The main issue is not the electoral college per se, but the winner-take-all rules. A couple of states, including Maine, have their electors proportionally allocated to the candidates according to the popular vote. In most states, the candidate who wins the most popular votes, even only 50%, gets all the electors. Having proportional allocation of electors makes your vote relevant in all elections.
Why do we care about prehistoric plants that turned into underground petrochemical deposits millions for years ago. I agree that cars are ridiculously inefficient, but underground oil is not one of the natural features I am worried about being disturbed. Above-ground pollution, oil spills, global warming, yes, but why cry for rotten prehistoric plants?
The poster probably meant statistically different from zero, but this is not a random sample! This is the whole population. There is exactly 20 some thousand self-proclaimed Jedi worshippers out of 31 million Canadians, which is definitely not zero.
Actual server log data shows that 61% of Slashdot readers use Windows (among those who visited this Ask Slashdot link).. 22% of Slashdotters use *nix (90% of them Linux) and 6% Macintosh.
Anh Zone Patriotism is the conviction that your country is superior to all others because you were born there. (GBS)
It is the evidence that some resellers are making a lot of money that is spurring publishers to monitor the resale market and bring old books back into print if they are still popular (see the original article). It is now possible for publishers to print very small lots of books economically because of IT.
Capitalism doesn't work so well with monopolies, such as copyrights. If the publishers of Robert Anton Wilson don't realize that money could be make by reissuing his books, no competitor is allowed to do it for them (assuming the publisher holds the copyrights). But there is still a strong incentive at work here to correct this kind of problem.
The public library is an institution partly for dealing with the adverse social consequences of the copyright monopoly. You can find all the Wilson books you need there.
This particular hoarder is a problem for you, but the phenomenon should mean more books being reprinted at a reasonable price in general.
though, is that digital books are not a good substitute for physical books, and cannot be digitized without a lot of effort.
Although I cannot condone the ostrich-like response of RIAA and MPAA, I don't envy their position because they could easily (and eventually will) lose the farm if digital media becomes freely available.
Even if you do you want to stay in system administration for the rest of your life, a college degree is important or required for advancing your position. They may not make you a supervisor or head of the computing center without a degree despite your qualifications. Every year going back gets harder.
Having a college degree is important enough that even Steven
Spielburg
has put in nights and weekends just to complete his degree this spring, 33 years after dropping out.
The great benefit of Open Source if it becomes the mainstream will not be that some of the volunteer contributors will make money off it. As we have all seen, it is hard to make money off things you give away.
The great benefit will be that everyone can share the huge value of what economists call the the "network effect" that comes from everyone else using the same system. Every new user to a shared system like an OS makes the system more valuable to those who already use it. That is the source of the huge inertial power of Windows, but we have to pay Microsoft billions for the priviledge of sharing their protocols.
With Open Source, not only don't we have to pay to enjoy the network effects (if Open Source really takes off), but we are free to modify whatever part we think needs tweeking.
Big corps don't work for charity. The will support Linux iff it makes money for them. The benefit to the rest of us is the expanding network of Linux users. Let's hope all the big corps jump on the bandwagon and make this system the standard.
Popular misconceptions to the contrary, Adam Smith never believed that the "Invisible Hand" would fix everything. I don't have the exact quote in front of me, but for instance he is famous for writing that if you get any two or more merchants together, they are sure to conspire against free competition in the market.
Adam Smith is one of those writers who has so much more insight and subtlety than their popular image. There are few general principles of modern economics that Smith did not anticipate. There are not many figures writing in other fields of social science or natural science in the 1700's for whom we could say the same.
Smith argued against the big government-protected monopolies of his time, and it would be perfectly consistent for him to support breaking up the (market-generated) Microsoft monopoly.
I submitted the story about the huge growth in French broadband:
Broadband in France has grown by 500% in the past year, causing total Internet use in France to increase by 26% just in last quarter of 2001. France Telecom is charging such low prices (~$25/month) that they are being accused of trying to reimpose their monopoly.
