temporarily embarrassed rich people... who just didn't happen to go to Yale, be a member of the Skulls fraternity, have the ex-Director of the CIA and President of the US for a daddy, and so on. In a way, they're right -- Sam Walton's kids are separated from the greeters that they hire and pay a pittance without benefits only by several billion dollars, a fair bit of nose candy, and the fact that sometimes the greeters are actually fairly nice people.
But the Walton fortune is the exception. Even Gates is the exception. At least those guys did, in fact, break in and earn their money while not really being a part of "the system". The rule is General Electric, IBM, Bank of America, various megabanks and investment groups. The rule is Halliburton, Boeing, Ford Motor company. The rule is (fill in your favorite oil company here). The rule is (still) AT&T.
I love capitalism -- moderately free enterprise beats the hell out of managed economies if only because the latter are invariably even less free and more entrenched. Capitalism is, however, seriously flawed in several ways. One is that without protection of the commons, it is an open invitation to exploit resources until they are gone (where things like "clean water" are merely resources to dump your waste in right up to the point where the water glows at night and makes people have babies that look like frogs, we're not just talking about strip mining and overfishing and growing tobacco on the land until nothing is left but bare red clay without a trace of actual nutrient value). Another is that money is easy to manipulate into more money, so that the rich get richer -- the playing field that needs to be level for Capitalism to be mostly beneficial to humans is warped into a castle at the top of a peak surrounded by a moat filled with sharks with laser beams by the first few winners of the game. This is where Microsoft has excelled in the past -- monopolies are almost impossible for entrepreneurs to break because they have all the money in the world to spend to defeat you (in the marketplace, in court) and you have no money at all to spend to win. Finally, humans in high office have empirically proven to be embarrassingly easy to bribe and buy off, all over the world. By themselves they are unproductive and of modest means, and companies with literally billions to spend purchasing legislation and discrete ways of raping the taxpayer and putting the money into favored corporate pockets don't hesitate to arrange it for their "friends" to become rich in untraceable ways.
Like Bush. By rights, he should have been bankrupted three times over. Instead, he ends up with tens of millions of dollars (the more you have, the faster you make it, remember) from three failed companies and one minor insider trading episode (that we know of). Taxpayer money goes straight into his pocket, not because he is especially talented but because of who he knows, because of who his friends are, because the dealmakers knew that a future governor, a future president in your debt and possibly even blackmailable is worth a dozen other investors with more money but no connections.
they can be created out of thin air to be saddled with the liabilities while the CEO and his gang walk away with all the assets in their personal portfolio
Found a company (anybody can do that, costs almost nothing). Sell shares to some investors, attract a few big names. Run it into the ground so that it fails, but...
Sell out to a second company who wants your goodwill (those big names) plus whatever assets you managed not to squander, become CEO of second company which also fails, and...
Sell out to a third company who still wants that goodwill, those names, the top political cover (your daddy is president, after all), get a seat on the board of directors, and y'know, damned if that company doesn't start to suck wind and fail due to mismanagement as well. Alas, now there is no sugar daddy outside corporation willing to buy, the company is out of money but the stock is still sitting up there at optimistic prices because the ordinary shareholders do not yet know that the company is down to its few days worth of operating capital.
Borrow money from a bank. Buy into a cushy deal that manages to both suck off money from the taxpayer and screw the actual owner of the land seized for the project. Ask counsel of that failing company that bought the failed company that bought the failed company you originally founded if selling off stock right before the company is about to run out of money is "insider trading". Counsel says yes, damn skippy it is, don't do it.
Do it anyway, pay off loan and manage to pocket a quarter of a million actual profit right before the company loses 2/3 of its book value when the running-out-of-money-with-no-income-to-replace-it shit hits the fan. Wait a few years, cushy deal pays you $15 million dollars in profits -- not bad for return on three failed companies you personally ran or helped to run (you weren't on the board of the cushy deal -- by then everybody but the voters in Texas and the United States knew you were a complete klutz who lost money on every deal you actually ran or helped run). Even on this final deal there was nothing like an actual, honest profit in the payout. The taxpayers of Texas are still paying for the actual sports dome for the Rangers; the profit Bush realized was more or less paid directly from taxpayer pockets into his own, and who knows what the landowner ever got out of the deal (probably nothing)...
The moral of this sad tale is that it isn't just a network of companies -- it is a network of people, all born into wealthy families, owning or controlling the large corporations, looking out for each other and protecting all of the "insiders" while shooting, burning, and clubbing the dead bodies until they stop twitching of all of the outsiders that seek to break in to this tiny enclave of wealth and power. These are the people that control the Fed. They control (or are) many of the governors, senators, presidents of our country. They own huge blocks of stock in the largest and most powerful companies or they sit on the board of directors and draw huge salaries because of their political influence. Insider trading is a way of life -- a wink is as good as a nod -- and make a profit (like Bush) from every failure where the ordinary shareholders lost wads of money.
They exist, impervious in our society, simply because we lack the will to oppose them.
Well, yes, and He_4 + He_4 fusion isn't stable or exothermic. My eventually perhaps concern is being open minded about just fusion processes in real exothermic generators will look like until we actually have such a thing operating, as they might well involve physics that it not anticipated by the mainline squeeze-it-til-it-cooks approach. But yes, at the moment this isn't the most likely scenario. I just don't like the idea of more or less squandering the helium resources of the planet on kids balloons and non-sustainable dirigibles against even the remote possibility that it will turn out to be critical for some other purpose -- fusion, manufacturing, whatever.
Even if there are nothing but roads, a robot-controlled solar-powered 1 ton pickup truck is going to be cheaper than a blimp. Although laying rail track is no more "uneconomical" than building the roads that service the places already. If you are worried about delivering goods to places accessible only by horse/foot trails, then could I commend -- a horse? Solar powered, self-replicating, can typically pull a fairly large load, and they do not require large amounts of helium gas to operate.
All good points, actually. As I said, an estimate (perhaps a too-rosy one, but nothing like the too-rosy nature of helium-filled blimps). I think you're overly pessimistic about average insolation (and my lowball estimates were for as little as 2-3 hours per day on average, not the 7+ that IIRC are the average insolation nearly anywhere in the US). The point is that unless and until we bite the bullet and make major investments to get this particular ball rolling, we'll just continue to burn up fossil fuels at an ever escalating cost. Sure, one day the cost will intersect from below, but that sucks! That means that fuel costs have to double or triple before solar finally gets cheap enough. There are plenty of unrealized economies of scale in solar cell manufacture. As I said, $0.50/watt or even $0.25/watt should be pretty straightforward, if we ever get a big enough market to make it worth it build the big foundries required.
...although one already explored by SF authors such as Norman Spinrad in Songs from the Stars. 1000 kg weighs 2200 pounds and is basically the load of a pickup truck. By far the easiest way and cheapest way to get a load 1000 km is to build a solar powered electric railroad, especially if you don't care how fast it gets there at first. Of course, with solar collectors on the ground, there is basically no practical limit to the power you can deliver per kilogram and consequently one can get the load to destination at very high speeds with a new design.
The difficulties with a solar powered helium dirigible are manifold and have already been pointed out -- finite supply of helium, helium needed for kids' balloons and (eventually, perhaps) as thermonuclear fuel (at which time we'll kick ourselves for wasting it for decades in kids' balloons), absolutely impossible to keep sun-warmed helium inside any sort of bag. Weather and wind make the transportation dangerous or impossible (given the wimpy peak power likely to be available to move the bag -- probably inadequate to overcome even a very modest headwind). The danger of 1000 kg loads being dropped on people's heads if weather conditions exceed the limited capacity of robot brains to solve weather problems and the lifter breaks up, pops, catastrophically fails.
