even if you conflate the authority-driven epistemology of religion with the transparent, empirical methods of science
The church was genuinely convince it had the right method for determining truth, and just about everyone thought they were correct in terms of that method. Science today has everyone involved convinced it has the right method for determining truth, and just about everyone thinks they were correct in terms of that method.
Sure, you think science is right, and I think science is right, but the torturers of the inquisition were equally convinced that divine revelation was right. Intellectual arrogance is no excuse for using force against others. If you really are right, it's only a matter of time before almost everyone agrees, and no force will be needed.
I agree in general, but the question must be asked, at what point does it go from genuine dissent into outright fraud for gain?
Precisely when it's no longer a contentious issue among the voters. As long as there's significant disagreement, to impose an answer is to replace democracy with authoritarianism - and there's overwhelming historical evidence that that ends badly for all involved.
As soon as you have an authority who decides who is a liar, you no longer have a democracy in that area, you have an authoritarian government. That works out OK in, say, commercial fraud, because it's so objective and so easy to verify in a way that almost everyone in the democracy accepts is correct. It doesn't end well in areas where there's broad disagreement among the voters.
Remember, any time you think "the voters aren't smart enough, we need a special person to impose the correct solution": that's authoritarian government, and no matter how justly it might begin it never ends well.
I see this as a blatant heresy law. The Church of Global Warming wants to make it illegal to publically disagree with the Received Doctrine. Humanity has been there before, with state-mandated religions, and parts of there world are there now, and it's a dark and ugly place we should never again go.
Think the above is trolling, because global warming is so obviously correct? Remember, almost every religion in history has declared that it is obviously correct, and anyone disagreeing is obviously a political troublemaker out to subvert the legitimate authority of the church, or worse, to do the devil's work. Clearly no one intelligent could actually disagree with the Received Doctrine, right?
Even if you agree fully with the man-made global warming hypothesis, that's not the question here. The question is not who's right, the question is: do you respect the humanity of people who disagree with you on something you believe (and believe to be important)? Are you willing to compete in the marketplace of ideas to convince the non-believers? Or are you really willing to use force to squash all dissent? We know just how ugly that road gets, how it leads through some of humanity's most appalling history, and that road was walked by people who were also utterly convinced they were right!
You promoted his "some users" to your "most users", and then argued it wouldn't be "most", but he never made that claim.
I think the news will get to enough users to cause a problem, over time. Most low-information PC users turn to someone technical for help eventually. I have no idea how many of those "knows computers" people are/. readers, or will otherwise have heard of this, but I'd bet it was a significant percentage. However, that will be spread over years, and ther may not be enough of a immediate backlash for AVG to back down - I expect there won't be.
a rising "standard of living" doesn't benefit everyone equally
Nor should it: the wise should do better than the foolish in a just world. The important thing is that a rising standard of living benefits everyone, not precise equality of outcome.
If you have exponential growth with roughly fixed ratios of "economic inequality", everyone still sees exponential growth. And we have in fact seen that on average since the industrial revolution. Further, in some key ways, ways that were important 150 years ago, economic inequality has nearly vanished. The rich eat less food than the poor, for example, and (very nearly) everyone has shoes, clothing they didn't make themselves, tableware, chairs, and so on. Modern economic inequality is more about ownership of investments than consumer goods.
These are water cooled VWs we're talking about. Not worth suping up.
The Audi R10
begs to differ, having dominated LeMans for several years. The low-rpm diesel 4WD "racing truck" left the other conventional twice-the-RPM LMP1s in the dust. TDI is surprisingly sporty, though few enough people buy for that.
Oh, I should add that indirectly, there is one very nasty side-effect here: taxes. The worst outcome for BTC tax-wise is to be treated as a commodity, as commodities have higher tax rates for small investors, compared to other capital gains. This isn't an IRS ruling, but the IRS already seemed to be leaning this way.
It appears that the CFTC has just declared a monopoly-by-fiat over trading a certain aspect of BTC (futures in this case). I don't think there's a route to do something nasty from here, but still, there's that nagging feeling...
