The fact that you and I know different things does not imply that what we do know is equivalent in scope, usefulness, or difficulty- and pretending that "the art of instructional design" is equivalent in difficulty to rocket science is probably an excellent sign that you have no idea what the hell you're talking about.
Documen-what? Use the source Luke. This is big part why I love open source. Source is the ultimate documentation. I can read how anything I fancy works! Documentation is always going to have problems keeping up with the source.
Opinions like this kill good projects. Document your damn code.
Sure. Same thing as what happens with sudo. Most people don't configure it to do anything more than grant root, but its actually quite a bit more powerful than that. And anyway, my intent wasn't to slam UAC, but rather to point out that where the goal of UAC was to provide a pretty mechanism for priv escalation, something like SElinux is designed to effectively provide a supplemental security model.
MIC and SElinux aren't really all that similar. MIC just basically assigns one of four categories to each process and puts each object in one of those four buckets, and disallows on that basis. SElinux, on the other hand, allows you to do much finer grained settings. More importantly, though, MIC sets object settings on a global basis, where SElinux can set them on a number of different dimensions.
Things like SElinux are actually quite a bit more advanced than UAC. Where UAC is pretty much just a thin skin around a priv escalation, SElinux exists to control the level of authority that a pretty thoroughly compromised program or account can exercise. Other tools, like libcap and korset, also exist to enforce the same principles at different layers.
Pretty cool stuff, when it comes right down to it.
In point of fact, that is not the converse of my statement, since it bears absolutely no logical relationship.
For those unfamiliar with the term (but still inclined to use it conversationally!), the logical converse of the statement "if p then q" is "if q then p". What you have done instead is take my statement of the form "p does not imply q" and magically transmuted it into the statement "p does not imply z". My statement does not address this, and in fact has nothing to do with the truth or falsehood of either q or z, but rather the lack of a relationship between p and q.
In the future, please at least use proper terminology when constructing strawmen.
Where does the right come from? The technology itself. The underlying medium. The essential properties of information. After that, everything is legal artifice, and what's worse is that it is an unenforceable, incomprehensible mess of an artifice. I'm not against artists getting fair compensation- I'm against the failed model under which that compensation is currently distributed, and I'm against the injustice of the system that cannot and will not fairly enforce it, and honestly, if takes dismantling the media conglomerates to get fair compensation and fair costs, I am all for it.
Indeed. When I was working on putting Ubuntu on the Alpha 400 I was quite surprised by how dependent it was on closed-source drivers, but almost everything worked within about two months. By the end, the only things remaining were dependent on hand-coded ASM or entirely closed source. If there were to be a mass migration to ARM, a pretty big chunk of the Windows software ecosystem would go poof overnight.
Why should I address that? I don't like the war on drugs, but I don't think it has nearly as much to do with economic regulation as it does with misplaced moralities, despite the convoluted constitutional reasoning used to justify it. And I don't see how guns enter into it at all.
Let me start out by saying that I like to think you're a pretty intelligent human being. You have a good grasp of some aspects of economic theory, and you have an interest in the topics of the day, which says good things. Unfortunately, I get to hear a lot of these arguments pretty often from people without those advantages- people whose inexperience with real life has led them to conclude that a textbook's amoral theoretical certitude constitutes a roadmap to the perfection of a nation. I've found that to be, excuse my French, utter bullshit- and I know you're too smart to buy into the thinking that has led a solid chunk of our economy into the crapper in the last eight months. Having said that, forgive me if I begin to get a trifle grumpy about the issue. I don't want to lump you in with the other lumps, but I'm prone to occasional lapses in that direction. My apologies in advance.
As far as the SEC goes, no, I don't think it should be trashed. I said so to start out with, and the fact that it failed in this case is not proof either that it is entirely without merit, as you claim, or that it doesn't pay for itself in the end. However, the SEC is an ancillary claim and to be honest I have no real interest in discussing it. If you want to claim point here- fine.
As far as minimum wage goes, you are making the old argument that the level of employment is inversely proportional to the misappreciation of the value of labor. Unfortunately, like most things in economics, attempting to directly apply theory to practice doesn't give you the results you anticipated. As I said last time, in the low end of the wage scale, the pressures of market friction wind up consuming the efficiency of the market model, thus forming a powerful- and artificial- employer's market. Minimum wage is there to offset an artificially low price on the seller's end. There have been a ton of studies on this issue, but the work that Krugman has done are probably both the most well-regarded and the most accessible. I'd recommend it pretty highly.
