This is what I did for my grandpa. I set it up so that I can SSH into his box wherever I happen to live, which is good for installing updates, software he doesn't have, troubleshooting, etc. I could, in theory, have him do a dist-upgrade too (this is Ubuntu), but I haven't ever tried that via long distance. Whenever I visit, if a new LTS version of Ubuntu is out, I install that on there (preserving his home partition), configure it again, and carry on for the next few years or so.
Until these companies are forced to license to third-parties, we'll still see a real lack of competition.
Forcing them to license out all the relevant x86 patents would open up the playing field, but it wouldn't be totally open. One must still pay for what will almost certainly be expensive licenses. The only way to truly open up this market for competition is just to get rid of all of the x86 patents. Otherwise, Intel and AMD will still have quite a bit of control over who they deem important enough to enter the hallowed x86 market.
I think only the DoJ can open up criminal anti-trust suits, but I believe anyone can do a civil anti-trust suit. I could be mistaken, as I am not a lawyer.
But if you want to walk around with dangerous dogs that can attack me or want to spread dangerous pesticides on the environment, that's not only YOUR freedom on the table.
There are many things that are dangerous in this world. Cars, for instance, are numerous times more dangerous to me than any dog, and I speak as someone who has been attacked by a large and dangerous dog as a child. I would never call for a ban on either of those, but they do not necessarily invade the rights of others. Pesticides, too, can perhaps be used in a way that doesn't cause all of those nasty chemicals to pollute someone else's property. Until it crosses the border from one person's property to the next, it's OK in my book.
Quietly engaging in what? Buying up all of our debt so that our government can continue to spend like crazy? Fixing their currency to ours so that their goods are even cheaper for US consumers? Spending 100-150 billion dollars per year on defense while the US spends something on the order of $1 trillion per year (includes general military budget + wars)?
Call me crazy, but I don't think this is a new cold war. And even if it were, the US (and others) has the capability of killing every last man, woman, and child on the planet with nuclear weapons. I'm more concerned with local gangs than with China.
Friedman wasn't an Austrian in any sense of the word. Hayek, though, is who I'm talking about. And Rothbard, Hayek, and Mises all had their own disagreements. Rothbard dedicates a tiny section of one of his books (For a New Liberty?) to a critique of Mises's claim that economics lacks value judgements, for example.
That's because their absurd notions don't stand up to mathematical scrutiny.
"We don't use math because what we say can be disproven by math"
What sort of conclusions have they come to that are A) absurd and B) demonstrated to be absurd with the application of math? I hear many economists dismiss them out of hand, but I have seen very few actually go into depth as to why they must be absurd. Bryan Caplan has a critique of the Austrians, but his is one of the few I've read.
And his teacher, Mises, before him in his work Human Action devoted an entire section of that massive tome to just this very topic: that humans are not equations.
From said tome:
No laboratory experiments can be performed with regard to human action. We are never in a position to observe the change in one element only, all other conditions of the event remaining unchanged. Historical experience as an experience of complex phenomena does not provide us with facts in the sense in which the natural sciences employ this term to signify isolated events tested in experiments. The information conveyed by historical experience cannot be used as building material for the construction of theories and the prediction of future events. Every historical experience is open to various interpretations, and is in fact interpreted in different ways.
The postulates of positivism and kindred schools of metaphysics are therefore illusory. It is impossible to reform the sciences of human action according to the pattern of physics and the other natural sciences. There is no means to establish an a posteriori theory of human conduct and social events. History can neither prove nor disprove any general statement in the manner in which the natural sciences accept or reject a hypothesis on the ground of laboratory experiments. Neither experimental verification nor experimental falsification of a general proposition is possible in its field.
There are entire schools of economics that criticize the mainstream schools using this very line of reasoning. IIRC, the Austrian school economists (Mises, Menger, et. al) never use any sort of math at all, except in trying to determine things such as the rate of inflation. There are others, too, but their names escape me at the moment.
Google transcodes all video you upload to YouTube into mp4, IIRC. Flash is merely the engine used to stream the video. I would much rather Theora or some sort of open codec, but hey, I can still view the videos.
Yes, since when did 'conservative' start to mean 'dedicated to spending as much as possible on massive military buildup and wars of world domination', anyway?
