Thanks for the info. I'm a little out of the loop on this, being the Linux/BladeCenter/VMWare admin, but I talked to our DBA group and their manager said he will be meeting with EnterpriseDB on Monday. And Command Prompt isn't out of the running yet, from what I hear it was just one guy we talked to over there was surly or something. We are quite serious about moving to open source in general, and particularly for our database. We are a state agency and we have a very nice case management system that we are trying to move off of HP/Sybase to Linux/Postgres. Hopefully, then we will open source the whole application.
Morality and faith are not arbitrary to an athiest. They are arrived at through logical thought and rational deduction. Faith and morals are arbitrary to a deist because one's choice of God and religion is arbitrary, and even when one has chosen, one can choose which precepts to follow and which to reject. God says not to eat shellfish, but you know that part is just ancient tribal belief. God says not to kill innocents, but you know those guys are evil sinners so grab a stone!
Moral athiests have arrived at their morals through thought and introspection. There are good, solid, selfish reasons not to light children on fire, we don't need some arbitrary and unverifiable book of rules to know that. The fact is, either morals and rules come from outside the universe and there is no way of verifying their correctness because they are outside all possible experience, or they come from inside the universe and can be deduced from experiences had inside the universe.
If there is no God, then people who believe in God are not only more delusional than those of us who know that God's existence or lacjk thereof simply doesn't matter, they are less likely to arrive at correct action in any given situation. By correct action I mean the action that will most efficiently bring about the greatest satisfaction among the greatest number. Admitedly, it is an arbitrary definition, but you will find that it is one many can agree with and from a pragmatic standpoint, that is what counts.
Because "believers" have subjugated their ability to think for themselves to religious dogma, they will be unable to act flexibly and creatively in situations that cause cognitive dissonance within their religious framework. People who have arrived at their morality through logic and introspection can adapt and be good people in any situation.
Well, I'm not part of the DBA team, but I heard they were rude and didn't seem to know much about Postgres internals. We are looking for something similar to the contract we had with Sybase, that's all I know.
We have a lot of enthusiasm for open source where I work, and we wanted to move our Family and Child Tracking System off of Sybase and onto Postgress but the major stumbling block is support. We're a state agency and CYA is crucial here. We talked to several companies offering support and they have all sucked so far.
Let me confirm this. Kfg is right, most of our depth perception does not come from stereoscopic vision. Parallax, color fading, bluring, occlusion and about 10-20 other systems all process visual information to provide depth perception. I can still throw a ball or a frisbee right to you, but I have a hard time playing pool and I can't thread a needle to save my life.
You are right of course. I wasn't really trying for accuracy, just a quick ballpark of "Is this remotely feasible?" To which the answer is, "No, not really." Linux is great, and for running a nifty home firewall/router, or even doing high end routing over a few interfaces it's great. But if you want to do high end stuff over dozens of ports, you need high end hardware and software to handle the throughput.
Informative. Just a back of the napkin calculation and a few seconds thought says this will not be nearly as easy as just throwing a bunch of multi port ethernet cards into a PCI bus, nor just naively running linux on some random switch hardware. When you are dealing with that much data, you need tight integration of the hardware and OS. A managed switch with VLANs is definitely the way to go.
Item finding isn't even one of the major categories of play in an RPG. There are three types of players: Dice Rollers, Problem Solvers, and Role Players. A good DM knows his players and can juggle the desires of everyone in a group. When someone looks bored, the DM can throw in a challenge suited to that player.
Dice Rollers are numbers wranglers who want a good game of chance. The most common sub-species is the Hack-n-Slasher, but that's just because most rule sets lend themselves to that kind of dice rolling. In games that have skill rolls, you'll find these guys rolling for damn near every feat up to and including getting up in the morning. "An 18?!? I spring from my bed and land in my shoes in one smooth motion! Hurrah!"
Problem Solvers like puzzles and planning. These are the guys who calculate exactly how many miles your party will average per day trekking across the Great Arid Waste and know exactly how much food and water to pack. When the party stumbles across a series of levers and switches in the dungeon, these are the guys to call. "Gruntmore the Dwarf pulls the red lever, goes through the blue door, pushes the star shaped switch, coems back out, pushes the green lever to a 45 degree angle disabling the secret blade trap and we all go merrily on our way!"