It isn't quite inconceivable that one could build a solar-solar system -- a solar balloon for lift, solar power for "thrust" -- although again I think that the force of wind pressure instantly will exceed the peak thrust of any onboard solar system on even a very sunny, nearly still day. To lift a metric ton you'll need a rather large balloon, so very small overpressure on the upwind side will exert a huge force downwind. And you'll still have the problems with weather, with the fact that the sun doesn't shine at night and you can't carry batteries or the whole design becomes laughably impossible, not marginally feasible (either one, Helium or hot air).
But rail? Piece of cake. Hell, you could probably deliver a steady stream of pickup truck sized loads driven by solar collectors along the roadway -- 70-100 watts per square meter of collector, plenty of room for 1000 watts per meter of actual track along the 1000 km route. In fact, the track (with a mere 12 meter wide roadway, 2 meters of which is track and vehicle) will generate anywhere from 100s of megawatts to a gigawatt of power on any reasonably sunny day. Assuming 10 kW per metric ton to move payload at 100 km/hour or better, one can move anywhere from a minimum of 10,000 metric tons up to a maximum of 100,000 metric tons per 10 hours of useable daylight day, for the amortized capital cost of the solar powered roadway. (Don't whack the math too much, these are all estimates and YMMV). The cost of the solar electrification is currently a bit over $1/watt, installation and collection will double that. Call it a $5 billion project (the cost of a couple of weeks in Iraq), build it on an existing rail corridor between (say) Detroit and Chicago square in the heart of the industrial heartland. If one charges $10/ton for transport (pretty cheap, one would think) it grosses close to $1 million/day running the rail at capacity, $300 million a year, payback of the initial investment in 15-20 years.
As is so frequently the case in solar projects, this is maddeningly close but not quite a cigar. For a billion dollar investment it would be a no brainer -- payback in 3 years (more likely 5 with operating costs), pure profit thereafter. For 2 or 3 billion dollars it is attractive -- an effective yield of maybe 5-10% on investment in the long run. For 5 it is right down there at 1-3% yield, implying a fairly long period to wait for a not-too-large ROI, plenty of risk. Drop the cost of solar cells by one more factor of two and it will happen all by itself. Drop it by a factor of four or more, which is entirely plausible given sufficient volume in the market (and this project alone would consume
There isn't really any substitute for creative intelligence, is there, or for engagement in the process? Even the dollar costs are often deceiving -- one can at least partially fund local development efforts for lots of things with e.g. stock options, and give the programmer a stake in the outcome while conserving scarce capital. Paying coders in India may save you up-front dollars but won't get you the effort you would get out of a participant.
Then there is the issue of support -- writing the original code is only the first part of any software project.
When managers hold endless meetings, the programmers write games. When accountants talk of quarterly profits, the development budget is about to be cut. When senior scientists talk blue sky, the clouds are about to roll in.
Truly, this is not the Tao of Programming.
When managers make commitments, game programs are ignored. When accountants make long-range plans, harmony and order are about to be restored. When senior scientists address the problems at hand, the problems will soon be solved.
Truly, this is the Tao of Programming.
It's difficult to conform to the Tao if your coders are in India or Ireland or China. "Making commitments" seems likely to involve direct acceptance of the risks and local investment in the project(s).
Wait, are you trying to inject a note of sanity into an idiotic conversation using the medium of humor?
Forget it!
What's really fun is in trying to figure out how cell phones might cause cancer. Any sane analysis of the actual physics involved results in the wild, off the cuff guess that "they can't". Non-ionizing radiation with no more than a watt directed into the solid angle occupied by the head, no more than 4 watts if you ate a phone. You are at more risk putting on a hat than you are using a cell phone -- it prevents the loss of much more than 4 lousy watts (your brain burns almost a third of the total calories consumed by your body).
Let's see, a cell phone doesn't cause a measurable increase in temperature in tissue -- what little heating it might cause is instantly thermalized by the surrounding tissue and carried away and dispersed elsewhere in the body, just as is the energy trapped by wearing clothes, or a hat. The frequencies of radiation used aren't resonant with any particular structures (and are almost entirely attenuated within a CM or so of the skin anyway). At least two huge studies -- with commensurately good statistics -- find no correlation between cell phone usage and cancer. Various smaller studies sometimes do, but always at the limit of their statistical resolution, another way of saying "it's probably just statistical noise but we want to publish anyway".
The truly amazing thing is that nobody has the intestinal fortitude to just say it: Cell Phones Do Not Cause Cancer, So Get Over It.
It's not like there aren't plenty of things that do cause cancer out there to obsess over, after all. You know, cigarettes, coffee, booze, sex with many partners, certain common viruses, radiation, and a dazzling array of chemical additives that are routinely added to our food or pollutants to be found in our water. The really funny thing is that the person who rides a jet from where they do the research to the meeting where they present it in that one trip to 30,000 feet exposes themselves to real ionizing radiation that almost certainly increases their risk of cancer hundreds of times more than a lifetime of cell phone use (and is still such a small increase that it only shows up as a measurable increase in e.g. pilots and flight attendants who have flown almost daily for five years or more).
Somebody that actually wants to learn the difference between ionizing and non-ionizing radiation could always go someplace like this:
Ionizing radiation is high-frequency radiation that has enough energy to remove an electron from (ionize) an atom or molecule. Ionizing radiation has enough energy to damage the DNA in cells, which in turn may lead to cancer. Gamma rays, x-rays, some high-energy UV rays, and some sub-atomic particles such as alpha particles and protons are forms of ionizing radiation.
Non-ionizing radiation is low-frequency radiation that does not have enough energy to remove electrons or directly damage DNA. Low-energy UV rays, visible light, infrared rays, microwaves, and radio waves are all forms of non-ionizing radiation. Aside from UV rays, these types of radiation are not known to increase cancer risk.
It is important to understand the difference between these types of radiation. For example, the non-ionizing radiation given off by a cell phone or a television screen is not the same as the ionizing radiation you might get from x-rays taken in the hospital.
(emphasis my own). That really says it all, doesn't it?
And why is it free? Because they get it for free. And how do they get it for free? Because our tax dollars paid for it, and it is therefore delivered to pretty much anybody who wants it through many no-cost distribution channels. How are those channels supported? A variety of ways, but most of them entail the carefully controlled use of public resources (such as bandwidth) so that Rhode Island companies can't just flood all of the FM radio bands with enormous and powerful stations and thereby prevent FM stations from functioning at all in Delaware, Pennsylvania, New York, etc -- or vice versa. Now, let's just get rid of the FCC -- damned government agency! Let the radio stations fight an open war for bandwidth, what the hell. Laissez faire, after all. Eventually, to survive, some of the stations band together and create their own governance -- note well, they simply become a shadow government on their own. Of course one of the laws in their government is There Will Be No Competition With This Government, so all competition ceases, quite possibly by a single company buying all of the stations. The owner of that one company is a fervent believer in (pick your poison) and devotes two hours a day to delivering propaganda to its listeners. Nobody can afford to create a radio company that will ever compete with them, because they own all of the delivery infrastructure and can defend the bandwidth by literally scrambling any competing station that tries.
They don't rely on consumer choices any more -- if you're working and want to listen to music at all, where else will you go? What unregulated "public" resource is protected from exactly the same sort of monopolistic tackeover? Of course they are equally at the mercy of the company(s) that send up weather satellites, and everybody is now TOTALLY at the mercy of the people who send up communications satellites. Eventually the radio companies are taken over by the satellite companies, or vice versa. Why, in a decade or two we could ALL end up working for The Company and you could see what happens when you let corporations provide their own, unrestricted, governance.
You really do need to read "The Tragedy of The Commons" by Hardin. It's free and online and only takes a few minutes. It deconstructs the greatest myth of unrestricted Capitalism in a few short pages, and all you have to do is drive down any highway and look at the trash at the side of the road in spite of hefty fines and attempted governance to know that it is so very, very true.