After World War Two, the Old Right that was anti-war (World War One and Two) began moving in a more interventionist direction.
The Democrats of the era were already in favor in foreign intervention. Before Pearl Harbor, FDR was waging pretty much an undeclared naval war on Germany to help the Allies. Wilson before FDR engaged America in WWI. Truman jumped into Korea, and Kennedy in Vietnam (though it was in the planning stages, IIRC, in the Eisenhowever administration).
The rise of the neo-conservatives provided the spark to twist the Old Right from non-intervention in economy and diplomacy into an evil legion that pretty much approved of any war put before them. Prior to this point, IIRC, the Old Right called before Pearl Harbor for students to sign up to oppose the draft in case of US intervention in Europe. IIRC it was supposed to be the largest anti-war movement in US history, but it was totally destroyed by Pearl Harbor. Odd how they forgot their roots so quickly; the transformation likely began in this era, and I believe this transformation became more or less complete around the time of Vietnam, where many on the American left became anti-war (save for those such as Johnson). There still were (and are) those who follow the tradition of the Old Right in this era, opposing the war, but they were pushed to the sidelines of the conservative movement.
War mongers such as William Buckley became highly influential on the Right, and Republican presidents that were influenced by this new pro-war tradition cranked up the bellicosity. The US military was thus dispatched to Grenada, to Iraq, to Lebanon, and to many other places. Liberal leaders began to pick up some of the anti-war slack, but, just as with the Old Right, they haven't been totally effective. And not all of them have been converted, either. Bill Clinton, for example, began US interventions in Somalia and Serbia. He continued the bombing of Iraq, and also bombed Sudan and Afghanistan half-heartedly a few times after the embassy bombing in Kenya. Returning to a neo-con, Bush engaged the US in yet more war. While he was president, the anti-war movement sprang up. It was mostly confined to liberals, but there were also libertarians amongst their midst.
With Obama's election, the anti-war movement has (sadly) died down amongst the liberals. I still hear libertarians denounce the wars, but I now hear fewer liberal voices amongst them. Conservatives call for the expansion of the war into Iran and, on the furthest fringes, Pakistan.
You know, this wouldn't even be so much of a problem if the music industry (these publishers) charged a reasonable price for a CD that costs them a few cents to make.
Well, since all valuation is subjective, I don't think anyone can come to a fair price. What you see as fair may to me be horrendously expensive.
Government is influenced by money, but those in government are primarily influenced by a maintenance of their power. They also absolutely love to use this power, and love even more to acquire more of it for themselves. The bribes and corruption are only symptoms of this root cause.
Where I live, the roads are inadequate and decaying, making me wonder how much, if any, of the tax money is going towards the roads. The road work I see is almost always devoted to paving the same section of road over and over again, even when said section is silky smooth. One such section has had this done three or four times since I've been driving on it. Another section with a massive pothole has been left untreated for years. So what money goes into the system is very poorly allocated.
The annoyingly slow preview scripts here on Slashdot, that appear to bring Firefox to its knees, take very little time at all to run. Now we can finally enjoy Slashdot with its annoying web 2.0 features. Thanks, Google!
On my Dell laptop, which is a couple of years old now (2006 or 2007, IIRC), I've gotten better boot times. Shutting down, on the other hand, takes forever. The best boot times it ever achieved were under Gentoo, and I don't currently have the time to play with that. It also shut down very quickly.
One of the flaws in your argument is the assertion that bloggers do not get paid. While that is the case for most of them, there are those who rake in huge amounts of ad revenue on their blog. IIRC, the guy who runs The Daily Kos is now a millionaire. I'm sure there are other examples of bloggers hitting it big. So, good journalists can continue to get paid and get well read, so long as they are capable of drawing in a large enough population.
As far as facts go, there are many, many incidents in the history of journalism that make it clear journalists are not saints. On the contrary, they are just as fallible as we are, if not more so in some cases. An example is the lead up to the Spanish-American war, where journalists leveled wild accusations against the Spanish. Walter Duranty, IIRC, won a Pulitzer prize for denying the existence of the Ukrainian famine. Dan Rather was thrown off for forging papers (though the substance of those papers may have been at least somewhat true).
