You just disproved your own statement. A free market would allow a monopoly to continue it's anti-competitve behavior even to the detriment of the market. You're arguing for better regulation not a freer market.
[note: unless my definition of free market is off, which is quite possible]
The definition of a free market depends on who you ask; different people will have different views on what exactly you should be "free" to do. The ideal you seem to subscribe to is one where the market is free from any form of intervention. I prefer the idea that the "free market" refers to the freedom of anyone to participate in the market, without having to deal with anti-competitive practices and monopolies; that form of market necessitates some degree of regulation.
Like so many other areas in life, instead of taking well defined opposing views on a subject, people just agree on a fairly nebulous term and then make wildly different interpretations of it and claim they broadly agree.
And that gross domestic product is? Americans spend more than they earn. Chinese spend most of what they earn. All I see is a bunch of Americans living their lives, a bunch of Chinese living their lives, and the Americans polluting 4 times as much as the Chinese.
I see no sources linked in that article. I merely see two graphs which may or may not be correct. Even if the graphs were taken from actual reliable sources, I would like to be able to read why the people at those sources decided to make adjustments. Some adjustments can be made for valid reasons. An article by a sensationalist newspaper providing two graphs with no data source is worthless.
In a free society the industry will produce what the people demand. Unfortunately the market for sturdier products is *very* small. People will rather have luxury than quality.
This is true. And that, my friend, is where regulation comes in. I did say "massive regulation of manufacturing". That does not have to be a bad thing. Equating regulation of manufacturing with a stalinist economy is just plain wrong. I know this is an american site, and as such most suggestions of regulation will be viewed in a bad light, but rules are needed in a world that is slowly going to shit. All I'm suggesting is that a set of rules is produced that is beneficial to consumers. To take a leaf out of Opportunist's book as per above, why not implement minimum standards for televisions? Yes people will want to buy a shiny new TV that's better than their old set. They look in the shop window, see enormous prices, they KNOW that any and all of these has a warranty of only 1 year, so they buy the cheapest one. How would they make their decision if they see 2 shiny TV's, one with a 1 year warranty and costs 700 quid, and one with a ten year warranty that costs a grand? Enforcing a minimum standard through regulation does not in any way interfere with competition, and competition is what capitalism is all about. Capitalism will not destroy the world, if it has a framework within which it is forced to operate.
to the "intern who fixes windoze". I can understand wanting some differentiation between different fields in IT, but just because someone does something different is no reason to look down on it. I fix computers for a living. Sure, the programmers who write software for the companies I provide tech support for know a lot more about programming than I do. But, apart from the occasional programmer I meet who is an all round computer guru, the vast majority of them have problems fixing the smallest problem outside of their own software. Me? Give me a problem and I'll fix it. Broken printer, broken scanner, broken whatever, I'll fix it or condemn it if it is beyond economical repair. Mac, Windows, SCO, AIX, Solaris, AS400, DGUX, HPUX, Linux, BSD, I don't care. If there's a problem, I'll either know how to sort it out or know how to figure out how to fix it. And I don't worry about what title I get. Most of my work is in network maintenance and security, but when I go to a customer's site, they view me as the guy who fixes the dot matrix printers. You know why? Because I do.
Indeed, reform of the way the economy is defined is needed. A collapse in "economic growth" need not necessarily lead to a drastic decrease in living standards. Vast amounts of energy are used in the world today to produce items with a lifetime far shorter than they could be. High quality engineering and craftsmanship could, at a slightly higher cost, produce items (furniture, cars, refrigerators, whatever) with lifetimes of many decades instead of a few years. Yeah, so there would be a lot less employment available as a result, both directly in manufacturing and indirectly in waste recycling, but people wouldn't need to buy as much either, so you could conceivably achieve shorter working hours and lessened energy/materials consumption (lessened economic activity) with little effect on people's quality of life. I'd even say it would be a better quality of life if everybody had to work less.
The only way I could see to make something like that happen however would be massive regulation of manufacturing to prevent the production of garbage. I don't believe the problem with econmic activity is the use of resources, I think it is more a matter of how much we just waste. Leaving a light bulb turned on overnight is nothing compared to the amount of energy used to create all the plastic rubbish in landfills around the world.
You don't have to get remote users to open ports on their firewalls. Get them to run a VNC server, you run a VNC listening client on your machine with a portforward on your side to 5500, and get them to connect their server to your client. If they are running on windows with realvnc for example, you get them to right click their vnc server, select "add new client", and type in server-address:5500
W His inspiration was drawn from not just the physical sciences, but also the social sciences.