This limits the nasty. Goldman Sachs can destroy any unregulated market for profit, and quickly. This helps prevent that.
The biggest single cause for the 2008 financial crisis was GS doing exactly that to unregulated mortgage-backed securities. The CBT went to the SEC to ask that mortgage-backed securities be traded just like other securities (financials are a bit different from commodities, most of the same market rules apply, but different regulators), but the SEC rebuffed them. But then, most senior SEC officials used to work for GS, or will soon work for GS, so that's hardly a surprise. Had the MBS market been a normal financial market, the risks would have been understood, and the crisis would only have been one of banks writing mortgages they shouldn't have (and just letting those banks fail was no big deal).
No, that's not how it works. Every futures contract must be delivered (a small percentage are delivered by buying the commodity on the market the day the contract matures, mostly due to crop failure, but still: somebody planted and grew the crop that was delivered). The contracts are mostly written by farmers, and mostly expire in the hands of food manufacturers. They may pass through the hands of 1000 speculators in the meantime, but the contract always represents real product that must be delivered.
Who's to say you won't have technological progress once you have basic income?
Directly? Nothing. But if you tax the rewards (huge profits) for technological innovation, such as automation of production, then you will get less such innovation. (Also, if you subsidize sitting on your ass doing nothing, you'll get more of that, but in the US today I think the political win of basic income replacing all other welfare systems would outweigh that moral hazard).
And technological progress isn't exponential, btw.
Of course it is. There's always a way to make any production process X% more efficient (mostly though automation these days, but materials science is still big), at some cost. As the cost of automation comes down, more and more such efficiencies become cost-effective, and thus we all benefit from the added efficiency when it gets done. And the cost of automation has been falling my whole life, with no end in sight (and materials science continues apace).
t all in all our world isn't so much different from the one in the 1960s
That's just ignorance of history. We have vastly better medical care, vastly safer and more environmentally friendly cars, vastly cheaper products if you compare to the actual functionality of products in the 60s. We have almost twice as much room in our houses per-capita. We have vastly better access to information, and more than anything: vastly better entertainment choices. Hell, we've reach a place in the world where obesity is as common a problem as starvation (just over 1 billion of each, according to WHO reports), which definitely was not the case 50 years ago. We have much better air quality, more of America is forested (if that's a plus).
What does "CRM" mean? This all sounds like management bafflegab, not English. Voice recognition is hard enough in one language.
Of course, if some effort was made to integrate Cortana with some specific product, then understanding the opaque technical jargon associated with that product seems reasonable, but let's not pretend this isn't opaque technical jargon.
We pay for almost all the medical research. That's why it costs more. There are plenty of ways to make it cheaper if you only remove the profit needed for progress.
You return benefit to the people by charging less. Remember, in low-margin goods, you don't tax companies, you tax consumers.
It replaces the growing inequality where automation benefits only the owner of the factory, with a system where automation benefits everyone
Just as wrong as when Marx wrote it. It's his biggest mistake IMO. Technological progress trumps all redistribution schemes when it comes to standard of living, because the former is exponential growth, while the latter is a constant.
Let the old, infirm generations perish and you'll eliminate most of the worlds despots and imperialists.
Sorry, the world's despots and imperialists mostly took power in their 30s and 40s, when they were still young enough to want to change the world. Most people who want to change the world simply want to impose their will on others through force - left and right, that's the same. That's the upside of hashtag activism: it's meaningless, which is generally for the best.
And by simplifying and removing that bureaucracy, you can theoretically save money overall.
If that actually happened, I'd be all for it. The main reason I oppose the idea is that it seems unlikely. Instead, it will be just one more program, just one more bureaucracy, just one more ta, just one more system that gets twisted to give more aid to people likely to vote for A, and less to supporters of B.
But, man, if it really were a fixed amount to everyone replacing all other programs (which would take a constitutional amendment, I think), the net win would be huge: no longer making it a political football, except for a single number that applies equally to all.
