I won't bother digressing too hard. I'll admit that there there are billions in alternative energy solutions, and I'll also suggest that it's not all about anthropogenic global warming. But then again, you probably know that peak oil is pure bunk, just like anthropogenic global warming.
But my point was, billions in sales of alternative energy solutions still doesn't hold a candle to 30-40 billion pure profit in one quarter by one admittedly very large oil company
I'm willing to accept that perhaps global warming isn't anthropogenic, but I haven't seen as much evidence as I have the other way. How about you - what would the burden of evidence be to convince you?
Funny, I think one can point to a lot of measurments and data that at least suggest anthropogenic orgins. There may be questions, at least in the US, but I don't think it's echo chamber.
Whose motives would I question more, an academic doing it for a 6-figure grant, or a company with 11-figure quarterly profits?
This makes me think back to an old discussion on "Car Talk", where they came to the amazing conclusion that two can be more stupid than one. In their line of reasoning, one person might see something obviously absurd and label it as such. With two, both might see the absurdity, one might see a less absurd corner and start nibbling at it, with the other joining in, until together they've talked each other into swallowing the whole thing.
In political terms it's called the "echo chamber" where something repeated often enough, loudly enough, and with dissent ridiculed enough, it begins to take on the appearance of truth, regardless of actual merit.
I hear about bitcoin some time ago. At the time it was an interesting and abstract idea. It remains abstract until it becomes possible to exchange bitcoin for things in the real world. I guess I could have been an early adopter, but at the time it was just another interesting thing and I had limited time to pursue such stuff. The same could be said about buying any number of stocks, except that the excess required would have been money instead of time.
I won't deny that it might be a pyramid scheme, but I don't think that's exclusive to bitcoin. A year or two back, Fairpoint bought my landline phone service business from Verizon. At the time there were articles suggesting that Fairpoint's financial history resembled a pyramid scheme. I strongly suspect that the real difference between a pyramid scheme and an investment is a combination of expectations, discipline, and regulation.
The lack of central authority for bitcoin is a key feature, but it's also a vulnerability, in that there is no way to supply a "guiding hand." Elsewhere on this thread someone mentioned vulnerability to pump'n'dump, and that's certainly true. Next imagine high-frequency trading, quants, and all that stuff, and what they could do to bitcoin.
On the other hand, the early adopters are the ones who made bigcoin into something sufficiently viable that you're even thinking of getting involved. They have performed a service, and they've been compensated for it. Of course now they have to mine under the same conditions as you, so their extra incentive has ended.
If those corporations were doing what they should be, I might agree with your sentiment. I see them as falling down on their jobs, and the mechanisms for marketplace corrections have been dismantled.
Corporations ought to be competing with each other to provide the best goods and services to me at the best price. In exchange for doing that, they're entitled to make a profit. The competition is gone, and the profit is coming before the goods and services.
In a scaled-down bad analogy... Would you rather buy a car from someone who loves cars, wants to study them and design and build the best cars he can, then goes into the car business to fulfill his passion? Or... Would you rather buy a car from someone who loves to make money, and sees building cars as a route to that end?
Assuming he can stay in business, I would certainly prefer the former. Current US business is all about the latter.
> And if you think that not hiding all information will make you safer, > I think there is a bridge in Brooklyn you can buy.
I take exception to the "all" in that sentence. I certainly believe that some information should be hidden, as someone else mentioned, the location of my submarines, the nuclear launch codes, etc. But there's also other information that makes us safer by helping others understand our intent, and that information MUST be open. To coin a new term, the "bear analogy". I think we all know, "Never get between Mother Bear and her cubs." It's in all of our best interests to know that little fact, and it's in all of our best interests to know where both Mother Bear and her cubs are, so we don't accidentally get in between them. The same can apply to nations.
These days, we seem to be secret by default, and choose to make some information public. I would assert that it's better to be public by default, and choose to keep some information secret. One way this makes us safer is by self-policing. In a public by default situation, you'll be more careful about your conduct, knowing that conduct can be known and you will be held responsible for it. In a secret by default situation, you may be not be so careful, figuring that nobody will ever know. Then consider the whole torture, secret rendition, prison abuse, etc mess.
