Quite the contrary. Employers are able to find good workers for a reasonable price and the government is saying no.
They want to work for free but the gov says no. It's sensible, because stopping people from working for too little avoids races to the bottom and makes sure everyone gets paid enough (which in turn ensures that the economy keeps moving).
Free trade, by definition, is mutually beneficial to both parties.
Only in a simple and sterile world where everything is linear. In truth, it is easy to find examples of free trades that do not benefit anyone. Like the addict and the heroin dealer, both sinking deeper into tragedy as a result of their (free) trade.
Not to mention the insane amount of paid time off many Europeans get.
What is insane is how little paid time off people get in the US. I am sure most americans would love to have a decent break every now and then without having to fear that the job is gone when they are back.
you've correctly identified that the straw "greedy suit" is rational to make the "it's on a computer" argument, but the "it's on a computer argument" is still not rational.
Rational argument can't happen in isolation. It needs axioms to be based upon, and if you choose axioms properly, "software must be patentable because it makes lawyers rich" can be a perfectly rational and logical argument.
No, this is a political issue, and one of values. It is about the choice of axioms.
It's fine and defensible to oppose (or support) patents, but the "when it is about software, particularly so" is just a geek engaging in irrational thinking.
No, it is entirely rational to fight something you don't want.
The chemists, for example, seem to be ok with a world ruled by lawyers, or where, after having a good idea, you end up owing someone a shipload of money just because someone has a patent on it. The chemists can get it unlubed in the if they are ok with that. It seems they are a spineless bunch.
[...]irrational thinking. The same way the suit rubbing his hands together in greed because "it's on a computer" is.
Perhaps your idea of what is "rational" is severly limited and crooked. Here is your mistake: that greedy suit is being rational, because the "it's on a computer" is just an argument he uses for his own self interest. Just like that incredibly narcistic "why should I think if i don't get to become rich for some stupid idea" line. The point that should matter is that he or she is a greedy asshole that wants to take your money away, wants to enslave you, and deserves something entirely different from being rich and successful. What is important is that he or she must be stopped.
That whole line with "being rational", especially when the arguments are as stupid as they are when people favour patents, is quite often just a smokescreen and a maneuver to make you think in a way someone else wants.
Why should, say, the marching cubes algorithm, which transforms bitmap data into polygonal surface data, not be worthy of a patent when the set of instructions for turning bauxite into aluminum is? Because one uses a silicon chip and electricity and the other uses a pressure vessel and electricity?
Because I don't want it to be patentable. I find patents ugly, inhuman, and perverse. They make thinking dangerous. When it is about software, particularily so.
I have a say in this matter, however small it may be, and I don't want algorithms to be patentable.
It is sort of funny in an unsettling way that commenters got worked up about that, and not about
every grant must benefit 'national defense'
which truly sounds batshit crazy. I'd expect that of an Iranian or Norky minister, but not of someone overseeing research funding in a civilized country.
Facebook doesn't have the staff to take complaints from a billion users. It has less than 5000 employees. So it would be abuse of lack of power? They make a few dollars per account per year. 1 15 min phone call wipes out any chance of making a profit from an account.
So they get to make that profit but without any responsibility? That can't work.
If they can't do it properly they should not be doing it at all.
Here is a nice article that includes a historical writeup by Evgeny Morozov on how the concepts of Open Source and Free Software ended up meaning something different (and fas less interesting and progressive) than initially. Warning: It is a long read.
The regulators requires that money laundering is kept in check.
Which, frankly, is a good thing.
BitCoin prevents that and therefore, among other reasons, it will become increasingly difficult to exchange bitcoin and the established currencies.
Maybe, maybe not.
To be freely tradable this kind of financial product (let's stop that ridiculous "currency" bullshit) requires some type of legal framework that isn't available. If it ever gets it, you could trade bitcoins as easily as shares. But as it stands, and aside from money laundring issues, you could as well prosecute bitcoin trading on the grounds that it is illegal gambling.
Of course, a sound legal framework for bitcoins would most likely make them pointless.
But imagine how much it would have changed if it had been floating like today.
I don't understand what your point is. But just in case, a floating fiat currency can be used to effectively combat deflation, which is significantly more damaging than inflation.
Also, inflation is nothing more than supply and demand as applied to a currency. If we started trading in loaves of bread, and some baker messes up and accidentaly bakes a trillion loaves, you just "inflated" bread.
