That may be bad taste but I'm tired of all those stories about how brave Christopher Reeve is for being crippled. As far as I know he doesnt have any choice in the matter.
Maybe you have no idea just how much freedom you dont have. With high enough unemployment and/or sufficient concentration of capital, there is no functional difference at all between real slavery and wage slavery.
> You can leave that employer, move somewhere else, get a new employer or even be your own employer.
These options are open to most Americans still, but they all assume you have a certain amount of capital or some slack, ie you can earn in a week more than you absolutely must spend in a week. There is no guarantee this will remain true.
There will be no due process here. He will never appear on US soil specifically to avoid these inconveniences. The bit I am suspicious of is.. is this really Khalid Sheikh Mohammed ? It's not like there hasnt been massive pressure on the US government to prove to people that they havent taken their eye off the ball. Gee, what good timing that arrest was. They may well have caught this guy, he may well be a terrorist, but after the last few months, it is asking a bit much to accept anything on trust.
> That dollar bill in your wallet is no more or less money than a digit in a Wells Fargo computer.
No, there is a difference. The dollar bill is backed by the US government, the digit in a Wells Fargo computer is backed by Wells Fargo. To a certain extent the government will back up Wells Fargo, but banks are private institutions, they can fail, and they have in the past.
This brings us to a fundamental point about money, which is permanently swept under the carpet, which is where money comes from. The notes printed by the government obviously come from them, but the majority of money is invented by private banks when they give out loans. The common picture that your loan is someone else's money is wrong, it would be more accurate to say that this money did not exist before you took out the loan.
This is hard to believe, so let me show you how it works. It simplifies matters to imagine that there is only 1 bank, or if that strains your imagination, just imagine that A,B and C all bank with Wells Fargo.
Let us start with people A,B,C and a bank and keep track of how much money they have. The bank keeps separate accounts for A,B,C and itself
1. We'll start everybody off with no money, and nothing in their bank account except for C who has $5000 External funds A: 0, B: 0, C 5000 Bank a:0 b:0 c:0 bank:0
2. C pays his money into his bank account External A: 0 B: 0 C: 0 Bank a:0 b:0 c:5000 bank:0
3. A asks to borrow from bank so it breaks A's account of 0 into $5000 of money for his current account and a debt of -$5000 External A: 0, B: 0, C: 0 Bank a:(5000,-5000) b:0 c:5000 bank:0
4. The bank transfers the money to A External: A: 5000, B: 0, C: 0 Bank a:-5000 b:0 c:5000 bank:0
5. A pays this money to B Exernal A: 0, B: 5000, C: 0 Bank a:-5000 b:0 c:5000 bank:0
6. B pays the money into his account External A: 0, B: 0, C: 0 Bank a:-5000 b:5000 c:5000 bank:0
7. A obtains money from elsewhere (easier said than done) External A: 5500, B: 0, C: 0 Bank a:-5000 b:5000 c:5000 bank:0
8. A repays 5000 to bank, plus interest of 500 External A 0, B 0, C 0 Bank a:0 b:5000 c:5000 bank:500
9. The bank pays some interest to C External A: 0, B: 0, C: 0 Bank a:0 b:5000 c:5300 bank:200
So far, the bank has done nothing strange, and this actually corresponds to the understanding that most people have about the way banks work. One thing to notice is that when A received $5000, nothing happened to C's account. Theoretically C could withdraw his money at any time.
The clever bit is that step 4 never needs to actually happen. A doesn't remove $5000 in cash from his bank - he just writes a check out to B, who never takes out the money either - he just pays it into his account. So in order to "lend money" to A, all that the bank needs to do is change it's accounts from saying:
Bank a:0 b:0 c:5000 bank:0
to saying:
Bank a:5000,-5000 b:0 c:5000 bank:0
Which means: A has $5000 in his current account and also has a debt of $5000 in a separate account.
and as far as A is concerned he has borrowed $5000 from the bank.
But there is nothing to stop the bank from "lending" lots of people money in this way. Why not lend D $5000 too, just change the accounts to say:
Bank a:5000,-5000 b:0 c:5000 d:5000,-5000 bank:0
The money that it lends out does not have to exist before it lends it out - the bank invents the money [temporarily]. In fact, almost all the money in circulation has been invented in this way.
Are banks allowed to do this - isn't there a law against this ? No, not at all, banks are expected to do this - in fact without the banks providing credit, the money supply drys up and the economy goes into recession. There used to be laws specifying a limit - banks could only lend out X times as much money as they received, but these laws have been scrapped in most modern economies. The only constraint is market confidence. If people start to lose confidence in the bank, too many people demand to physically get their hands on their money at the same time, then the whole facade comes tumbling down.
