Pretty much! I remember when Sun sued Microsoft on the same grounds (an incomplete implementation.) Slashdotters everywhere foamed at the mouth and declared Sun the David to Microsoft's Goliath.
In reality, Sun sued Microsoft for two reasons: - The Microsoft VM was enormously faster than the Sun VM, to the point where no sane person would ever use the Sun VM. - Visual J++ had delegates.
Actually Google shows the top couple of results from all of the video hosts they index. The only reason they're often from Youtube is... surprise!... because Youtube is thousands of times more popular than any other video host.
And to really understand big-O notation, you need to know quite a lot about real analysis.
Programming is 99% math, but if you've never had a rigorous mathematical education you'd never know it. Discrete math/combinatorics has been mentioned. You also have coding theory, set theory, ring theory (we do all math over a quotient ring), many ideas from linear algebra, graph theory. If you have a job that doesn't suck, you probably deal with numerical methods and number theory a bit (e.g. why Karatsuba's algorithm works, why Euler integration is terrible.)
Yeah, most programmers can probably hack out a solution to most problems without a lot of mathematics knowledge. The best part about reinventing the wheel is getting to decide how many sides it has.
Are you seriously arguing that an economy is healthy when the richest thousand people have a fifth as much money as the other 300 million people put together?
I... I'm sorry, I started reading your post and started getting flashbacks to a third wave feminist blog I read once.
You're preaching to the choir, dude. Linux has a great server offering. OSX is a robust OS for the client. That's what we're talking about: client applications. Desktop applications. Games.
Windows and OSX are fairly well-regulated monocultures: you have a consistent idea about how installation is supposed to work, you know where to put your config files, you know what permissions you need and how to get them. You rarely need to worry about broken dependencies: they happen, but the platform vendors usually provide an updater you can distribute with your application.
On the other hand, Linux is an undifferentiated mass. An application developer literally cannot make any useful predictions about the end user's configuration, which means it's almost impossible to provide support. The state of Linux is fine - it's even very strong - when you're only talking about FOSS. When you start asking for money, you need to make sure that your software is Suitable for a Particular Purpose. Installation needs to be easy and it needs to work everywhere.
I'm offering 10:1 I get modded flamebait for not drinking the Linux Kool-Aid.
You're joking, but what you said is actually a problem. Go suffers from the same design mentality behind UNIX and C. Whether you love C or hate C, we don't need a new clone that solves none of the problems and introduces no new ideas.
There are lots of people who have designed and implemented a C-like programming language. I'm one of them. The only reason anybody even cares about Go is because of Ken's name, which is pretty surprising because his insane, short-sighted design decisions are responsible for so many software engineering problems it isn't even funny.
There's way too much emphasis on Software Engineering in these comments. Multithreading? Self-taught programmers are the only people who ever have the time to study IA-32 and associated errata to the point where they're able to write a reliable threading library. Object-oriented design? Computer architecture? Design patterns? All of this is easily within the reach of a self-taught programmer.
Here's my answer: self-taught programmers will not learn computability theory, complexity (incl. real analysis), classical algorithms/data structures, discrete math, combinatorics or numerical methods. Other than that, a self-taught programmer will probably be much better at the purely mechanical part.
Cap and trade is direct government interference with the market to protect people from themselves and/or others. How is it anything but socialism?
Because socialism involves the collective ownership of capital. Do you own the air we breathe? No. Do I? No. We all own it. It is collectively owned capital.
The sale of the right to pollute is the privatization of a public good. It is the literal opposite of socialism.
Meanwhile, your original claim that cap and trade is a free market solution to pollution directly contradicts the definition of a free market, yet you continue to insist it doesn't.
That doesn't change the fact that calling "cap and trade" a "free market solution" is a lie.
No, 'socialism' is the fact that I am paying for you to drive your F-350.
If you want to say "We need to resort to socialism to solve this problem," then say it. Don't spread FUD by claiming cap and trade is a free market solution to the problem when it isn't.