Moving to the violence question, I've never seen any particular violence in a sweatshop. I grant you, it might have happened after I left, but I haven't witnessed it. The question I have is whether starving your workers to death is tantamount to violence against their person. I don't think it should be stated in such absolute terms- they confuse the bejeezus out of the issue- but I certainly think it happens and that it shouldn't be allowed to continue. The unregulated market doesn't have a mechanism to protect society from that, and that's where I start to have an issue with an otherwise "clean" theory.
As far as the question of what a regulated market is, I don't see why we should change from the standard definition- regulation is government involvement in an otherwise free market system designed to change the size, scope, or scheme of economic activity. An unregulated market, then, is one without government interference- note the difference in terminology between a "free" and "unregulated" market. You confuse the terms- not me.
The unregulated market I was specifically talking about there was the one in Kutna Hora, in the Czech Republic. While the Czech government has minimum wage and other labor protections, nobody seems to have gotten the memo there, and a pretty significant chunk of the population lives in destitute misery, just 6 or so hours from one of the most beautiful capitals in the world. The police exist, they generally keep order, and they don't mess with business. And nearly everybody is either in the service industry, run through the Church, unemployed and destitute, or destitute and employed. What should really scare you, though, is that I've seen things stateside that aren't all *that* much different- just a little more isolated.
I don't agree with you that testing toys for lead is a bad thing. That strikes me as being kind of a common sense thing to do- on a par with having health inspections for restaurants and hospitals. I won't disagree
I'm afraid I don't see either the logic or the factual basis of your arguments.
First, I think your anger at the SEC is misplaced. I grant you that there have been some monumental screwups in that institution, and that in the light of our current economic woes some of the trust we placed in our financial institutions seems misplaced. Having said that, the institutions most responsible were not the regulators but the regulatees- AIG, Fannie Mae, Freddy Mac, the now endless litany of failed or failing banks- we were deliberately deceived, and they were foolishly wrong in their calculation of risk. Should the economic regulations surrounding these institutions, and the government agencies that enforce them, be changed? Absolutely. Should we allow the scoundrels of industry a freer reign with which to abuse our trust once again? Absolutely not. Re-regulate, don't de-regulate.
Secondly, you seem to be arguing that the economy has grown past the point where it needs the abuses of the past. You then go on to mention "even worse informal market jobs" as being the consequence of the absence of minimum wage. This is a contradiction, and it reveals the extent of your experience with the truly deregulated markets. Outside of the minimum wage economy lies misery, particularly where it relates to the (totally unregulated) labor conditions under which illegal immigrants work. It would kill you to work like that, and if you suspect for even a moment that it was more than the accident of your birth that protected you from that fate, think again. The companies that abuse immigrants, if given even the faintest whiff of an opportunity, would cheerfully work you to death too.
The fact is that while companies do bid for the services of workers, in the swollen uneducated labor market the cost of the mobility required by the free exchange of services is prohibitive to most workers. Those that do migrate do so constantly, unable to scrape together enough savings to escape their lifestyle, and denying their children the education needed to eventually find a better life. Even if you maintain that those workers have earned their lives- an attitude I find repugnant- I have found few people willing to callously condemn the children of this country to lives of ceaseless misery on the back of an empty economic principle.
You say I don't know economics. I won't lie, I've heard this before from people probably not so different from you. The reality is that I know the unregulated markets quite literally inside and out. I've spent a lot of time in places where unemployment sits at 30%, and the desperate bow to the unscrupulous for their daily bread. Places where the law is openly scoffed at, and the needs of the workers ignored. I've been escorted around sweatshops by their proud proprietors, and come home to found my own business. The question you need to be asking yourself, is how far a walk was it for me to come home? Are all the abuses and evils of the industrial revolution part of history, the problems of another time and place? Or is it the demon waiting outside the door, waiting for the unwary, the blissfully ignorant, the comfortable denizens of a world so far removed from those horrors that they cannot comprehend their implications, to stumble, all smiling, through? We take a pretty different view on the subject, and I won't demean you or your position- which has, after all, been held by some of the greatest minds of our time- by chalking it up to life experience. But I do hope that in the future, when you call for deregulation, you'll at least think back to this conversation and see its rationale, the way that it is supposed to work, and the good that, done properly, regulation can do.
When I see Enron and AIG and all pretty much lying to investors' faces, deliberately abusing the notion of deregulation, and eventually destroying tens of thousands of peoples lives, homes, and savings, I don't sit down and think "damn regulations!".
Maybe I should. Maybe you're right and all the work that the EPA does, and DHEC, and the FDA- maybe it's all just a false savings, and the market could correct against them without government interference.