When banks lend people money, they increase the amount of money in circulation. This changes the balance between the amount of money in the world and the amount of stuff in the world. This slightly decreases the value of all money - it is the root cause of inflation. Effectively banks steal money off everybody else by lending out more money than they have. It's a form of legal forgery. A private individual would have exactly the same effect on the economy if he produced perfectly forged money that he was allowed to add to the system on the condition that he removed and destroyed the same amount at a later date.
An expanding economy needs an ever increasing amount of money. The more stuff in the world, the more money is needed. This money is invented by private banks in the form of debt. Even governments borrow their money from private banks. So we have this paradoxical situation where the most successful countries have the largest amounts of debt.
During boom times the credit supply increases. The system keeps afloat by ever increasing amounts of debt. In order to service this debt, the economy *must* expand - it is completely impossible for the monetary system to stay afloat with a stable economy, because the only way the debts can be serviced is by creating new debts.
Obviously this debt cycle cannot quite go on forever. At some stage people lose confidence, and it becomes harder to get credit. Then businesses go bankrupt, banks foreclose on the assets, and we go into recession or depression. Then gradually things improve and we start over again - the only difference being that now more of the actual assets in the world (rather than just the money), are then owned by the banks.
So the boom/bust cycle is inevitable when all money is created in the form of debt. The system is inherently unstable. We end up with rather large debts. For instance, the national debt of USA is $5,673,018,308,921 (last time I checked). The estimated population of the United States is 276,004,098 so each citizen's share of this debt is $20,554.11. The money to service this debt is extracted (taxed) with menaces by the government and paid to the banks. If you wanted to be alarmist about it, you could say we are selling our children into slavery (or at the very least indentured servitude) to the owners of the private institutions that invent our money.
Whose idea was this wonderful mechanism for inventing money ? Amazingly enough, it was the bankers. In 1694, Britain's King William was having trouble with money and probably did not understand it too well. At the time governments were scratching their heads over how to pitch the speed of money supply to the economy so as to avoid periods of inflation and at the same time finance their wars, build their palaces and even, from time to time, make life bearable for their people. The bankers convinced King William that the bankers were the "experts" who understood money and that the job of issuing currency should be handed to them.
As the amount of stuff in the world increases, the amount of money needs to increase. An artist paints a picture and wants to sell it - the amount of stuff in the world has just increased. Either: more money has to be created everything; the price of everything needs to reduce slightly; or we have a world where their is plenty of stuff, but nobody can buy it. It is a good thing that extra money is constantly being created, but having banks create it all in the form of debt is not necessarily ideal.
Letting the banks invent all money in the form of debt is not the only possible system. For instance, the government could invent money and give everybody a certain amount each year. This scheme was advocated by Douglas in the 30s and was making progress before war broke out. The introduction of more debt free money into the economy would reduce the need for loans and gradually eliminate the boom and bust cycle. Of course if the government invents too much we end up with inflation. But we have inflation already because the banks are inventing money all the time. If people were given money, they would borrow less from the banks so we wouldn't need inflation. A lot of inflationary pressure comes from the need to make interest payments. This scheme is far less inflationary than you might think.
The reason that the current system (where money is invented by banks) has become dominant is that the current monetary system is good at creating a vibrant thriving economy where enterprise is encouraged and financed - it undeniably encourages growth, in fact, it can't live without it. A stable economy is absolutely impossible in the current system, people must be perpetually taking out loans and investing. Without constant investment and new loans the money dissappears and we sink into recession. That's why the idea has spread so wide - it's the most competitive model so far seen.
It's not exactly perfect though. The tendancy to enslave populations into the service of bank owners is one flaw. An insatiable need to expand economies until the whole planet is covered in concrete is another. The necessity for people to work like mules their whole lives, scraping a living amongst plenty when automation should provide us with leisure is another. The maintenance of a huge parasitical segment of the economy that creates virtually nothing of value is another. I could go on, but I think you see my point - the current system is not ideal.
Superfluous layers of abstraction are the real enemy today. Too much flexibility, too many layers in the class library, not enough code that actually *does* stuff.
Permature optimization is not the enemy any more. When Knuth complained about it most people wrote in assembly code and it was a concern. He was talking about things squeezing out an instruction by reusing the value in a register in a counter-intuitive way. Since OO became the dominant paradigm we have gone too far in other direction. The great thing about optimization is it causes people to focus back on what they are actually trying to achieve instead of concentrating on their over elaborate badly design class hierearchies.