FUD stands for "Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt." The only person spreading FUD is the person claiming that cap and trade is 'socialism' without actually supporting his argument. That'd be you, buck-o.
But making the 'vast money flows' closed to public scrutiny is the point. A general tax involves a lot more government intervention in the private sector than a scheme like cap and trade.
The point isn't to create a source of revenue for the government, or to directly penalize polluters. ACES/Waxman-Markey (the US carbon cap and trade bill) distributes 85% of the permits for free - $0, free - and auctions off the remainder. The objective is to get the permits in the hands of the firms that need them the most, and the best way of doing that is by finding out who is willing to pay the most for them.
As for who gets the money... it doesn't really matter, does it? Selling pollution permits is a company's reward for not polluting. I also don't think the process will be as opaque as you claim, because any publicly-traded corporation would need to divulge the sale to its shareholders - not to mention the good will they'd get for becoming 'greener.'
(Aside: There's a lot of misinformation about cap and trade and I'd like to clear it up: The permits aren't a permanent source of revenue for the government. How could they be? If the government just prints more, how is it a 'cap?' If they expired after a year and needed to be renewed, what's the point of 'trade?' The idea is to distribute the permits once, and rely on the free market to distribute the permits to the firms willing to pay the most for them.)
Government mandated interference, like "cap and trade," is the antithesis of free market principles.
Pollution is called an 'externality' because it presents an added social cost of production that is not paid for by the firm. The costs of the externality - damage to your health, your property, your overall utility of the environment - are born by the people.
This means society collectively subsidizes the production of the good. Sounds a lot like socialism to me!
Ideally, the program would be structured as a "feebate", with all CAT tax revenue being compensated for by, say, cutting payroll taxes.
It's a nice theory.
Then you get essentials like gasoline, electricity and heating oil, which have very inelastic demands. The idea is that market forces will decide the division of the tax between consumers and producers, and the government will pay back the consumers. The reality is that the consumer's share of a tax on gasoline (for example) is almost the entire tax.
It's good if your goal is to get companies to stop making luxury goods though.:)
Well, governments are right to lump all tax revenue into one huge pile because money is fungible.:) It's difficult to comment on the success of taxation without discussing the likelihood of a government fulfilling their obligations.
I'm not sure what you mean by free rights to lobbyists though. The reason carbon cap and trade isn't working in the EU is due to overallocation. It's hard to expect market forces to take over when you don't have scarcity.... On the other hand, the American sulfur dioxide cap and trade program has been an outstanding success. Emissions have dropped by something like 80% since the program started in the 1990s.
Enough of them. Cap and trade is a solution that exists within the free market and naturally inherits the same equilibrium-seeking behavior. These days it's an exercise they assign to undergrads.
As far as the tax receipts, it wouldn't be that hard to find something to do with the money (pay off debt is an easy one), the only hard part would be agreeing on where to spend it (and that's only a problem because our politics are ridiculous).
Oh, really? Off the top of my head I can think of three completely sensible ways to spend the money to directly offset the social cost of pollution. FWIW, paying off debt is not one of those ways.
The problem is that taxes are too 'fair:' you're equally taxing the companies that cannot afford to stop polluting and the companies that can. There is no direct incentive, only a sunk cost that can only motivate change if the cost of replacing the equipment is less than the cost of the tax in the *short run.*
Cap and trade allows the industry to distribute the right to pollute to the firms that need it the most. Companies that can reduce pollution easily and cheaply do so, and they get a nice black number on their quarterly report for selling their carbon credits. Companies that cannot efficiently reduce their pollution effectively subsidize the pollution reduction of their industry.
Taxation is a punitive measure that does not have the above merits. It only encourages the most trivial improvements to manufacturing processes, and raises many more questions (like what to do with the tax money.)
Economists have modeled cap and trade versus the other alternatives (in a game theoretic sense) and the results are pretty much clear. Within the framework of a free market, there is no more efficient way of forcing companies to internalize their externalities.
IT powerhouses decide to start randomly hosing key pieces of their information infrastructure.