What about the market structure in France makes companies compete to provide cheap broadband service to customers, while in most other countries they are trying to prevent their competitors from providing service?
For everyone but the M$ bashers, RTF makes a lot of sense. It has a published specification
just like PDF files.
The widespread use of RTF would do more to facilitate Open Source than PDF files. Unlike PDF, RTF files are editable by almost any word processor. This not only solves problems for Linux users, but for many Windows users because there are serious incompatibilies problems between versions of Word's DOC formats for complex documents. For those who need or want Windows, RTF use helps free them from the M$ upgrade treadmill.
The only downside that I see for RTF vs. PDF is that complex formatting like embedded pictures, equations, complicated tables in RTF documents are usually ignored by Linux word processors, so they could not be viewed properly. This will improve as these word processors get more mature themselves.
The development of good file conversion software for Word documents, including RTF, is a crucial piece of the Open Source struggle!
Granted such a backdoor is useless against a skilled user trying to encrypt their data - they will just use a different algorithm without a backdoor.
An encryption backdoor still could be useful for law enforcement if, for example, in the future email is encrypted as a matter of course (which seems inevitable). Then a backdoor would allow easy access to email that was encrypted without special user effort, but is still slow to access without the backdoor.
This seems like a reasonable tradeoff - more secure email for daily use, but law enforcement access with a wiretapping subpeona. Paranoid users could still encrypt their messages with other algorithms before the standard email encryption was carried out.
I second the practically network site. Especially good are the product reviews. Start here.
On the strength of a Practically Networked review, I had good luck with an SMC Barricade router with 4 ports and a built-in firewall a year ago, but things may have changed a lot since then. It took me only about 15 minutes to install (not counting network setup on the computer) and cost ~$100.
Timothy has a head on his shoulders
on
The Hacker Ethic
·
· Score: 1
It's great to see a (non-technical) book review on Slashdot that does not either gush about everyting said or tear down a straw man.
A new world of fulfilling, creative work is an ideal to get excited about (and to work towards), but in need of some healthy skepticism. Nothing comes from nowhere, and there are few true sea changes in history, mostly slow changes that it takes our collective consciousness a while to figure out.
The 'hacker ethic' may just turn out to be a continuation of the long line of small groups of individuals who pursue the good life as they see it even when this is not socially respectable. Hopefully, doing this (and living reasonably comfortably) is becoming easier.
The other work of Manuel Castells (especially his Information Age trilogy) is good reading for natural skeptics who can't help themselves from getting excited about the way information technology might make a better world. Castells is smart enough also to be interested in how IT makes the world a worse place, and evidence that goes against his theories.
When Linux (and KDE, GNOME, etc.) begins to win over the desktops of non-geeks, it will be because Linux is the first system they learned, or because their office uses it.
I agree that people who are not interested in computers will probably never convert to a better operating system than the one they first learned, unless forced to do so.
However, if Linux becomes the system of choice for schools, universities and large organizations, Linux will win the desktop battle regardless of the wishes of non-geeks (who will benefit in spite of themselves).
Economists have a simple, but profound, explanation for this. (I am referring to those who actually study economic theory, not people on Wall Street who declare themselves economists and make predictions just as unreliable as anyone else.)
If it were easy to predict which companies would make a lot of money, well informed people with a lot of money would have invested in these companies, so their stock price already reflects what can be predicted. Even if the smart people don't have lots of money, they can start their own investment fund and rich uninformed people will give them money to invest, with the same effect.
If investors didn't behave this way, any smart investor could make huge amounts of money by betting on the companies that have good prospects. There would be lots of "$500 bills left on the sidewalk", and we don't see that - people pick them up when they find them.
The result is that stock prices usually reflect what can be figured out by smart people with industry knowledge. Stock prices can move wildly, but that is because there is a lot of true uncertainty about how a company's performance will turn out (nobody knows).
Unless you have inside information that no one else has (and it is not illegal to trade on it), on average you won't do any better than the market average return (adjusted for the riskiness of the stock - risky stocks have to have higher returns to get people to buy them.) Bubbles like the run up in the value of tech stocks make it appear that anyone who sees a future in IT is an investing genius, but the bursting of the bubble shows the fallacy of this.