Wrong. That baker increased the bread supply, but if he, for example, chooses to put all that in his basement, then it will not affect how many loafs an air ticket costs. Thus, in this case it does not affect inflation. Same thing if he decides to give it to people who then bunker it in their basements.
You can of course decide to call "inflation" the increase of money supply. But then that would be your personal fringe definition, and not what most people understand under inflation (the increase of prices).
How many people lost money with Bernie Madoff, while he didn't murder them, he lost billions of their money and they believed they were OK, because of various government regulations.
You have that backwards. Bernie wasn't investigated because the regulators are weak. Such things do not happen in well-governed countries were regulators have not been castrated by Randroids.
I am against all government business regulations, they are all unconstitutional, thus illegal.
Yeah, right. But then you are deranged and crazy, who cares about what you are against or believe in?
- no it's not true. Regulations have nothing to do with how well designed coffee makers are, people who build them don't want to kill their customers anymore than anybody else that produces other things.
Maybe, but they might delude themselves into thinking they don't. Companies are run by humans, remember? That's why there is regulation and official approval procedures. And while crappy coffee machines can be had, they are unlikely to be unsafe thanks to regulation.
Reputation is what counts, brand name recognition is important to a company and having brand name tied to a series of fires that kill customers is lethal to a business.
That may be so too, but regulations are there so that killing people is not how they get their bad reputation.
That is: you are free to get as bad a reputation as you want, but not free to do so by injuring or killing people. I think that is quite sensible.
The simple fact is that if you release a dangerous product, no amount of warnings are going to prevent you from being sued. Just because your coffee maker states "always turn off coffee maker to prevent fires" you're still going to be sued if the damn thing bursts into flames because a well-designed coffee maker should not burst into flames, even if left turned on indefinitely.
That is true. Regulation ensures that we only have well-designed coffee makers. At least on the safety front. Regulation ensures that companies do not compromise safety with cost of production. Personally, I think that this is a good idea.
Warning labels, like most company to consumer communications, are purely about having something to point at to discourage lawsuits.
That might be true to some extent, but to a very large extent the warnings are there to prevent accidents. And they do. And most companies do actually care for what happens to their customers. Well, companies that want to be arround for a while do. And it is not all cynicism.
Or better: each colleague will check out/clone the project from revision control, write her part of the text in whatever she likes, and commit/push the changes. Then you can touch it up, and it goes back out on review until everyone's satisfied.
Theory is that way <==
Practice over there ==>
Some people use editors that wrap lines on screen but save it as one long line, and others use editors that wrap it on file too. Enough to mess up any useful version control. And it's not practicable to convinve people to chane their tools.
Standard practice is to email tarballed or zipped versions to each other, or use dropbox, and keep a kind of locking protocol on sections and files ("I am working on the proof of the this-and-that theorem - don't touch it until I'm done") Or better yet, one person has control of the file, and sends it to one researcher at a time for changes, merges the results by hand based on merit and contents, and then sends the thing to the next one.
For that type of workflow, ammendment tracking like what Word has is just fantastic, while typical VC magic on plain text files (git and co) just suck.
LyX is a nice idea, but I don't know anyone who actually uses it. In my case, I tried writing an article with it, but at the end I had to submit a LaTeX document, and the tex export of LyX was simply not usable. Much better to just use emacs + auctex + reftex.
If you're a student, running your game server (or Net-accessible model railroad controller, or whatever) doesn't have anything to do with what you're paying MIT for and there's nothing stopping you from getting it hosted at a colo somewhere.
Also, if the reputation of MIT as a pressure cooker is true, you won't be a student at MIT for too long if you waste your time running and administrating your own game server.
Name one that also can be used for baseload generation that doesn't depend on variable environmental conditions that also doesn't result in massive ecological change.
Hint: there aren't any.
Well, so what? I hear that as argument, over and over. That we absolutely need baseload power generation is never put into question. It is quite likely that we can adapt to a much lower baseline than we currently have. At the moment, we pretty much expect power to be there whenever we want, as much as we want. But why should that be set in stone? If this is what it takes to avoid nuclear, then I say go for it.
As for the numbers claimed in the article, they are of course bullshit, because, as has been pointed out, the storage problem hasn't been solved. Also, the claim that waste from coal plants is as dangerous as that from nuclear plants is simply ridiculous.
I use rdiff-backup on each of the machines I administer (my machines and those of my wife, at home and at work, plus laptops). rdiff-backup is nice because it saves the current snapshot as a directory that looks exactly like the one being backed up, so restoring stuff is really very trivial.