Also bear in mind that weather satellites are not actually built and launched by "the government". Every single bit of them is built by corporations; "the government" is at most responsible for the launching itself and the primary processing of the data that comes from them, and I'd bet that a lot of that is pieced out as contract work (and in any event is done with e.g. computers and other resources purchased from corporations). What you are suggesting is the fragmentation of this clearly near-optimal separation of the work into pieces that are done by companies whose primary business function is to do it and a central entity that both purchases that work at optimal prices and distributes the benefits of that work at optimal prices on our collective behalf! We don't even ask if we "should" provide information about the weather to everyone at the lowest possible marginal cost (free!) -- any idiot can see the enormous benefits of that information being freely available and not controlled by any narrow corporate interest, responsible not to the "customer" but to stockholders interested in making a profit. Weather prediction saves lives, crops, picnics, and billions and billions of dollars of damages that unpredicted weather used to inflict on the human race prior to the 1960's.
Only a complete, brainless tool like Ron Paul could even contemplate dismantling NOAA, the government agency responsible for providing us with go
[rant]
Right. And if one actually studies history, philosophy, and things like that one learns quickly that lots of things that were originally organized at the state level -- e.g. "militias", roads, laws permitting slavery, y'know, little stuff like that -- proved ultimately impracticable. For the United States of America -- still the name of the country to become the United States of America, we had to move past the despicable regionalism that lingers still, expressed as resentment that (for the love of God, Montressor) some fraction North Dakota taxes go to help provide tsunami warning in California, some other fraction is spent photographing and tracking hurricanes in the Atlantic, and so on. Sure, and some fraction of the taxes I pay goes to help North Dakota support roadways to rural communities, pay for a massive national defense that protects North Dakotans as much as it protects me (in North Carolina) and both of us pay taxes that go or have gone to help support the massive manufacturing infrastructure in places like Michigan or Illinois or Ohio that provide us with cars and many other goods. From the Civil War on, the US has truly been one country, not lots of fragmented states, and its national identity has been forged and reforged by decades of political, economic, and military conflict with a turbulent world. One has only to look at places like Libya to see the dangers of tribalism and fragmentation in a unified state. Perhaps their civil war will forge a single country with a national identity that transcends their internal tribal identities; perhaps not.
I'm a native North Carolinian -- born less than 20 miles from where I'm sitting, but I take no particular pride in that and have lived in two other states in the US and one foreign country for periods spanning at least years. I like NC -- it's a great place to live, primarily because the people are mostly good people, the weather is awesome a lot of the year, the state has mountains on one end and the sea at the other, and the research triangle is a place of high civilization, one of the if not the highest per capita concentration of Ph.D.'s and MDs in the world, four Universities and a half dozen colleges within a thirty minute drive of one another (three within a fifteen minute drive -- NC State is the one that's a bit farther away), lots of representation of the arts, a decent economic base. But I cherish the fact that NC is just one state in the United States, arguably the most civilized nation in the world. This is not to pick on or disparage the many other excellent countries out there -- the world itself is finally becoming rather civilized, and the light of freedom is indeed burning brighter all over the world with every passing year (sometimes without even requiring horrific wars to ignite it) -- but we, along with a handful of close, more or less equally civilized friends, have led the way, often at the expense of many lives and much spent fortune, none of which would have ever been possible as a confederation of loosely allied individual states with no common goals or identity.
There are in this country still many people who deeply resent the fact that they have to pay taxes. It doesn't matter that in the civilized modern world, our taxes rates are perhaps the lowest, while the benefits we derive from those taxes are the highest. It doesn't matter than they invariably rely on the services and infrastructure provided by those taxes. It doesn't matter that in many cases, they wouldn't even have the jobs that they have in any sector of the economy if it were not for the centralized management and regulation of that economy paid for in part by their taxes. They can always point to one thing or another that some of their tax money is spent on that they derive no benefit from, or that they disagree morally or politically with, and consider it some sort of "tyranny" for their money to be taken away and used for those purposes, even though they have a vote that counts the same
Right, the people of North Dakota can pay for the monitoring of things like volcanos and earthquakes. And hell, I'm sure that they never use any of the goods or services provided by the people of California and would never miss it if it were gone.
Of course if you were the moral purist pay-your-own-way libertarian you seem to want to claim that you are, you would instantly log off and cease to use all of the publicly funded services such as "the internet" or "roads". Make sure that you get a good contract with somebody who will come to put out a fire at your house. Figure out what you're going to need to pay for police services -- I hear that hunting down somebody that kidnaps and rapes your daughter and flees across state lines is expensive, and hell boy, I don't want to have to pay to help you out, I only have sons! In fact, let's just plain outlaw doing things collectively. Damn communists anyway! Feudalism is the only way to go! Let the strong prevail over the weak -- that's what Darwinism is all about, isn't it? In fact, why bother with democracy? Isn't it always about making the losers go along with the will of the winners? That ain't right, clearly, especially when the winners force the losers in North Dakota to help out those lazy bums in California that produce a lot of their electronics and orange juice. No true North Dakotan needs orange juice -- they just eat raw elk and winter potatoes!
Yes, but who is going to buy the service provided by these "corporations"? The states? A government. The Feds? A government. Local municipalities? A government. All, in the end, supported by taxes. No, I know -- we'll each and every one of us get to pay market rates for the weather tomorrow, if and only if it is worth it to us. If a hurricane hits and you're not paying for your feed, well, tough titties, ain't it. Next time fork over the fees we charge.
Let's see if we can figure out a way of doing things that clearly belong in the commons as inefficiently as humanly possible by eliminating all economies of scale and rely on personal and corporate ethics to ensure that the common resources are not exploited to destruction and that services are delivered to everybody that needs them.
I swear, sometimes I wonder what the hell people smoke that let's them imagine that we could privatize all public services and end up in some sort of utopia. In Ron Paul's case, it probably isn't anything good. Old sweatsocks. Geese. Mustache hairs.
Damn, and here I am, no mod points to give. Slashdot needs a way for everybody but AC to thumbs up any given post, points or no points.
Bring me my ponies, sirrah! I want to ride on the open range, enjoying the breathtaking view of oil drills and strip mines right there in the middle of the Grand Canyon!
Raising my lonely dental floss for a living, of course. Because alas, scientists like myself will be out of work and the church will once again be in charge of people's minds, the way God clearly intended they should be.
Sure, but I'm guessing that we (the US and NATO) have access to Gadhafi's DNA, and of course many of his offspring are still living so we have access to his first degree relatives' DNA. I'm also fairly certain that NATO (and probably the US) have people on the ground in Libya who will be given the opportunity to take samples of his tissue to confirm beyond reasonable doubt that the dead person is indeed him, just as they have done for many other tyrants or terrorists.
Besides, if they are wrong, how long will it be before Gadhafi himself is on the phone to Al Jazeera taunting his opponents about his premature demise? Hours? Days? If this does not happen by Saturday or Sunday, even without DNA testing I'd say it is pretty evident that he's really dead. It's a Bayesian problem, isn't it? Every new piece of evidence becomes a prior in the computation of the probability that he is really dead until "beyond reasonable doubt" is reached...
Ah, you mean the part about not loaning money at interest? Yes, he's clearly taken many steps in that direction. Devilish clever, to loan/give huge amounts of money (at interest) to banks so that they can continue to loan massive amounts of that money (at interest) back to believers and unbelievers alike, hoping to cause us to rise up and put an end to usurious lending practices -- it is even working!
Or perhaps you mean the part about homosexual individuals needing to be stoned to death and women kept in de facto bondage as the chattel of the men they belong to. Hillary looks good in a burka, don't you think? Well, better. Oh, wait, that's the Republican party, that appears ready to turn the reins of government over to the Mormon cult, which ultimately will force us all to wear white shirts and ties, drink nothing but lemonade, and sing "Joseph Smith, dumb, da dumb, da dumb" all day until he joins forces with the Shiites that are strangely similar in their ethical philosophy and attitude towards personal freedom. Oh hell, at least we'll get to marry a bunch of wives, and no more back-talk!