A strangely high proportion of these problems are due to our bizarre monetary policy which prevents us from using the gains made by technology to live a more enjoyable life. Instead humanity as a whole is like a business that never pays dividends, but instead always invests profit back into further growth.
A book called "The grip of death" explains all this and more: http://www.monetary-reform.on.ca/forum/messages/12 5.html
I used to think this was due to greed on behalf by the few and ignorance or insanity by the many, but now I think it's because humanity needs to be driven forwards relentlessly [at the price of fulfillment and happiness for the majority] in order to achieve a sufficient level of technological prowess within a short time frame, I dunno why, maybe this is necessary to avoid wipeout by an asteroid or something.
Not necessarily. Even in the US, about half the money spent on drug research is publicly funded, which ownership ends up 100% private. There is quite a lot of evidence that we would be better off with 100% public funding and public ownership.
> Java's been shown time and time again to be as fast as FORTRAN/C++ when using a good compiler, rather than an interpreter. *sigh*
No it hasn't, because it isn't.
You can sigh all you like, it doesnt change a thing.
You acknowledge your link is weak and biased, why not try posting a reasonable link, particuarly one which seems to show that java is as fast as fortran or C++ for anything meaningful.
Well, that may be the most common explanation, and I am sure it is correct in some cases, but there is another explanation: that sometimes people really do remember things from very early childhood.
The assertion that people dont remember things from earlier is obviously ridiculous. How the hell would we ever advance at all if memory did not work earlier ?
I have an early memory from being in my pram, outside, on a sunny day and being frustrated at not being able to get out and play. This is not something anybody told about [although since memory is notoriously faulty I cannot prove that I didnt invent it or even be 100% certain of that, but it I believe it is a genuine memory as firmly as I believe in any other memories.]
I'm curious as to where you get idea that American media has a liberal bias. Oooh, wait, let me guess... it was from certain sections of American media, right ? I guess the more conservative pundits tend to believe that other outlets have a liberal bias. It depends entirely on where you stand, if you believe the media should be more conservative, one complains of liberal bias, if you believe it should be more liberal one complains of conservative bias.
So, perversely enough, the more one hears of a liberal bias, the more conservative the media must be, and vica versa.
I don't think there is an objective answer to this, but, could you maybe mention a country with a more conservative media than America ?
> Translation: The government is finding it harder and harder to spy on terrorists
He had it right first time. How do you know who the terrorists are without spying on them.
Personally I think I have much more to fear from the US government than from a bunch of beardy islamic nutters. Not that the average federal employee is more evil than the average fundamentalist muslim, but they have their fair share of fucktards, religious loons included, and they have more and larger weapons.
>> Nations, governments and the electorate gradually lose power
> You say that like it's a bad thing, but think about this: it's a lot easier to change your employer if you don't agree with them than it is to change your citizenship if you don't agree with your government.
The electorate losing power to corporations is a bad thing, except for the tiny minority who own signficant stock.
Captialism only works with govenment constraints, otherwise cartels and monopolies form. It is not easy to change your employer when there only is one, or when they all offer the same shitty deal. A corporation is only ever going to be interested in what it can get from you. With insufficient constraints one ends up with a situation which is indistinguisable from slavery. You may think this alarmist, but try visiting a gold mine in brazil or a Nike factory in indonesia.
I second the recommendation for FLTK, it's excellent [based upon work done for NEXT]. Very fast, very tight, cross platform, but most of all, easy to understand and modify code. Good OpenGL integration [btw, you might want to think about using OpenInventor instead of OpenGL]. The FLUID GUI builder that comes with it is second to none. It takes a little getting used to, and you need to experiment some to come up with a good way of structuring your application such that you keep the autogenerated code and your application code nicely separated, [email me for more info] but this is not too difficult. I have used VisualC++, Delphi, VisualBasic, JBuilder7, and Qt. All of these builders looked richer and are vastly more complex than FLUID, but FLUID is strangely powerful and more maintainable [GUI builders are usually good for generating something vaguely right quickly but often its easier to restart from scratch than modify earlier projects]. Qt is a close second and has a richer widget set than FLTK, but FLTK beats it in terms of tight code and flexibility [also, FLTK is LGPL so you dont have to buy anything extra to use it on win32].
