towards socioeconomic safety as opposed to socioeconomic freedom.
My point was that many Americans do not value wealth so much as they place much more value on socioeconomic freedom as opposed to socioeconomic safety than the ggp and apparently you do. It's true that there are higher rates of violent crimes in many areas on the US (not where I grew up, even though it was a very poor area where everyone owned guns (all hunters)), but it's also true that, if I so choose, I can exercise far greater control over my socioeconomic standing than someone from a more socialist country.
Most Americans that I know, myself included, don't measure happiness in wealth. However, wealth is, to a large degree, a measure of your freedom.
In basically any of the situations in which you find yourself during your life, the amount of wealth you have at your disposal determines what options are available to you. You can be perfectly happy living off of the land in a subsistence society, but make no mistake here, choosing to be happy with your circumstances and choosing circumstances that you'll be happy with are two entirely different things. A penniless environmentalist might feel self-righteous waving a cardboard sign at the one annual rally he can afford to drive to, but a rich one can finance a wind farm and perhaps actually make a difference.
How much wealth you want to have is basically a measure of how much you care to tolerate the circumstances of your life being dictated to you.
When you have nothing, you have more drive to succede, and liberal capitalism allows that. If you are born rich, or already rich, what drive is there to create anything new?
I grew up in a poor area, and my family made less than $25k take-home per year, with both my parents working full-time, living in a state with one of the highest COL's in the US. I made it to Harvard on a scholarship by studying so much in HS that I only slept around 4 hours each weekday (and most weekends) from the beginning of my sophomore year up until graduation. People with backgrounds like mine were the vast minority there, and they tended to be far less ambitious than kids born into power.
Given that I went to a high school where over 85% children came from families who were below the poverty level, you would expect them to be the most motivated people in the state. Instead, that school is among the worst in the state by all metrics (from graduation rates and standardized test scores to teen pregnancies).
While poverty can be a strong motivator for a vanishingly small minority, all measurable data indicates that the exact opposite is true for the majority. The poor are far less likely to pursue higher education, more likely to struggle economically throughout the entirety of their lives, and their children are more likely to maintain or drop below their parents' economic status.
When was the last time that you saw news coverage about a millionaire's son being accepted to Harvard? How about a homeless man getting drunk and saying stupid things? Rags-to-riches success stories (e.g., Liz Murray) and lurid pieces on the boorish behavior of the wealthy (e.g., Mel Gibson) are newsworthy because they're exceptional, unlike those two everyday scenarios. Unfortunately, because the exceptions to the norm get a disproportionate amount of media coverage—including in school textbooks—many people tend to get the two terribly confused.
Being poor is, statistically speaking, a massive demotivator, while starting rich has the opposite effect.
The assertion that capitalism must be eliminating the 'rich caste' because the standard of living has been improving assumes a false dichotomy. Even a casual analysis of the economic trends in, say, the US, will show a steadily increasing stratification of society between the rich and everyone else, even as the standard of living has been improving.
The change that capitalism brings is that intelligence becomes the strongest correlation to potential wealth. This actually increases the selection pressure towards divergence of the species along social lines because the social division correlates to a genetically heritable trait and reinforces the tendency for that trait's 'carriers' (for lack of a better term) to select other 'carriers' as mates. In other words, given that, in a western capitalist society:
People tend to marry people within the same socioeconomic class.
People tend to marry people with similar educational backgrounds and levels of intelligence.
Wealthy people tend to be smart.
Smart people tend to be educated.
Educated people tend to be relatively wealthy.
You have a perfect recipe for the eventual divergence of a subspecies of smart rich humans.
To be perfectly honest, however, the Japanese were taught imperialism by the western nations. Until the US forced it open for trade, and Japan was exposed to the European colonialism happening across the rest of Asia, they were almost pathologically isolationist.
Embedded real-time operating systems and what you're referring to (a process priority level) are two entirely unrelated things. The process priority setting we call 'realtime' simply tells the scheduler that the designated process always preempts other processes whenever it asks for processing time (e.g., it will consume all of your CPU unless/until it sleeps). A real-time OS, on the other hand, is an OS designed such that the length of time any given system call takes to complete is deterministic.
This is necessary for embedded systems so that you can make guarantees about the performance and state of the system. Being able to do this is a requirement for many types of mission-critical software, such as avionics, medical device control, heavy equipment control, etc.
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Take a paper airplane. Fold the trailing edge of both wings slightly (either up or down is fine, as long as both wings are folded in the same direction). Launch airplane. Gasp in amazement while your model of physics is obliterated as the plane repeatedly makes 180 degree course changes. The principles that govern the plane's flight are no different than those that apply to a guided mortar shell. Another illustrative example: Imagine the barrel of the howitzer is depressed 0.01 arcseconds from vertical (let's assume the howitzer is capable of doing this). It should now be fairly obvious that a guided shell would be able to make a 180 degree course correction. Again, your original assertion is not based on the law of phyics, but rather poor assumptions about the range of the target and other factors.
