One should of course point out that 1. the "master criminal" (I presume you mean Kenneth Noye) is now doing life for a road-rage murder. 2. the man who killed the burglar (Tony Martin,I presume) shot him in the back with an illegally held pump action shotgun, and had previously had his gun licence revoked after other incidents involving firearms. Regards, tree_frog
I'll vote for this. VC5/6 is a good environment and the compiler is robust. Don't get me wrong, I'm a great egcs fan, but this is a good product and (with a few notable exceptions -eg scoping of variables declared in for loops) nicely ANSI compliant.
Anyone who slags off the prof because of the programming enviroment he has to work in should get a life - wait till you end up in the real world and have to use KDE instead of Gnome - Oh the hardship!
Most of these ideas are already up and running for 2.5G and 3G cellular radio. Certainly TCP/IP and voice over IP are on their way.
There is a problem with getting a radio to work on multiple frequencies, but soft radio is on its way (i.e. a software programmable radio receiver).
And as for open source - well, there is an awful lot of *very* proprietry (Read patented) stuff out there - licenecing of patented ideas is a major revenue stream for the equipment manufacturers. However, the standards are open, and (for UMTS - the 3G system) held here.
You are right about one thing though; things are different in the US because their frequency allocation is diffrent from the rest of the world. Their cellular standards are different (e.g. IS95), but there is an awful lot of cross-fertilization of ideas between IS95 and UMTS, because the manufacturers are looking to minimise their costs.
isn't this just the prisoner's dilemma (or it's extension into a multiplayer situation, the "Common good" problem, as discussed by Mancur Olsen in The Logic of Collective Action)
However, the situation as you describe is only correct on the assumption that it is a one-off game. When the situation you describe is repeated, then things are rather different. This is the situation described by Robert Axelrod in The Evolution of Co-operation
In a repeated situation, whilst free riders can be a problem in the short term, in the long term they are not. Many different scenarios exist, depending on the intelligence of the players and the potential for misunderstanding either the situation or the way that others are playing.
I don't think that your analysis is sound, because the situation is not a one-shot play, but a repeated game. State governments are elected, so there is the potential for laws to be repealed at regular intervals, or for new laws (such as the inapplicability of shrink-wrap contracts) to be passed.
However your point about the applicability of laws in differing states, and the relationship between them is well made. Sounds like there could be a realy nice little BSc or MSc project in examining this sort of thing as a spatially distributed economic game.
I'm sick to death of a bunch of right wing libertarian assholes with a US centric view (if they even believe in the US as an idea (can you spell militia!) banging away at any sort of regulation.
Get a few facts straight. GM food - look at public opinion - informed public opinion (like all my mates who have PhD's in environmental toxicolgy and other such subjects) who won't touch the stuff with a bargepole. FUD works both ways. And as for us being a bunch of socialists, well thats the way we like things (if I had wanted a conservative government I'd have voted for Tony!). Oh, and we don't like Austrian Fascists either!
Big corporations will run roughshod over anyone who doesn't stand up against them. Be thankful for the US government and the EU taking a stance when they do.
Whilst there are indeed troubling aspects to the Time Warner/AOL merger, it should be put into the context of the so-called "market forces" that are driving it.
In the UK where I am writing from (and I have no reason to think that the law may be differnt in the USA), the managers of pension funds are legally obliged (yep, and there are cases where they have been taken to court) to make as much money as possible for the holders of that pension fund.
The managers of yopur pension fund, which your hard earned cash goes into every month, are the people responsible for driving many of these deals forwards. Why - because they are legally obliged to.
I think that there are two underlying reasons for this (I seem to recall a story in the financial section of the Guardian I can't find the article I was looking for in the archive - but these ones may be relevent/of interest:
First, this legal obligation on pension fund managers - pressure for a legal change would help here, although the recent performance of ethical trusts and investment portfolios has been encouraging, and can be used for pointed questioning for pension fund meetings. Second, the investment model in the US/USA is much more dependent on raising money from shareholders than from the bank (which, while they may be b*stards from time to time, at least only demand a set interest rate, and don't ask why you havn't been able to pay them more interest).
So where does this leave us. If you want to check the power of the multinationals it is unfortunately the case that the offering of economic incentives is, as Jon Katz points out, the most effective. The adverse publicity that Shell received over the Brent Spar decommisioning caused a major change in mindest. The publicity over 'fat cat' utility managers in the UK has also been very high profile.
If you want to get involved, then talk to your representatives of your pension fund. Apply pressure to them directly to invest ethically, and to take a long term view. After all - it's your money. If you own shares in a corporation, get along to the AGM if you can. Ask them about their policies, these people *really* hate it when they take flak from shareholders - as any number of news stories show.
Remember, it's your money. You may have earned it, but the way you invest it (be it in goods, services or stock) is, amongst other things, an ethical decision.
Mindcraft are our friends. They go out and they tell us what is wrong with our product. They tell us how much worse than a rival product it is. Stop wingeing. Make it better....
I'm not convinced that this is possible; or at least I think it would be extremely hard and dependent upon a really trick GA coding. A GA is basically a parallel search technique that exploits regularities in a fitness landscape. 2 points: 1. In a fitness landscape based upon prime factoring, do such regularities exist. 2. If they do, is the resulting function generalisable (ie will it work with data other than the training/validation data) I think that (1) is quite possibly true, but I'd be extremely surprised if (2) is.