Role Players like to have long, drawn out in-character conversations with every shopkeeper and passing peasant they encounter. Whereas Dice Rollers will do whatever it takes to win, and Problem Solvers playing stupid characters will still come up with genius plans, these guys are apt to do utterly stupid things if they think that's what their character would do. They also tend to talk about their characters in the first person. "I leap from behind the tree and run screaming at the horde of orcs- What? Yes, I know the plan was to sneak up on them, but I'm overconfident with anger management issues. But you should really say that in character..."
But perhaps I missed your point, were you saying RPGs are about item finding or RTSs are? In any case, I think the real trick to either is actually basing it on a good simulation of some sort, but having story telling hooks that can effect the sim in the scripting interface, and have those hooks have flexible triggers and random details so that the same basic plotline can be activated from many different starting points using characters and locations tailored to the individual players. But I understand how hard it would be to scale a system like that up to WoW levels.
The real problem with WoW is that it isn't an RPG and it isn't for people who traditionally like RPGs so the players who would bring real quality to the game are driven away by all the Azkiker4921s and l33tWariers in the game.
It's a free market in the sense that when CEOs of any large company whine about wanting a free market, this is what they actually want. You know, free to have the market all to themselves?
But seriously, people can buy any healthcare they want here, right? So Kaiser Permanente is operating in a free market. And the labor market is a free market, right? If the labor market is not efficient at allocating talented individuals to companies willing to pay the big bucks for them, perhaps there is something wrong. When a company, which buys things on the free market and sells health care on the free market (I mean, your company could go with any HMO, right?) can't do things right, who or what is to blame?
If you said "The individuals involved," well, then I hope you say the same thing when a socialist system fails too, otherwise you are being a big old hypocrite. If you said "The system" then, again, you should apply the same reasoning to socialism, and when things fail in that system, blame that system. If you said, "It depends," or "I don't have enough information to judge," well, there's an old dead Greek guy who would have loved to meet you.
What specific predictions jave "global warming theorists" made that have not come true? How are their predicitions unscientific? If you aren't just trolling, I would be interested to hear where they have got it wrong.
technology historians for the realization of past promises
You guys have your work cut out for you. As well as beamed power and flying cars, I also want my space resort, moon, mars and undersea colonies, strong AI, and Duke Nukem Forever. Chop chop!
Anti-tank mines take either a significant amount of weight or a significant amount of metal to detonate, don't they? Still, this would catch anti-personnel mines and it sounds damn cool to boot. Any videos?
You don't even need companies or marketing to kill cool. If the edge of hip people can't keep their damn traps shut, the Californians will find out about it and ruin it sooner or later. Happened to Santa Fe, NM and Sedona, AZ just through word of mouth. You know all that rain in Seattle? A flat out lie, it's sunnier than Mexico up there. They just say that to keep the Californians out. Word of advice: if you live someplace cool, keep your mouth shut, or better yet lie. Say there's vicious Ebola ridden Grizzley Bears there. Tell people you have the highest per capita population of sex offenders in the US. Claim that you live in a racist, sexist, redneck hellhole. Californians hate that. God help you if you say that the weather is nice, the scenery is beautiful and the people are friendly.
P.S. If you live in California (especially San Francisco, but excluding L.A. which is just generally fucked), the same thing applies to East Coasters. The bastards.
Evolution is as much about cooperation as it is about competition. And don't forget the key point here: cooperation is simply a competative strategy, and a damn effective one. Even if competition is the way things are and cooperation does not exist, according to your point b, that is not necessarily the way things should be. And a final note: the phrase "bloody competition" is anthropomorphizing nature. Nature exists, but not as a seperate entity, rather it is the law of the universe. Competition is a human idea, a category crafted out of undifferentiated experience by humanity in order to explain natural events. Caracterizing nature in the way you have is simply putting your own human categories on it.
I don't think cooperation is any more or less "Nature's way" than competition is. I have a few questions though. Do you think we should all get along together? Or do you think that's a bad idea? Do you just not want to be burdened with other people's feelings? Do you want a justification for hurting others? Is that why the idea of "Nature, red in tooth and claw" is so appealing to you?
