why shouldn't employees (who are free to associate, right?) try to leverage the sunk costs of their training into higher salary? assuming (for sake of argument) that there is no government interference on their behalf and that the unionizers don't initiate "violence" against the non-unionizers, why is this not a rational approach compatible with Libertarianism(tm)?
note, a reply should either explain how unionizing under these assumptions is irrational or give a coherent argument along the lines that these assumptions are impossible to satisfy (i.e. convince me that government interference and/or violence is an absolutely inevitable effect of voluntary unionization).
this is in much the same sense, that any physical device is "math" because it obeys the laws of physics.
yes, you can say that the mathematical description of the physical device only approximates the real device. however, i analogously would dare you to fix a non-trivial encoding system & compute the Church-numbers for some meaningful programs... you can start with emacs and vi.:)
i'm against software patents (see sig), but this argument, although formally true in some sense, is just silly; no software is derived mathematically - the fact that there is a church numeral has nothing at all to do with how the software came to be. for one, two programs which are intuitively close (say, change for() to while()) may have no meaningful proximity under the mapping to |N.
rms has a better argument in that the "overlap" problem is too easy for software - it's so much easier to combine and adapt techniques in software, that one piece of software can easily and necessarily infringe a huge number of patents and thus be doomed. knuth for instance has said that he couldn't have written TeX today for this reason.
moving on, and conversely, a (strong imho) case could be made that patents are more appropriate than copyright for a lot of software design. apart from some poetic musings by emotional programmers, software is much more like engineering than it is like playwriting. of course i admit that copyright "works" for software, but it does so in a convoluted way. basically by prohibiting copying, it forces duplication of effort toward a well-defined goal and thus artificially increases the cost. that the effort is toward a well-defined goal makes it different from the application of copyright to "fine arts." yes, copyright "works" for software, but it's economically pretty incoherent.
i think the most sensible angle to take (and the only one which would be even remotely attainable) would be to scale patent terms back into line with what 17 years meant in the 1800s. in terms of technology lifecycles, seventeen years back then is equivalent to, what, maybe a few years? an entire generation of technology can pass over one patent term, and i think you could get wide agreement that that's just dumb.
the very best case among those possible i think might be to remove copyright protection and scale patents down drastically - as in on the scale of months, not years.
Chernobyl: it was the USSR. meaningless to generalize.
batteries and oil: might be a better argument if it weren't illegal to do those things. i guess that's just government lulling us into letting it kill us by the millions.
taking your word for this, one still has to then hope that amazon doesn't disable the old software from requesting the e-books...
i mean, i know that any drm by amazon can technically be circumvented eventually, but for an average person, the argument that kindle is ok since the drm can be removed is a pretty weak one. you may at any time be put into the position of waiting for a skilled person to do a substantial amount of legally-dubious work for nothing or next-to-nothing (at most, they can put google ads on their site or ask for donations until someone else rips off their code).
if i gave a damn about drm or buying ebooks, i would never have bought a kindle...
on the contrary, i'm sure that amazon keeps statistics on the people who buy the kindle and then don't buy any amazon ebooks, and thus can roughly estimate how many ebook sales they are losing to drm.
on my 9.7" kindle it takes between 3 and 10 seconds to advance page on a pdf. in one particular case it took 20+ seconds. the search is also very slow.
this, and the UI, makes it really suck for technical reference books. the bookmarks help a little, but it's basically linear reading only.
that plugin doesn't work on my kindle account; neither do any of the myriad python scripts for doing the same thing (i suspect the calibre plugin is a wrapper for these scripts). now maybe i'm just being dumb, but i also note that none of the "how to strip amazon drm" sites have been updated within a year... i suspect that the drm has been updated, while people still claim these year-old scripts are a functional circumvention.
anyone buying a kindle on the assumption that there is a point-and-click circumvention of drm, may want to think twice... (i personally don't read drmed books on mine, so no big deal; i just tried the crack on a cheap.amz out of curiosity)
the knowledge will be modularized and commercialized fairly quickly. in the 50s and 60s linear algebra was really hard because it hadn't been parsed out into an easy form - the useful stuff was all tied up with operator theory and the sort of understanding that geniuses have. fast-forward to now, and computing a matrix svd is a fairly standard task (even if you don't really have what a mathematician would call 'understanding').
similarly, quantum programming will most likely condense into a hierarchy of professional modules and life will go on. the structure of IT and computer engineering is almost totally is socioeconomic phenomenon and not a technical one...