God what a relief, almost every time there is some claim about someone inventing something or other first, light bulb, public key cryptography, whatever.. we get claims that a Brit invented it first. As a Brit I find this intensely irritating. Who gives a flying fuck ? We all know America is Number 1 when it comes to self promoting propoganda. This is far more useful in the long run than inventing miscellaneous bits of modern technology. The British used to be pretty good at this too, but we lost it. When people [especially ourselves] stopped believing our propoganda, the empire evaporated immediately. Please stop rubbing our noses in it with these "XXX really invented by YYYY" stories. This time it's a New Zealander... phew [although I'm sure there was some Argentinian who flew before Wright brothers mentioned a few years back].
Well, since you don't personally own any forest, I suppose it's fine with you if we destroy every tree on the planet.
The logging companies seldom own the land either. If they did, they would manage it. Usually it's federal land which they bought logging rights to for a pittance [although it works out a little more if you include campaign contributions].
Oh - too bad if you can't breathe anymore. In fact, since you don't own the air you should stop breathing immediately.
> Most of these people have a hypocritical, short sighted, rose colored view of the world
Really. How well do you know them ? Have you actually spoken with a decent number of them or listened to what they are saying ? The environmental activists I have met have been informed, intelligent and realistic, perhaps a bit on the pessimistic side, but often with good reason.
> they should be negotiating (note not suing) with the logging company
What on earth do they have to negotiate with. The logging company is only interested in making as much money as possible. They will invest some of that money for campaign contributions to make sure regulation is kept to a minimum. Costing the logging company money by occupying trees is a mechanism to gain some negotiation power.
> It baffles me that the choice is either rape the land, or don't touch it.
Where the hell did you get that idea ?
Do you think these people spend time, discomfort get beaten half to death by paid goons etc while remaining completely uninformed about everything. They are not doing it for fun. They have been successfully painted as a bunch of stupid unrealistic hippies by a sophisticated PR industry that manipulates the vast majority of the media. Check out this sometime if you want to understand better where you get your views from.
Maybe you were just being funny, money is funny stuff. The US has massive debt, which it theoretically owes to... er well, mostly private US banking interests.
You have to remember what money is and where it comes from. 5% is in form of cash, and is invented by the government when it prints notes. 95% is invented when people/corporations/governments take out loans. Since they owe interest on those loans, more loans have to be continually taken out otherwise the existing loans cannot be repaid. It's very weird, but not as complicated as bankers like to pretend. Check out http://csf.colorado.edu/forums/longwaves/nov99/msg 01317.html
Fair comment, but if you mean to suggest that software could be designed like an airliner, consider this:
When they make a new airliner, they model the entire thing on a computer first. The CAD model is an unambiguous model of the plane. Important subsystems in it are modelled and analysed independently and in conjunction with the components around it.
So, if writing software was similar, we would first model the software on a computer. Oh, er, wait a moment. In an important sense, software is a design. The only unambiguous design is the actual software [otherwise we could make the design the programming language]. So, one could have a notion of starting with a fuzzy design and gradually making it clearer, but you can still end up with a bad design.
When someone designs a bad aircraft, the design is modelled, flaws are found and the design is improved. Nobody builds the thing until they feel pretty sure the design is right. However, software is often bad for the same reason that an initial design of anything else is bad. If it was equivalent to an airplane, windows 95 for instance, once designed, would never have been built. However, once the design for a piece of software is complete, one has created the software. All the development money has been spent, so the makers will try to get what they can for it. It's *all* design.
> And we've only been building transistors for 50 years and chips for 30? years
Yeah, but the problem has not changed much. They are refining the solution. Software is different because if the problem has already been solved, there is little point solving it again. Sometimes people come up with better algorithms for the same problem, but often they need to solve better problems.
I have to ask, how long have you been writing software ? what great software have you produced ? Have you got proven success using this method or are you just talking out of your ass ?
> This means that one has to complete the design before one starts coding/building
This doesnt work. It was tried for many years, until people realised that its better to test assumptions along the way before committing to everything, hence waterfall model.
Part of the reason it does not work is that software *is* a design. It makes perfect sense for bridges or buildings to be designed completely first. One can have an unambiguous design which is in a different medium to the finished product, eg as a CAD model. Then you can model how it behaves more cheaply than seeing whether the bridge falls down. Try finding an analogy to that for software, er lets model the software on a computer...
The only totally unambiguous design for a piece of software is the software itself. If a design was unambiguous, one could define that as the programming language.
Slashdot Mirror
> I didn't come across any that could coherently argue as to why the negative effects would outweigh the positive.
What, were you out there taking surveys ?
> how is that heavy losses for small gains?
Well, if the goal is to kill Iraqis the "coalition" is doing fine I guess.
What are they actually gaining from all this though ? [No, don't mention the O word !!]