No, I'm sure you mean the part about apostasy, executing anybody who turns away from the One True Faith, or perhaps the bit about stoning adulterers to death, at least if they happen to be female. Obama is clearly all about that. Isn't everybody?
His killing, which came swiftly after his capture near Sirte...
s/killing/death/
The actual reports on Al Jazeera and elsewhere suggest that he was badly wounded in the legs and head while being captured and died of his wounds in captivity. The phrase above suggests that he was first captured, then deliberately killed which none of the reports suggests. Just FYI, for those who don't have time to read any of the many articles that are flashing up as AJ has posted what is claimed to be an actual (rather graphic) video of his dead body. Naturally, it is on youtube:
Well, yes, but doesn't krill give you, well, gas? I mean, one doesn't like to comment, but it is a well known biological fact that whale farts emit more methane on a daily basis than the entire gulf oil spill. And methane is an order of magnitude or two more powerful of a greenhouse gas than CO_2, with their close cousins cows contributing another factor of two or so.
Of course you could compensate by getting off your lazy tail and breaching straight down onto pods of penguins, sending their broken bodies drifting down to the subduction seams of the tectonic plates. That way they would get sucked down and turn back into oil, sequestering all of that high-energy carbon in their stumpy little bodies.
You could also ram the occasional ship. Just make sure that they aren't pirate ships.
9. Hijacking the the article to debate AGW.
10. Hijacking the article to debate Linux vs Windows vs Macs.
11. Inserting a goatse link inside a, um, "provocative" wrapper.
12. Hijacking the article to insert a meta comment about slashdotters that has nothing to with TFA.
13. Hijacking the article to insert a meta comment about slashtdotters that has nothing to do with TFA.
If they raised the life expectancy of all people to 150 (more than doubling it) with a simple, cheap pill that magically cures all genetic disorders, prevents atherosclerosis and cancer, regrows your hair and rebuds your teeth and restores your failing joints, eyesight and hearing, then I'd spend the extra time fighting in a perpetual war that would ultimately have to kill people at the same rate that they are dying today (or even faster).
Or does the magic pill cure starvation and global eco-disaster too?
You can take my word for it, from direct conversations with FBI agents tasked with pursuing kiddy porn. Kiddy porn is like heroin or cocaine -- if you see a bag of white powder and pick it up, you are instantly a felon even if you thought that it might be powdered sugar. If you actually see kiddy porn on a computer screen, you are an instant felon. All that ultimately protects you from prosecution and de facto being required to prove your innocence is the good judgement of an arresting officer and/or the DA, and what they do is largely determined by what you do next. What you are required to do next is call the police and hand over the bag of white powder that turned out not to be powdered sugar when you snor-- er -- "tasted" it, or instantly and without passing go call the police or the feds or both and turn over the kiddy porn and the system the kiddy porn was on and everything you know about the owners/users of that system and get out of the way!
This is all federal, note -- it doesn't make a damn bit of difference what Missouri's statutes are. This is all good stuff for sysadmins to know, BTW. They can (and should!) legally ignore all kinds of things they see in e.g. user directories during the course of doing their jobs, but kiddy porn is one of the things they cannot legally ignore without becoming felons themselves.
The same is true for the Bishop. I personally have kids, and hope he (if guilty) rots in jail.
It's even better than that. The "cloud" often puts the actual application on the cloud servers, right? All that is running at your end is a browser with a network API. So Microsoft can take GPL applications, hack them and repackage them any way they like, and put them on their own cloud servers without contributing back a damn thing, all while staying perfectly well within the GPL. In fact, the cloud gives MS the best of all possible worlds -- the ability to use GPL and other OSS software internally on their cloud servers after adding anything they like to enhance or differentiate it, and the ability ensure that some key pieces of functionality can only be accessed if the remote system is running Windows plus Explorer. I mean, it's like the skies are raining money for them, in the end.
An end that IMO will probably never come, BTW, but that is another rant. The history of computing is littered with the fossilized bones of companies that thought that consumers were finally ready for thin clients and would no longer insist on having a fully functional local workstation with its own local software. The cloud may -- and I do say may -- eventually become the universal data-haven, extending the existing client-server data model to client-cloud megaserver, although there are some serious questions of data security and privacy and recoverability and liability in the event of the bankruptcy or corruption of the parent cloud company remaining to be answered, but the notion that all of the software is going to live "in the cloud" is far from proven. Rather, the evidence of the past is that it ain't happening this time any more than any of the other times it has been proposed.
I have to disagree, sir. Microsoft has stolen the wheel, for the most part terribly.
CPM -> DOS
Basic -> Basica
Turbo [Pascal, C,...] -> Quick C (early), then IDEs for all MS compilers
Lotus 123 -> Excel
Wordstar, Word Perfect -> Microsoft Word
Apple Lisa -> Windows 1
Mac OS -> Windows 2
Mac OS, Sunview, etc -> Windows 3
VMS,OS/2 -> Windows NT (and boy, was IBM pissed, long story of billion-dollar betrayal biting of the hand that raised you up from a pup)
Mosaic -> Explorer
TCP/IP -> Reluctantly, TCP/IP. Damn they wanted their own proprietary network. Too bad about that Internet thing...
Java -> Java, sort of. See above. In fact, see a whole list of web development stuff, all cloned or stolen to make it proprietarily their own.
And the list goes on. You can count the number of significant, actual, in-house innovations and products invented and programmed by Microsoft's own programmers on the fingers of one hand. Microsoft's entire history is one of waiting for somebody else to innovate, invent, take huge risks, and bring a radical killer app to the PC market just so that they could then clone it, spread a bit of FUD, emphasize the FUD by ensuring that the original product was still only partially debugged when MS released each successive version of Windows (and that those versions would therefore break the competitor's product in critical ways), and then smoothly sell their own replacement into all of the really big corporate houses and most of the smaller consumer houses, leaving the innovator and risk taker gasping with 1/4 or even less of the market.
Just ask Borland. Ask Corel. Ask Lotus. Ask MicroPro. Oooo, you can't ask some of these companies anything at all any more, can you, because Antitrust laws don't, actually, get enforced when the company in question is the partial stock base of nearly every pension fund in the Universe and a major contributor to every candidate who looks at all venal. To Microsoft's "credit", they do sometimes make smaller companies an offer that they can't refuse and buy them out instead of clone-and-conquer, but it is buyout where the buyee is looking down the barrel of a long metal tube waiting for somebody to shout "Chin le Bo", ancient pirate talk for "fire the cannon".
So yeah, when you read slashdot stories there is a certain amount of anti-MS rhetoric. Perhaps that is because those of us who are "old guys", ageing geeks, persons born back when computers still booted from paper tape and who learned to program using actual -- not emulated -- teletypes and card punches remember the history of MS and got to actually watch as they went from being "the good guys", the purveyors of the operating system (only) of the IBM PC, the computer that more than any other (including the Mac, sorry ghost of Steven Jobs, now Pony) set all humans on the path of Enlightened Freedom from the serfdom of timesharing on huge and expensive mainframes or smaller but still expensive minis, to Evil Incarnate, a corporate amoeba that actually managed to invert the hardware market and put the cart firmly in front of the horse, taking the lion's share of the profit of (nearly) every computer sold.
Slashdot Mirror
temporarily embarrassed rich people... who just didn't happen to go to Yale, be a member of the Skulls fraternity, have the ex-Director of the CIA and President of the US for a daddy, and so on. In a way, they're right -- Sam Walton's kids are separated from the greeters that they hire and pay a pittance without benefits only by several billion dollars, a fair bit of nose candy, and the fact that sometimes the greeters are actually fairly nice people.
