I have no idea what communism has to do with anything I've said.
Indeed, Kyoto may be the wrong policy -- I have no idea, as I've never read it nor have I advocated it.
But the notion that there is simply no way we can address large-scale problems without economic ruin is simply silly -- we've gone through much more dramatic economic and technological revolutions than voluntarily switching energy sources gradually to clean/renewable ones would require. Energy is so intimately tied to some of the most volatile yet critical political and economic issues today that any significant shift towards independence and efficiency would have dramatic benefits outside the energy sector, letting us save hundreds of billions in military costs as well as lowering the risk on many investments. Lowering risk is usually a pretty fantastic way to increase profit for ANY market.
And the solution is not to allow American industry to return to child labor, it's to continue to eliminate child labor elsewhere. It's a short-term economic solution that sacrifices significantly greater long-term benefits, both economic and social. But stockholders don't have to worry about the global economy, or the literacy rate in Cambodia, or the economic potential of customers from that region in 40 years.
All we can do is artificially increase the short-term monetary cost of such poor decisions so that the non-monetary cost can be taken into account by the market.
My friends and I stayed up all night long for days on end playing Dune 2, it was certainly the *eureka* moment for the RTS genre that later dominated the entire game industry. Starcraft was the pinnacle of the genre, but Dune 2 was clearly the moment it all began.
How about them cursing you for having trashed the economy
i find this notion fascinating -- I can't think of any other situation in which funneling research and development into more efficient and automated technology has resulted in anything other than economic progress. The entire western world is built on replacing the cheap, easy and obvious method of doing things with expensive but vastly more scalable and efficient technology.
Outlawing child labor didn't result in an energy or manufacturing crisis, it resulted in a more educated society while causing all the industries that relied on child labor to invest in better tools that wound up being MORE effective and profitable.
All that environmental concerns accomplish is to change the economic incentives so that the market has the motivation to cover the startup costs of technologies we know will be more productive in the long run anyways. Building more efficient and cleaner power plants and vehicles is a great idea that we know will benefit all aspects of the economy and society. So why not make it profitable for the market to move to that stage sooner rather than later?
modifications to data are not distributed evenly across all of the flash chips. Your filesystem metadata will tend to be clustered in the first flash chip, which will result in much faster wear, as it is the most frequently modified data on the disk.
Why aren't modifications to data evenly distributed over the flash? That's much of the advancement in modern flash controllers, distributing those writes. Just because your metadata is initially written in the first chip doesn't mean the updates have to be written to that same chip. The controller can put it on whatever chip it fancies. We're not dealing with spinning disks and moving heads, there's no need to worry about the physical location of a sector to optimize data transfer.
The have limited cycles per sector, but the drives automagically allocate writes over the least-used sectors. In practice, a modern flash drive should have at least the same lifespan as a spinning disk if not longer.
Requiring PE involvement in the software world might work to put some kind of (very welcome) brake on the reckless development practices that many companies follow, but given the added cost and added legal responsibility, I suspect it'd just end up decimating the domestic software labor pool and pricing custom software out of the reach of all but a few companies. Substantially more programs get built during any given year than bridges, after all.
True, but a lot more "things" get built than bridges, and most things don't require a PE. The software world has no reason to be different -- PEs could be required for some only segments or applications. You don't need an engineer to sign off on your homemade bookshelves, and you wouldn't need one to sign off on your shareware CD catalog program. But Red Hat and Microsoft might very well be expected to provide a certification that the kernel or cryptographic subsystem they provide are built to certain accepted development and code reviewing standards.
Sorry, I don't take their word when I can tell IMMEDIATELY when I'm listening to an MP3. Their double blind test sucked apparently.
You don't have to take their word for it -- take the tests yourself. Or make your own, install ABX software and see if you can tell to any statistically significant consistency when you're listening to the original CD rip vs a 320kbps MP3. You'll be in a pretty small group if you can.
It's not like this is all being done in a dark room by a cabal somewhere. Put your ego where your mouth is -- lots of people "know" that they have to have the best possible quality, and then find out the hard way that they can't tell a 128kbps AAC from a DAT master when asked to prove it in a double-blind ABX test.
If you can't then your hardware for listening sucks. Put on a set of great headphones and tell me you can't hear the noise in a 256k lossy music file created from a CD.
All the double-blind tests by audiophiles at Hydrogenaudio and other sites that due true ABX testing disagree with you. For most people, most of the time, with most types of music, pretty much every modern codec is transparent well below 256kbps.
Yes, people can train themselves to listen for the specific artifacts of different codecs, but if you're not an audio engineer, why would you want to?
Why can't a human keep it in the air from monitoring attitude and airspeed displays?
Because it can only fly when stabilised by the computer. Of course the flight systems and the navigation are totally separate, so having the location screwed up doesn't have any effect on the plane's ability to tell it is banking or flying straight and level.
I thought flash memory had a lower read/write cycle expectancy before crapping out?
They do have a limited read/write lifetime for each sector, BUT the controllers automatically distribute data over the least-used sectors (since there's no performance penalty to non-linear storage), and you wind up getting the maximum possible lifetime from well-built solid-state drives (assuming no other failures).