When you throw a big cloak of secrecy over operations from the top, more secrets get kept that those at the top know, and some of those secrets will very likely be embarrassing and perhaps even counter to the desired policies.
Every so often going down the road, you see a semi with a sign on the back saying, "This vehicle pays $x,xxx per year in road-use taxes!" as if to say that they're paying more than their fair share. Usually the number is in the thousands or tens-of-thousands of dollars.
However I've seen other writings supporting the 4th-power-of-weight, suggesting that even with these "outrageous" road taxes, the trucks are still under-paying.
Maybe we want to subsidize cheap transportation this way. But if we do, it should be a conscious decision. Maybe we SHOULD have our goods reflect the true cost of moving them from here to there, because maybe such cost/price changes would affect our behavior to the better.
Another argument... Isn't the "Free Market" based on "informed consumers" exercising "choice". Hiding costs like this is just another way of subverting the free market, just like more overt government controls.
That's true, but by the time you add the weight of a heat exchanger to a nuclear ramjet, I suspect the best you'll do is a nuclear-ramjet-powered car or boat.
Check out "Project Pluto" some time. It was a nuclear-powered ramjet cruise missile. At some point they realized that simply flying the dirty engine at low-altitude mach 3 over anything was about as bad as actually bombing the target. The stuff the engine spewed out the back was so bad that there was no safe way to flight test it, and you could never fly it over a friendly nation on its way to a target.
That the people performing these heroic services are generally in the less-rewarded sectors of our society reflects poorly - on our society. Those people to which our society gives the greatest rewards - are generally (though not exclusively) aggressive sociopaths. Go figure.
At the very least, if true heroism is part of the job requirement, then part of the fringe benefit requirements ought to be good medical, and good life insurance.
And how about those coal miners...
(I'd rather have had mod points to give you than post this.)
Supposedly "The Forever War" is going to have some focus on this, through Mandella's alienation when he comes home after missions, finding that home is in the past.
That is, assuming it doesn't keep slipping year-for-year, like fusion power.
I'm not sure if I have to say this, but "Non Practicing Entities", meaning companies that hold patents, but don't actually make anything related to the patents. For companies with patents, the normal way of things is to cross-license, because what they really want is freedome of action in making products. That's not the case for NPEs - they're just out to tap someone else's revenue stream. (The previous may be an unfair statement - maybe some of them actually are out to protect small independent inventors. Not the ones I've seen, though.)
And perhaps you were just pulling my leg, in which case I grant you one free "Whoosh!"
Nice shiny-looking coded you've got there. It would be a pity of something bad were to happen to it. You know that you won't have to worry about any of these legal threats if you just license h.264, and it's just a small fee. For a short time, we've even waived the fee, just for you!
I know what MPLA is doing is technically legal, but spiritually it's corrupt. The patent system is broken, from many directions. For the other way around, my employer is routinely trolled by NPEs.
Really Gentoo is probably off-topic for any discussion of LUSER-oriented Linux, anyway. Though I've been running Gentoo for quite a few years now, I advise others against it. The people who should be running Gentoo are the ones who know enough to look beyond my advise and go into it with their eyes open.
Far less likely to be the autorun type, though at this very moment there's quite a discussion going on about getting automount to work properly in a post-HAL era.
From cron I run "emerge --sync' and "emerge -ptuvDN world". I'll agree, you'd have to be nuts to actually update from cron. At the very least etc-update requires personal care to function with the updates, but not hose your configuration tweaks. At worst, every now and then there's a fiasco like libexpat. Plus there are certain packages that are nearly always problematic, like major XOrg or MythTV revisions.
Slashdot Mirror
I won't bother digressing too hard. I'll admit that there there are billions in alternative energy solutions, and I'll also suggest that it's not all about anthropogenic global warming. But then again, you probably know that peak oil is pure bunk, just like anthropogenic global warming.