As much as you seem to have a problem with people who advocate peace, love and cooperation, I have a very big problem with people who try to justify their own selfish behavior through the idea of a violent, competitive natural order.
Why do you hate Bev Harris so much? Do you work for ES&S? Are you a Republican and you don't like her politics? Are you working for the Tom Flocco anti Bev Harris disinfo campaign? You see, she pissed some people off and they started a serious campaign of slander and disnformation against her. And here you are, every time that she or blackboxvoting.org are mentioned, chiming in about how crazy she is...
Frankly, you come off sounding like far more of a kook than she does. That quote does not make her sound like a creationist, it makes the other side sound like creationists. She's saying that someone falsified a report in order to make their position look better. If I saw a "scientist" doing that, I'd call them on it, too.
In any case, the level of venom in your tone is astounding. To an impartial observer, it appears as if you are out for revenge. Again I ask: why do you hate Bev so much? There are plenty of kookier kooks in the world, why focus so much frothing rage against her?
There's little difference between an armored vehicle and, say, a fully loaded donkey cart. There's even less difference between an armored vehicle and a tractor. That said, I've heard the Army is developing a bacteria that grows quickly in the presence of explosives and glows in black light. Simply spray some on a suspect field, wait a few days, and you can see the location of not only land mines but other unexploded ordinance.
You mention only one of the three root causes of altruism specifically, while touching on another without acknowledging it and ignoring the thirs. The other reasons are mutual aid and the handicap principle. Don't forget that situations almost never devolve to the simple prisoner's dilemma, but to the iterated prisoners dilemma with knowledge of the other players past history. This leads to altruism through the possibility of mutual aid. The handicap principle says that organisms will do things that are detrimental to their well being, including such things as peacock's tail which makes him easier to catch as well as giving away resources in order to brag to potential mates about fitness. If I can survive with a huge gaudy tail, or if I give away everything I have, then I must be incredibly fit and worthy of mating with.
Your analysis is correct though, people will naturally compete in come circumstances and cooperate in others. Our system skews our natural behavior towards competition by refusing to allow fair and equitable access to justice, which is simply the ability to punish non-cooperation. It actually goes further and rewards selfishness. And further, by assuming and excusing selfishness it encourages it.
You forget that you have 99.9% the same genes as every other human beings on the planet. Your genes don't give a rats ass about you, they just want to be passed on. If you die but help enough of your species to pass on your genes, you have passed on your genes even if you don't breed. Funny you mention bees, you do know that most bees are sterile, right? How does a completely selfish, competitive creature ever give rise to a descendant that can't breed?
If resources were completely abundant or very scarce, you would be correct. But we live in a world of local surpluses and scarcities. In such a situation, cooperation is the best strategy.
You sound as if you are very attached to the idea of competition, and uncomfortable with the idea of cooperation. If true, that is counterproductive to your well being, and perhaps you should look at why the idea of a world where cooperation is important threatens you.
The cable needs to stretch beyond geosynchronous orbit. The center of mass of the cable will be in geosynchronous orbit. As for the sheilding, the article simply says what you say: we will need some. Three centimeters of aluminum should do it. This is absolutely not news to anyone who has seriously looked into space elevator technology.
Plenty of businessmen act in ways that are detrimental to overal maximum efficiency in society. People are naturally more motivated by notions of fairness and reciprocity than pure, short sighted self interest. This is because genetics works on the level of species, not individuals, and for the species, fairness and reciprocity are more successful strategies than competition. We have to compete with every other species in nature, what sense is there in competing amongst ourselves for survival? For desirable mates, sure, but not survival. but when our society rewards self interest, or more importantly when it fails to punish lack of fairness and reciprocity, people feel they must be selfish in order to compete. People's natural inclination to cooperate is crushed.
Personally, I don't think Mr. Gates, Mr. Ballmer, or any of the thousands of other corrupt bussinessmen are to blame for the situation. They are only doing what we all do, that which we see as in our best interest. Can they help it if our society does not reward and encourage us to recognize that which is truly in our interest? No, because society is something we all build together.