But the Walton fortune is the exception. Even Gates is the exception. At least those guys did, in fact, break in and earn their money while not really being a part of "the system". The rule is General Electric, IBM, Bank of America, various megabanks and investment groups. The rule is Halliburton, Boeing, Ford Motor company. The rule is (fill in your favorite oil company here). The rule is (still) AT&T.
I love capitalism -- moderately free enterprise beats the hell out of managed economies if only because the latter are invariably even less free and more entrenched. Capitalism is, however, seriously flawed in several ways. One is that without protection of the commons, it is an open invitation to exploit resources until they are gone (where things like "clean water" are merely resources to dump your waste in right up to the point where the water glows at night and makes people have babies that look like frogs, we're not just talking about strip mining and overfishing and growing tobacco on the land until nothing is left but bare red clay without a trace of actual nutrient value). Another is that money is easy to manipulate into more money, so that the rich get richer -- the playing field that needs to be level for Capitalism to be mostly beneficial to humans is warped into a castle at the top of a peak surrounded by a moat filled with sharks with laser beams by the first few winners of the game. This is where Microsoft has excelled in the past -- monopolies are almost impossible for entrepreneurs to break because they have all the money in the world to spend to defeat you (in the marketplace, in court) and you have no money at all to spend to win. Finally, humans in high office have empirically proven to be embarrassingly easy to bribe and buy off, all over the world. By themselves they are unproductive and of modest means, and companies with literally billions to spend purchasing legislation and discrete ways of raping the taxpayer and putting the money into favored corporate pockets don't hesitate to arrange it for their "friends" to become rich in untraceable ways.
Like Bush. By rights, he should have been bankrupted three times over. Instead, he ends up with tens of millions of dollars (the more you have, the faster you make it, remember) from three failed companies and one minor insider trading episode (that we know of). Taxpayer money goes straight into his pocket, not because he is especially talented but because of who he knows, because of who his friends are, because the dealmakers knew that a future governor, a future president in your debt and possibly even blackmailable is worth a dozen other investors with more money but no connections.
rgb
they can be created out of thin air to be saddled with the liabilities while the CEO and his gang walk away with all the assets in their personal portfolio
Sort of like:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_life_of_George_W._Bush
Found a company (anybody can do that, costs almost nothing). Sell shares to some investors, attract a few big names. Run it into the ground so that it fails, but...
Sell out to a second company who wants your goodwill (those big names) plus whatever assets you managed not to squander, become CEO of second company which also fails, and...
Sell out to a third company who still wants that goodwill, those names, the top political cover (your daddy is president, after all), get a seat on the board of directors, and y'know, damned if that company doesn't start to suck wind and fail due to mismanagement as well. Alas, now there is no sugar daddy outside corporation willing to buy, the company is out of money but the stock is still sitting up there at optimistic prices because the ordinary shareholders do not yet know that the company is down to its few days worth of operating capital.
Borrow money from a bank. Buy into a cushy deal that manages to both suck off money from the taxpayer and screw the actual owner of the land seized for the project. Ask counsel of that failing company that bought the failed company that bought the failed company you originally founded if selling off stock right before the company is about to run out of money is "insider trading". Counsel says yes, damn skippy it is, don't do it.
Do it anyway, pay off loan and manage to pocket a quarter of a million actual profit right before the company loses 2/3 of its book value when the running-out-of-money-with-no-income-to-replace-it shit hits the fan. Wait a few years, cushy deal pays you $15 million dollars in profits -- not bad for return on three failed companies you personally ran or helped to run (you weren't on the board of the cushy deal -- by then everybody but the voters in Texas and the United States knew you were a complete klutz who lost money on every deal you actually ran or helped run). Even on this final deal there was nothing like an actual, honest profit in the payout. The taxpayers of Texas are still paying for the actual sports dome for the Rangers; the profit Bush realized was more or less paid directly from taxpayer pockets into his own, and who knows what the landowner ever got out of the deal (probably nothing)...
The moral of this sad tale is that it isn't just a network of companies -- it is a network of people, all born into wealthy families, owning or controlling the large corporations, looking out for each other and protecting all of the "insiders" while shooting, burning, and clubbing the dead bodies until they stop twitching of all of the outsiders that seek to break in to this tiny enclave of wealth and power. These are the people that control the Fed. They control (or are) many of the governors, senators, presidents of our country. They own huge blocks of stock in the largest and most powerful companies or they sit on the board of directors and draw huge salaries because of their political influence. Insider trading is a way of life -- a wink is as good as a nod -- and make a profit (like Bush) from every failure where the ordinary shareholders lost wads of money.
They exist, impervious in our society, simply because we lack the will to oppose them.
rgb
Well, yes, and He_4 + He_4 fusion isn't stable or exothermic. My eventually perhaps concern is being open minded about just fusion processes in real exothermic generators will look like until we actually have such a thing operating, as they might well involve physics that it not anticipated by the mainline squeeze-it-til-it-cooks approach. But yes, at the moment this isn't the most likely scenario. I just don't like the idea of more or less squandering the helium resources of the planet on kids balloons and non-sustainable dirigibles against even the remote possibility that it will turn out to be critical for some other purpose -- fusion, manufacturing, whatever.
rgb
Even if there are nothing but roads, a robot-controlled solar-powered 1 ton pickup truck is going to be cheaper than a blimp. Although laying rail track is no more "uneconomical" than building the roads that service the places already. If you are worried about delivering goods to places accessible only by horse/foot trails, then could I commend -- a horse? Solar powered, self-replicating, can typically pull a fairly large load, and they do not require large amounts of helium gas to operate.
rgb
All good points, actually. As I said, an estimate (perhaps a too-rosy one, but nothing like the too-rosy nature of helium-filled blimps). I think you're overly pessimistic about average insolation (and my lowball estimates were for as little as 2-3 hours per day on average, not the 7+ that IIRC are the average insolation nearly anywhere in the US). The point is that unless and until we bite the bullet and make major investments to get this particular ball rolling, we'll just continue to burn up fossil fuels at an ever escalating cost. Sure, one day the cost will intersect from below, but that sucks! That means that fuel costs have to double or triple before solar finally gets cheap enough. There are plenty of unrealized economies of scale in solar cell manufacture. As I said, $0.50/watt or even $0.25/watt should be pretty straightforward, if we ever get a big enough market to make it worth it build the big foundries required.
rgb
...although one already explored by SF authors such as Norman Spinrad in Songs from the Stars. 1000 kg weighs 2200 pounds and is basically the load of a pickup truck. By far the easiest way and cheapest way to get a load 1000 km is to build a solar powered electric railroad, especially if you don't care how fast it gets there at first. Of course, with solar collectors on the ground, there is basically no practical limit to the power you can deliver per kilogram and consequently one can get the load to destination at very high speeds with a new design.
The difficulties with a solar powered helium dirigible are manifold and have already been pointed out -- finite supply of helium, helium needed for kids' balloons and (eventually, perhaps) as thermonuclear fuel (at which time we'll kick ourselves for wasting it for decades in kids' balloons), absolutely impossible to keep sun-warmed helium inside any sort of bag. Weather and wind make the transportation dangerous or impossible (given the wimpy peak power likely to be available to move the bag -- probably inadequate to overcome even a very modest headwind). The danger of 1000 kg loads being dropped on people's heads if weather conditions exceed the limited capacity of robot brains to solve weather problems and the lifter breaks up, pops, catastrophically fails.
