Arrow proved that you can't make a perfect election system for more than two candidates. That doesn't mean every voting system that does exist is equally worthless.
Consider France, for instance. They use top-two runoffs, and they have more than two parties. While top-two doesn't really fit Arrow (as it's not a ranked ballot method), it probably doesn't pass the independence of irrelevant alternatives criterion, and so isn't a perfect method by Arrow's yardstick. Yet it works: it does permit multiple parties. That in itself means that some methods, while not perfect, are good enough.
Instant runoff voting is so strange that moving a candidate higher on your ranked ballot can actually make him lose, whereas if you had kept him lower when you voted, he would have won. It could also neglect to choose the candidate that would win a hypothetical top-two runoff against every other candidate. Give me actual runoffs any day, or for ranked ballots, the method Wikimedia itself uses.
Let's see. Standard DVD size has a diameter of 120mm (radius = 60 mm). You want 1 in (25.4 mm). There's a center hole that's 15 mm in the DVD standard, so let's say it's shrunk to 8 mm. Then the area of the DVD sized disc is pi * (60^2 - 15^2), and of the small disc, pi * (25.4^2 - 8^2). The DVD sized disc has about 5.8 times the area of your smaller disc, so if they can get 500 GB on the big one, 80 GB on the small? Sounds good.
However, the record companies are not run by robotic automatons. They are run by humans and, quite frankly, as human beings, they should have the cognitive capacity to understand complex mental abstractions such as morality, healthy social balance, empathy, and temperance. Trying to earn a profit is not a morally corrupt quest. Trying to earn a profit at the expense and livlihood of your fellow human beings, and at the disruption of the society that you, yourself, are part of is downright stupid, if not flagrantly evil.
There's a selection pressure going on. If you have a sense of morality, you're not going to last long in such an environment, so you quit. Meanwhile, the people that don't have such compunctions keep working. Pretty soon all the moral people have been weeded out.
If the corporate optimization function is aligned for profit alone, then don't be surprised when the upper echelons of the companies get filled with people who care only about profit. In this respect, the sociopaths have an "evolutionary" (selective) advantage: they don't let their morals get in the way of the profit optimization. Thus they can optimize further than ordinary people can, and hence they're selected for. Doing something about that would involve altering the optimization ("fitness function"), but how?
Bioshock was basically System Shock 2's story set underwater, they had 10 years to come up with something semi-original.
And how blatantly so. Atlas is Polito, with the same twist. That makes Fontaine SHODAN and Ryan XERXES (and his splicers The Many). Tenenbaum is Delacroix (atoner). In this corner, we have some pipe hybrids, and over in that corner, some splicers, both zombies.
As for the game elements... stock up on elements in System Shock 2 and take pictures in Bioshock, then grab some cybermodules or ADAM. Can't do spooky action at a distance? No problem, hack some vending machines/vending machines and get some PSI hypos/EVE, then let 'er rip from your PSI-amp/arm.
I find it extremely unlikely that the state can re-engineer the internet to such a point that the limitations to internet liberty can't simply be sidestepped. Even less likely is that they can do that without destroying the very thing that makes the internet useful in the first place: all intelligence at the edges, simple neutral routing between the endpoints.
It's unclear from the game whether your side is purely defensive or if it's actually aiming to wipe the cabal out. Without spoiling things too much if you want to play the game, they never get their chance. But your point about illness is a good one. It used to be the case that mental hospitals were run like prisons. Perhaps one should instead run prisons (for those who have no alternative, like the cabal members) as hospitals.
As for social-technical points, I would say that social points are actually more important than technical points. If you have lots of social points, you can make abundance work without high tech; but if you have lots of technical points - i.e. power - without the social points that confer the responsibility needed, you could get a parallel LulzSec making an airborne plague "for the lulz", or terrorist fanatics wiping out cities with nanotech. Some of the same is alluded to in a later cutscene of Hostile Waters, where it is shown that the universal assemblers can also be used as universal disassemblers.
So far, responsibility has managed to stay ahead of power - even with nuclear weapons, the nations of the world have managed to not destroy themselves. But will it hold as more and more power is available? I don't know, but there will be interesting times.
(And as a note on churches: I got the feeling that they were talking about the kind of religion that could be subordinated to authority. Consider the claim of the divine right of kings, and the significant power the Pope wielded back in those days. One can graft hierarchy to any organization, and so attempt to gain control of the organization's domain.)