1 AU is the mean radius of the earth's orbit, not the diameter.
Wrong. You are probably making the false assumption that the target is at the maximum range. A shell can easily have enough kinetic energy to correct for a 180 degree error in azimuth if the target is close enough.
What he means is that there is no legal definition of an 'SRI', and therefore no hard requirements that need to be met for the SRI label to be slapped onto a fund. This gives fund managers a basically unlimited amount of leeway, and turns 'Socially Responsible' into an effectively meaningless buzzword that has the added effect of lowering investor expectations.
Most SRI's, if you study them carefully, either exclude or target a very specific class of ventures. 'Non-evil' is just too broad and vague. This leads to things like funds labelled as a SRI choice because they contain no interests in tobacco and alchohol—a fact that will be loudly proclaimed in all brochures etc.—while quietly investing in a Chinese startup specializing in censorship tech. Another fund may be declared to be SR because it only invests in organic food production, ignoring the fact that the operations in question rely on slash-n-burn farming and/or legions of quasi-slave laborers working for pennies per day.
That is exactly what a hard RTOS is for.
You can't really compare PCs to a console by directly comparing superficial hardware specs like clock speed. Just look at the PS2 for obvious examples. E.g., do you see any 300mhz PCs with 32mb shared/4mb dedicated vid ram with a 150mhz graphics card playing games that look like FF12? Pure hardware-hardware comparisons fail to account for the fact that you can optimize the living crap out of console games because you've got a well-defined static hardware target. It's not an exaggeration to say that you can push a console to play games that would otherwise require a PC with over an order of magnitude greater technical specs.
That's actually not as implausible as you'd think. You can use a technique similar to interferometry to derive a much higher resolution still shot from several frames of video.
They only have to share the source if they distribute the software. If the usage is exclusively internal (almost always the case) then they have no obligation to release the source.
Ejaculation converts testosterone in to dihydrotestosterone, which, coincidentally, is one cause of male pattern baldness.
In short, over-spanking the monkey will lead to lower levels of testosterone by converting it into DHT, and perhaps leave you bald to boot.
That's not how it works. The copyright owner of project Foo can release ver. 1.0 under any license he/she wants to, and you must respect the terms of that license, even if vers. 0.0.01 - 1.0rc97 were under the 'GPLv2+any later revisions' license. Similarly, the developer of project Bar, which depends on Foo, can decide to exercise the 'any later revisions' clause and turn around and release his version of Foo v1.0rc97 (which need not even be modified at all) exclusively under GPLv3, and you cannot use his distribution of Foo under the terms of GPLv2.
Two points to remember here:
Theft is already restricted. What you're doing is conflating the issue of legality/acceptability with that of enforcement.
'X is bad for freedom, and is therefore not acceptable' does not lead to 'Y restricts X, and is therefore acceptable' for all values of Y. To extend the GP's example scenario, forcing 1984-style surveillance on everyone would easily be the most successful deterrent to freedom-depriving activities—such as kidnapping—in history. That enforcement mechanism itself causes a net loss of freedom, however, so it would be considered to be unacceptable if the philosophical basis for a law against kidnapping was the issue of denial of freedom.
It is important to remember that enforcement mechanisms should not be exempt from being evaluated under the same philosophical framework as the activities they're designed to curtail. The FSF simply realized that a subset of DRM's functionality could be used to curtail copyright violations, but only at the expense of everyone's freedom, and that, for them, the scales were decidedly tipped in favor of everyone's freedom. In short, even though they do not condone copyright violations (hence their aggressive enforcement of the GPL), it does not necessarily follow that they endorse every enforcement mechanism that would help to prevent copyright violations, as the enforcement mechanism itself may violate the same principles as the offending act.
Linus Torvalds, on the other hand, does not necessarily agree with GPLv3 because he is not interested in the freedom of users, just the pragmatic issues that it would raise for developers. He and RMS basically approach (F)OSS from diametric opposites in that respect.
Yes, I can. Earning more does not significantly increase your need for health care, state education, etc., yet socialist policies require you to contribute progressively more to public works the more you earn. The reason, like I said, is that the philosophy behind socialism places more weight on the side of socioeconomic safety for all than socioeconomic freedom.
As for whether or not this translates into better circumstances in reality, take my personal situation as an anecdote. Neither of my parents holds a degree, and neither have ever held a job that paid higher than 150% of the minimum wage, despite the fact that my father has kept the same job for nearly 20 years. We live in a very poor area, and my HS was rated among the worst in the state—and rightly so. I'm currently earning my degree through a scholarship to Harvard. I'm taking some time off from school to help manage the family expenses, and can put far more of the $2000/week that I'm earning as an IT/resource management contractor to paying off family loans than I would have been able to in a more socialist country.