But my point was, billions in sales of alternative energy solutions still doesn't hold a candle to 30-40 billion pure profit in one quarter by one admittedly very large oil company
I'm willing to accept that perhaps global warming isn't anthropogenic, but I haven't seen as much evidence as I have the other way. How about you - what would the burden of evidence be to convince you?
Funny, I think one can point to a lot of measurments and data that at least suggest anthropogenic orgins. There may be questions, at least in the US, but I don't think it's echo chamber.
Whose motives would I question more, an academic doing it for a 6-figure grant, or a company with 11-figure quarterly profits?
Thank you for the refresher.
Hitler! Hitler! Hitler!
There, it's been said. Can we stop, now?
This makes me think back to an old discussion on "Car Talk", where they came to the amazing conclusion that two can be more stupid than one. In their line of reasoning, one person might see something obviously absurd and label it as such. With two, both might see the absurdity, one might see a less absurd corner and start nibbling at it, with the other joining in, until together they've talked each other into swallowing the whole thing.
In political terms it's called the "echo chamber" where something repeated often enough, loudly enough, and with dissent ridiculed enough, it begins to take on the appearance of truth, regardless of actual merit.
I hear about bitcoin some time ago. At the time it was an interesting and abstract idea. It remains abstract until it becomes possible to exchange bitcoin for things in the real world. I guess I could have been an early adopter, but at the time it was just another interesting thing and I had limited time to pursue such stuff. The same could be said about buying any number of stocks, except that the excess required would have been money instead of time.
I won't deny that it might be a pyramid scheme, but I don't think that's exclusive to bitcoin. A year or two back, Fairpoint bought my landline phone service business from Verizon. At the time there were articles suggesting that Fairpoint's financial history resembled a pyramid scheme. I strongly suspect that the real difference between a pyramid scheme and an investment is a combination of expectations, discipline, and regulation.
The lack of central authority for bitcoin is a key feature, but it's also a vulnerability, in that there is no way to supply a "guiding hand." Elsewhere on this thread someone mentioned vulnerability to pump'n'dump, and that's certainly true. Next imagine high-frequency trading, quants, and all that stuff, and what they could do to bitcoin.
On the other hand, the early adopters are the ones who made bigcoin into something sufficiently viable that you're even thinking of getting involved. They have performed a service, and they've been compensated for it. Of course now they have to mine under the same conditions as you, so their extra incentive has ended.
Seems fair to me.
If those corporations were doing what they should be, I might agree with your sentiment. I see them as falling down on their jobs, and the mechanisms for marketplace corrections have been dismantled.
Corporations ought to be competing with each other to provide the best goods and services to me at the best price. In exchange for doing that, they're entitled to make a profit. The competition is gone, and the profit is coming before the goods and services.
In a scaled-down bad analogy...
Would you rather buy a car from someone who loves cars, wants to study them and design and build the best cars he can, then goes into the car business to fulfill his passion?
Or...
Would you rather buy a car from someone who loves to make money, and sees building cars as a route to that end?
Assuming he can stay in business, I would certainly prefer the former. Current US business is all about the latter.
> And if you think that not hiding all information will make you safer,
> I think there is a bridge in Brooklyn you can buy.
I take exception to the "all" in that sentence. I certainly believe that some information should be hidden, as someone else mentioned, the location of my submarines, the nuclear launch codes, etc. But there's also other information that makes us safer by helping others understand our intent, and that information MUST be open. To coin a new term, the "bear analogy". I think we all know, "Never get between Mother Bear and her cubs." It's in all of our best interests to know that little fact, and it's in all of our best interests to know where both Mother Bear and her cubs are, so we don't accidentally get in between them. The same can apply to nations.
These days, we seem to be secret by default, and choose to make some information public. I would assert that it's better to be public by default, and choose to keep some information secret. One way this makes us safer is by self-policing. In a public by default situation, you'll be more careful about your conduct, knowing that conduct can be known and you will be held responsible for it. In a secret by default situation, you may be not be so careful, figuring that nobody will ever know. Then consider the whole torture, secret rendition, prison abuse, etc mess.
When you throw a big cloak of secrecy over operations from the top, more secrets get kept that those at the top know, and some of those secrets will very likely be embarrassing and perhaps even counter to the desired policies.