The backup scripts run daily, backing up to the home directory of the user (a/home/$user/backups directory) so that casual deletion means at most a day of work lost. I rsync all those backup dirs weekly to one of three 1TB drives. They are about 60% full each.
The three of them are rotated arround. One is next to me, one in the basement, and another in a drawer at my office. They get rotated every week.
Seems pretty solid to me. A lot has to happen to leave me with a serious data loss.
Bullshit. Without patents, there is no motivation, at all, for him to tool up and make them, as there is always a larger predator who can out-compete him.
If he's the kind of guy who thinks he deserves to get rich for a bit of rubber, then I say let the predators have him.
In your bullshit worldview, his best case was to sit on his idea, and refuse to innovate, because there would be no possible way for him to recover any profit for the time he spent innovating.
If he is the kind of guy who thinks he deserves to get rich for a bit of rubber, then I say let him sit on his idea and rot away.
There's no skills crisis, there's a corporate unwillingness to pay for skill crisis.
Indeed. I wonder how the market taliban think this plays out in terms of their holy theories. That is - why hasn't the market reacted as it should, raising salaries for skilled people?
It is indeed weird, because that is what should have happened even if you think that markets aren't always working perfectly.
Of course, it's completely bizarre that placement in any such global list is a factor in purchasing and design at all.
There is a whole lot of politics involved in HPC. The only way to justify the ridiculous costs (not only in hardware, but also in energy) for this type of machines is by convincing university management that they are going to look really good ("We will be recognized as global players if we have a machine in that list", etc, etc.). This is indeed bizarre, but the way it is.
The people who build and manage these machines aren't usually terribly interested in the needs of scientists running jobs on it. They are just obsessed in piling up hardware and getting the credits, like race car builders. The needs of the scientists tend to be an afterthought. Quite often, and I have that as an insider, these machines idle around because a lot of scientists have a nice quad-core machine under their desks fullfilling their computing needs just fine, and getting something to run on the monster machine is a hassle.
On top of that, many of the applications that actually run on these machines are things like least-squares fitting problems, but solved using genetic algorithms (which is ridiculous) mainly due to the ineptitude of the scientists involved. Or absurd brute force Monte-Carlo simulations done simply because some scientists don't know or understand differential equations. It so happens in many disciplines that doing something with an HPC machine using some stupid but expensive algorithm will get you more hype credits than doing it smartly on last decade's laptop in a tenth of the time and one millionth of the electrical energy.
So, yeah, it's completely bizarre. That the good folks of the 'Blue Waters' machine rebel sounds very nice. I wonder if they are just deluded and missing the only point of building such a machine, though (which seems to be to race in the Dongarra 500 oval track challenge).
Yes. And that's your job. Not the state's. You control the environment. You are responsible for the environment.
No, I don't. I have influence, but I don't have ultimate control over it. If you think you do, please go consult a psychiatrist - because you are utterly deluded and belive you are some kind of deity.
There is no way the state can make the environment you provide "safe enough", that is completely on you.
It can't make it completely safe, but can help avoid the worst. This is a fact.
People like you are, quite literally this time, why we can't have nice things.
If by "nice things" you mean things like assault weapons and 1000mW lasers, then, well, frankly, I am proud. Your short-sightedness, stupidity, and recklessness is something worth fighting against. I am happy to know that the reasonable people are winning.
Please do not vote or breed. It is the parent's responsibility to ensure the environment the children is safe - always unless that responsibility is given to a caretaker. Even selecting a quality caretaker is a parent's responsibility. Stop trying to blame your ineptitude on inanimate objects.
The issue is: what happens that moment when attention slips, perhaps for not longer than a second? It's obviously better when there are no buckyball supermagnets or guns around. That's why it is a good idea to regulate them by law.
You are really stupid and deluded if you think you can keep 100% attention always, day and night, for years on end.
Mistakes happen. If you think you are able to 100% not make a mistake, then you are a deluded idiot and a liability to yourself and everyone around you.
Slashdot Mirror
They want to work for free but the gov says no. It's sensible, because stopping people from working for too little avoids races to the bottom and makes sure everyone gets paid enough (which in turn ensures that the economy keeps moving).
Only in a simple and sterile world where everything is linear. In truth, it is easy to find examples of free trades that do not benefit anyone. Like the addict and the heroin dealer, both sinking deeper into tragedy as a result of their (free) trade.
What is insane is how little paid time off people get in the US. I am sure most americans would love to have a decent break every now and then without having to fear that the job is gone when they are back.
In fact, without having to fear.