I agree, social sciences should be included in sci-fi. My favourite Asimov story is "The Martian way", which is pretty much all about human nature, wrapped up in a futuristic scenario.
Technobabble has its place. Look at the writings of Peter F. Hamilton. Very little solid science behind any of it, mostly pure space opera. I think it still has valid technology predictions. Ideas about what might be possible are more important than a plausible explanation of how to get there, at least in fiction stories.
Not at all. Whether a town was officially classed as a city in historical europe was usually a matter of having a royal charter proclaiming it as such. This had nothing to do with population size, and all to do with rights being conferred by the crown.
I think one of the biggest scale issues is the amount of work involved in the design of the game world. Eve supports 45k+ simultaneous connections because the have a server for each star system; however, each of those star systems involved minimal designm, just a star, then a few planets, moons and star bases, all using fairly generic models, and asteroid belts with randomly generated asteroids. Other than that, its just space. Something like warcraft could similarly have a very large game world, instead of what are effectively 4 islands of each about 10-15 square kilometers. But there would be a massive amount more work involved in the design of such a world, and you would have to put in place mechanisms to stop populations from clumping a lot, like slower travel (Another thing Eve has; I can remember from when I played that long journeys could take hours, not just jumping through a mage portal like WOW), and putting in collisions for characters to limit large crowd movements, so that people will naturally avoid excessively populated ares. This would of course have negative gameplay effects, but could be mitigated somewhat by having nonstatic worlds, where settlement patterns, vendors etc follwed player populations on the map.
Warren doesn't fund companies from an altruistic job creation goal. He funds companies to get a return on his investment. The actual creation of jobs is far more demand driven than supply driven anyway. He increases his income by investing his money.
Actually, If I remember correctly, he doesn't pay himself a huge amount, so his income per se doesn't go up. His WEALTH however, the value of his companies, keeps going up, and seeing as he's not paying himself much of it in salary, he's not paying income tax either. Just a one-off lump sum capital gains tax any time he flogs some shares.
From 1801 to 1921 Ireland was a part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain. Oscar Wilde lived between the 1850s and around 1900 and was undeniably British (though not English obviously)...
No. Ireland was a part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Britain and Ireland were seperate entities in the "United Kingdom". Ireland was never a part of Britain.
Indeed. This is because there is no such thing as an ideal power source; batteries will have an internal resistance that must be taken into account. If most of the resistance in a circuit is across the battery itself, it will completely wreck your numbers if you didn't take it into consideration.
all of his authority with respect to this network come from his supervisor/manager. He only has the authority to "do what's best for the network" as long as it's still granted to him by his supervisor. As soon as his supervisor revokes that authority, he no longer has the privilege of deciding what is best for the network.
And as soon as his employment is terminated, his obligations to that supervisor end, including the divulging of passwords.
After all that, he was just being a dick
I would consider someone firing you and then saying "Oh by the way I forgot to ask you to do something before I fired you, do it now or I'll get my friends to stick you in prison" to be the dick.
No you may not stand behind me and watch. You can hire me as an outside contractor to take care of your system remotely with site visits when warranted. You can pay more to have me sit on your site as your employee and twiddle my thumbs while everything is working and fix stuff when it isn't. But you SURE AS HELL CAN NOT STAND BEHIND ME WATCHING. Am I alone or do other people here have a problem with being watched while working? I bloody well hate it. Having to account for what you have done and/or explain it, fine. But some gobshite sitting watching your every move? No way.
Creating thousands of splinter civilizations with no emotional investment in the species homeworld is a recipe for galactic war if I've ever heard one.
Which species?
Any colonisation with those kind of time periods between inter-population contact would result in vast amounts of speciation.
Just move to Ireland. Close to home for you, and nobody here takes the government seriously except when they're trying to rob us blind. Rules here are made to be broken, just don't piss off the neighbours.
This is what I was thinking as soon as I read the article. Even if it works (and the theory seems valid if they could do it on a massive enough scale, but it would have to be MASSSIVE) what else are you screwing up by doing this?
I'd be much more worried that it would create BIGGER hurricanes. Storing up all that energy locally, causing the higher latitudes to become colder... I can just see it in my head, a MASSIVE cold air front coming down from the north atlantic into an area of ocean where Bill's been saving up hot water like crazy.
Slashdot Mirror
You just disproved your own statement. A free market would allow a monopoly to continue it's anti-competitve behavior even to the detriment of the market. You're arguing for better regulation not a freer market.