But we are discussing whether they deserve to be called heroes. To me, a real hero is someone who moves society towards a more efficient way of functioning. Linus has done that. Bill and Steve have only served to reinforce the status quo. They are not bad men, merely average. They have done precisely what society expected of them: they played hardball and made lots of money. Quite frankly, any smart person could have done the same given similar circumstances and opportunities. Linus did something that reinforced cooperation. He did what he wanted to do, even when that was not what society said would make him a success. By being himself despite society, he gives courage to others who wish to be themselves as well. That makes him a hero. No one needs any further encouragement to do what society says to do and make a lot of money.
The fact that they play hardball makes them not bad people, just people who do bad things. Playing hardball is just a friendly euphamism for playing dirty. It means you are willing to hurt others for profit instead of finding a way for everyone to win.
When you laud Gates et. al. for employing people, you forget the concept of opportunity cost. It's as if I said, "Hey, I invested some money and got 3% return on my investment. That proves that that investment was a good thing. Why, without investing that money, I wouldn't have made that 3%!" Who's to say that things actually would not have turned out better if Gates and firends never existed, and all that effort and money had gone someplace else instead.
There is nothing wrong with doing things to make a profit. There is also nothing heroic about it. Torvalds is a hero because he did something for the greater good rather than persuing selfish ends. Doing something for the greater good with little thought towards personal profit is pretty much the definition of heroism.
Ballmer not only does everything for personal gain, he actively suppresses those who do things for the greater good, because they cut into his profits. That is what makes him a bad guy.
The difference between a hero and a villain is in the means, not the ends. In the end, there is no altruism, and everyone does everything for their own selfish reasons. Gates and Ballmer have actively harmed others for profit. Linus wrote a free operating system as a brag to the world: see how great I am, I can give the fruit of my labor away and still be a success. Both were selfish acts, but society benefits from one sort of selfish act without rewarding it, whereas the other sort of selfish act is rewarded with riches. So we should laud Linus and not Gates or Ballmer as a hero. Those two have already gotten their reward from society in the form of wealth, they shouldn't be called heros as well.
As the administration has no integrity, they must have had other, more pragmatic reasons for waiting. Perhaps their assessment of the situation differed from yours.
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Thanks for the info. I'm a little out of the loop on this, being the Linux/BladeCenter/VMWare admin, but I talked to our DBA group and their manager said he will be meeting with EnterpriseDB on Monday. And Command Prompt isn't out of the running yet, from what I hear it was just one guy we talked to over there was surly or something. We are quite serious about moving to open source in general, and particularly for our database. We are a state agency and we have a very nice case management system that we are trying to move off of HP/Sybase to Linux/Postgres. Hopefully, then we will open source the whole application.
Command Prompt was the one we talked with and didn't get a competent vibe from.
Morality and faith are not arbitrary to an athiest. They are arrived at through logical thought and rational deduction. Faith and morals are arbitrary to a deist because one's choice of God and religion is arbitrary, and even when one has chosen, one can choose which precepts to follow and which to reject. God says not to eat shellfish, but you know that part is just ancient tribal belief. God says not to kill innocents, but you know those guys are evil sinners so grab a stone!
Moral athiests have arrived at their morals through thought and introspection. There are good, solid, selfish reasons not to light children on fire, we don't need some arbitrary and unverifiable book of rules to know that. The fact is, either morals and rules come from outside the universe and there is no way of verifying their correctness because they are outside all possible experience, or they come from inside the universe and can be deduced from experiences had inside the universe.
If there is no God, then people who believe in God are not only more delusional than those of us who know that God's existence or lacjk thereof simply doesn't matter, they are less likely to arrive at correct action in any given situation. By correct action I mean the action that will most efficiently bring about the greatest satisfaction among the greatest number. Admitedly, it is an arbitrary definition, but you will find that it is one many can agree with and from a pragmatic standpoint, that is what counts.
Because "believers" have subjugated their ability to think for themselves to religious dogma, they will be unable to act flexibly and creatively in situations that cause cognitive dissonance within their religious framework. People who have arrived at their morality through logic and introspection can adapt and be good people in any situation.
Well, I'm not part of the DBA team, but I heard they were rude and didn't seem to know much about Postgres internals. We are looking for something similar to the contract we had with Sybase, that's all I know.
We have a lot of enthusiasm for open source where I work, and we wanted to move our Family and Child Tracking System off of Sybase and onto Postgress but the major stumbling block is support. We're a state agency and CYA is crucial here. We talked to several companies offering support and they have all sucked so far.