I would say that the fact that blogs have no air of authority is a good thing, because lies and distortions as above wouldn't have had the same impact if made by Joe Blow on his blog.
The delicious irony is the wailing about "author's intent" and bemoaning someone other than the original author covering the same ground coming from a group that would gladly see copyright curtailed so that EVERYONE would be free to butcher an author's vision after a period of time.
The thing about not having copyright on the book is that there could be no 'official' sequels. Everything would be, more or less, fan fiction. Sure, some of that fan fiction could be marketed and sold, but it is not 'official' fan fiction.
Really? The GP should be subjected to George Bush because he chooses to get his news from an alternative source? It'd be one thing if he said that he never gets any news, ever, but then again, no one deserves George Bush, and he clearly demonstrated that he is still wired up.
I personally get my news from a ton of line sources. The wire services, but also blogs. And I get information from a bunch of those, from the leftists of the Daily Kos, to the right-wingers of Little Green Footballs, to the libertarians of lewrockwell.com, and many, many, in between. The great thing about it is these guys do not pretend to have an air of non-ideology. They straight up tell you their biases; no need for subtle hints, omitted facts, or turns of phrases to find out. You know straight away. And with all the conflicting views, you can build up a nice picture of the world.
There is no hostage shooting level in Counter Strike. There's no encouragement and in fact there is punishment for doing it.
Not every server actually kicks you for killing hostages. All the sane ones do, but it is still possible to find ones that allow it. And I'll bet someone, somewhere, has devised a map in CS solely for the purpose of slaughtering hostages. If not, someone in Garry's Mod certainly has.
The reason that city driving in a hybrid or electric vehicle can be more efficient than highway is because the inefficiency of the regeneration is overpowered by the reduced wind resistance.
I suppose to be fair, a hybrid switches from a relatively inefficient internal combustion engine to a more efficient electric engine at these lower speeds; the hybrid's gains would be due to more than simply capturing some of the energy from braking.
Slashdot Mirror
This is what I did for my grandpa. I set it up so that I can SSH into his box wherever I happen to live, which is good for installing updates, software he doesn't have, troubleshooting, etc. I could, in theory, have him do a dist-upgrade too (this is Ubuntu), but I haven't ever tried that via long distance. Whenever I visit, if a new LTS version of Ubuntu is out, I install that on there (preserving his home partition), configure it again, and carry on for the next few years or so.
Until these companies are forced to license to third-parties, we'll still see a real lack of competition.
Forcing them to license out all the relevant x86 patents would open up the playing field, but it wouldn't be totally open. One must still pay for what will almost certainly be expensive licenses. The only way to truly open up this market for competition is just to get rid of all of the x86 patents. Otherwise, Intel and AMD will still have quite a bit of control over who they deem important enough to enter the hallowed x86 market.
I think only the DoJ can open up criminal anti-trust suits, but I believe anyone can do a civil anti-trust suit. I could be mistaken, as I am not a lawyer.
But if you want to walk around with dangerous dogs that can attack me or want to spread dangerous pesticides on the environment, that's not only YOUR freedom on the table.
There are many things that are dangerous in this world. Cars, for instance, are numerous times more dangerous to me than any dog, and I speak as someone who has been attacked by a large and dangerous dog as a child. I would never call for a ban on either of those, but they do not necessarily invade the rights of others. Pesticides, too, can perhaps be used in a way that doesn't cause all of those nasty chemicals to pollute someone else's property. Until it crosses the border from one person's property to the next, it's OK in my book.
Quietly engaging in what? Buying up all of our debt so that our government can continue to spend like crazy? Fixing their currency to ours so that their goods are even cheaper for US consumers? Spending 100-150 billion dollars per year on defense while the US spends something on the order of $1 trillion per year (includes general military budget + wars)?
Call me crazy, but I don't think this is a new cold war. And even if it were, the US (and others) has the capability of killing every last man, woman, and child on the planet with nuclear weapons. I'm more concerned with local gangs than with China.
Friedman wasn't an Austrian in any sense of the word. Hayek, though, is who I'm talking about. And Rothbard, Hayek, and Mises all had their own disagreements. Rothbard dedicates a tiny section of one of his books (For a New Liberty?) to a critique of Mises's claim that economics lacks value judgements, for example.