[note: unless my definition of free market is off, which is quite possible]
The definition of a free market depends on who you ask; different people will have different views on what exactly you should be "free" to do. The ideal you seem to subscribe to is one where the market is free from any form of intervention. I prefer the idea that the "free market" refers to the freedom of anyone to participate in the market, without having to deal with anti-competitive practices and monopolies; that form of market necessitates some degree of regulation. Like so many other areas in life, instead of taking well defined opposing views on a subject, people just agree on a fairly nebulous term and then make wildly different interpretations of it and claim they broadly agree.
It is a certainty that any well-funded terrorist group will eventually have access to nuclear-scale weapons.
Seriously though, what good is a weapon that small going to be?
At lower class affairs, I shall accept beer and pretzels.
And that gross domestic product is? Americans spend more than they earn. Chinese spend most of what they earn. All I see is a bunch of Americans living their lives, a bunch of Chinese living their lives, and the Americans polluting 4 times as much as the Chinese.
I see no sources linked in that article. I merely see two graphs which may or may not be correct. Even if the graphs were taken from actual reliable sources, I would like to be able to read why the people at those sources decided to make adjustments. Some adjustments can be made for valid reasons. An article by a sensationalist newspaper providing two graphs with no data source is worthless.
In a free society the industry will produce what the people demand. Unfortunately the market for sturdier products is *very* small. People will rather have luxury than quality.
This is true. And that, my friend, is where regulation comes in. I did say "massive regulation of manufacturing". That does not have to be a bad thing. Equating regulation of manufacturing with a stalinist economy is just plain wrong. I know this is an american site, and as such most suggestions of regulation will be viewed in a bad light, but rules are needed in a world that is slowly going to shit. All I'm suggesting is that a set of rules is produced that is beneficial to consumers. To take a leaf out of Opportunist's book as per above, why not implement minimum standards for televisions? Yes people will want to buy a shiny new TV that's better than their old set. They look in the shop window, see enormous prices, they KNOW that any and all of these has a warranty of only 1 year, so they buy the cheapest one. How would they make their decision if they see 2 shiny TV's, one with a 1 year warranty and costs 700 quid, and one with a ten year warranty that costs a grand? Enforcing a minimum standard through regulation does not in any way interfere with competition, and competition is what capitalism is all about. Capitalism will not destroy the world, if it has a framework within which it is forced to operate.
to the "intern who fixes windoze". I can understand wanting some differentiation between different fields in IT, but just because someone does something different is no reason to look down on it. I fix computers for a living. Sure, the programmers who write software for the companies I provide tech support for know a lot more about programming than I do. But, apart from the occasional programmer I meet who is an all round computer guru, the vast majority of them have problems fixing the smallest problem outside of their own software. Me? Give me a problem and I'll fix it. Broken printer, broken scanner, broken whatever, I'll fix it or condemn it if it is beyond economical repair. Mac, Windows, SCO, AIX, Solaris, AS400, DGUX, HPUX, Linux, BSD, I don't care. If there's a problem, I'll either know how to sort it out or know how to figure out how to fix it. And I don't worry about what title I get. Most of my work is in network maintenance and security, but when I go to a customer's site, they view me as the guy who fixes the dot matrix printers. You know why? Because I do.
Indeed, reform of the way the economy is defined is needed. A collapse in "economic growth" need not necessarily lead to a drastic decrease in living standards. Vast amounts of energy are used in the world today to produce items with a lifetime far shorter than they could be. High quality engineering and craftsmanship could, at a slightly higher cost, produce items (furniture, cars, refrigerators, whatever) with lifetimes of many decades instead of a few years. Yeah, so there would be a lot less employment available as a result, both directly in manufacturing and indirectly in waste recycling, but people wouldn't need to buy as much either, so you could conceivably achieve shorter working hours and lessened energy/materials consumption (lessened economic activity) with little effect on people's quality of life. I'd even say it would be a better quality of life if everybody had to work less. The only way I could see to make something like that happen however would be massive regulation of manufacturing to prevent the production of garbage. I don't believe the problem with econmic activity is the use of resources, I think it is more a matter of how much we just waste. Leaving a light bulb turned on overnight is nothing compared to the amount of energy used to create all the plastic rubbish in landfills around the world.
I see at least 7 people were way ahead of me with that :)
You don't have to get remote users to open ports on their firewalls. Get them to run a VNC server, you run a VNC listening client on your machine with a portforward on your side to 5500, and get them to connect their server to your client. If they are running on windows with realvnc for example, you get them to right click their vnc server, select "add new client", and type in server-address:5500
W His inspiration was drawn from not just the physical sciences, but also the social sciences.