Let me confirm this. Kfg is right, most of our depth perception does not come from stereoscopic vision. Parallax, color fading, bluring, occlusion and about 10-20 other systems all process visual information to provide depth perception. I can still throw a ball or a frisbee right to you, but I have a hard time playing pool and I can't thread a needle to save my life.
You are right of course. I wasn't really trying for accuracy, just a quick ballpark of "Is this remotely feasible?" To which the answer is, "No, not really." Linux is great, and for running a nifty home firewall/router, or even doing high end routing over a few interfaces it's great. But if you want to do high end stuff over dozens of ports, you need high end hardware and software to handle the throughput.
Informative. Just a back of the napkin calculation and a few seconds thought says this will not be nearly as easy as just throwing a bunch of multi port ethernet cards into a PCI bus, nor just naively running linux on some random switch hardware. When you are dealing with that much data, you need tight integration of the hardware and OS. A managed switch with VLANs is definitely the way to go.
A 40 port router needs A LOT of processing power and internal bus bandwidth. If it's Gigabit Ethernet, that's potentially 40 Gigabits per second.
Item finding isn't even one of the major categories of play in an RPG. There are three types of players: Dice Rollers, Problem Solvers, and Role Players. A good DM knows his players and can juggle the desires of everyone in a group. When someone looks bored, the DM can throw in a challenge suited to that player.
Dice Rollers are numbers wranglers who want a good game of chance. The most common sub-species is the Hack-n-Slasher, but that's just because most rule sets lend themselves to that kind of dice rolling. In games that have skill rolls, you'll find these guys rolling for damn near every feat up to and including getting up in the morning. "An 18?!? I spring from my bed and land in my shoes in one smooth motion! Hurrah!"
Problem Solvers like puzzles and planning. These are the guys who calculate exactly how many miles your party will average per day trekking across the Great Arid Waste and know exactly how much food and water to pack. When the party stumbles across a series of levers and switches in the dungeon, these are the guys to call. "Gruntmore the Dwarf pulls the red lever, goes through the blue door, pushes the star shaped switch, coems back out, pushes the green lever to a 45 degree angle disabling the secret blade trap and we all go merrily on our way!"
Role Players like to have long, drawn out in-character conversations with every shopkeeper and passing peasant they encounter. Whereas Dice Rollers will do whatever it takes to win, and Problem Solvers playing stupid characters will still come up with genius plans, these guys are apt to do utterly stupid things if they think that's what their character would do. They also tend to talk about their characters in the first person. "I leap from behind the tree and run screaming at the horde of orcs- What? Yes, I know the plan was to sneak up on them, but I'm overconfident with anger management issues. But you should really say that in character..."
But perhaps I missed your point, were you saying RPGs are about item finding or RTSs are? In any case, I think the real trick to either is actually basing it on a good simulation of some sort, but having story telling hooks that can effect the sim in the scripting interface, and have those hooks have flexible triggers and random details so that the same basic plotline can be activated from many different starting points using characters and locations tailored to the individual players. But I understand how hard it would be to scale a system like that up to WoW levels.
The real problem with WoW is that it isn't an RPG and it isn't for people who traditionally like RPGs so the players who would bring real quality to the game are driven away by all the Azkiker4921s and l33tWariers in the game.
It's a free market in the sense that when CEOs of any large company whine about wanting a free market, this is what they actually want. You know, free to have the market all to themselves?
But seriously, people can buy any healthcare they want here, right? So Kaiser Permanente is operating in a free market. And the labor market is a free market, right? If the labor market is not efficient at allocating talented individuals to companies willing to pay the big bucks for them, perhaps there is something wrong. When a company, which buys things on the free market and sells health care on the free market (I mean, your company could go with any HMO, right?) can't do things right, who or what is to blame?
If you said "The individuals involved," well, then I hope you say the same thing when a socialist system fails too, otherwise you are being a big old hypocrite. If you said "The system" then, again, you should apply the same reasoning to socialism, and when things fail in that system, blame that system. If you said, "It depends," or "I don't have enough information to judge," well, there's an old dead Greek guy who would have loved to meet you.