Rational argument can't happen in isolation. It needs axioms to be based upon, and if you choose axioms properly, "software must be patentable because it makes lawyers rich" can be a perfectly rational and logical argument.
No, this is a political issue, and one of values. It is about the choice of axioms.
But perhaps this is all too subtle for you.
No, it is entirely rational to fight something you don't want.
The chemists, for example, seem to be ok with a world ruled by lawyers, or where, after having a good idea, you end up owing someone a shipload of money just because someone has a patent on it. The chemists can get it unlubed in the if they are ok with that. It seems they are a spineless bunch.
Perhaps your idea of what is "rational" is severly limited and crooked. Here is your mistake: that greedy suit is being rational, because the "it's on a computer" is just an argument he uses for his own self interest. Just like that incredibly narcistic "why should I think if i don't get to become rich for some stupid idea" line. The point that should matter is that he or she is a greedy asshole that wants to take your money away, wants to enslave you, and deserves something entirely different from being rich and successful. What is important is that he or she must be stopped.
That whole line with "being rational", especially when the arguments are as stupid as they are when people favour patents, is quite often just a smokescreen and a maneuver to make you think in a way someone else wants.
Because I don't want it to be patentable. I find patents ugly, inhuman, and perverse. They make thinking dangerous. When it is about software, particularily so.
I have a say in this matter, however small it may be, and I don't want algorithms to be patentable.
That previous life also explains why he managed to keep calm. Compared to his experiences from the 70s that episode in belize was a walk in the park.
It is sort of funny in an unsettling way that commenters got worked up about that, and not about
every grant must benefit 'national defense'
which truly sounds batshit crazy. I'd expect that of an Iranian or Norky minister, but not of someone overseeing research funding in a civilized country.
So they get to make that profit but without any responsibility? That can't work.
If they can't do it properly they should not be doing it at all.
Here is a nice article that includes a historical writeup by Evgeny Morozov on how the concepts of Open Source and Free Software ended up meaning something different (and fas less interesting and progressive) than initially. Warning: It is a long read.
Which, frankly, is a good thing.
Maybe, maybe not.
To be freely tradable this kind of financial product (let's stop that ridiculous "currency" bullshit) requires some type of legal framework that isn't available. If it ever gets it, you could trade bitcoins as easily as shares. But as it stands, and aside from money laundring issues, you could as well prosecute bitcoin trading on the grounds that it is illegal gambling.
Of course, a sound legal framework for bitcoins would most likely make them pointless.
I don't understand what your point is. But just in case, a floating fiat currency can be used to effectively combat deflation, which is significantly more damaging than inflation.
During the worst of the great depression, the US$ had 20% deflation a year. AFAICT, that's pretty much a record.
Wrong. That baker increased the bread supply, but if he, for example, chooses to put all that in his basement, then it will not affect how many loafs an air ticket costs. Thus, in this case it does not affect inflation. Same thing if he decides to give it to people who then bunker it in their basements.
You can of course decide to call "inflation" the increase of money supply. But then that would be your personal fringe definition, and not what most people understand under inflation (the increase of prices).
You have that backwards. Bernie wasn't investigated because the regulators are weak. Such things do not happen in well-governed countries were regulators have not been castrated by Randroids.
Yeah, right. But then you are deranged and crazy, who cares about what you are against or believe in?
Maybe, but they might delude themselves into thinking they don't. Companies are run by humans, remember? That's why there is regulation and official approval procedures. And while crappy coffee machines can be had, they are unlikely to be unsafe thanks to regulation.
That may be so too, but regulations are there so that killing people is not how they get their bad reputation.
That is: you are free to get as bad a reputation as you want, but not free to do so by injuring or killing people. I think that is quite sensible.
That is true. Regulation ensures that we only have well-designed coffee makers. At least on the safety front. Regulation ensures that companies do not compromise safety with cost of production. Personally, I think that this is a good idea.
That might be true to some extent, but to a very large extent the warnings are there to prevent accidents. And they do. And most companies do actually care for what happens to their customers. Well, companies that want to be arround for a while do. And it is not all cynicism.
Theory is that way <==
Practice over there ==>
Some people use editors that wrap lines on screen but save it as one long line, and others use editors that wrap it on file too. Enough to mess up any useful version control. And it's not practicable to convinve people to chane their tools.
Standard practice is to email tarballed or zipped versions to each other, or use dropbox, and keep a kind of locking protocol on sections and files ("I am working on the proof of the this-and-that theorem - don't touch it until I'm done") Or better yet, one person has control of the file, and sends it to one researcher at a time for changes, merges the results by hand based on merit and contents, and then sends the thing to the next one.