Most investors, including fund managers, who make lots of money on the stock market are lucky, not endowed with an ability to see things that no one else does. Look at the best performing mutual funds in the months and years after their exceptional performance. They usually do worse than the market. So buying a fund that has already done well is usually a bad idea.
The upshot of this for you and me: pick a broad market index fund that will give you average market returns, but with lower variability than a narrow stock or fund, and much lower expenses (the only certain part of your rate of return) since the fund manager is not buying and selling all the time. Broad index funds outperform 70% of mutual funds, mainly due to low expenses. Look at your stocks and see if they have performed better than the S&P 500 over the past ten years, and how much more variable (risky) they have been.
You rarely hear this advice because no one makes money giving it, and financial types have to admit they don't accomplish much. Financial advisors get no commissions from these barebone funds, so they don't recommend them. Check out Vanguard index funds because Vanguard is in effect a cooperative owned by the investors - it has no financial incentive to sell you things you don't need that make high fees for the fund owners. Vanguard was created by large pension funds to introduce the first index funds.
There was a large scale study last spring, IIRC, that showed that 70% of day traders lose money. The excitement of working independently, maybe making millions, seems to have sucked in a lot of day traders who don't acurate perceive how unlikely it is to consistently make money on short term trading.
It is true that computers are not the largest energy users, but the real value of efforts like this is to increase the use of photovoltaic cells, directly and by publicizing them.
We need to increase the critical mass of PV users. PV technology benefits greatly from economies of scale (in R& D, production, marketing, etc.) helping to bring about the day when PV is cheaper than more polluting technologies even for companies that don't give a @#$% about the environment. (BTW, this is a solid economic justification for the government to subsidize PV.) PV has other advantages like portability and reliability.
2) What do people in the villages need with the Internet anyway?
First of all, the Internet by railway venture is not using any public money as I recall. It can live off the money that poor users want to spend for Internet and telephone connections plus some donations.
For why the Internet is relevant for India in general, see this article. Many of the large players are moving into the Indian market. Why should the rural areas be cut out of this new part of society in India any more than here?
I recently heard Ashok Jhunjhunwala give a presentation on this and other technologies his team is developing in India. He is a leader of the group running the Internet on railway signalling cables, and an engineering professor at one of the Indian Institutes of Technology (the Indian equivalents of MIT that have trained so many of the founders of Silicon Valley start-ups). His group is very sophistocated and focussed on developing a range of exciting technologies that make lower cost Internet access possible in India.
Low cost telephone and Internet connection technologies (with somewhat lower performance) are not being developed by U.S. firms because consumers and businesses will pay for more expensive higher quality connections, but essential for bringing Internet to Indian users. Using the railway signals network is just one of range of solutions the group is developing including microwave to local cable systems for Internet and telephony, and manufacturing their own network and switching equipment, which is being used commercially in several countries besides India.
A number of posters have questioned why India needs the internet before they have access to running water, sewage, abundant food, etc. The general reason is that India will not have any of these things without economic development that allows them reach higher income levels than are possible in a predominantly agricultural economy. Communications, electricity, etc. are necessary for this transformation, both to bring about higher productivity agriculture and to expand into higher productivity sectors. As I recall, IT now accounts for almost half of India's total exports from nothing ten years ago!
Internet makes sense even in a country largely made up of poor farmers with high illiteracy if it can be made affordable. Email and Internet is much lower cost than voice telephony and some of the people in almost any village are literate. To an area with no telephone access, the Internet brings the whole world's ideas and information to them for the first time.
Getting market information in distant cities is essential to allow poor farmers to bargain for competitive prices for their products. The Grameen Bank finds that its rural cell telephone centers in Bangladesh are used more intensively by the landless than higher income people because they are making calls to find employment.
There are plenty (hundreds of millions) of rural Indians who are just as clever as we are, and this kind of internet access could eventually allow them to earn the kind of incomes that we do, rather than just be clever subsistence farmers.