What specific predictions jave "global warming theorists" made that have not come true? How are their predicitions unscientific? If you aren't just trolling, I would be interested to hear where they have got it wrong.
signed,
technology historians for the realization of past promises
You guys have your work cut out for you. As well as beamed power and flying cars, I also want my space resort, moon, mars and undersea colonies, strong AI, and Duke Nukem Forever. Chop chop!
Anti-tank mines take either a significant amount of weight or a significant amount of metal to detonate, don't they? Still, this would catch anti-personnel mines and it sounds damn cool to boot. Any videos?
You don't even need companies or marketing to kill cool. If the edge of hip people can't keep their damn traps shut, the Californians will find out about it and ruin it sooner or later. Happened to Santa Fe, NM and Sedona, AZ just through word of mouth. You know all that rain in Seattle? A flat out lie, it's sunnier than Mexico up there. They just say that to keep the Californians out. Word of advice: if you live someplace cool, keep your mouth shut, or better yet lie. Say there's vicious Ebola ridden Grizzley Bears there. Tell people you have the highest per capita population of sex offenders in the US. Claim that you live in a racist, sexist, redneck hellhole. Californians hate that. God help you if you say that the weather is nice, the scenery is beautiful and the people are friendly.
P.S. If you live in California (especially San Francisco, but excluding L.A. which is just generally fucked), the same thing applies to East Coasters. The bastards.
Evolution is as much about cooperation as it is about competition. And don't forget the key point here: cooperation is simply a competative strategy, and a damn effective one. Even if competition is the way things are and cooperation does not exist, according to your point b, that is not necessarily the way things should be. And a final note: the phrase "bloody competition" is anthropomorphizing nature. Nature exists, but not as a seperate entity, rather it is the law of the universe. Competition is a human idea, a category crafted out of undifferentiated experience by humanity in order to explain natural events. Caracterizing nature in the way you have is simply putting your own human categories on it.
I don't think cooperation is any more or less "Nature's way" than competition is. I have a few questions though. Do you think we should all get along together? Or do you think that's a bad idea? Do you just not want to be burdened with other people's feelings? Do you want a justification for hurting others? Is that why the idea of "Nature, red in tooth and claw" is so appealing to you?
As much as you seem to have a problem with people who advocate peace, love and cooperation, I have a very big problem with people who try to justify their own selfish behavior through the idea of a violent, competitive natural order.
Why do you hate Bev Harris so much? Do you work for ES&S? Are you a Republican and you don't like her politics? Are you working for the Tom Flocco anti Bev Harris disinfo campaign? You see, she pissed some people off and they started a serious campaign of slander and disnformation against her. And here you are, every time that she or blackboxvoting.org are mentioned, chiming in about how crazy she is...
Frankly, you come off sounding like far more of a kook than she does. That quote does not make her sound like a creationist, it makes the other side sound like creationists. She's saying that someone falsified a report in order to make their position look better. If I saw a "scientist" doing that, I'd call them on it, too.
In any case, the level of venom in your tone is astounding. To an impartial observer, it appears as if you are out for revenge. Again I ask: why do you hate Bev so much? There are plenty of kookier kooks in the world, why focus so much frothing rage against her?
There's little difference between an armored vehicle and, say, a fully loaded donkey cart. There's even less difference between an armored vehicle and a tractor. That said, I've heard the Army is developing a bacteria that grows quickly in the presence of explosives and glows in black light. Simply spray some on a suspect field, wait a few days, and you can see the location of not only land mines but other unexploded ordinance.
You mention only one of the three root causes of altruism specifically, while touching on another without acknowledging it and ignoring the thirs. The other reasons are mutual aid and the handicap principle. Don't forget that situations almost never devolve to the simple prisoner's dilemma, but to the iterated prisoners dilemma with knowledge of the other players past history. This leads to altruism through the possibility of mutual aid. The handicap principle says that organisms will do things that are detrimental to their well being, including such things as peacock's tail which makes him easier to catch as well as giving away resources in order to brag to potential mates about fitness. If I can survive with a huge gaudy tail, or if I give away everything I have, then I must be incredibly fit and worthy of mating with.