On the other hand, I had to study until 3am basically every night for the last 3 years of high school to make up for the non-education I was receiving from the state, and I regularly work 14 hour days right now. It's definitely not easy, and perhaps I should just kick back and relax a bit more like some of my friends, but at least here I have the option to work hard and see real returns.
I don't believe socialism to be evil—or even wrong—to be honest, it's just that as one of those people who are willing to work hard, I prefer to see proportional compensation for my efforts.
Most of what you say is true, but none of it really addresses my post. I'm well aware that socialism provides better average economic circumstances in return for less economic freedom. That is really the whole point of socialism, because it stems from a philosophy that tips the valuation scale towards socioeconomic safety as opposed to socioeconomic freedom.
My point was that many Americans do not value wealth so much as they place much more value on socioeconomic freedom as opposed to socioeconomic safety than the ggp and apparently you do. It's true that there are higher rates of violent crimes in many areas on the US (not where I grew up, even though it was a very poor area where everyone owned guns (all hunters)), but it's also true that, if I so choose, I can exercise far greater control over my socioeconomic standing than someone from a more socialist country.
Most Americans that I know, myself included, don't measure happiness in wealth. However, wealth is, to a large degree, a measure of your freedom.
In basically any of the situations in which you find yourself during your life, the amount of wealth you have at your disposal determines what options are available to you. You can be perfectly happy living off of the land in a subsistence society, but make no mistake here, choosing to be happy with your circumstances and choosing circumstances that you'll be happy with are two entirely different things. A penniless environmentalist might feel self-righteous waving a cardboard sign at the one annual rally he can afford to drive to, but a rich one can finance a wind farm and perhaps actually make a difference.
How much wealth you want to have is basically a measure of how much you care to tolerate the circumstances of your life being dictated to you.
Thanks for the quote. It just so happens that Les Misérables is actually one of my favorite books.
I grew up in a poor area, and my family made less than $25k take-home per year, with both my parents working full-time, living in a state with one of the highest COL's in the US. I made it to Harvard on a scholarship by studying so much in HS that I only slept around 4 hours each weekday (and most weekends) from the beginning of my sophomore year up until graduation. People with backgrounds like mine were the vast minority there, and they tended to be far less ambitious than kids born into power.
Given that I went to a high school where over 85% children came from families who were below the poverty level, you would expect them to be the most motivated people in the state. Instead, that school is among the worst in the state by all metrics (from graduation rates and standardized test scores to teen pregnancies).
While poverty can be a strong motivator for a vanishingly small minority, all measurable data indicates that the exact opposite is true for the majority. The poor are far less likely to pursue higher education, more likely to struggle economically throughout the entirety of their lives, and their children are more likely to maintain or drop below their parents' economic status.
When was the last time that you saw news coverage about a millionaire's son being accepted to Harvard? How about a homeless man getting drunk and saying stupid things? Rags-to-riches success stories (e.g., Liz Murray) and lurid pieces on the boorish behavior of the wealthy (e.g., Mel Gibson) are newsworthy because they're exceptional, unlike those two everyday scenarios. Unfortunately, because the exceptions to the norm get a disproportionate amount of media coverage—including in school textbooks—many people tend to get the two terribly confused.
Being poor is, statistically speaking, a massive demotivator, while starting rich has the opposite effect.
The assertion that capitalism must be eliminating the 'rich caste' because the standard of living has been improving assumes a false dichotomy. Even a casual analysis of the economic trends in, say, the US, will show a steadily increasing stratification of society between the rich and everyone else, even as the standard of living has been improving.
The change that capitalism brings is that intelligence becomes the strongest correlation to potential wealth. This actually increases the selection pressure towards divergence of the species along social lines because the social division correlates to a genetically heritable trait and reinforces the tendency for that trait's 'carriers' (for lack of a better term) to select other 'carriers' as mates. In other words, given that, in a western capitalist society:
- People tend to marry people within the same socioeconomic class.
- People tend to marry people with similar educational backgrounds and levels of intelligence.
- Wealthy people tend to be smart.
- Smart people tend to be educated.
- Educated people tend to be relatively wealthy.
You have a perfect recipe for the eventual divergence of a subspecies of smart rich humans.To be perfectly honest, however, the Japanese were taught imperialism by the western nations. Until the US forced it open for trade, and Japan was exposed to the European colonialism happening across the rest of Asia, they were almost pathologically isolationist.
Embedded real-time operating systems and what you're referring to (a process priority level) are two entirely unrelated things. The process priority setting we call 'realtime' simply tells the scheduler that the designated process always preempts other processes whenever it asks for processing time (e.g., it will consume all of your CPU unless/until it sleeps). A real-time OS, on the other hand, is an OS designed such that the length of time any given system call takes to complete is deterministic. This is necessary for embedded systems so that you can make guarantees about the performance and state of the system. Being able to do this is a requirement for many types of mission-critical software, such as avionics, medical device control, heavy equipment control, etc.