How about Fox then, is that liberal media crap too, or d;ya reckon it's fairly balanced ?
nah, its in London, not NY
That may be bad taste but I'm tired of all those stories about how brave Christopher Reeve is for being crippled. As far as I know he doesnt have any choice in the matter.
> You have no idea how much freedom you have
Maybe you have no idea just how much freedom you dont have. With high enough unemployment and/or sufficient concentration of capital, there is no functional difference at all between real slavery and wage slavery.
> You can leave that employer, move somewhere else, get a new employer or even be your own employer.
These options are open to most Americans still, but they all assume you have a certain amount of capital or some slack, ie you can earn in a week more than you absolutely must spend in a week. There is no guarantee this will remain true.
There will be no due process here. He will never appear on US soil specifically to avoid these inconveniences. The bit I am suspicious of is .. is this really Khalid Sheikh Mohammed ? It's not like there hasnt been massive pressure on the US government to prove to people that they havent taken their eye off the ball. Gee, what good timing that arrest was. They may well have caught this guy, he may well be a terrorist, but after the last few months, it is asking a bit much to accept anything on trust.
> That dollar bill in your wallet is no more or less money than a digit in a Wells Fargo computer.
No, there is a difference. The dollar bill is backed by the US government, the digit in a Wells Fargo computer is backed by Wells Fargo. To a certain extent the government will back up Wells Fargo, but banks are private institutions, they can fail, and they have in the past.
This brings us to a fundamental point about money, which is permanently swept under the carpet, which is where money comes from. The notes printed by the government obviously come from them, but the majority of money is invented by private banks when they give out loans. The common picture that your loan is someone else's money is wrong, it would be more accurate to say that this money did not exist before you took out the loan.
This is hard to believe, so let me show you how it works. It simplifies matters to imagine that there is only 1 bank, or if that strains your imagination, just imagine that A,B and C all bank with Wells Fargo.
Let us start with people A,B,C and a bank and keep track of how much money they have. The bank keeps separate accounts for A,B,C and itself
1. We'll start everybody off with no money, and nothing in their bank account
except for C who has $5000
External funds A: 0, B: 0, C 5000
Bank a:0 b:0 c:0 bank:0
2. C pays his money into his bank account
External A: 0 B: 0 C: 0
Bank a:0 b:0 c:5000 bank:0
3. A asks to borrow from bank so it breaks A's account of 0
into $5000 of money for his current account and a debt of -$5000
External A: 0, B: 0, C: 0
Bank a:(5000,-5000) b:0 c:5000 bank:0
4. The bank transfers the money to A
External: A: 5000, B: 0, C: 0
Bank a:-5000 b:0 c:5000 bank:0
5. A pays this money to B
Exernal A: 0, B: 5000, C: 0
Bank a:-5000 b:0 c:5000 bank:0
6. B pays the money into his account
External A: 0, B: 0, C: 0
Bank a:-5000 b:5000 c:5000 bank:0
7. A obtains money from elsewhere (easier said than done)
External A: 5500, B: 0, C: 0
Bank a:-5000 b:5000 c:5000 bank:0
8. A repays 5000 to bank, plus interest of 500
External A 0, B 0, C 0
Bank a:0 b:5000 c:5000 bank:500
9. The bank pays some interest to C
External A: 0, B: 0, C: 0
Bank a:0 b:5000 c:5300 bank:200
So far, the bank has done nothing strange, and this actually corresponds to the understanding that most people have about the way banks work. One thing to notice is that when A received $5000, nothing happened to C's account. Theoretically C could withdraw his money at any time.
The clever bit is that step 4 never needs to actually happen. A doesn't remove $5000 in cash from his bank - he just writes a check out to B, who never takes out the money either - he just pays it into his account. So in order to "lend money" to A, all that the bank needs to do is change it's accounts from saying:
Bank a:0 b:0 c:5000 bank:0
to saying:
Bank a:5000,-5000 b:0 c:5000 bank:0
Which means: A has $5000 in his current account and also has a debt of $5000 in a separate account.
and as far as A is concerned he has borrowed $5000 from the bank.
But there is nothing to stop the bank from "lending" lots of people money in this way. Why not lend D $5000 too, just change the accounts to say:
Bank a:5000,-5000 b:0 c:5000 d:5000,-5000 bank:0
The money that it lends out does not have to exist before it lends it out - the bank invents the money [temporarily]. In fact, almost all the money in circulation has been invented in this way.