Your analysis is correct though, people will naturally compete in come circumstances and cooperate in others. Our system skews our natural behavior towards competition by refusing to allow fair and equitable access to justice, which is simply the ability to punish non-cooperation. It actually goes further and rewards selfishness. And further, by assuming and excusing selfishness it encourages it.
You forget that you have 99.9% the same genes as every other human beings on the planet. Your genes don't give a rats ass about you, they just want to be passed on. If you die but help enough of your species to pass on your genes, you have passed on your genes even if you don't breed. Funny you mention bees, you do know that most bees are sterile, right? How does a completely selfish, competitive creature ever give rise to a descendant that can't breed?
If resources were completely abundant or very scarce, you would be correct. But we live in a world of local surpluses and scarcities. In such a situation, cooperation is the best strategy.
You sound as if you are very attached to the idea of competition, and uncomfortable with the idea of cooperation. If true, that is counterproductive to your well being, and perhaps you should look at why the idea of a world where cooperation is important threatens you.
The cable needs to stretch beyond geosynchronous orbit. The center of mass of the cable will be in geosynchronous orbit. As for the sheilding, the article simply says what you say: we will need some. Three centimeters of aluminum should do it. This is absolutely not news to anyone who has seriously looked into space elevator technology.
Plenty of businessmen act in ways that are detrimental to overal maximum efficiency in society. People are naturally more motivated by notions of fairness and reciprocity than pure, short sighted self interest. This is because genetics works on the level of species, not individuals, and for the species, fairness and reciprocity are more successful strategies than competition. We have to compete with every other species in nature, what sense is there in competing amongst ourselves for survival? For desirable mates, sure, but not survival. but when our society rewards self interest, or more importantly when it fails to punish lack of fairness and reciprocity, people feel they must be selfish in order to compete. People's natural inclination to cooperate is crushed.
Personally, I don't think Mr. Gates, Mr. Ballmer, or any of the thousands of other corrupt bussinessmen are to blame for the situation. They are only doing what we all do, that which we see as in our best interest. Can they help it if our society does not reward and encourage us to recognize that which is truly in our interest? No, because society is something we all build together.
But we are discussing whether they deserve to be called heroes. To me, a real hero is someone who moves society towards a more efficient way of functioning. Linus has done that. Bill and Steve have only served to reinforce the status quo. They are not bad men, merely average. They have done precisely what society expected of them: they played hardball and made lots of money. Quite frankly, any smart person could have done the same given similar circumstances and opportunities. Linus did something that reinforced cooperation. He did what he wanted to do, even when that was not what society said would make him a success. By being himself despite society, he gives courage to others who wish to be themselves as well. That makes him a hero. No one needs any further encouragement to do what society says to do and make a lot of money.
The fact that they play hardball makes them not bad people, just people who do bad things. Playing hardball is just a friendly euphamism for playing dirty. It means you are willing to hurt others for profit instead of finding a way for everyone to win.
When you laud Gates et. al. for employing people, you forget the concept of opportunity cost. It's as if I said, "Hey, I invested some money and got 3% return on my investment. That proves that that investment was a good thing. Why, without investing that money, I wouldn't have made that 3%!" Who's to say that things actually would not have turned out better if Gates and firends never existed, and all that effort and money had gone someplace else instead.
There is nothing wrong with doing things to make a profit. There is also nothing heroic about it. Torvalds is a hero because he did something for the greater good rather than persuing selfish ends. Doing something for the greater good with little thought towards personal profit is pretty much the definition of heroism.
Ballmer not only does everything for personal gain, he actively suppresses those who do things for the greater good, because they cut into his profits. That is what makes him a bad guy.
The difference between a hero and a villain is in the means, not the ends. In the end, there is no altruism, and everyone does everything for their own selfish reasons. Gates and Ballmer have actively harmed others for profit. Linus wrote a free operating system as a brag to the world: see how great I am, I can give the fruit of my labor away and still be a success. Both were selfish acts, but society benefits from one sort of selfish act without rewarding it, whereas the other sort of selfish act is rewarded with riches. So we should laud Linus and not Gates or Ballmer as a hero. Those two have already gotten their reward from society in the form of wealth, they shouldn't be called heros as well.
As the administration has no integrity, they must have had other, more pragmatic reasons for waiting. Perhaps their assessment of the situation differed from yours.