IT powerhouses are publicly traded: it will never happen. Eric Schmidt wants to keep doing business with China even though they were hacked. Walmart will keep buying Chinese baby formula. Toys R Us will keep stocking Chinese toys. Purina will keep buying Chinese dog food.
American investment and corporate ownership is a maze. Ideally a corporation is directly liable to its shareholders - meaning that, if the shareholders didn't want to do business with China, they would be able to influence the company in that direction. However, in reality, the 'shareholders' of a major corporation are large holding companies and mutual funds, which are also publicly-traded and owned by other large holding companies and mutual funds. If an executive takes actions that do not maximize profits, they will be removed or possibly sued by the soulless corporate automaton that owns them. The fact that Google got the consent of its shareholders to take any action about China is *incredible*, but Google's a huge exception in the IT world for the share of the company that's self-owned or owned by its employees. The rest - Cisco, Microsoft, Apple - are all in for the long run.
If anybody on this planet has had time to play with an iPad, it's Steve Jobs. Seeing him fumble the device and make repeated typing errors during a public presentation does not inspire my confidence about its utility.
I guess that's why TFA is saying the total opposite?
Simple explanation: the brain can't metabolize fat. If you're a "tub of lard" and you stop eating, you won't lose fat... you'll just become a "tub of lard" who can't walk anymore.
Next time you try to defend the evil acts in history, study them first. It'll shorten the distance you have to pull your foot out of your mouth.
Yeah sure. State-sponsored rape, directed infanticide, torture and pillage had a name back then: war. The Crusades were exceptional in scale, not in scope.
Oh, give me a break. It's always 'other things!' The main reason for the Crusades, for example, was to stop the expansion of the Seljuk Empire into Europe. There is always an underlying social or economic reason beyond religion. This is some damn shallow logic.
Slashdot Mirror
Pretty much! I remember when Sun sued Microsoft on the same grounds (an incomplete implementation.) Slashdotters everywhere foamed at the mouth and declared Sun the David to Microsoft's Goliath.
In reality, Sun sued Microsoft for two reasons:
- The Microsoft VM was enormously faster than the Sun VM, to the point where no sane person would ever use the Sun VM.
- Visual J++ had delegates.
Actually Google shows the top couple of results from all of the video hosts they index. The only reason they're often from Youtube is... surprise!... because Youtube is thousands of times more popular than any other video host.
And to really understand big-O notation, you need to know quite a lot about real analysis.
Programming is 99% math, but if you've never had a rigorous mathematical education you'd never know it. Discrete math/combinatorics has been mentioned. You also have coding theory, set theory, ring theory (we do all math over a quotient ring), many ideas from linear algebra, graph theory. If you have a job that doesn't suck, you probably deal with numerical methods and number theory a bit (e.g. why Karatsuba's algorithm works, why Euler integration is terrible.)
Yeah, most programmers can probably hack out a solution to most problems without a lot of mathematics knowledge. The best part about reinventing the wheel is getting to decide how many sides it has.
But income disparity is one of the primary indicators of recession.
Are you seriously arguing that an economy is healthy when the richest thousand people have a fifth as much money as the other 300 million people put together?
Lies, damn lies, and statistics.
I... I'm sorry, I started reading your post and started getting flashbacks to a third wave feminist blog I read once.
You're preaching to the choir, dude. Linux has a great server offering. OSX is a robust OS for the client. That's what we're talking about: client applications. Desktop applications. Games.
What did you think we were talking about?
Actually there's a much bigger jump.
Windows and OSX are fairly well-regulated monocultures: you have a consistent idea about how installation is supposed to work, you know where to put your config files, you know what permissions you need and how to get them. You rarely need to worry about broken dependencies: they happen, but the platform vendors usually provide an updater you can distribute with your application.
On the other hand, Linux is an undifferentiated mass. An application developer literally cannot make any useful predictions about the end user's configuration, which means it's almost impossible to provide support. The state of Linux is fine - it's even very strong - when you're only talking about FOSS. When you start asking for money, you need to make sure that your software is Suitable for a Particular Purpose. Installation needs to be easy and it needs to work everywhere.