Slashdot Mirror
One should of course point out that 1. the "master criminal" (I presume you mean Kenneth Noye) is now doing life for a road-rage murder. 2. the man who killed the burglar (Tony Martin,I presume) shot him in the back with an illegally held pump action shotgun, and had previously had his gun licence revoked after other incidents involving firearms. Regards, tree_frog
I'll vote for this. VC5/6 is a good environment and the compiler is robust. Don't get me wrong, I'm a great egcs fan, but this is a good product and (with a few notable exceptions -eg scoping of variables declared in for loops) nicely ANSI compliant.
Anyone who slags off the prof because of the programming enviroment he has to work in should get a life - wait till you end up in the real world and have to use KDE instead of Gnome - Oh the hardship!
regards
tree_frog
There is a problem with getting a radio to work on multiple frequencies, but soft radio is on its way (i.e. a software programmable radio receiver).
And as for open source - well, there is an awful lot of *very* proprietry (Read patented) stuff out there - licenecing of patented ideas is a major revenue stream for the equipment manufacturers. However, the standards are open, and (for UMTS - the 3G system) held here .
You are right about one thing though; things are different in the US because their frequency allocation is diffrent from the rest of the world. Their cellular standards are different (e.g. IS95), but there is an awful lot of cross-fertilization of ideas between IS95 and UMTS, because the manufacturers are looking to minimise their costs.
regards, treefrog
oops -terminal klutz mode entered
this post has been accidentaly moderated down.
apologies
treefrog.
isn't this just the prisoner's dilemma (or it's extension into a multiplayer situation, the "Common good" problem, as discussed by Mancur Olsen in The Logic of Collective Action)
However, the situation as you describe is only correct on the assumption that it is a one-off game. When the situation you describe is repeated, then things are rather different. This is the situation described by Robert Axelrod in The Evolution of Co-operation
In a repeated situation, whilst free riders can be a problem in the short term, in the long term they are not. Many different scenarios exist, depending on the intelligence of the players and the potential for misunderstanding either the situation or the way that others are playing.
I don't think that your analysis is sound, because the situation is not a one-shot play, but a repeated game. State governments are elected, so there is the potential for laws to be repealed at regular intervals, or for new laws (such as the inapplicability of shrink-wrap contracts) to be passed.
However your point about the applicability of laws in differing states, and the relationship between them is well made. Sounds like there could be a realy nice little BSc or MSc project in examining this sort of thing as a spatially distributed economic game.
Regards
treefrog.
Anyone got any photos of this??
I'm sick to death of a bunch of right wing libertarian assholes with a US centric view (if they even believe in the US as an idea (can you spell militia!) banging away at any sort of regulation.
Get a few facts straight. GM food - look at public opinion - informed public opinion (like all my mates who have PhD's in environmental toxicolgy and other such subjects) who won't touch the stuff with a bargepole. FUD works both ways. And as for us being a bunch of socialists, well thats the way we like things (if I had wanted a conservative government I'd have voted for Tony!). Oh, and we don't like Austrian Fascists either!
Big corporations will run roughshod over anyone who doesn't stand up against them. Be thankful for the US government and the EU taking a stance when they do.
how secure is the slashdot domain name. If it isn't, I'd do something. There are a lot of trolls and worse things out there.
treefrog.
In the UK where I am writing from (and I have no reason to think that the law may be differnt in the USA), the managers of pension funds are legally obliged (yep, and there are cases where they have been taken to court) to make as much money as possible for the holders of that pension fund.
The managers of yopur pension fund, which your hard earned cash goes into every month, are the people responsible for driving many of these deals forwards. Why - because they are legally obliged to.
I think that there are two underlying reasons for this (I seem to recall a story in the financial section of the Guardian I can't find the article I was looking for in the archive - but these ones may be relevent/of interest:
Investors wield their power
Whisper it ... takeovers don't pay )
First, this legal obligation on pension fund managers - pressure for a legal change would help here, although the recent performance of ethical trusts and investment portfolios has been encouraging, and can be used for pointed questioning for pension fund meetings. Second, the investment model in the US/USA is much more dependent on raising money from shareholders than from the bank (which, while they may be b*stards from time to time, at least only demand a set interest rate, and don't ask why you havn't been able to pay them more interest).
So where does this leave us. If you want to check the power of the multinationals it is unfortunately the case that the offering of economic incentives is, as Jon Katz points out, the most effective. The adverse publicity that Shell received over the Brent Spar decommisioning caused a major change in mindest. The publicity over 'fat cat' utility managers in the UK has also been very high profile.
If you want to get involved, then talk to your representatives of your pension fund. Apply pressure to them directly to invest ethically, and to take a long term view. After all - it's your money. If you own shares in a corporation, get along to the AGM if you can. Ask them about their policies, these people *really* hate it when they take flak from shareholders - as any number of news stories show.
Remember, it's your money. You may have earned it, but the way you invest it (be it in goods, services or stock) is, amongst other things, an ethical decision.
Mindcraft are our friends. They go out and they tell us what is wrong with our product. They tell us how much worse than a rival product it is. Stop wingeing. Make it better....
I'm not convinced that this is possible; or at least I think it would be extremely hard and dependent upon a really trick GA coding. A GA is basically a parallel search technique that exploits regularities in a fitness landscape. 2 points: 1. In a fitness landscape based upon prime factoring, do such regularities exist. 2. If they do, is the resulting function generalisable (ie will it work with data other than the training/validation data) I think that (1) is quite possibly true, but I'd be extremely surprised if (2) is.