Slashdot Mirror
The main issue is not the electoral college per se, but the winner-take-all rules. A couple of states, including Maine, have their electors proportionally allocated to the candidates according to the popular vote. In most states, the candidate who wins the most popular votes, even only 50%, gets all the electors. Having proportional allocation of electors makes your vote relevant in all elections.
Why do we care about prehistoric plants that turned into underground petrochemical deposits millions for years ago. I agree that cars are ridiculously inefficient, but underground oil is not one of the natural features I am worried about being disturbed. Above-ground pollution, oil spills, global warming, yes, but why cry for rotten prehistoric plants?
John
The poster probably meant statistically different from zero, but this is not a random sample! This is the whole population. There is exactly 20 some thousand self-proclaimed Jedi worshippers out of 31 million Canadians, which is definitely not zero.
Actual server log data shows that 61% of Slashdot readers use Windows (among those who visited this Ask Slashdot link). .
22% of Slashdotters use *nix (90% of them Linux) and 6% Macintosh.
Anh Zone
Patriotism is the conviction that your country is superior to all others because you were born there. (GBS)
It is the evidence that some resellers are making a lot of money that is spurring publishers to monitor the resale market and bring old books back into print if they are still popular (see the original article). It is now possible for publishers to print very small lots of books economically because of IT.
Capitalism doesn't work so well with monopolies, such as copyrights. If the publishers of Robert Anton Wilson don't realize that money could be make by reissuing his books, no competitor is allowed to do it for them (assuming the publisher holds the copyrights). But there is still a strong incentive at work here to correct this kind of problem.
The public library is an institution partly for dealing with the adverse social consequences of the copyright monopoly. You can find all the Wilson books you need there.
This particular hoarder is a problem for you, but the phenomenon should mean more books being reprinted at a reasonable price in general.
Anh Zone
though, is that digital books are not a good substitute for physical books, and cannot be digitized without a lot of effort.
Although I cannot condone the ostrich-like response of RIAA and MPAA, I don't envy their position because they could easily (and eventually will) lose the farm if digital media becomes freely available.
AnhZone
Having a college degree is important enough that even Steven Spielburg has put in nights and weekends just to complete his degree this spring, 33 years after dropping out.
AnhZone
The great benefit of Open Source if it becomes the mainstream will not be that some of the volunteer contributors will make money off it. As we have all seen, it is hard to make money off things you give away.
The great benefit will be that everyone can share the huge value of what economists call the the "network effect" that comes from everyone else using the same system. Every new user to a shared system like an OS makes the system more valuable to those who already use it. That is the source of the huge inertial power of Windows, but we have to pay Microsoft billions for the priviledge of sharing their protocols.
With Open Source, not only don't we have to pay to enjoy the network effects (if Open Source really takes off), but we are free to modify whatever part we think needs tweeking.
Big corps don't work for charity. The will support Linux iff it makes money for them. The benefit to the rest of us is the expanding network of Linux users. Let's hope all the big corps jump on the bandwagon and make this system the standard.
John Gallup
Popular misconceptions to the contrary, Adam Smith never believed that the "Invisible Hand" would fix everything. I don't have the exact quote in front of me, but for instance he is famous for writing that if you get any two or more merchants together, they are sure to conspire against free competition in the market.
Adam Smith is one of those writers who has so much more insight and subtlety than their popular image. There are few general principles of modern economics that Smith did not anticipate. There are not many figures writing in other fields of social science or natural science in the 1700's for whom we could say the same.
Smith argued against the big government-protected monopolies of his time, and it would be perfectly consistent for him to support breaking up the (market-generated) Microsoft monopoly.
John Gallup
I submitted the story about the huge growth in French broadband:
Broadband in France has grown by 500% in the past year, causing total Internet use in France to increase by 26% just in last quarter of 2001. France Telecom is charging such low prices (~$25/month) that they are being accused of trying to reimpose their monopoly.