Do you have a source for the assertion that Austrians view monopolies as being non-evil?
One of them won a Nobel prize, so I'd have to say they're not totally crazy.
That's because their absurd notions don't stand up to mathematical scrutiny. "We don't use math because what we say can be disproven by math"
What sort of conclusions have they come to that are A) absurd and B) demonstrated to be absurd with the application of math? I hear many economists dismiss them out of hand, but I have seen very few actually go into depth as to why they must be absurd. Bryan Caplan has a critique of the Austrians, but his is one of the few I've read.
And his teacher, Mises, before him in his work Human Action devoted an entire section of that massive tome to just this very topic: that humans are not equations.
From said tome:
No laboratory experiments can be performed with regard to human action. We are never in a position to observe the change in one element only, all other conditions of the event remaining unchanged. Historical experience as an experience of complex phenomena does not provide us with facts in the sense in which the natural sciences employ this term to signify isolated events tested in experiments. The information conveyed by historical experience cannot be used as building material for the construction of theories and the prediction of future events. Every historical experience is open to various interpretations, and is in fact interpreted in different ways.
The postulates of positivism and kindred schools of metaphysics are therefore illusory. It is impossible to reform the sciences of human action according to the pattern of physics and the other natural sciences. There is no means to establish an a posteriori theory of human conduct and social events. History can neither prove nor disprove any general statement in the manner in which the natural sciences accept or reject a hypothesis on the ground of laboratory experiments. Neither experimental verification nor experimental falsification of a general proposition is possible in its field.
There are entire schools of economics that criticize the mainstream schools using this very line of reasoning. IIRC, the Austrian school economists (Mises, Menger, et. al) never use any sort of math at all, except in trying to determine things such as the rate of inflation. There are others, too, but their names escape me at the moment.
Google transcodes all video you upload to YouTube into mp4, IIRC. Flash is merely the engine used to stream the video. I would much rather Theora or some sort of open codec, but hey, I can still view the videos.
Yes, since when did 'conservative' start to mean 'dedicated to spending as much as possible on massive military buildup and wars of world domination', anyway?
After World War Two, the Old Right that was anti-war (World War One and Two) began moving in a more interventionist direction.
The Democrats of the era were already in favor in foreign intervention. Before Pearl Harbor, FDR was waging pretty much an undeclared naval war on Germany to help the Allies. Wilson before FDR engaged America in WWI. Truman jumped into Korea, and Kennedy in Vietnam (though it was in the planning stages, IIRC, in the Eisenhowever administration).
The rise of the neo-conservatives provided the spark to twist the Old Right from non-intervention in economy and diplomacy into an evil legion that pretty much approved of any war put before them. Prior to this point, IIRC, the Old Right called before Pearl Harbor for students to sign up to oppose the draft in case of US intervention in Europe. IIRC it was supposed to be the largest anti-war movement in US history, but it was totally destroyed by Pearl Harbor. Odd how they forgot their roots so quickly; the transformation likely began in this era, and I believe this transformation became more or less complete around the time of Vietnam, where many on the American left became anti-war (save for those such as Johnson). There still were (and are) those who follow the tradition of the Old Right in this era, opposing the war, but they were pushed to the sidelines of the conservative movement.
War mongers such as William Buckley became highly influential on the Right, and Republican presidents that were influenced by this new pro-war tradition cranked up the bellicosity. The US military was thus dispatched to Grenada, to Iraq, to Lebanon, and to many other places. Liberal leaders began to pick up some of the anti-war slack, but, just as with the Old Right, they haven't been totally effective. And not all of them have been converted, either. Bill Clinton, for example, began US interventions in Somalia and Serbia. He continued the bombing of Iraq, and also bombed Sudan and Afghanistan half-heartedly a few times after the embassy bombing in Kenya. Returning to a neo-con, Bush engaged the US in yet more war. While he was president, the anti-war movement sprang up. It was mostly confined to liberals, but there were also libertarians amongst their midst.
With Obama's election, the anti-war movement has (sadly) died down amongst the liberals. I still hear libertarians denounce the wars, but I now hear fewer liberal voices amongst them. Conservatives call for the expansion of the war into Iran and, on the furthest fringes, Pakistan.