You might want to check the cutscenes to the old game Hostile Waters, particularly Nanotechnology and Cabal. It's an RTS, but your side is a post-scarcity society and the enemy group is those leaders that didn't like the redistribution of power that brought.
It may be simple, but I haven't seen that kind of setting elsewhere.
No, that is not what I'm saying. I'm saying that were replicators or printers to exist, but the classical economy derived its scarcity value entirely from DRM, I would have no problem downloading "LaBWaRe.CRACKED.stl.rar", or for the intellectual challenge of it, downloading the demo (were there such a thing) and cracking it myself. And since the only thing separating this scenario from one where everybody could have everything they wanted is the artificial addition of DRM, I don't think the majority of the people would feel bad in either cracking or downloading pirated copies, either.
In the current world, at least you can claim that it's unjust to download a pirated copy since it deprives the author of the money they would get if you had bought it legally. However, if the only thing that makes things have monetary value in a replicator+DRM society is that there is DRM, then money only exists as a legitimate way of canceling the DRM. Thus, my pirating doesn't deprive the ultimate authors of their value since they can just pirate what they need, too.
It is true that things will be much less clear in the intermediate period where somethings can be printed and other things not, but the greater the fraction of things you need that can be printed, the weaker the claim that piracy is morally bad will be. In practice, in such a "mixed economy" (scarcity/abundance), I'd probably just try to make open source labware.
And if they put DRM into it so you can't just "print up whatever you want"?
Then I start IDA, Replicator Edition -- or wait for the kind folks at Razor (or Reloaded, Deviance, whoever) to do that if I don't know how. At least for current "digital content", those who don't like pirates can claim to some degree that pirating deprives the producers of money - but if the DRM is just a scheme to keep poor (who otherwise could print anything they wanted) poor, that logic kinda goes out the window.
And if they're going to implement another image format, why don't they do it right and pick some form of embedded zerotree wavelet? Those beat the pants off JPEG (and most other DCT codecs) while being perfectly progressive (i.e. you can truncate the picture data itself at any point and get the same result as you would if you had compressed to that size).
Instead we'll get yet another block coding format, for what? So that Google can use it to leverage WebM?
The distributed approach—a market economy—solves the problem by accepting that information is never perfectly complete or accurate, but tends to be more complete and accurate at a local level; in short, people look out for their own interests far better than even the most benevolent central planners (or AIs). A high degree of global efficiency is an emergent by-product of distributed local efficiency.
Couldn't the AI act as the superstructure of that distributed approach? As it is, in the ideal case, the market economy converges on prices through a process of trial and failure (tatonnement); but given more detailed data (say, input-output information), the AI could converge more quickly towards equilibrium. It's still a distributed approach because all the actual innovation happens at the hands of the participants - the people - but the mechanism itself would be much more responsive. The additional information could also be aggregated by the AI for the people to use. For instance, input-output data could show what the limiting resources to production of a given sort are, and people could then try to find better ways of producing those resources if they value the good in question -- and such could happen without having to go through multiple stages of tatonnement.
There's such a thing as a PR ranked ballot system. The most well known one is the single transferable vote, but Schulze (for which the election method used by the German Piratenpartei is named) has devised a proportional representation variant called Schulze STV, too.
Unlike first past the post, STV does work in providing competition. When New York tried it in the late thirties, it proved to work so well that the corrupt machines had to red-scare it to death.
That would have serious incentive incompatibility. You think for-profit prison lobbyists pushing for harder terms is bad now? If the police were to be for-profit, it would benefit from catching "criminals" - and from redefining what a criminal is, and squeezing as much labor out of them as they could manage, and if possible, encouraging criminals to commit greater offenses. Every arrested person would mysteriously resist arrest so that could be added to the charge sheets. The prisons would be harsh and have no rehabilitation - if they turn into academies of crime, all the better, because it increases the revenue stream of recidivists.
In short: if it's profitable to catch criminals, the private police would farm them. Like any other company, if they get paid for X, then well, you'll get plenty of X.
Slashdot Mirror
Arrow proved that you can't make a perfect election system for more than two candidates. That doesn't mean every voting system that does exist is equally worthless.
Consider France, for instance. They use top-two runoffs, and they have more than two parties. While top-two doesn't really fit Arrow (as it's not a ranked ballot method), it probably doesn't pass the independence of irrelevant alternatives criterion, and so isn't a perfect method by Arrow's yardstick. Yet it works: it does permit multiple parties. That in itself means that some methods, while not perfect, are good enough.