Bitcoin's problem is that they artificially limited the maximum number of bitcoins to 21 million. That breaks one of the fundamental requirements for a true currency. The entire reason countries have moved off the gold standard is because for a currency to function, it has to grow at roughly the same rate as your economy. Gold didn't, and every time economic growth outstripped the rate new gold was mined, the currency deflated (gold became worth more).
No, that's way off base. The size of the US money supply isn't increased by printing more slips of paper with presidents on them. The number of tangible (well, whatever you want to call a bitcoin) units of currency barely matters to the money supply.
The size of the money supply is controlled by fractional reserve lending, and indirectly by insurance floats and credit derivative swaps (there are nearly $1 quadrillion in CDSs now). All of that would work with BTC, or gold, or USD with equal facility.
Remember, when you deposit money in a saving account or CD, there's no physical curreny backing that up. There's no ledger entry backing that up (except the IUO from the bank). The bank keeps nothing lying around with which to repay you. If even 2% of money in savings accounts were withdrawn as cash, the cash simply couldn't be found to do that (without new deposits in cash). None of that would be different with a BTC or gold-backed currency.
The economic breakthrough was fraction-reserve lending, not fiat currency. People just accept the former easier with the latter.
Slashdot Mirror
even if you conflate the authority-driven epistemology of religion with the transparent, empirical methods of science
The church was genuinely convince it had the right method for determining truth, and just about everyone thought they were correct in terms of that method. Science today has everyone involved convinced it has the right method for determining truth, and just about everyone thinks they were correct in terms of that method.
Sure, you think science is right, and I think science is right, but the torturers of the inquisition were equally convinced that divine revelation was right. Intellectual arrogance is no excuse for using force against others. If you really are right, it's only a matter of time before almost everyone agrees, and no force will be needed.
I agree in general, but the question must be asked, at what point does it go from genuine dissent into outright fraud for gain?
Precisely when it's no longer a contentious issue among the voters. As long as there's significant disagreement, to impose an answer is to replace democracy with authoritarianism - and there's overwhelming historical evidence that that ends badly for all involved.
As soon as you have an authority who decides who is a liar, you no longer have a democracy in that area, you have an authoritarian government. That works out OK in, say, commercial fraud, because it's so objective and so easy to verify in a way that almost everyone in the democracy accepts is correct. It doesn't end well in areas where there's broad disagreement among the voters.
Remember, any time you think "the voters aren't smart enough, we need a special person to impose the correct solution": that's authoritarian government, and no matter how justly it might begin it never ends well.
It's 2015 and browsers are not properly sanitizing the URL bar?
At launch, you could crash Chrome with just 2 characters in the URL bar, so this is progress!
That bug was along the lines of:
for (size_t i = 0; i < size; i++) { stuff }
Except size was computed as -1, and like i was unsigned, so it got ugly.
I see this as a blatant heresy law. The Church of Global Warming wants to make it illegal to publically disagree with the Received Doctrine. Humanity has been there before, with state-mandated religions, and parts of there world are there now, and it's a dark and ugly place we should never again go.
Think the above is trolling, because global warming is so obviously correct? Remember, almost every religion in history has declared that it is obviously correct, and anyone disagreeing is obviously a political troublemaker out to subvert the legitimate authority of the church, or worse, to do the devil's work. Clearly no one intelligent could actually disagree with the Received Doctrine, right?
Even if you agree fully with the man-made global warming hypothesis, that's not the question here. The question is not who's right, the question is: do you respect the humanity of people who disagree with you on something you believe (and believe to be important)? Are you willing to compete in the marketplace of ideas to convince the non-believers? Or are you really willing to use force to squash all dissent? We know just how ugly that road gets, how it leads through some of humanity's most appalling history, and that road was walked by people who were also utterly convinced they were right!
You promoted his "some users" to your "most users", and then argued it wouldn't be "most", but he never made that claim.