Are banks allowed to do this - isn't there a law against this ? No, not at all, banks are expected to do this - in fact without the banks providing credit, the money supply drys up and the economy goes into recession. There used to be laws specifying a limit - banks could only lend out X times as much money as they received, but these laws have been scrapped in most modern economies. The only constraint is market confidence. If people start to lose confidence in the bank, too many people demand to physically get their hands on their money at the same time, then the whole facade comes tumbling down.
When banks lend people money, they increase the amount of money in circulation. This changes the balance between the amount of money in the world and the amount of stuff in the world. This slightly decreases the value of all money - it is the root cause of inflation. Effectively banks steal money off everybody else by lending out more money than they have. It's a form of legal forgery. A private individual would have exactly the same effect on the economy if he produced perfectly forged money that he was allowed to add to the system on the condition that he removed and destroyed the same amount at a later date.
An expanding economy needs an ever increasing amount of money. The more stuff in the world, the more money is needed. This money is invented by private banks in the form of debt. Even governments borrow their money from private banks. So we have this paradoxical situation where the most successful countries have the largest amounts of debt.
During boom times the credit supply increases. The system keeps afloat by ever increasing amounts of debt. In order to service this debt, the economy *must* expand - it is completely impossible for the monetary system to stay afloat with a stable economy, because the only way the debts can be serviced is by creating new debts.
Obviously this debt cycle cannot quite go on forever. At some stage people lose confidence, and it becomes harder to get credit. Then businesses go bankrupt, banks foreclose on the assets, and we go into recession or depression. Then gradually things improve and we start over again - the only difference being that now more of the actual assets in the world (rather than just the money), are then owned by the banks.
So the boom/bust cycle is inevitable when all money is created in the form of debt. The system is inherently unstable. We end up with rather large debts. For instance, the national debt of USA is $5,673,018,308,921 (last time I checked). The estimated population of the United States is 276,004,098 so each citizen's share of this debt is $20,554.11. The money to service this debt is extracted (taxed) with menaces by the government and paid to the banks. If you wanted to be alarmist about it, you could say we are selling our children into slavery (or at the very least indentured servitude) to the owners of the private institutions that invent our money.
Whose idea was this wonderful mechanism for inventing money ? Amazingly enough, it was the bankers. In 1694, Britain's King William was having trouble with money and probably did not understand it too well. At the time governments were scratching their heads over how to pitch the speed of money supply to the economy so as to avoid periods of inflation and at the same time finance their wars, build their palaces and even, from time to time, make life bearable for their people. The bankers convinced King William that the bankers were the "experts" who understood money and that the job of issuing currency should be handed to them.
As the amount of stuff in the world increases, the amount of money needs to increase. An artist paints a picture and wants to sell it - the amount of stuff in the world has just increased. Either: more money has to be created everything; the price of everything needs to reduce slightly; or we have a world where their is plenty of stuff, but nobody can buy it. It is a good thing that extra money is constantly being created, but having banks create it all in the form of debt is not necessarily ideal.
Letting the banks invent all money in the form of debt is not the only possible system. For instance, the government could invent money and give everybody a certain amount each year. This scheme was advocated by Douglas in the 30s and was making progress before war broke out. The introduction of more debt free money into the economy would reduce the need for loans and gradually eliminate the boom and bust cycle. Of course if the government invents too much we end up with inflation. But we have inflation already because the banks are inventing money all the time. If people were given money, they would borrow less from the banks so we wouldn't need inflation. A lot of inflationary pressure comes from the need to make interest payments. This scheme is far less inflationary than you might think.
The reason that the current system (where money is invented by banks) has become dominant is that the current monetary system is good at creating a vibrant thriving economy where enterprise is encouraged and financed - it undeniably encourages growth, in fact, it can't live without it. A stable economy is absolutely impossible in the current system, people must be perpetually taking out loans and investing. Without constant investment and new loans the money dissappears and we sink into recession. That's why the idea has spread so wide - it's the most competitive model so far seen.
It's not exactly perfect though. The tendancy to enslave populations into the service of bank owners is one flaw. An insatiable need to expand economies until the whole planet is covered in concrete is another. The necessity for people to work like mules their whole lives, scraping a living amongst plenty when automation should provide us with leisure is another. The maintenance of a huge parasitical segment of the economy that creates virtually nothing of value is another. I could go on, but I think you see my point - the current system is not ideal.
'kin right.
Superfluous layers of abstraction are the real enemy today. Too much flexibility, too many layers in the class library, not enough code that actually *does* stuff.
Permature optimization is not the enemy any more. When Knuth complained about it most people wrote in assembly code and it was a concern. He was talking about things squeezing out an instruction by reusing the value in a register in a counter-intuitive way. Since OO became the dominant paradigm we have gone too far in other direction. The great thing about optimization is it causes people to focus back on what they are actually trying to achieve instead of concentrating on their over elaborate badly design class hierearchies.