What about the market structure in France makes companies compete to provide cheap broadband service to customers, while in most other countries they are trying to prevent their competitors from providing service?
just like PDF files.
The widespread use of RTF would do more to facilitate Open Source than PDF files. Unlike PDF, RTF files are editable by almost any word processor. This not only solves problems for Linux users, but for many Windows users because there are serious incompatibilies problems between versions of Word's DOC formats for complex documents. For those who need or want Windows, RTF use helps free them from the M$ upgrade treadmill.
The only downside that I see for RTF vs. PDF is that complex formatting like embedded pictures, equations, complicated tables in RTF documents are usually ignored by Linux word processors, so they could not be viewed properly. This will improve as these word processors get more mature themselves.
The development of good file conversion software for Word documents, including RTF, is a crucial piece of the Open Source struggle!
John
Granted such a backdoor is useless against a skilled user trying to encrypt their data - they will just use a different algorithm without a backdoor.
An encryption backdoor still could be useful for law enforcement if, for example, in the future email is encrypted as a matter of course (which seems inevitable). Then a backdoor would allow easy access to email that was encrypted without special user effort, but is still slow to access without the backdoor.
This seems like a reasonable tradeoff - more secure email for daily use, but law enforcement access with a wiretapping subpeona. Paranoid users could still encrypt their messages with other algorithms before the standard email encryption was carried out.
On the strength of a Practically Networked review, I had good luck with an SMC Barricade router with 4 ports and a built-in firewall a year ago, but things may have changed a lot since then. It took me only about 15 minutes to install (not counting network setup on the computer) and cost ~$100.
I learned about related topics from
How to set up a network at home: MIT guide with Linux focus.
World of Windows Networking: If Windows networking is screwing up (as it often does), go here.
homePCnetwork forum: Configuration questions answered, mostly by guy who runs the forum.
Technocopia: Overview articles on home networking.
Grant's Closet: Home LAN wiring.
Steve DeRose's guide: CAT5 wiring.
Telecom wiring: links to HOWTO and info articles on wiring.
Blue screen of death floats
like gentle clouds in the sky
when written in verse
A new world of fulfilling, creative work is an ideal to get excited about (and to work towards), but in need of some healthy skepticism. Nothing comes from nowhere, and there are few true sea changes in history, mostly slow changes that it takes our collective consciousness a while to figure out.
The 'hacker ethic' may just turn out to be a continuation of the long line of small groups of individuals who pursue the good life as they see it even when this is not socially respectable. Hopefully, doing this (and living reasonably comfortably) is becoming easier.
The other work of Manuel Castells (especially his Information Age trilogy) is good reading for natural skeptics who can't help themselves from getting excited about the way information technology might make a better world. Castells is smart enough also to be interested in how IT makes the world a worse place, and evidence that goes against his theories.
John Luke
I agree that people who are not interested in computers will probably never convert to a better operating system than the one they first learned, unless forced to do so.
However, if Linux becomes the system of choice for schools, universities and large organizations, Linux will win the desktop battle regardless of the wishes of non-geeks (who will benefit in spite of themselves).
AnhZone
Economists have a simple, but profound, explanation for this. (I am referring to those who actually study economic theory, not people on Wall Street who declare themselves economists and make predictions just as unreliable as anyone else.)
If it were easy to predict which companies would make a lot of money, well informed people with a lot of money would have invested in these companies, so their stock price already reflects what can be predicted. Even if the smart people don't have lots of money, they can start their own investment fund and rich uninformed people will give them money to invest, with the same effect.
If investors didn't behave this way, any smart investor could make huge amounts of money by betting on the companies that have good prospects. There would be lots of "$500 bills left on the sidewalk", and we don't see that - people pick them up when they find them.
The result is that stock prices usually reflect what can be figured out by smart people with industry knowledge. Stock prices can move wildly, but that is because there is a lot of true uncertainty about how a company's performance will turn out (nobody knows).