The spammers will instantly attack bananas with ads for P3N1$ EnL4rg3mEnt or V14gra.
You know, this wouldn't even be so much of a problem if the music industry (these publishers) charged a reasonable price for a CD that costs them a few cents to make.
Well, since all valuation is subjective, I don't think anyone can come to a fair price. What you see as fair may to me be horrendously expensive.
Government is influenced by money, but those in government are primarily influenced by a maintenance of their power. They also absolutely love to use this power, and love even more to acquire more of it for themselves. The bribes and corruption are only symptoms of this root cause.
You can still make money in the only form that cannot be duplicated: concerts.
Where I live, the roads are inadequate and decaying, making me wonder how much, if any, of the tax money is going towards the roads. The road work I see is almost always devoted to paving the same section of road over and over again, even when said section is silky smooth. One such section has had this done three or four times since I've been driving on it. Another section with a massive pothole has been left untreated for years. So what money goes into the system is very poorly allocated.
The annoyingly slow preview scripts here on Slashdot, that appear to bring Firefox to its knees, take very little time at all to run. Now we can finally enjoy Slashdot with its annoying web 2.0 features. Thanks, Google!
On my Dell laptop, which is a couple of years old now (2006 or 2007, IIRC), I've gotten better boot times. Shutting down, on the other hand, takes forever. The best boot times it ever achieved were under Gentoo, and I don't currently have the time to play with that. It also shut down very quickly.
One of the flaws in your argument is the assertion that bloggers do not get paid. While that is the case for most of them, there are those who rake in huge amounts of ad revenue on their blog. IIRC, the guy who runs The Daily Kos is now a millionaire. I'm sure there are other examples of bloggers hitting it big. So, good journalists can continue to get paid and get well read, so long as they are capable of drawing in a large enough population.
As far as facts go, there are many, many incidents in the history of journalism that make it clear journalists are not saints. On the contrary, they are just as fallible as we are, if not more so in some cases. An example is the lead up to the Spanish-American war, where journalists leveled wild accusations against the Spanish. Walter Duranty, IIRC, won a Pulitzer prize for denying the existence of the Ukrainian famine. Dan Rather was thrown off for forging papers (though the substance of those papers may have been at least somewhat true).
I would say that the fact that blogs have no air of authority is a good thing, because lies and distortions as above wouldn't have had the same impact if made by Joe Blow on his blog.
The delicious irony is the wailing about "author's intent" and bemoaning someone other than the original author covering the same ground coming from a group that would gladly see copyright curtailed so that EVERYONE would be free to butcher an author's vision after a period of time.
The thing about not having copyright on the book is that there could be no 'official' sequels. Everything would be, more or less, fan fiction. Sure, some of that fan fiction could be marketed and sold, but it is not 'official' fan fiction.
Really? The GP should be subjected to George Bush because he chooses to get his news from an alternative source? It'd be one thing if he said that he never gets any news, ever, but then again, no one deserves George Bush, and he clearly demonstrated that he is still wired up.
I personally get my news from a ton of line sources. The wire services, but also blogs. And I get information from a bunch of those, from the leftists of the Daily Kos, to the right-wingers of Little Green Footballs, to the libertarians of lewrockwell.com, and many, many, in between. The great thing about it is these guys do not pretend to have an air of non-ideology. They straight up tell you their biases; no need for subtle hints, omitted facts, or turns of phrases to find out. You know straight away. And with all the conflicting views, you can build up a nice picture of the world.
There is no hostage shooting level in Counter Strike. There's no encouragement and in fact there is punishment for doing it.
Not every server actually kicks you for killing hostages. All the sane ones do, but it is still possible to find ones that allow it. And I'll bet someone, somewhere, has devised a map in CS solely for the purpose of slaughtering hostages. If not, someone in Garry's Mod certainly has.
The reason that city driving in a hybrid or electric vehicle can be more efficient than highway is because the inefficiency of the regeneration is overpowered by the reduced wind resistance.
I suppose to be fair, a hybrid switches from a relatively inefficient internal combustion engine to a more efficient electric engine at these lower speeds; the hybrid's gains would be due to more than simply capturing some of the energy from braking.
But I do agree with the rest of what you said.