For that type of workflow, ammendment tracking like what Word has is just fantastic, while typical VC magic on plain text files (git and co) just suck.
LyX is a nice idea, but I don't know anyone who actually uses it. In my case, I tried writing an article with it, but at the end I had to submit a LaTeX document, and the tex export of LyX was simply not usable. Much better to just use emacs + auctex + reftex.
Also, if the reputation of MIT as a pressure cooker is true, you won't be a student at MIT for too long if you waste your time running and administrating your own game server.
Well, so what? I hear that as argument, over and over. That we absolutely need baseload power generation is never put into question. It is quite likely that we can adapt to a much lower baseline than we currently have. At the moment, we pretty much expect power to be there whenever we want, as much as we want. But why should that be set in stone? If this is what it takes to avoid nuclear, then I say go for it.
As for the numbers claimed in the article, they are of course bullshit, because, as has been pointed out, the storage problem hasn't been solved. Also, the claim that waste from coal plants is as dangerous as that from nuclear plants is simply ridiculous.
I use rdiff-backup on each of the machines I administer (my machines and those of my wife, at home and at work, plus laptops). rdiff-backup is nice because it saves the current snapshot as a directory that looks exactly like the one being backed up, so restoring stuff is really very trivial.
The backup scripts run daily, backing up to the home directory of the user (a /home/$user/backups directory) so that casual deletion means at most a day of work lost. I rsync all those backup dirs weekly to one of three 1TB drives. They are about 60% full each.
The three of them are rotated arround. One is next to me, one in the basement, and another in a drawer at my office. They get rotated every week.
Seems pretty solid to me. A lot has to happen to leave me with a serious data loss.
If he's the kind of guy who thinks he deserves to get rich for a bit of rubber, then I say let the predators have him.
If he is the kind of guy who thinks he deserves to get rich for a bit of rubber, then I say let him sit on his idea and rot away.
Indeed. I wonder how the market taliban think this plays out in terms of their holy theories. That is - why hasn't the market reacted as it should, raising salaries for skilled people?
It is indeed weird, because that is what should have happened even if you think that markets aren't always working perfectly.
There is a whole lot of politics involved in HPC. The only way to justify the ridiculous costs (not only in hardware, but also in energy) for this type of machines is by convincing university management that they are going to look really good ("We will be recognized as global players if we have a machine in that list", etc, etc.). This is indeed bizarre, but the way it is.
The people who build and manage these machines aren't usually terribly interested in the needs of scientists running jobs on it. They are just obsessed in piling up hardware and getting the credits, like race car builders. The needs of the scientists tend to be an afterthought. Quite often, and I have that as an insider, these machines idle around because a lot of scientists have a nice quad-core machine under their desks fullfilling their computing needs just fine, and getting something to run on the monster machine is a hassle.
On top of that, many of the applications that actually run on these machines are things like least-squares fitting problems, but solved using genetic algorithms (which is ridiculous) mainly due to the ineptitude of the scientists involved. Or absurd brute force Monte-Carlo simulations done simply because some scientists don't know or understand differential equations. It so happens in many disciplines that doing something with an HPC machine using some stupid but expensive algorithm will get you more hype credits than doing it smartly on last decade's laptop in a tenth of the time and one millionth of the electrical energy.
So, yeah, it's completely bizarre. That the good folks of the 'Blue Waters' machine rebel sounds very nice. I wonder if they are just deluded and missing the only point of building such a machine, though (which seems to be to race in the Dongarra 500 oval track challenge).
No, I don't. I have influence, but I don't have ultimate control over it. If you think you do, please go consult a psychiatrist - because you are utterly deluded and belive you are some kind of deity.
It can't make it completely safe, but can help avoid the worst. This is a fact.
If by "nice things" you mean things like assault weapons and 1000mW lasers, then, well, frankly, I am proud. Your short-sightedness, stupidity, and recklessness is something worth fighting against. I am happy to know that the reasonable people are winning.
The issue is: what happens that moment when attention slips, perhaps for not longer than a second? It's obviously better when there are no buckyball supermagnets or guns around. That's why it is a good idea to regulate them by law.
You are really stupid and deluded if you think you can keep 100% attention always, day and night, for years on end.
Mistakes happen. If you think you are able to 100% not make a mistake, then you are a deluded idiot and a liability to yourself and everyone around you.