It isn't quite inconceivable that one could build a solar-solar system -- a solar balloon for lift, solar power for "thrust" -- although again I think that the force of wind pressure instantly will exceed the peak thrust of any onboard solar system on even a very sunny, nearly still day. To lift a metric ton you'll need a rather large balloon, so very small overpressure on the upwind side will exert a huge force downwind. And you'll still have the problems with weather, with the fact that the sun doesn't shine at night and you can't carry batteries or the whole design becomes laughably impossible, not marginally feasible (either one, Helium or hot air).
But rail? Piece of cake. Hell, you could probably deliver a steady stream of pickup truck sized loads driven by solar collectors along the roadway -- 70-100 watts per square meter of collector, plenty of room for 1000 watts per meter of actual track along the 1000 km route. In fact, the track (with a mere 12 meter wide roadway, 2 meters of which is track and vehicle) will generate anywhere from 100s of megawatts to a gigawatt of power on any reasonably sunny day. Assuming 10 kW per metric ton to move payload at 100 km/hour or better, one can move anywhere from a minimum of 10,000 metric tons up to a maximum of 100,000 metric tons per 10 hours of useable daylight day, for the amortized capital cost of the solar powered roadway. (Don't whack the math too much, these are all estimates and YMMV). The cost of the solar electrification is currently a bit over $1/watt, installation and collection will double that. Call it a $5 billion project (the cost of a couple of weeks in Iraq), build it on an existing rail corridor between (say) Detroit and Chicago square in the heart of the industrial heartland. If one charges $10/ton for transport (pretty cheap, one would think) it grosses close to $1 million/day running the rail at capacity, $300 million a year, payback of the initial investment in 15-20 years.
As is so frequently the case in solar projects, this is maddeningly close but not quite a cigar. For a billion dollar investment it would be a no brainer -- payback in 3 years (more likely 5 with operating costs), pure profit thereafter. For 2 or 3 billion dollars it is attractive -- an effective yield of maybe 5-10% on investment in the long run. For 5 it is right down there at 1-3% yield, implying a fairly long period to wait for a not-too-large ROI, plenty of risk. Drop the cost of solar cells by one more factor of two and it will happen all by itself. Drop it by a factor of four or more, which is entirely plausible given sufficient volume in the market (and this project alone would consume
Then there is the issue of support -- writing the original code is only the first part of any software project.
When managers hold endless meetings, the programmers write games. When accountants talk of quarterly profits, the development budget is about to be cut. When senior scientists talk blue sky, the clouds are about to roll in.
Truly, this is not the Tao of Programming.
When managers make commitments, game programs are ignored. When accountants make long-range plans, harmony and order are about to be restored. When senior scientists address the problems at hand, the problems will soon be solved.
Truly, this is the Tao of Programming.
It's difficult to conform to the Tao if your coders are in India or Ireland or China. "Making commitments" seems likely to involve direct acceptance of the risks and local investment in the project(s).
rgb
Forget it!
What's really fun is in trying to figure out how cell phones might cause cancer. Any sane analysis of the actual physics involved results in the wild, off the cuff guess that "they can't". Non-ionizing radiation with no more than a watt directed into the solid angle occupied by the head, no more than 4 watts if you ate a phone. You are at more risk putting on a hat than you are using a cell phone -- it prevents the loss of much more than 4 lousy watts (your brain burns almost a third of the total calories consumed by your body).
Let's see, a cell phone doesn't cause a measurable increase in temperature in tissue -- what little heating it might cause is instantly thermalized by the surrounding tissue and carried away and dispersed elsewhere in the body, just as is the energy trapped by wearing clothes, or a hat. The frequencies of radiation used aren't resonant with any particular structures (and are almost entirely attenuated within a CM or so of the skin anyway). At least two huge studies -- with commensurately good statistics -- find no correlation between cell phone usage and cancer. Various smaller studies sometimes do, but always at the limit of their statistical resolution, another way of saying "it's probably just statistical noise but we want to publish anyway".
The truly amazing thing is that nobody has the intestinal fortitude to just say it: Cell Phones Do Not Cause Cancer, So Get Over It.
It's not like there aren't plenty of things that do cause cancer out there to obsess over, after all. You know, cigarettes, coffee, booze, sex with many partners, certain common viruses, radiation, and a dazzling array of chemical additives that are routinely added to our food or pollutants to be found in our water. The really funny thing is that the person who rides a jet from where they do the research to the meeting where they present it in that one trip to 30,000 feet exposes themselves to real ionizing radiation that almost certainly increases their risk of cancer hundreds of times more than a lifetime of cell phone use (and is still such a small increase that it only shows up as a measurable increase in e.g. pilots and flight attendants who have flown almost daily for five years or more).
Somebody that actually wants to learn the difference between ionizing and non-ionizing radiation could always go someplace like this:
http://www.cancer.org/Cancer/CancerCauses/OtherCarcinogens/MedicalTreatments/radiation-exposure-and-cancer
Ionizing radiation is high-frequency radiation that has enough energy to remove an electron from (ionize) an atom or molecule. Ionizing radiation has enough energy to damage the DNA in cells, which in turn may lead to cancer. Gamma rays, x-rays, some high-energy UV rays, and some sub-atomic particles such as alpha particles and protons are forms of ionizing radiation.
Non-ionizing radiation is low-frequency radiation that does not have enough energy to remove electrons or directly damage DNA. Low-energy UV rays, visible light, infrared rays, microwaves, and radio waves are all forms of non-ionizing radiation. Aside from UV rays, these types of radiation are not known to increase cancer risk.
It is important to understand the difference between these types of radiation. For example, the non-ionizing radiation given off by a cell phone or a television screen is not the same as the ionizing radiation you might get from x-rays taken in the hospital.
(emphasis my own). That really says it all, doesn't it?
Cell phones cause cancer (if at all) by magic!
rgb
And why is it free? Because they get it for free. And how do they get it for free? Because our tax dollars paid for it, and it is therefore delivered to pretty much anybody who wants it through many no-cost distribution channels. How are those channels supported? A variety of ways, but most of them entail the carefully controlled use of public resources (such as bandwidth) so that Rhode Island companies can't just flood all of the FM radio bands with enormous and powerful stations and thereby prevent FM stations from functioning at all in Delaware, Pennsylvania, New York, etc -- or vice versa. Now, let's just get rid of the FCC -- damned government agency! Let the radio stations fight an open war for bandwidth, what the hell. Laissez faire, after all. Eventually, to survive, some of the stations band together and create their own governance -- note well, they simply become a shadow government on their own. Of course one of the laws in their government is There Will Be No Competition With This Government, so all competition ceases, quite possibly by a single company buying all of the stations. The owner of that one company is a fervent believer in (pick your poison) and devotes two hours a day to delivering propaganda to its listeners. Nobody can afford to create a radio company that will ever compete with them, because they own all of the delivery infrastructure and can defend the bandwidth by literally scrambling any competing station that tries.
They don't rely on consumer choices any more -- if you're working and want to listen to music at all, where else will you go? What unregulated "public" resource is protected from exactly the same sort of monopolistic tackeover? Of course they are equally at the mercy of the company(s) that send up weather satellites, and everybody is now TOTALLY at the mercy of the people who send up communications satellites. Eventually the radio companies are taken over by the satellite companies, or vice versa. Why, in a decade or two we could ALL end up working for The Company and you could see what happens when you let corporations provide their own, unrestricted, governance.
You really do need to read "The Tragedy of The Commons" by Hardin. It's free and online and only takes a few minutes. It deconstructs the greatest myth of unrestricted Capitalism in a few short pages, and all you have to do is drive down any highway and look at the trash at the side of the road in spite of hefty fines and attempted governance to know that it is so very, very true.