think instead, that solving the hamiltonian is equivalent to (or potentially "harder than") solving the original problem, so that you can translate the original problem into a hamiltonian problem. it doesn't mean that you know the answer of either, but you do know that the solution of the hamiltonian will match up to a solution of the original problem. this is the spirit of it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reduction_(complexity)
very, very roughly, think of it like rewriting java, for example, as c. you may not know what the particular code actually DOES in an overall sense, or what it will output, but you can nevertheless rewrite it sort of mechanically (like a compiler would) if you know both languages. furthermore, it's feasible that translating the code is easier than devising the algorithm from scratch. this is basically a reduction. if you can "easily" rewrite any java code as c code, that means java is "reducible" to c. the theory of computation essentially deals with reductions, not of code, but of entire problem classes, which is where P, NP and all that come from.
the genuine emergency alarm system could induce panic which can be fatal. the crowd psychology seems to argue for the current set-up; no rights are being seriously infringed, and we can just be smug about things. this does seem like the easy way; teaching people is hard.
yeah and my point was that this gets built-up, so that eventually vlc supports split rars, which means that the megauploadblogs use rar and eventually rar actually IS the way to do it although not for any good reason.
in unix, yes. in the windows world, there's only two levels of difficulty: drag-and-drop or impossible. most users have winzip or 7zip or whatever and pirates have traditionally favored rar. thus, the rar standard emerges and metastasizes so that programs like vlc support it natively. kind of silly, but it works.
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why shouldn't employees (who are free to associate, right?) try to leverage the sunk costs of their training into higher salary? assuming (for sake of argument) that there is no government interference on their behalf and that the unionizers don't initiate "violence" against the non-unionizers, why is this not a rational approach compatible with Libertarianism(tm)?
note, a reply should either explain how unionizing under these assumptions is irrational or give a coherent argument along the lines that these assumptions are impossible to satisfy (i.e. convince me that government interference and/or violence is an absolutely inevitable effect of voluntary unionization).
all four of them.
this is in much the same sense, that any physical device is "math" because it obeys the laws of physics.
yes, you can say that the mathematical description of the physical device only approximates the real device. however, i analogously would dare you to fix a non-trivial encoding system & compute the Church-numbers for some meaningful programs... you can start with emacs and vi. :)
i'm against software patents (see sig), but this argument, although formally true in some sense, is just silly; no software is derived mathematically - the fact that there is a church numeral has nothing at all to do with how the software came to be. for one, two programs which are intuitively close (say, change for() to while()) may have no meaningful proximity under the mapping to |N.
rms has a better argument in that the "overlap" problem is too easy for software - it's so much easier to combine and adapt techniques in software, that one piece of software can easily and necessarily infringe a huge number of patents and thus be doomed. knuth for instance has said that he couldn't have written TeX today for this reason.
moving on, and conversely, a (strong imho) case could be made that patents are more appropriate than copyright for a lot of software design. apart from some poetic musings by emotional programmers, software is much more like engineering than it is like playwriting. of course i admit that copyright "works" for software, but it does so in a convoluted way. basically by prohibiting copying, it forces duplication of effort toward a well-defined goal and thus artificially increases the cost. that the effort is toward a well-defined goal makes it different from the application of copyright to "fine arts." yes, copyright "works" for software, but it's economically pretty incoherent.
i think the most sensible angle to take (and the only one which would be even remotely attainable) would be to scale patent terms back into line with what 17 years meant in the 1800s. in terms of technology lifecycles, seventeen years back then is equivalent to, what, maybe a few years? an entire generation of technology can pass over one patent term, and i think you could get wide agreement that that's just dumb.
the very best case among those possible i think might be to remove copyright protection and scale patents down drastically - as in on the scale of months, not years.
Chernobyl: it was the USSR. meaningless to generalize.
batteries and oil: might be a better argument if it weren't illegal to do those things. i guess that's just government lulling us into letting it kill us by the millions.
taking your word for this, one still has to then hope that amazon doesn't disable the old software from requesting the e-books...
i mean, i know that any drm by amazon can technically be circumvented eventually, but for an average person, the argument that kindle is ok since the drm can be removed is a pretty weak one. you may at any time be put into the position of waiting for a skilled person to do a substantial amount of legally-dubious work for nothing or next-to-nothing (at most, they can put google ads on their site or ask for donations until someone else rips off their code).
if i gave a damn about drm or buying ebooks, i would never have bought a kindle...