I think the news will get to enough users to cause a problem, over time. Most low-information PC users turn to someone technical for help eventually. I have no idea how many of those "knows computers" people are /. readers, or will otherwise have heard of this, but I'd bet it was a significant percentage. However, that will be spread over years, and ther may not be enough of a immediate backlash for AVG to back down - I expect there won't be.
You are all interplanetary Cows. Cows say Mooooo. MOOOOOOO! MOOOOOOOOOOOO cows MOOOOOOOOO! Moooooooooo say the cows. YOU COWS!!!
Mars cows say MOOOOO. Space Cowboys say
Come in, come in mission control
Give us guidance for our souls
With eyes that scan the universe
No more talking time to land
You give me hope, you understand
Our future lies beyond this earth
Someday we'll live among the stars
Maybe own a ranch on Mars
A ranch full of Mars cows that say moo.
OK, now it makes sense, thanks. I was wondering what this was for, but "bit torrent tracker" makes it clear. Very nice hack indeed.
It won't break the internet, but it will perplex and confuse MAFIAA lawyers, and that's something.
a rising "standard of living" doesn't benefit everyone equally
Nor should it: the wise should do better than the foolish in a just world. The important thing is that a rising standard of living benefits everyone, not precise equality of outcome.
If you have exponential growth with roughly fixed ratios of "economic inequality", everyone still sees exponential growth. And we have in fact seen that on average since the industrial revolution. Further, in some key ways, ways that were important 150 years ago, economic inequality has nearly vanished. The rich eat less food than the poor, for example, and (very nearly) everyone has shoes, clothing they didn't make themselves, tableware, chairs, and so on. Modern economic inequality is more about ownership of investments than consumer goods.
If you had more horsepower, you might be able to catch up with and discover what's making that "whooshing" sound you hear overhead.
Freaking last-century slashcode. Linkey.
These are water cooled VWs we're talking about. Not worth suping up.
The Audi R10
begs to differ, having dominated LeMans for several years. The low-rpm diesel 4WD "racing truck" left the other conventional twice-the-RPM LMP1s in the dust. TDI is surprisingly sporty, though few enough people buy for that.
That's weird. Every time I get a hard-on, it rains.
I have a whole new respect for you Ratzo, or at least part of you (the part that writes your /. posts, by all appearances).
enough horsepower
I don't understand those words in that order. There cannot be "enough horsepower", there can only be "more horsepower".
Oh, I should add that indirectly, there is one very nasty side-effect here: taxes. The worst outcome for BTC tax-wise is to be treated as a commodity, as commodities have higher tax rates for small investors, compared to other capital gains. This isn't an IRS ruling, but the IRS already seemed to be leaning this way.
It appears that the CFTC has just declared a monopoly-by-fiat over trading a certain aspect of BTC (futures in this case). I don't think there's a route to do something nasty from here, but still, there's that nagging feeling...
This limits the nasty. Goldman Sachs can destroy any unregulated market for profit, and quickly. This helps prevent that.
The biggest single cause for the 2008 financial crisis was GS doing exactly that to unregulated mortgage-backed securities. The CBT went to the SEC to ask that mortgage-backed securities be traded just like other securities (financials are a bit different from commodities, most of the same market rules apply, but different regulators), but the SEC rebuffed them. But then, most senior SEC officials used to work for GS, or will soon work for GS, so that's hardly a surprise. Had the MBS market been a normal financial market, the risks would have been understood, and the crisis would only have been one of banks writing mortgages they shouldn't have (and just letting those banks fail was no big deal).
you can trade in crops that will never be planted
No, that's not how it works. Every futures contract must be delivered (a small percentage are delivered by buying the commodity on the market the day the contract matures, mostly due to crop failure, but still: somebody planted and grew the crop that was delivered). The contracts are mostly written by farmers, and mostly expire in the hands of food manufacturers. They may pass through the hands of 1000 speculators in the meantime, but the contract always represents real product that must be delivered.
Who's to say you won't have technological progress once you have basic income?
Directly? Nothing. But if you tax the rewards (huge profits) for technological innovation, such as automation of production, then you will get less such innovation. (Also, if you subsidize sitting on your ass doing nothing, you'll get more of that, but in the US today I think the political win of basic income replacing all other welfare systems would outweigh that moral hazard).