I agree, social sciences should be included in sci-fi. My favourite Asimov story is "The Martian way", which is pretty much all about human nature, wrapped up in a futuristic scenario.
Indeed. Nuclear fusion releases energy; the "cold" bit merely refers to the fact that it is controlled.
But I do want more than a bit of technobabble.
Technobabble has its place. Look at the writings of Peter F. Hamilton. Very little solid science behind any of it, mostly pure space opera. I think it still has valid technology predictions. Ideas about what might be possible are more important than a plausible explanation of how to get there, at least in fiction stories.
Not at all. Whether a town was officially classed as a city in historical europe was usually a matter of having a royal charter proclaiming it as such. This had nothing to do with population size, and all to do with rights being conferred by the crown.
I think one of the biggest scale issues is the amount of work involved in the design of the game world. Eve supports 45k+ simultaneous connections because the have a server for each star system; however, each of those star systems involved minimal designm, just a star, then a few planets, moons and star bases, all using fairly generic models, and asteroid belts with randomly generated asteroids. Other than that, its just space. Something like warcraft could similarly have a very large game world, instead of what are effectively 4 islands of each about 10-15 square kilometers. But there would be a massive amount more work involved in the design of such a world, and you would have to put in place mechanisms to stop populations from clumping a lot, like slower travel (Another thing Eve has; I can remember from when I played that long journeys could take hours, not just jumping through a mage portal like WOW), and putting in collisions for characters to limit large crowd movements, so that people will naturally avoid excessively populated ares. This would of course have negative gameplay effects, but could be mitigated somewhat by having nonstatic worlds, where settlement patterns, vendors etc follwed player populations on the map.
Long time no see! We all miss you loads here, when are you arriving home for Christmas?
Lots of love,
your favourite nephew
Warren doesn't fund companies from an altruistic job creation goal. He funds companies to get a return on his investment. The actual creation of jobs is far more demand driven than supply driven anyway. He increases his income by investing his money.
Actually, If I remember correctly, he doesn't pay himself a huge amount, so his income per se doesn't go up. His WEALTH however, the value of his companies, keeps going up, and seeing as he's not paying himself much of it in salary, he's not paying income tax either. Just a one-off lump sum capital gains tax any time he flogs some shares.
From 1801 to 1921 Ireland was a part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain. Oscar Wilde lived between the 1850s and around 1900 and was undeniably British (though not English obviously)...
No. Ireland was a part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Britain and Ireland were seperate entities in the "United Kingdom". Ireland was never a part of Britain.
Indeed. This is because there is no such thing as an ideal power source; batteries will have an internal resistance that must be taken into account. If most of the resistance in a circuit is across the battery itself, it will completely wreck your numbers if you didn't take it into consideration.
all of his authority with respect to this network come from his supervisor/manager. He only has the authority to "do what's best for the network" as long as it's still granted to him by his supervisor. As soon as his supervisor revokes that authority, he no longer has the privilege of deciding what is best for the network.
And as soon as his employment is terminated, his obligations to that supervisor end, including the divulging of passwords.
After all that, he was just being a dick
I would consider someone firing you and then saying "Oh by the way I forgot to ask you to do something before I fired you, do it now or I'll get my friends to stick you in prison" to be the dick.
when people use the language wrong
Muahahahahaha
"An American" in English has one and only one meaning.
Indeed. It means someone from America.
No you may not stand behind me and watch. You can hire me as an outside contractor to take care of your system remotely with site visits when warranted. You can pay more to have me sit on your site as your employee and twiddle my thumbs while everything is working and fix stuff when it isn't. But you SURE AS HELL CAN NOT STAND BEHIND ME WATCHING. Am I alone or do other people here have a problem with being watched while working? I bloody well hate it. Having to account for what you have done and/or explain it, fine. But some gobshite sitting watching your every move? No way.
Creating thousands of splinter civilizations with no emotional investment in the species homeworld is a recipe for galactic war if I've ever heard one.
Which species? Any colonisation with those kind of time periods between inter-population contact would result in vast amounts of speciation.
Just move to Ireland. Close to home for you, and nobody here takes the government seriously except when they're trying to rob us blind. Rules here are made to be broken, just don't piss off the neighbours.
This is what I was thinking as soon as I read the article. Even if it works (and the theory seems valid if they could do it on a massive enough scale, but it would have to be MASSSIVE) what else are you screwing up by doing this?
I'd be much more worried that it would create BIGGER hurricanes. Storing up all that energy locally, causing the higher latitudes to become colder... I can just see it in my head, a MASSIVE cold air front coming down from the north atlantic into an area of ocean where Bill's been saving up hot water like crazy.