Also bear in mind that weather satellites are not actually built and launched by "the government". Every single bit of them is built by corporations; "the government" is at most responsible for the launching itself and the primary processing of the data that comes from them, and I'd bet that a lot of that is pieced out as contract work (and in any event is done with e.g. computers and other resources purchased from corporations). What you are suggesting is the fragmentation of this clearly near-optimal separation of the work into pieces that are done by companies whose primary business function is to do it and a central entity that both purchases that work at optimal prices and distributes the benefits of that work at optimal prices on our collective behalf! We don't even ask if we "should" provide information about the weather to everyone at the lowest possible marginal cost (free!) -- any idiot can see the enormous benefits of that information being freely available and not controlled by any narrow corporate interest, responsible not to the "customer" but to stockholders interested in making a profit. Weather prediction saves lives, crops, picnics, and billions and billions of dollars of damages that unpredicted weather used to inflict on the human race prior to the 1960's.
Only a complete, brainless tool like Ron Paul could even contemplate dismantling NOAA, the government agency responsible for providing us with go
[rant]
Right. And if one actually studies history, philosophy, and things like that one learns quickly that lots of things that were originally organized at the state level -- e.g. "militias", roads, laws permitting slavery, y'know, little stuff like that -- proved ultimately impracticable. For the United States of America -- still the name of the country to become the United States of America, we had to move past the despicable regionalism that lingers still, expressed as resentment that (for the love of God, Montressor) some fraction North Dakota taxes go to help provide tsunami warning in California, some other fraction is spent photographing and tracking hurricanes in the Atlantic, and so on. Sure, and some fraction of the taxes I pay goes to help North Dakota support roadways to rural communities, pay for a massive national defense that protects North Dakotans as much as it protects me (in North Carolina) and both of us pay taxes that go or have gone to help support the massive manufacturing infrastructure in places like Michigan or Illinois or Ohio that provide us with cars and many other goods. From the Civil War on, the US has truly been one country, not lots of fragmented states, and its national identity has been forged and reforged by decades of political, economic, and military conflict with a turbulent world. One has only to look at places like Libya to see the dangers of tribalism and fragmentation in a unified state. Perhaps their civil war will forge a single country with a national identity that transcends their internal tribal identities; perhaps not. I'm a native North Carolinian -- born less than 20 miles from where I'm sitting, but I take no particular pride in that and have lived in two other states in the US and one foreign country for periods spanning at least years. I like NC -- it's a great place to live, primarily because the people are mostly good people, the weather is awesome a lot of the year, the state has mountains on one end and the sea at the other, and the research triangle is a place of high civilization, one of the if not the highest per capita concentration of Ph.D.'s and MDs in the world, four Universities and a half dozen colleges within a thirty minute drive of one another (three within a fifteen minute drive -- NC State is the one that's a bit farther away), lots of representation of the arts, a decent economic base. But I cherish the fact that NC is just one state in the United States, arguably the most civilized nation in the world. This is not to pick on or disparage the many other excellent countries out there -- the world itself is finally becoming rather civilized, and the light of freedom is indeed burning brighter all over the world with every passing year (sometimes without even requiring horrific wars to ignite it) -- but we, along with a handful of close, more or less equally civilized friends, have led the way, often at the expense of many lives and much spent fortune, none of which would have ever been possible as a confederation of loosely allied individual states with no common goals or identity.
There are in this country still many people who deeply resent the fact that they have to pay taxes. It doesn't matter that in the civilized modern world, our taxes rates are perhaps the lowest, while the benefits we derive from those taxes are the highest. It doesn't matter than they invariably rely on the services and infrastructure provided by those taxes. It doesn't matter that in many cases, they wouldn't even have the jobs that they have in any sector of the economy if it were not for the centralized management and regulation of that economy paid for in part by their taxes. They can always point to one thing or another that some of their tax money is spent on that they derive no benefit from, or that they disagree morally or politically with, and consider it some sort of "tyranny" for their money to be taken away and used for those purposes, even though they have a vote that counts the same
Right, the people of North Dakota can pay for the monitoring of things like volcanos and earthquakes. And hell, I'm sure that they never use any of the goods or services provided by the people of California and would never miss it if it were gone.
Of course if you were the moral purist pay-your-own-way libertarian you seem to want to claim that you are, you would instantly log off and cease to use all of the publicly funded services such as "the internet" or "roads". Make sure that you get a good contract with somebody who will come to put out a fire at your house. Figure out what you're going to need to pay for police services -- I hear that hunting down somebody that kidnaps and rapes your daughter and flees across state lines is expensive, and hell boy, I don't want to have to pay to help you out, I only have sons! In fact, let's just plain outlaw doing things collectively. Damn communists anyway! Feudalism is the only way to go! Let the strong prevail over the weak -- that's what Darwinism is all about, isn't it? In fact, why bother with democracy? Isn't it always about making the losers go along with the will of the winners? That ain't right, clearly, especially when the winners force the losers in North Dakota to help out those lazy bums in California that produce a lot of their electronics and orange juice. No true North Dakotan needs orange juice -- they just eat raw elk and winter potatoes!
Get a grip, man!
rgb
Yes, but who is going to buy the service provided by these "corporations"? The states? A government. The Feds? A government. Local municipalities? A government. All, in the end, supported by taxes. No, I know -- we'll each and every one of us get to pay market rates for the weather tomorrow, if and only if it is worth it to us. If a hurricane hits and you're not paying for your feed, well, tough titties, ain't it. Next time fork over the fees we charge.
Let's see if we can figure out a way of doing things that clearly belong in the commons as inefficiently as humanly possible by eliminating all economies of scale and rely on personal and corporate ethics to ensure that the common resources are not exploited to destruction and that services are delivered to everybody that needs them.
I swear, sometimes I wonder what the hell people smoke that let's them imagine that we could privatize all public services and end up in some sort of utopia. In Ron Paul's case, it probably isn't anything good. Old sweatsocks. Geese. Mustache hairs.
rgb
Damn, and here I am, no mod points to give. Slashdot needs a way for everybody but AC to thumbs up any given post, points or no points.
Bring me my ponies, sirrah! I want to ride on the open range, enjoying the breathtaking view of oil drills and strip mines right there in the middle of the Grand Canyon!
Raising my lonely dental floss for a living, of course. Because alas, scientists like myself will be out of work and the church will once again be in charge of people's minds, the way God clearly intended they should be.
rgb
Sure, but I'm guessing that we (the US and NATO) have access to Gadhafi's DNA, and of course many of his offspring are still living so we have access to his first degree relatives' DNA. I'm also fairly certain that NATO (and probably the US) have people on the ground in Libya who will be given the opportunity to take samples of his tissue to confirm beyond reasonable doubt that the dead person is indeed him, just as they have done for many other tyrants or terrorists.
Besides, if they are wrong, how long will it be before Gadhafi himself is on the phone to Al Jazeera taunting his opponents about his premature demise? Hours? Days? If this does not happen by Saturday or Sunday, even without DNA testing I'd say it is pretty evident that he's really dead. It's a Bayesian problem, isn't it? Every new piece of evidence becomes a prior in the computation of the probability that he is really dead until "beyond reasonable doubt" is reached...
rgb
Ah, you mean the part about not loaning money at interest? Yes, he's clearly taken many steps in that direction. Devilish clever, to loan/give huge amounts of money (at interest) to banks so that they can continue to loan massive amounts of that money (at interest) back to believers and unbelievers alike, hoping to cause us to rise up and put an end to usurious lending practices -- it is even working!
Or perhaps you mean the part about homosexual individuals needing to be stoned to death and women kept in de facto bondage as the chattel of the men they belong to. Hillary looks good in a burka, don't you think? Well, better. Oh, wait, that's the Republican party, that appears ready to turn the reins of government over to the Mormon cult, which ultimately will force us all to wear white shirts and ties, drink nothing but lemonade, and sing "Joseph Smith, dumb, da dumb, da dumb" all day until he joins forces with the Shiites that are strangely similar in their ethical philosophy and attitude towards personal freedom. Oh hell, at least we'll get to marry a bunch of wives, and no more back-talk!