I'm offering 10:1 I get modded flamebait for not drinking the Linux Kool-Aid.
You're joking, but what you said is actually a problem. Go suffers from the same design mentality behind UNIX and C. Whether you love C or hate C, we don't need a new clone that solves none of the problems and introduces no new ideas.
There are lots of people who have designed and implemented a C-like programming language. I'm one of them. The only reason anybody even cares about Go is because of Ken's name, which is pretty surprising because his insane, short-sighted design decisions are responsible for so many software engineering problems it isn't even funny.
There's way too much emphasis on Software Engineering in these comments. Multithreading? Self-taught programmers are the only people who ever have the time to study IA-32 and associated errata to the point where they're able to write a reliable threading library. Object-oriented design? Computer architecture? Design patterns? All of this is easily within the reach of a self-taught programmer.
Here's my answer: self-taught programmers will not learn computability theory, complexity (incl. real analysis), classical algorithms/data structures, discrete math, combinatorics or numerical methods. Other than that, a self-taught programmer will probably be much better at the purely mechanical part.
Cap and trade is direct government interference with the market to protect people from themselves and/or others. How is it anything but socialism?
Because socialism involves the collective ownership of capital. Do you own the air we breathe? No. Do I? No. We all own it. It is collectively owned capital.
The sale of the right to pollute is the privatization of a public good. It is the literal opposite of socialism.
Meanwhile, your original claim that cap and trade is a free market solution to pollution directly contradicts the definition of a free market, yet you continue to insist it doesn't.
Try again.
That doesn't change the fact that calling "cap and trade" a "free market solution" is a lie.
No, 'socialism' is the fact that I am paying for you to drive your F-350.
If you want to say "We need to resort to socialism to solve this problem," then say it. Don't spread FUD by claiming cap and trade is a free market solution to the problem when it isn't.
FUD stands for "Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt." The only person spreading FUD is the person claiming that cap and trade is 'socialism' without actually supporting his argument. That'd be you, buck-o.
Try again, Milton Friedman.
But making the 'vast money flows' closed to public scrutiny is the point. A general tax involves a lot more government intervention in the private sector than a scheme like cap and trade.
The point isn't to create a source of revenue for the government, or to directly penalize polluters. ACES/Waxman-Markey (the US carbon cap and trade bill) distributes 85% of the permits for free - $0, free - and auctions off the remainder. The objective is to get the permits in the hands of the firms that need them the most, and the best way of doing that is by finding out who is willing to pay the most for them.
As for who gets the money... it doesn't really matter, does it? Selling pollution permits is a company's reward for not polluting. I also don't think the process will be as opaque as you claim, because any publicly-traded corporation would need to divulge the sale to its shareholders - not to mention the good will they'd get for becoming 'greener.'
(Aside: There's a lot of misinformation about cap and trade and I'd like to clear it up: The permits aren't a permanent source of revenue for the government. How could they be? If the government just prints more, how is it a 'cap?' If they expired after a year and needed to be renewed, what's the point of 'trade?' The idea is to distribute the permits once, and rely on the free market to distribute the permits to the firms willing to pay the most for them.)
Government mandated interference, like "cap and trade," is the antithesis of free market principles.
Pollution is called an 'externality' because it presents an added social cost of production that is not paid for by the firm. The costs of the externality - damage to your health, your property, your overall utility of the environment - are born by the people.
This means society collectively subsidizes the production of the good. Sounds a lot like socialism to me!
Ideally, the program would be structured as a "feebate", with all CAT tax revenue being compensated for by, say, cutting payroll taxes.
It's a nice theory.
Then you get essentials like gasoline, electricity and heating oil, which have very inelastic demands. The idea is that market forces will decide the division of the tax between consumers and producers, and the government will pay back the consumers. The reality is that the consumer's share of a tax on gasoline (for example) is almost the entire tax.