Unless you have inside information that no one else has (and it is not illegal to trade on it), on average you won't do any better than the market average return (adjusted for the riskiness of the stock - risky stocks have to have higher returns to get people to buy them.) Bubbles like the run up in the value of tech stocks make it appear that anyone who sees a future in IT is an investing genius, but the bursting of the bubble shows the fallacy of this.
Most investors, including fund managers, who make lots of money on the stock market are lucky, not endowed with an ability to see things that no one else does. Look at the best performing mutual funds in the months and years after their exceptional performance. They usually do worse than the market. So buying a fund that has already done well is usually a bad idea.
The upshot of this for you and me: pick a broad market index fund that will give you average market returns, but with lower variability than a narrow stock or fund, and much lower expenses (the only certain part of your rate of return) since the fund manager is not buying and selling all the time. Broad index funds outperform 70% of mutual funds, mainly due to low expenses. Look at your stocks and see if they have performed better than the S&P 500 over the past ten years, and how much more variable (risky) they have been.
You rarely hear this advice because no one makes money giving it, and financial types have to admit they don't accomplish much. Financial advisors get no commissions from these barebone funds, so they don't recommend them. Check out Vanguard index funds because Vanguard is in effect a cooperative owned by the investors - it has no financial incentive to sell you things you don't need that make high fees for the fund owners. Vanguard was created by large pension funds to introduce the first index funds.
IAAAE (I am an academic economist.)
AnhZone
There was a large scale study last spring, IIRC, that showed that 70% of day traders lose money. The excitement of working independently, maybe making millions, seems to have sucked in a lot of day traders who don't acurate perceive how unlikely it is to consistently make money on short term trading.
We need to increase the critical mass of PV users. PV technology benefits greatly from economies of scale (in R& D, production, marketing, etc.) helping to bring about the day when PV is cheaper than more polluting technologies even for companies that don't give a @#$% about the environment. (BTW, this is a solid economic justification for the government to subsidize PV.) PV has other advantages like portability and reliability.
Go Solarhost!
First of all, the Internet by railway venture is not using any public money as I recall. It can live off the money that poor users want to spend for Internet and telephone connections plus some donations.
For why the Internet is relevant for India in general, see this article. Many of the large players are moving into the Indian market. Why should the rural areas be cut out of this new part of society in India any more than here?
I recently heard Ashok Jhunjhunwala give a presentation on this and other technologies his team is developing in India. He is a leader of the group running the Internet on railway signalling cables, and an engineering professor at one of the Indian Institutes of Technology (the Indian equivalents of MIT that have trained so many of the founders of Silicon Valley start-ups). His group is very sophistocated and focussed on developing a range of exciting technologies that make lower cost Internet access possible in India.
Low cost telephone and Internet connection technologies (with somewhat lower performance) are not being developed by U.S. firms because consumers and businesses will pay for more expensive higher quality connections, but essential for bringing Internet to Indian users. Using the railway signals network is just one of range of solutions the group is developing including microwave to local cable systems for Internet and telephony, and manufacturing their own network and switching equipment, which is being used commercially in several countries besides India.
A number of posters have questioned why India needs the internet before they have access to running water, sewage, abundant food, etc. The general reason is that India will not have any of these things without economic development that allows them reach higher income levels than are possible in a predominantly agricultural economy. Communications, electricity, etc. are necessary for this transformation, both to bring about higher productivity agriculture and to expand into higher productivity sectors. As I recall, IT now accounts for almost half of India's total exports from nothing ten years ago!
Internet makes sense even in a country largely made up of poor farmers with high illiteracy if it can be made affordable. Email and Internet is much lower cost than voice telephony and some of the people in almost any village are literate. To an area with no telephone access, the Internet brings the whole world's ideas and information to them for the first time.
Getting market information in distant cities is essential to allow poor farmers to bargain for competitive prices for their products. The Grameen Bank finds that its rural cell telephone centers in Bangladesh are used more intensively by the landless than higher income people because they are making calls to find employment.
There are plenty (hundreds of millions) of rural Indians who are just as clever as we are, and this kind of internet access could eventually allow them to earn the kind of incomes that we do, rather than just be clever subsistence farmers.