A strangely high proportion of these problems are due to our bizarre monetary policy which prevents us from using the gains made by technology to live a more enjoyable life. Instead humanity as a whole is like a business that never pays dividends, but instead always invests profit back into further growth.
2 5.html
A book called "The grip of death" explains all this and more: http://www.monetary-reform.on.ca/forum/messages/1
I used to think this was due to greed on behalf by the few and ignorance or insanity by the many, but now I think it's because humanity needs to be driven forwards relentlessly [at the price of fulfillment and happiness for the majority] in order to achieve a sufficient level of technological prowess within a short time frame, I dunno why, maybe this is necessary to avoid wipeout by an asteroid or something.
Not necessarily. Even in the US, about half the money spent on drug research is publicly funded, which ownership ends up 100% private. There is quite a lot of evidence that we would be better off with 100% public funding and public ownership.
http://www.cptech.org/ip/health/ has lots of info
> using an interpreter instead of a JIT compiler
No, he wasnt.
> Java's been shown time and time again to be as fast as FORTRAN/C++ when using a good compiler, rather than an interpreter. *sigh*
No it hasn't, because it isn't.
You can sigh all you like, it doesnt change a thing.
You acknowledge your link is weak and biased, why not try posting a reasonable link, particuarly one which seems to show that java is as fast as fortran or C++ for anything meaningful.
Well, that may be the most common explanation, and I am sure it is correct in some cases, but there is another explanation: that sometimes people really do remember things from very early childhood.
The assertion that people dont remember things from earlier is obviously ridiculous. How the hell would we ever advance at all if memory did not work earlier ?
I have an early memory from being in my pram, outside, on a sunny day and being frustrated at not being able to get out and play. This is not something anybody told about [although since memory is notoriously faulty I cannot prove that I didnt invent it or even be 100% certain of that, but it I believe it is a genuine memory as firmly as I believe in any other memories.]
Hope metamoderators get this one
I'm curious as to where you get idea that American media has a liberal bias. Oooh, wait, let me guess... it was from certain sections of American media, right ? I guess the more conservative pundits tend to believe that other outlets have a liberal bias. It depends entirely on where you stand, if you believe the media should be more conservative, one complains of liberal bias, if you believe it should be more liberal one complains of conservative bias.
So, perversely enough, the more one hears of a liberal bias, the more conservative the media must be, and vica versa.
I don't think there is an objective answer to this, but, could you maybe mention a country with a more conservative media than America ?
> Translation: The government is finding it harder and harder to spy on terrorists
He had it right first time. How do you know who the terrorists are without spying on them.
Personally I think I have much more to fear from the US government than from a bunch of beardy islamic nutters. Not that the average federal employee is more evil than the average fundamentalist muslim, but they have their fair share of fucktards, religious loons included, and they have more and larger weapons.
>> Nations, governments and the electorate gradually lose power
> You say that like it's a bad thing, but think about this: it's a lot easier to change your employer if you don't agree with them than it is to change your citizenship if you don't agree with your government.
The electorate losing power to corporations is a bad thing, except for the tiny minority who own signficant stock.
Captialism only works with govenment constraints, otherwise cartels and monopolies form. It is not easy to change your employer when there only is one, or when they all offer the same shitty deal. A corporation is only ever going to be interested in what it can get from you. With insufficient constraints one ends up with a situation which is indistinguisable from slavery. You may think this alarmist, but try visiting a gold mine in brazil or a Nike factory in indonesia.
I second the recommendation for FLTK, it's excellent [based upon work done for NEXT]. Very fast, very tight, cross platform, but most of all, easy to understand and modify code. Good OpenGL integration [btw, you might want to think about using OpenInventor instead of OpenGL]. The FLUID GUI builder that comes with it is second to none. It takes a little getting used to, and you need to experiment some to come up with a good way of structuring your application such that you keep the autogenerated code and your application code nicely separated, [email me for more info] but this is not too difficult. I have used VisualC++, Delphi, VisualBasic, JBuilder7, and Qt. All of these builders looked richer and are vastly more complex than FLUID, but FLUID is strangely powerful and more maintainable [GUI builders are usually good for generating something vaguely right quickly but often its easier to restart from scratch than modify earlier projects]. Qt is a close second and has a richer widget set than FLTK, but FLTK beats it in terms of tight code and flexibility [also, FLTK is LGPL so you dont have to buy anything extra to use it on win32].