No, I'm sure you mean the part about apostasy, executing anybody who turns away from the One True Faith, or perhaps the bit about stoning adulterers to death, at least if they happen to be female. Obama is clearly all about that. Isn't everybody?
rgb
His killing, which came swiftly after his capture near Sirte...
s/killing/death/
The actual reports on Al Jazeera and elsewhere suggest that he was badly wounded in the legs and head while being captured and died of his wounds in captivity. The phrase above suggests that he was first captured, then deliberately killed which none of the reports suggests. Just FYI, for those who don't have time to read any of the many articles that are flashing up as AJ has posted what is claimed to be an actual (rather graphic) video of his dead body. Naturally, it is on youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/verify_controversy?next_url=http%3A//www.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3DKJQUShElCzE%26feature%3Dyoutu.be
Pretty convincing, actually, although only DNA does not lie...
rgb
Well, yes, but doesn't krill give you, well, gas? I mean, one doesn't like to comment, but it is a well known biological fact that whale farts emit more methane on a daily basis than the entire gulf oil spill. And methane is an order of magnitude or two more powerful of a greenhouse gas than CO_2, with their close cousins cows contributing another factor of two or so.
Of course you could compensate by getting off your lazy tail and breaching straight down onto pods of penguins, sending their broken bodies drifting down to the subduction seams of the tectonic plates. That way they would get sucked down and turn back into oil, sequestering all of that high-energy carbon in their stumpy little bodies.
You could also ram the occasional ship. Just make sure that they aren't pirate ships.
rgb
Which, in some strange way, seems to prevent global warming, don't forget.
Some days it's only the little things we do that make the world a better place...
rgb
That's not even the worst of the problems. What is it spinning around? An axis? Which axis? The axis through the middle?
What middle?
Oooo, head hurts...
One wonders if the book points out that Richard Cox derived what amounts to information theory several years prior to Shannon...
rgb
9. Hijacking the the article to debate AGW.
10. Hijacking the article to debate Linux vs Windows vs Macs.
11. Inserting a goatse link inside a, um, "provocative" wrapper.
12. Hijacking the article to insert a meta comment about slashdotters that has nothing to with TFA.
13. Hijacking the article to insert a meta comment about slashtdotters that has nothing to do with TFA.
Doh!
rgb
If they raised the life expectancy of all people to 150 (more than doubling it) with a simple, cheap pill that magically cures all genetic disorders, prevents atherosclerosis and cancer, regrows your hair and rebuds your teeth and restores your failing joints, eyesight and hearing, then I'd spend the extra time fighting in a perpetual war that would ultimately have to kill people at the same rate that they are dying today (or even faster).
Or does the magic pill cure starvation and global eco-disaster too?
rgb
You can take my word for it, from direct conversations with FBI agents tasked with pursuing kiddy porn. Kiddy porn is like heroin or cocaine -- if you see a bag of white powder and pick it up, you are instantly a felon even if you thought that it might be powdered sugar. If you actually see kiddy porn on a computer screen, you are an instant felon. All that ultimately protects you from prosecution and de facto being required to prove your innocence is the good judgement of an arresting officer and/or the DA, and what they do is largely determined by what you do next. What you are required to do next is call the police and hand over the bag of white powder that turned out not to be powdered sugar when you snor-- er -- "tasted" it, or instantly and without passing go call the police or the feds or both and turn over the kiddy porn and the system the kiddy porn was on and everything you know about the owners/users of that system and get out of the way!
This is all federal, note -- it doesn't make a damn bit of difference what Missouri's statutes are. This is all good stuff for sysadmins to know, BTW. They can (and should!) legally ignore all kinds of things they see in e.g. user directories during the course of doing their jobs, but kiddy porn is one of the things they cannot legally ignore without becoming felons themselves.
The same is true for the Bishop. I personally have kids, and hope he (if guilty) rots in jail.
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It's even better than that. The "cloud" often puts the actual application on the cloud servers, right? All that is running at your end is a browser with a network API. So Microsoft can take GPL applications, hack them and repackage them any way they like, and put them on their own cloud servers without contributing back a damn thing, all while staying perfectly well within the GPL. In fact, the cloud gives MS the best of all possible worlds -- the ability to use GPL and other OSS software internally on their cloud servers after adding anything they like to enhance or differentiate it, and the ability ensure that some key pieces of functionality can only be accessed if the remote system is running Windows plus Explorer. I mean, it's like the skies are raining money for them, in the end.
An end that IMO will probably never come, BTW, but that is another rant. The history of computing is littered with the fossilized bones of companies that thought that consumers were finally ready for thin clients and would no longer insist on having a fully functional local workstation with its own local software. The cloud may -- and I do say may -- eventually become the universal data-haven, extending the existing client-server data model to client-cloud megaserver, although there are some serious questions of data security and privacy and recoverability and liability in the event of the bankruptcy or corruption of the parent cloud company remaining to be answered, but the notion that all of the software is going to live "in the cloud" is far from proven. Rather, the evidence of the past is that it ain't happening this time any more than any of the other times it has been proposed.
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I have to disagree, sir. Microsoft has stolen the wheel, for the most part terribly.
...] -> Quick C (early), then IDEs for all MS compilers
CPM -> DOS
Basic -> Basica
Turbo [Pascal, C,
Lotus 123 -> Excel
Wordstar, Word Perfect -> Microsoft Word
Apple Lisa -> Windows 1
Mac OS -> Windows 2
Mac OS, Sunview, etc -> Windows 3
VMS,OS/2 -> Windows NT (and boy, was IBM pissed, long story of billion-dollar betrayal biting of the hand that raised you up from a pup)
Mosaic -> Explorer
TCP/IP -> Reluctantly, TCP/IP. Damn they wanted their own proprietary network. Too bad about that Internet thing...
Java -> Java, sort of. See above. In fact, see a whole list of web development stuff, all cloned or stolen to make it proprietarily their own.
And the list goes on. You can count the number of significant, actual, in-house innovations and products invented and programmed by Microsoft's own programmers on the fingers of one hand. Microsoft's entire history is one of waiting for somebody else to innovate, invent, take huge risks, and bring a radical killer app to the PC market just so that they could then clone it, spread a bit of FUD, emphasize the FUD by ensuring that the original product was still only partially debugged when MS released each successive version of Windows (and that those versions would therefore break the competitor's product in critical ways), and then smoothly sell their own replacement into all of the really big corporate houses and most of the smaller consumer houses, leaving the innovator and risk taker gasping with 1/4 or even less of the market.
Just ask Borland. Ask Corel. Ask Lotus. Ask MicroPro. Oooo, you can't ask some of these companies anything at all any more, can you, because Antitrust laws don't, actually, get enforced when the company in question is the partial stock base of nearly every pension fund in the Universe and a major contributor to every candidate who looks at all venal. To Microsoft's "credit", they do sometimes make smaller companies an offer that they can't refuse and buy them out instead of clone-and-conquer, but it is buyout where the buyee is looking down the barrel of a long metal tube waiting for somebody to shout "Chin le Bo", ancient pirate talk for "fire the cannon".
So yeah, when you read slashdot stories there is a certain amount of anti-MS rhetoric. Perhaps that is because those of us who are "old guys", ageing geeks, persons born back when computers still booted from paper tape and who learned to program using actual -- not emulated -- teletypes and card punches remember the history of MS and got to actually watch as they went from being "the good guys", the purveyors of the operating system (only) of the IBM PC, the computer that more than any other (including the Mac, sorry ghost of Steven Jobs, now Pony) set all humans on the path of Enlightened Freedom from the serfdom of timesharing on huge and expensive mainframes or smaller but still expensive minis, to Evil Incarnate, a corporate amoeba that actually managed to invert the hardware market and put the cart firmly in front of the horse, taking the lion's share of the profit of (nearly) every computer sold.
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