Instant runoff voting is so strange that moving a candidate higher on your ranked ballot can actually make him lose, whereas if you had kept him lower when you voted, he would have won. It could also neglect to choose the candidate that would win a hypothetical top-two runoff against every other candidate. Give me actual runoffs any day, or for ranked ballots, the method Wikimedia itself uses.
Let's see. Standard DVD size has a diameter of 120mm (radius = 60 mm). You want 1 in (25.4 mm). There's a center hole that's 15 mm in the DVD standard, so let's say it's shrunk to 8 mm. Then the area of the DVD sized disc is pi * (60^2 - 15^2), and of the small disc, pi * (25.4^2 - 8^2). The DVD sized disc has about 5.8 times the area of your smaller disc, so if they can get 500 GB on the big one, 80 GB on the small? Sounds good.
However, the record companies are not run by robotic automatons. They are run by humans and, quite frankly, as human beings, they should have the cognitive capacity to understand complex mental abstractions such as morality, healthy social balance, empathy, and temperance. Trying to earn a profit is not a morally corrupt quest. Trying to earn a profit at the expense and livlihood of your fellow human beings, and at the disruption of the society that you, yourself, are part of is downright stupid, if not flagrantly evil.
There's a selection pressure going on. If you have a sense of morality, you're not going to last long in such an environment, so you quit. Meanwhile, the people that don't have such compunctions keep working. Pretty soon all the moral people have been weeded out.
If the corporate optimization function is aligned for profit alone, then don't be surprised when the upper echelons of the companies get filled with people who care only about profit. In this respect, the sociopaths have an "evolutionary" (selective) advantage: they don't let their morals get in the way of the profit optimization. Thus they can optimize further than ordinary people can, and hence they're selected for. Doing something about that would involve altering the optimization ("fitness function"), but how?
Bioshock was basically System Shock 2's story set underwater, they had 10 years to come up with something semi-original.
And how blatantly so. Atlas is Polito, with the same twist. That makes Fontaine SHODAN and Ryan XERXES (and his splicers The Many). Tenenbaum is Delacroix (atoner). In this corner, we have some pipe hybrids, and over in that corner, some splicers, both zombies.
As for the game elements... stock up on elements in System Shock 2 and take pictures in Bioshock, then grab some cybermodules or ADAM. Can't do spooky action at a distance? No problem, hack some vending machines/vending machines and get some PSI hypos/EVE, then let 'er rip from your PSI-amp/arm.
I find it extremely unlikely that the state can re-engineer the internet to such a point that the limitations to internet liberty can't simply be sidestepped. Even less likely is that they can do that without destroying the very thing that makes the internet useful in the first place: all intelligence at the edges, simple neutral routing between the endpoints.
It could be a general Gnostic reference. Abraxas is also a Marvel Comics character.
Yours is the minority report!
And blackjack.
Sorry, I won't go for anything less than 239 PUs.
It's unclear from the game whether your side is purely defensive or if it's actually aiming to wipe the cabal out. Without spoiling things too much if you want to play the game, they never get their chance. But your point about illness is a good one. It used to be the case that mental hospitals were run like prisons. Perhaps one should instead run prisons (for those who have no alternative, like the cabal members) as hospitals.
As for social-technical points, I would say that social points are actually more important than technical points. If you have lots of social points, you can make abundance work without high tech; but if you have lots of technical points - i.e. power - without the social points that confer the responsibility needed, you could get a parallel LulzSec making an airborne plague "for the lulz", or terrorist fanatics wiping out cities with nanotech. Some of the same is alluded to in a later cutscene of Hostile Waters, where it is shown that the universal assemblers can also be used as universal disassemblers.
So far, responsibility has managed to stay ahead of power - even with nuclear weapons, the nations of the world have managed to not destroy themselves. But will it hold as more and more power is available? I don't know, but there will be interesting times.
(And as a note on churches: I got the feeling that they were talking about the kind of religion that could be subordinated to authority. Consider the claim of the divine right of kings, and the significant power the Pope wielded back in those days. One can graft hierarchy to any organization, and so attempt to gain control of the organization's domain.)
And all I have to say is:
This is how the Duke ends,
this is how the Duke ends,
not with a bang, but with a whimper.