Obviously, though, I wouldn't be writing this screed if I thought that were the case. I appreciate the phenomenal theoretical beauty of the informed participant model, both from a political and economic standpoint, but I cannot completely agree with it in practice. The fact is that liars are common, and their art is highly profitable. Deception, known in some circles as "marketing", is the bane of that theory, and the backbone of the modern economy. Add to that that our system is rife with the local dependencies that obliterate the free exchange of goods and services demanded by the founders of Enlightenment thought, and I simply cannot agree that economic issues should be allowed to ride roughshod over the social concerns of the day.
So when I hear someone ranting about regulation, I have to stop and think- has this person never worked minimum wage? Never pondered the implications of the forty hour work week, or of working 80 hours at the age of 8? It seems foolish- shortsighted- for us to sit in the midst of our comfortable lives, griping about the difficulty of accruing more comfort, and pondering enacting a system virtually guaranteed to grind the comfort from our lives. Do you think we would live so well without those protections? If so, how? And how can you be sure that that is true for society in general, rather than just yourself, or me? I look forward to hearing your answers.
Still have pay phones though, right? And almost everybody has a neighbor. Obviously you don't want the "we'll call you right back" approach if you're doing that, but a call-in from any local number seems like a pretty low standard to meet.
I'd reverse this, actually- the potential for pranksters to get your site to call people at 3AM seems like the kind of thing I would have had way too much fun with a few years ago. Just set up a Asterisk box and get it to log incoming. Force people to enter a phone number when they register, and void the registration if you don't get a call from that number within x amount of time.
In case people don't have a local number- cell phones being what they are and all- allow them to use pay phones, and include instructions on how to find their number.
Personally, I look forward to the day when I can use *any* language as a web language- at native speed, no less. Sounds like a great reason to embed x86 to me.
Slashdot Mirror
The fact that you and I know different things does not imply that what we do know is equivalent in scope, usefulness, or difficulty- and pretending that "the art of instructional design" is equivalent in difficulty to rocket science is probably an excellent sign that you have no idea what the hell you're talking about.
I'm not into better living through chemistry, but I've seen exactly what you say never happens, happen.
On top of that, you're trying to prove a negative through a personal anecdote.
Seriously, good luck on this one.
Users require very different documentation, as unrelated from the code as possible.
Depending on what kind of user you have.
The documentation I'm against is where it's the code in english form,
Its called literate programming, and smarter programmers than you or I swear by it.
that is stupid because it will never match the code,
then your programmers aren't doing their job- the code isn't complete until the docs are.
either because it will drift out of date or because it was what it was meant to do not what it does.
This last thing doesn't make sense to me. Could you clarify?
All of that is true, but it misses the point- the G1 is the HTC Dream rebranded for T-Mobile.
...and Judaism is the worship of Judas?
It scares me that some people cannot tell when I am joking.
That is actually a really clever line of reasoning. You have brightened my day.
It's a G1, genius- that would mean T-Mobile.
commented code != documented code.
End users need docs too.
Documen-what? Use the source Luke. This is big part why I love open source. Source is the ultimate documentation. I can read how anything I fancy works! Documentation is always going to have problems keeping up with the source.
Opinions like this kill good projects. Document your damn code.
That's why Linux will always by a system "by programmers, for programmers."
The original poster was complaining about *windows*, genius.
Sure. Same thing as what happens with sudo. Most people don't configure it to do anything more than grant root, but its actually quite a bit more powerful than that. And anyway, my intent wasn't to slam UAC, but rather to point out that where the goal of UAC was to provide a pretty mechanism for priv escalation, something like SElinux is designed to effectively provide a supplemental security model.
MIC and SElinux aren't really all that similar. MIC just basically assigns one of four categories to each process and puts each object in one of those four buckets, and disallows on that basis. SElinux, on the other hand, allows you to do much finer grained settings. More importantly, though, MIC sets object settings on a global basis, where SElinux can set them on a number of different dimensions.
Things like SElinux are actually quite a bit more advanced than UAC. Where UAC is pretty much just a thin skin around a priv escalation, SElinux exists to control the level of authority that a pretty thoroughly compromised program or account can exercise. Other tools, like libcap and korset, also exist to enforce the same principles at different layers.
Pretty cool stuff, when it comes right down to it.
In point of fact, that is not the converse of my statement, since it bears absolutely no logical relationship.
For those unfamiliar with the term (but still inclined to use it conversationally!), the logical converse of the statement "if p then q" is "if q then p". What you have done instead is take my statement of the form "p does not imply q" and magically transmuted it into the statement "p does not imply z". My statement does not address this, and in fact has nothing to do with the truth or falsehood of either q or z, but rather the lack of a relationship between p and q.
In the future, please at least use proper terminology when constructing strawmen.
The fact that a law exists is not a justification of its existence, sir.