It's good if your goal is to get companies to stop making luxury goods though. :)
Well, governments are right to lump all tax revenue into one huge pile because money is fungible. :) It's difficult to comment on the success of taxation without discussing the likelihood of a government fulfilling their obligations.
I'm not sure what you mean by free rights to lobbyists though. The reason carbon cap and trade isn't working in the EU is due to overallocation. It's hard to expect market forces to take over when you don't have scarcity....
On the other hand, the American sulfur dioxide cap and trade program has been an outstanding success. Emissions have dropped by something like 80% since the program started in the 1990s.
Which economists? All of them?
Enough of them. Cap and trade is a solution that exists within the free market and naturally inherits the same equilibrium-seeking behavior. These days it's an exercise they assign to undergrads.
As far as the tax receipts, it wouldn't be that hard to find something to do with the money (pay off debt is an easy one), the only hard part would be agreeing on where to spend it (and that's only a problem because our politics are ridiculous).
Oh, really? Off the top of my head I can think of three completely sensible ways to spend the money to directly offset the social cost of pollution. FWIW, paying off debt is not one of those ways.
The problem is that taxes are too 'fair:' you're equally taxing the companies that cannot afford to stop polluting and the companies that can. There is no direct incentive, only a sunk cost that can only motivate change if the cost of replacing the equipment is less than the cost of the tax in the *short run.*
Cap and trade allows the industry to distribute the right to pollute to the firms that need it the most. Companies that can reduce pollution easily and cheaply do so, and they get a nice black number on their quarterly report for selling their carbon credits. Companies that cannot efficiently reduce their pollution effectively subsidize the pollution reduction of their industry.
Taxation is a punitive measure that does not have the above merits. It only encourages the most trivial improvements to manufacturing processes, and raises many more questions (like what to do with the tax money.)
Economists have modeled cap and trade versus the other alternatives (in a game theoretic sense) and the results are pretty much clear. Within the framework of a free market, there is no more efficient way of forcing companies to internalize their externalities.
IT powerhouses decide to start randomly hosing key pieces of their information infrastructure.
IT powerhouses are publicly traded: it will never happen. Eric Schmidt wants to keep doing business with China even though they were hacked. Walmart will keep buying Chinese baby formula. Toys R Us will keep stocking Chinese toys. Purina will keep buying Chinese dog food.
American investment and corporate ownership is a maze. Ideally a corporation is directly liable to its shareholders - meaning that, if the shareholders didn't want to do business with China, they would be able to influence the company in that direction. However, in reality, the 'shareholders' of a major corporation are large holding companies and mutual funds, which are also publicly-traded and owned by other large holding companies and mutual funds. If an executive takes actions that do not maximize profits, they will be removed or possibly sued by the soulless corporate automaton that owns them.
The fact that Google got the consent of its shareholders to take any action about China is *incredible*, but Google's a huge exception in the IT world for the share of the company that's self-owned or owned by its employees. The rest - Cisco, Microsoft, Apple - are all in for the long run.
So what you're saying is that you are okay with a full size device suffering from the same user input flaws as the iPhone.
Alright.
If anybody on this planet has had time to play with an iPad, it's Steve Jobs. Seeing him fumble the device and make repeated typing errors during a public presentation does not inspire my confidence about its utility.
Which should be a hint about what's happening here.
I guess that's why TFA is saying the total opposite?
Simple explanation: the brain can't metabolize fat. If you're a "tub of lard" and you stop eating, you won't lose fat... you'll just become a "tub of lard" who can't walk anymore.
Nice strawman.
Next time you try to defend the evil acts in history, study them first. It'll shorten the distance you have to pull your foot out of your mouth.
Yeah sure. State-sponsored rape, directed infanticide, torture and pillage had a name back then: war. The Crusades were exceptional in scale, not in scope.
You should consider taking your own advice.
Oh, give me a break. It's always 'other things!' The main reason for the Crusades, for example, was to stop the expansion of the Seljuk Empire into Europe. There is always an underlying social or economic reason beyond religion. This is some damn shallow logic.