RIP!
You might want to check the cutscenes to the old game Hostile Waters, particularly Nanotechnology and Cabal. It's an RTS, but your side is a post-scarcity society and the enemy group is those leaders that didn't like the redistribution of power that brought.
It may be simple, but I haven't seen that kind of setting elsewhere.
No, that is not what I'm saying. I'm saying that were replicators or printers to exist, but the classical economy derived its scarcity value entirely from DRM, I would have no problem downloading "LaBWaRe.CRACKED.stl.rar", or for the intellectual challenge of it, downloading the demo (were there such a thing) and cracking it myself. And since the only thing separating this scenario from one where everybody could have everything they wanted is the artificial addition of DRM, I don't think the majority of the people would feel bad in either cracking or downloading pirated copies, either.
In the current world, at least you can claim that it's unjust to download a pirated copy since it deprives the author of the money they would get if you had bought it legally. However, if the only thing that makes things have monetary value in a replicator+DRM society is that there is DRM, then money only exists as a legitimate way of canceling the DRM. Thus, my pirating doesn't deprive the ultimate authors of their value since they can just pirate what they need, too.
It is true that things will be much less clear in the intermediate period where somethings can be printed and other things not, but the greater the fraction of things you need that can be printed, the weaker the claim that piracy is morally bad will be. In practice, in such a "mixed economy" (scarcity/abundance), I'd probably just try to make open source labware.
That would be Manna.
And if they put DRM into it so you can't just "print up whatever you want"?
Then I start IDA, Replicator Edition -- or wait for the kind folks at Razor (or Reloaded, Deviance, whoever) to do that if I don't know how. At least for current "digital content", those who don't like pirates can claim to some degree that pirating deprives the producers of money - but if the DRM is just a scheme to keep poor (who otherwise could print anything they wanted) poor, that logic kinda goes out the window.
Just like North Korean radio!
And if they're going to implement another image format, why don't they do it right and pick some form of embedded zerotree wavelet? Those beat the pants off JPEG (and most other DCT codecs) while being perfectly progressive (i.e. you can truncate the picture data itself at any point and get the same result as you would if you had compressed to that size).
Instead we'll get yet another block coding format, for what? So that Google can use it to leverage WebM?
Specialization is for insects.
No, but one of the passengers is a Belgian detective, and then the train gets stuck in a snowdrift.
The distributed approach—a market economy—solves the problem by accepting that information is never perfectly complete or accurate, but tends to be more complete and accurate at a local level; in short, people look out for their own interests far better than even the most benevolent central planners (or AIs). A high degree of global efficiency is an emergent by-product of distributed local efficiency.
Couldn't the AI act as the superstructure of that distributed approach? As it is, in the ideal case, the market economy converges on prices through a process of trial and failure (tatonnement); but given more detailed data (say, input-output information), the AI could converge more quickly towards equilibrium. It's still a distributed approach because all the actual innovation happens at the hands of the participants - the people - but the mechanism itself would be much more responsive. The additional information could also be aggregated by the AI for the people to use. For instance, input-output data could show what the limiting resources to production of a given sort are, and people could then try to find better ways of producing those resources if they value the good in question -- and such could happen without having to go through multiple stages of tatonnement.
Or the interactive fiction game A Mind Forever Voyaging
There's such a thing as a PR ranked ballot system. The most well known one is the single transferable vote, but Schulze (for which the election method used by the German Piratenpartei is named) has devised a proportional representation variant called Schulze STV, too.
Unlike first past the post, STV does work in providing competition. When New York tried it in the late thirties, it proved to work so well that the corrupt machines had to red-scare it to death.
That would have serious incentive incompatibility. You think for-profit prison lobbyists pushing for harder terms is bad now? If the police were to be for-profit, it would benefit from catching "criminals" - and from redefining what a criminal is, and squeezing as much labor out of them as they could manage, and if possible, encouraging criminals to commit greater offenses. Every arrested person would mysteriously resist arrest so that could be added to the charge sheets. The prisons would be harsh and have no rehabilitation - if they turn into academies of crime, all the better, because it increases the revenue stream of recidivists.
In short: if it's profitable to catch criminals, the private police would farm them. Like any other company, if they get paid for X, then well, you'll get plenty of X.
Sure, if he can find a perfectly reflective mirror. Even if it's 99.9% reflective, the 0.1% will destroy the mirror in short order.