And technological progress isn't exponential, btw.
Of course it is. There's always a way to make any production process X% more efficient (mostly though automation these days, but materials science is still big), at some cost. As the cost of automation comes down, more and more such efficiencies become cost-effective, and thus we all benefit from the added efficiency when it gets done. And the cost of automation has been falling my whole life, with no end in sight (and materials science continues apace).
t all in all our world isn't so much different from the one in the 1960s
That's just ignorance of history. We have vastly better medical care, vastly safer and more environmentally friendly cars, vastly cheaper products if you compare to the actual functionality of products in the 60s. We have almost twice as much room in our houses per-capita. We have vastly better access to information, and more than anything: vastly better entertainment choices. Hell, we've reach a place in the world where obesity is as common a problem as starvation (just over 1 billion of each, according to WHO reports), which definitely was not the case 50 years ago. We have much better air quality, more of America is forested (if that's a plus).
I could go on and on.
What does "CRM" mean? This all sounds like management bafflegab, not English. Voice recognition is hard enough in one language.
Of course, if some effort was made to integrate Cortana with some specific product, then understanding the opaque technical jargon associated with that product seems reasonable, but let's not pretend this isn't opaque technical jargon.
Still makes 0 sense to me. I would respond "could you ask the question a different way", as it doesn't even parse.
We pay for almost all the medical research. That's why it costs more. There are plenty of ways to make it cheaper if you only remove the profit needed for progress.
You return benefit to the people by charging less. Remember, in low-margin goods, you don't tax companies, you tax consumers.
It replaces the growing inequality where automation benefits only the owner of the factory, with a system where automation benefits everyone
Just as wrong as when Marx wrote it. It's his biggest mistake IMO. Technological progress trumps all redistribution schemes when it comes to standard of living, because the former is exponential growth, while the latter is a constant.
Let the old, infirm generations perish and you'll eliminate most of the worlds despots and imperialists.
Sorry, the world's despots and imperialists mostly took power in their 30s and 40s, when they were still young enough to want to change the world. Most people who want to change the world simply want to impose their will on others through force - left and right, that's the same. That's the upside of hashtag activism: it's meaningless, which is generally for the best.
And by simplifying and removing that bureaucracy, you can theoretically save money overall.
If that actually happened, I'd be all for it. The main reason I oppose the idea is that it seems unlikely. Instead, it will be just one more program, just one more bureaucracy, just one more ta, just one more system that gets twisted to give more aid to people likely to vote for A, and less to supporters of B.
But, man, if it really were a fixed amount to everyone replacing all other programs (which would take a constitutional amendment, I think), the net win would be huge: no longer making it a political football, except for a single number that applies equally to all.
Bitcoin's problem is that they artificially limited the maximum number of bitcoins to 21 million. That breaks one of the fundamental requirements for a true currency. The entire reason countries have moved off the gold standard is because for a currency to function, it has to grow at roughly the same rate as your economy. Gold didn't, and every time economic growth outstripped the rate new gold was mined, the currency deflated (gold became worth more).
No, that's way off base. The size of the US money supply isn't increased by printing more slips of paper with presidents on them. The number of tangible (well, whatever you want to call a bitcoin) units of currency barely matters to the money supply.
The size of the money supply is controlled by fractional reserve lending, and indirectly by insurance floats and credit derivative swaps (there are nearly $1 quadrillion in CDSs now). All of that would work with BTC, or gold, or USD with equal facility.
Remember, when you deposit money in a saving account or CD, there's no physical curreny backing that up. There's no ledger entry backing that up (except the IUO from the bank). The bank keeps nothing lying around with which to repay you. If even 2% of money in savings accounts were withdrawn as cash, the cash simply couldn't be found to do that (without new deposits in cash). None of that would be different with a BTC or gold-backed currency.
The economic breakthrough was fraction-reserve lending, not fiat currency. People just accept the former easier with the latter.