If you believe all existing laws to be good, fair, and equitable, the delusion is yours.
Where does the right come from? The technology itself. The underlying medium. The essential properties of information. After that, everything is legal artifice, and what's worse is that it is an unenforceable, incomprehensible mess of an artifice. I'm not against artists getting fair compensation- I'm against the failed model under which that compensation is currently distributed, and I'm against the injustice of the system that cannot and will not fairly enforce it, and honestly, if takes dismantling the media conglomerates to get fair compensation and fair costs, I am all for it.
Indeed. When I was working on putting Ubuntu on the Alpha 400 I was quite surprised by how dependent it was on closed-source drivers, but almost everything worked within about two months. By the end, the only things remaining were dependent on hand-coded ASM or entirely closed source. If there were to be a mass migration to ARM, a pretty big chunk of the Windows software ecosystem would go poof overnight.
Why should I address that? I don't like the war on drugs, but I don't think it has nearly as much to do with economic regulation as it does with misplaced moralities, despite the convoluted constitutional reasoning used to justify it. And I don't see how guns enter into it at all.
Let me start out by saying that I like to think you're a pretty intelligent human being. You have a good grasp of some aspects of economic theory, and you have an interest in the topics of the day, which says good things. Unfortunately, I get to hear a lot of these arguments pretty often from people without those advantages- people whose inexperience with real life has led them to conclude that a textbook's amoral theoretical certitude constitutes a roadmap to the perfection of a nation. I've found that to be, excuse my French, utter bullshit- and I know you're too smart to buy into the thinking that has led a solid chunk of our economy into the crapper in the last eight months. Having said that, forgive me if I begin to get a trifle grumpy about the issue. I don't want to lump you in with the other lumps, but I'm prone to occasional lapses in that direction. My apologies in advance.
As far as the SEC goes, no, I don't think it should be trashed. I said so to start out with, and the fact that it failed in this case is not proof either that it is entirely without merit, as you claim, or that it doesn't pay for itself in the end. However, the SEC is an ancillary claim and to be honest I have no real interest in discussing it. If you want to claim point here- fine.
As far as minimum wage goes, you are making the old argument that the level of employment is inversely proportional to the misappreciation of the value of labor. Unfortunately, like most things in economics, attempting to directly apply theory to practice doesn't give you the results you anticipated. As I said last time, in the low end of the wage scale, the pressures of market friction wind up consuming the efficiency of the market model, thus forming a powerful- and artificial- employer's market. Minimum wage is there to offset an artificially low price on the seller's end. There have been a ton of studies on this issue, but the work that Krugman has done are probably both the most well-regarded and the most accessible. I'd recommend it pretty highly.
Moving to the violence question, I've never seen any particular violence in a sweatshop. I grant you, it might have happened after I left, but I haven't witnessed it. The question I have is whether starving your workers to death is tantamount to violence against their person. I don't think it should be stated in such absolute terms- they confuse the bejeezus out of the issue- but I certainly think it happens and that it shouldn't be allowed to continue. The unregulated market doesn't have a mechanism to protect society from that, and that's where I start to have an issue with an otherwise "clean" theory.
As far as the question of what a regulated market is, I don't see why we should change from the standard definition- regulation is government involvement in an otherwise free market system designed to change the size, scope, or scheme of economic activity. An unregulated market, then, is one without government interference- note the difference in terminology between a "free" and "unregulated" market. You confuse the terms- not me.
The unregulated market I was specifically talking about there was the one in Kutna Hora, in the Czech Republic. While the Czech government has minimum wage and other labor protections, nobody seems to have gotten the memo there, and a pretty significant chunk of the population lives in destitute misery, just 6 or so hours from one of the most beautiful capitals in the world. The police exist, they generally keep order, and they don't mess with business. And nearly everybody is either in the service industry, run through the Church, unemployed and destitute, or destitute and employed. What should really scare you, though, is that I've seen things stateside that aren't all *that* much different- just a little more isolated.
I don't agree with you that testing toys for lead is a bad thing. That strikes me as being kind of a common sense thing to do- on a par with having health inspections for restaurants and hospitals. I won't disagree
I'm afraid I don't see either the logic or the factual basis of your arguments.
First, I think your anger at the SEC is misplaced. I grant you that there have been some monumental screwups in that institution, and that in the light of our current economic woes some of the trust we placed in our financial institutions seems misplaced. Having said that, the institutions most responsible were not the regulators but the regulatees- AIG, Fannie Mae, Freddy Mac, the now endless litany of failed or failing banks- we were deliberately deceived, and they were foolishly wrong in their calculation of risk. Should the economic regulations surrounding these institutions, and the government agencies that enforce them, be changed? Absolutely. Should we allow the scoundrels of industry a freer reign with which to abuse our trust once again? Absolutely not. Re-regulate, don't de-regulate.