on the contrary, i'm sure that amazon keeps statistics on the people who buy the kindle and then don't buy any amazon ebooks, and thus can roughly estimate how many ebook sales they are losing to drm.
on my 9.7" kindle it takes between 3 and 10 seconds to advance page on a pdf. in one particular case it took 20+ seconds. the search is also very slow.
this, and the UI, makes it really suck for technical reference books. the bookmarks help a little, but it's basically linear reading only.
that plugin doesn't work on my kindle account; neither do any of the myriad python scripts for doing the same thing (i suspect the calibre plugin is a wrapper for these scripts). now maybe i'm just being dumb, but i also note that none of the "how to strip amazon drm" sites have been updated within a year... i suspect that the drm has been updated, while people still claim these year-old scripts are a functional circumvention.
anyone buying a kindle on the assumption that there is a point-and-click circumvention of drm, may want to think twice... (i personally don't read drmed books on mine, so no big deal; i just tried the crack on a cheap .amz out of curiosity)
as i've heard, there are versions of nethack with elbereth compiled out, so it must be possible to win without it.
also, the oracle can tell you about it.
overall, though, i couldn't imagine playing unspoiled nethack. but there is at least one ascender who claims to have done it...
they should measure deaths per total miles driven, not per capita... those statistics are meaningless in this context.
I'm sure they'd have spent years studding as hard as their peers...
ROFL. I bet they did.
either that, or the Associated Fucking Press.
well, there are quantum algorithms for TSP. :-P
apart from that, no, they are not directly related.
the knowledge will be modularized and commercialized fairly quickly. in the 50s and 60s linear algebra was really hard because it hadn't been parsed out into an easy form - the useful stuff was all tied up with operator theory and the sort of understanding that geniuses have. fast-forward to now, and computing a matrix svd is a fairly standard task (even if you don't really have what a mathematician would call 'understanding').
similarly, quantum programming will most likely condense into a hierarchy of professional modules and life will go on. the structure of IT and computer engineering is almost totally is socioeconomic phenomenon and not a technical one...
think instead, that solving the hamiltonian is equivalent to (or potentially "harder than") solving the original problem, so that you can translate the original problem into a hamiltonian problem. it doesn't mean that you know the answer of either, but you do know that the solution of the hamiltonian will match up to a solution of the original problem. this is the spirit of it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reduction_(complexity)
very, very roughly, think of it like rewriting java, for example, as c. you may not know what the particular code actually DOES in an overall sense, or what it will output, but you can nevertheless rewrite it sort of mechanically (like a compiler would) if you know both languages. furthermore, it's feasible that translating the code is easier than devising the algorithm from scratch. this is basically a reduction. if you can "easily" rewrite any java code as c code, that means java is "reducible" to c. the theory of computation essentially deals with reductions, not of code, but of entire problem classes, which is where P, NP and all that come from.
or leftism starts from a deeper analysis of problems, which doesn't fit into "quick fix" emotional echo-chamber sound-bites.
wheee! i can make up spurious insulting explanations too!
the genuine emergency alarm system could induce panic which can be fatal. the crowd psychology seems to argue for the current set-up; no rights are being seriously infringed, and we can just be smug about things. this does seem like the easy way; teaching people is hard.
wow, extending shadowgate as a kid? must have been brutal. :)
"i grab the torch."
"the ceiling falls on you. you die instantly. it's a sad thing that your adventures have ended here."
no, i didn't need to. what's your point here, exactly? if you didn't get the pun, then feel free to die in a fire.
the "lux" part, i guess. :-/
yeah and my point was that this gets built-up, so that eventually vlc supports split rars, which means that the megauploadblogs use rar and eventually rar actually IS the way to do it although not for any good reason.
in unix, yes. in the windows world, there's only two levels of difficulty: drag-and-drop or impossible. most users have winzip or 7zip or whatever and pirates have traditionally favored rar. thus, the rar standard emerges and metastasizes so that programs like vlc support it natively. kind of silly, but it works.
if you want to cry, follow this link and count the number of shitty gui hacks that do nothing but "split" and "cat": http://www.google.com/search?q=split+file+windows
TFA says 500k employees. although probably they are not all at uniform risk (certain jobs suck more), it's a decent starting point.
Yeah, and if you really want to see some deplorable violations of human rights, just check out the suicide rate of MIT undergrads...
apple takes what they can get, sure, but they're happy to turn a blind eye to piracy if it keeps people buying and happy using their hardware/brand.