Monkey Island - Shut off the computer and go to bed!
I rather liked RealMyst and Uru: Ages Beyond Myst. I like the combination of exploration/puzzle with full 3D fps-like freedom.
I wouldn't call the first part of your characterization accurate at all.
And if it was, and if bin Laden was a hired hand, who hired him?
Every so often going down the road, you see a semi with a sign on the back saying, "This vehicle pays $x,xxx per year in road-use taxes!" as if to say that they're paying more than their fair share. Usually the number is in the thousands or tens-of-thousands of dollars.
However I've seen other writings supporting the 4th-power-of-weight, suggesting that even with these "outrageous" road taxes, the trucks are still under-paying.
Maybe we want to subsidize cheap transportation this way. But if we do, it should be a conscious decision. Maybe we SHOULD have our goods reflect the true cost of moving them from here to there, because maybe such cost/price changes would affect our behavior to the better.
Another argument... Isn't the "Free Market" based on "informed consumers" exercising "choice". Hiding costs like this is just another way of subverting the free market, just like more overt government controls.
That's true, but by the time you add the weight of a heat exchanger to a nuclear ramjet, I suspect the best you'll do is a nuclear-ramjet-powered car or boat.
Check out "Project Pluto" some time. It was a nuclear-powered ramjet cruise missile. At some point they realized that simply flying the dirty engine at low-altitude mach 3 over anything was about as bad as actually bombing the target. The stuff the engine spewed out the back was so bad that there was no safe way to flight test it, and you could never fly it over a friendly nation on its way to a target.
Or get him under the DMCA for illegally decrypting the double rot-13 encrypted signals.
That the people performing these heroic services are generally in the less-rewarded sectors of our society reflects poorly - on our society. Those people to which our society gives the greatest rewards - are generally (though not exclusively) aggressive sociopaths. Go figure.
At the very least, if true heroism is part of the job requirement, then part of the fringe benefit requirements ought to be good medical, and good life insurance.
And how about those coal miners...
(I'd rather have had mod points to give you than post this.)
Supposedly "The Forever War" is going to have some focus on this, through Mandella's alienation when he comes home after missions, finding that home is in the past.
That is, assuming it doesn't keep slipping year-for-year, like fusion power.
You got it! You win the prize!
No Whoooosh! for you!
Or worse, getting hit by a re-entering toilet.
Gadzooks, I wish I had mod points today.
Absolutely. It's about control, not money. In the long run control is more valuable than short-term money.
I'm not sure if I have to say this, but "Non Practicing Entities", meaning companies that hold patents, but don't actually make anything related to the patents. For companies with patents, the normal way of things is to cross-license, because what they really want is freedome of action in making products. That's not the case for NPEs - they're just out to tap someone else's revenue stream. (The previous may be an unfair statement - maybe some of them actually are out to protect small independent inventors. Not the ones I've seen, though.)
And perhaps you were just pulling my leg, in which case I grant you one free "Whoosh!"
Nice shiny-looking coded you've got there. It would be a pity of something bad were to happen to it. You know that you won't have to worry about any of these legal threats if you just license h.264, and it's just a small fee. For a short time, we've even waived the fee, just for you!
I know what MPLA is doing is technically legal, but spiritually it's corrupt. The patent system is broken, from many directions. For the other way around, my employer is routinely trolled by NPEs.
Really Gentoo is probably off-topic for any discussion of LUSER-oriented Linux, anyway. Though I've been running Gentoo for quite a few years now, I advise others against it. The people who should be running Gentoo are the ones who know enough to look beyond my advise and go into it with their eyes open.
Far less likely to be the autorun type, though at this very moment there's quite a discussion going on about getting automount to work properly in a post-HAL era.
From cron I run "emerge --sync' and "emerge -ptuvDN world". I'll agree, you'd have to be nuts to actually update from cron. At the very least etc-update requires personal care to function with the updates, but not hose your configuration tweaks. At worst, every now and then there's a fiasco like libexpat. Plus there are certain packages that are nearly always problematic, like major XOrg or MythTV revisions.