Secondly, you seem to be arguing that the economy has grown past the point where it needs the abuses of the past. You then go on to mention "even worse informal market jobs" as being the consequence of the absence of minimum wage. This is a contradiction, and it reveals the extent of your experience with the truly deregulated markets. Outside of the minimum wage economy lies misery, particularly where it relates to the (totally unregulated) labor conditions under which illegal immigrants work. It would kill you to work like that, and if you suspect for even a moment that it was more than the accident of your birth that protected you from that fate, think again. The companies that abuse immigrants, if given even the faintest whiff of an opportunity, would cheerfully work you to death too.
The fact is that while companies do bid for the services of workers, in the swollen uneducated labor market the cost of the mobility required by the free exchange of services is prohibitive to most workers. Those that do migrate do so constantly, unable to scrape together enough savings to escape their lifestyle, and denying their children the education needed to eventually find a better life. Even if you maintain that those workers have earned their lives- an attitude I find repugnant- I have found few people willing to callously condemn the children of this country to lives of ceaseless misery on the back of an empty economic principle.
You say I don't know economics. I won't lie, I've heard this before from people probably not so different from you. The reality is that I know the unregulated markets quite literally inside and out. I've spent a lot of time in places where unemployment sits at 30%, and the desperate bow to the unscrupulous for their daily bread. Places where the law is openly scoffed at, and the needs of the workers ignored. I've been escorted around sweatshops by their proud proprietors, and come home to found my own business. The question you need to be asking yourself, is how far a walk was it for me to come home? Are all the abuses and evils of the industrial revolution part of history, the problems of another time and place? Or is it the demon waiting outside the door, waiting for the unwary, the blissfully ignorant, the comfortable denizens of a world so far removed from those horrors that they cannot comprehend their implications, to stumble, all smiling, through? We take a pretty different view on the subject, and I won't demean you or your position- which has, after all, been held by some of the greatest minds of our time- by chalking it up to life experience. But I do hope that in the future, when you call for deregulation, you'll at least think back to this conversation and see its rationale, the way that it is supposed to work, and the good that, done properly, regulation can do.
Ok, I'll step into the flamewar.
When I see Enron and AIG and all pretty much lying to investors' faces, deliberately abusing the notion of deregulation, and eventually destroying tens of thousands of peoples lives, homes, and savings, I don't sit down and think "damn regulations!".
Maybe I should. Maybe you're right and all the work that the EPA does, and DHEC, and the FDA- maybe it's all just a false savings, and the market could correct against them without government interference.
Obviously, though, I wouldn't be writing this screed if I thought that were the case. I appreciate the phenomenal theoretical beauty of the informed participant model, both from a political and economic standpoint, but I cannot completely agree with it in practice. The fact is that liars are common, and their art is highly profitable. Deception, known in some circles as "marketing", is the bane of that theory, and the backbone of the modern economy. Add to that that our system is rife with the local dependencies that obliterate the free exchange of goods and services demanded by the founders of Enlightenment thought, and I simply cannot agree that economic issues should be allowed to ride roughshod over the social concerns of the day.
So when I hear someone ranting about regulation, I have to stop and think- has this person never worked minimum wage? Never pondered the implications of the forty hour work week, or of working 80 hours at the age of 8? It seems foolish- shortsighted- for us to sit in the midst of our comfortable lives, griping about the difficulty of accruing more comfort, and pondering enacting a system virtually guaranteed to grind the comfort from our lives. Do you think we would live so well without those protections? If so, how? And how can you be sure that that is true for society in general, rather than just yourself, or me? I look forward to hearing your answers.
help vampires? As in, vampires that help... or helpers that feed on human blood... or vampires that only attack the help...?
insert "i'ze confuzd" cat here.
Still have pay phones though, right? And almost everybody has a neighbor. Obviously you don't want the "we'll call you right back" approach if you're doing that, but a call-in from any local number seems like a pretty low standard to meet.
I'd reverse this, actually- the potential for pranksters to get your site to call people at 3AM seems like the kind of thing I would have had way too much fun with a few years ago. Just set up a Asterisk box and get it to log incoming. Force people to enter a phone number when they register, and void the registration if you don't get a call from that number within x amount of time.
In case people don't have a local number- cell phones being what they are and all- allow them to use pay phones, and include instructions on how to find their number.
Personally, I look forward to the day when I can use *any* language as a web language- at native speed, no less. Sounds like a great reason to embed x86 to me.