God what a relief, almost every time there is some claim about someone inventing something or other first, light bulb, public key cryptography, whatever.. we get claims that a Brit invented it first. As a Brit I find this intensely irritating. Who gives a flying fuck ? We all know America is Number 1 when it comes to self promoting propoganda. This is far more useful in the long run than inventing miscellaneous bits of modern technology. The British used to be pretty good at this too, but we lost it. When people [especially ourselves] stopped believing our propoganda, the empire evaporated immediately. Please stop rubbing our noses in it with these "XXX really invented by YYYY" stories. This time it's a New Zealander... phew [although I'm sure there was some Argentinian who flew before Wright brothers mentioned a few years back].
Well, since you don't personally own any forest, I suppose it's fine with you if we destroy every tree on the planet.
The logging companies seldom own the land either. If they did, they would manage it. Usually it's federal land which they bought logging rights to for a pittance [although it works out a little more if you include campaign contributions].
Oh - too bad if you can't breathe anymore. In fact, since you don't own the air you should stop breathing immediately.
> Most of these people have a hypocritical, short sighted, rose colored view of the world
Really. How well do you know them ? Have you actually spoken with a decent number of them or listened to what they are saying ? The environmental activists I have met have been informed, intelligent and realistic, perhaps a bit on the pessimistic side, but often with good reason.
> they should be negotiating (note not suing) with the logging company
What on earth do they have to negotiate with. The logging company is only interested in making as much money as possible. They will invest some of that money for campaign contributions to make sure regulation is kept to a minimum. Costing the logging company money by occupying trees is a mechanism to gain some negotiation power.
> It baffles me that the choice is either rape the land, or don't touch it.
Where the hell did you get that idea ?
Do you think these people spend time, discomfort get beaten half to death by paid goons etc while remaining completely uninformed about everything.
They are not doing it for fun. They have been successfully painted as a bunch of stupid unrealistic hippies by a sophisticated PR industry that manipulates the vast majority of the media. Check out this sometime if you want to understand better where you get your views from.
Maybe you were just being funny, money is funny stuff. The US has massive debt, which it theoretically owes to... er well, mostly private US banking interests.
g 01317.html
You have to remember what money is and where it comes from. 5% is in form of cash, and is invented by the government when it prints notes. 95% is invented when people/corporations/governments take out loans. Since they owe interest on those loans, more loans have to be continually taken out otherwise the existing loans cannot be repaid. It's very weird, but not as complicated as bankers like to pretend. Check out http://csf.colorado.edu/forums/longwaves/nov99/ms
Fair comment, but if you mean to suggest that software could be designed like an airliner, consider this:
When they make a new airliner, they model the entire thing on a computer first. The CAD model is an unambiguous model of the plane. Important subsystems in it are modelled and analysed independently and in conjunction with the components around it.
So, if writing software was similar, we would first model the software on a computer. Oh, er, wait a moment. In an important sense, software is a design. The only unambiguous design is the actual software [otherwise we could make the design the programming language]. So, one could have a notion of starting with a fuzzy design and gradually making it clearer, but you can still end up with a bad design.
When someone designs a bad aircraft, the design is modelled, flaws are found and the design is improved. Nobody builds the thing until they feel pretty sure the design is right. However, software is often bad for the same reason that an initial design of anything else is bad. If it was equivalent to an airplane, windows 95 for instance, once designed, would never have been built. However, once the design for a piece of software is complete, one has created the software. All the development money has been spent, so the makers will try to get what they can for it. It's *all* design.
> And we've only been building transistors for 50 years and chips for 30? years
Yeah, but the problem has not changed much. They are refining the solution. Software is different because if the problem has already been solved, there is little point solving it again. Sometimes people come up with better algorithms for the same problem, but often they need to solve better problems.
I have to ask, how long have you been writing software ? what great software have you produced ? Have you got proven success using this method or are you just talking out of your ass ?
> This means that one has to complete the design before one starts coding/building
This doesnt work. It was tried for many years, until people realised that its better to test assumptions along the way before committing to everything, hence waterfall model.
Part of the reason it does not work is that software *is* a design. It makes perfect sense for bridges or buildings to be designed completely first. One can have an unambiguous design which is in a different medium to the finished product, eg as a CAD model. Then you can model how it behaves more cheaply than seeing whether the bridge falls down. Try finding an analogy to that for software, er lets model the software on a computer...
The only totally unambiguous design for a piece of software is the software itself. If a design was unambiguous, one could define that as the programming language.
I suspect that for many slashdotters, being abducted by aliens and forced to procreate is about their best chance of getting hot women.