So in practice, the lifetime of modern solid state will be better than spinning disks as long as you aren't reading and writing every sector of the disk on a daily basis.
They called themselves socialist (because it was the cool thing at the time, much like China now call themselves a republic), but were fascist in their policies. The only "social" policies they advanced were ramping up industrial production, militarism, and trading on nationalist xenophobia to explain economic failures. There's nothing about workers owning the means of production, universal equality, elimination of the ruling class, or social services in any of the Nazi party's policies or actions.
They replaced democracy with totalitarianism, and it wasn't to provide universal health care or uniform wages.
the difference was that in other societies, you are free to leave if you don't like it.
And as I replied several messages upwards, there's no difference in being able to leave a modern democratic socialist state and a modern democratic capitalist state. Whether socialism inevitably leads to totalitarianism is obviously a good question, but there doesn't seem to be much evidence of it. All the major UNdemocratic communist states started out fairly authoritarian/totalitarian, they weren't democracies that were corrupted by socialism. The major corrupted democracy of the 20th century was a capitalist democracy -- Nazi Germany.
Yes, we as a society agree on all those principles of private property. Anyone who contradicts those agreements in their actions will be punished. That is true in whatever economic system you live under -- if you do not conform your actions to the agreed-upon structure, you will be punished. It is not unique to socialism.
I'm not complaining about anything, the original poster said socialism always fails because people are *forced* to participate in it. I was explaining that people are forced to live in *whatever* economy they are surrounded by, there's nothing unique about socialism that requires you to follow the rules or be punished.
You can work and use your wages to buy corn. You don't have to steal.
Yes, you can, but then you're participating in the capitalist economy. You're agreeing with the notion that somebody owns food they didn't make on land they didn't make, and that you should have to buy it from them simply because they stood next to it first and claimed ownership.
I really think there's a lot more nuance here...
Well, of course. There are no 100% capitalist societies or 100% socialist societies. I can't imagine any human group could function in either, they're abstract philosophies when reality demands a compromise of the two. That's why the 60/40, 40/60 societies believing one extreme or the other is right is so silly.
The society doesn't determine a person's beliefs.
Of course not, but it plays a role. It also determines which advantages, disadvantages, and nuances you see most clearly -- the ones you actually live with. Depending on what makes you happy, that will make you very strongly agree or disagree with your local system, or have an unrealistically rosy or negative view of the system you don't live in. I was only offering one example of a disagreement (the one I see most commonly here), obviously there are pro-socialists living in pro-capitalist societies and vice-versa. But they are all forced to participate or be branded as outlaws. That's the nature of societies on a populated planet, not an attribute of capitalism or socialism.
But I'd like to know what you mean by "punish" someone who goes outside the "system."
If you mean that people who won't pull their own weight get to live on welfare are being punished somehow... I'm not really sure I follow.
I offered the example of thieves and trespassers, both of which rely on the notion of private ownership without any inherent basis. Why should one person be allowed to say "this river is mine" or "this field is mine"? They didn't build it. It was there a thousand years before they were born, and will continue to be there a thousand years from their death. Why does a child inherit from parents? The child didn't make the money, the child didn't labor to build the company. If I go to a field and take corn, I am a thief -- but what option do I have if I am not participating in the capitalist agreement? All the land capable of growing corn has been fenced off by others as private property, even though the land and the corn existed before them.
All the places I could sleep, or hunt, or live are either private property or public property where you aren't allowed to do those things. If you try to do them, you'll be arrested. So even if I take naturally occurring food from a naturally occurring plant or animal, and sleep in an empty space, I'll still be breaking laws left and right.
We're ALL forced into participating in our economic system, regardless of whether it is capitalism or communism or something else. If we break the rules of the system we're in, we'll be punished.
Of course, you might mean a truly capitalistic society with no socialist restraints, but then I don't think you're going to find such a country. Still, those people who don't fit in are free to leave, unlike most communist countries.
I think you'll find it's just as easy to leave the socialistic democracies as it is to leave capitalistic democracies. Of course there aren't any truly capitalist countries, or truly socialist countries. That's why i think it's so funny that someone from a 60% capitalist/ 40% socialist country will come on here and talk about how evil socialism is, while someone from a 60% socialist/40% capitalist country argues just as strongly against capitalism.
You can't enforce mass participation without using force. Compulsory participation will invariably result in little more than the minimum output required to keep from getting shot.
But how is that any different than Capitalism, or any other system of economic distribution of scarce resources (including "might makes right")? Ultimately you get the majority of people to agree on a system and punish anyone who goes outside it. In a capitalist society, anyone who goes outside the market is called a thief/trespasser and jailed or shot.
There's certainly no inherent reason other than tradition and law that a person should "own" a plot of land, other than the fact that the owner can defend the land with force. Yet the ownership of capital is the most fundamental economic principle we have, based on nothing more than us all agreeing to let each other use force.
In any society, everyone will do the bare minimum that they have to in order to reach whatever level of happiness they consider acceptable. Perhaps capitalism is more efficient at meeting the needs of more people, or perhaps communism leads to fewer material desires in general. International happiness surveys certainly don't show that people in successful market economies are happier than those in successful socialist societies, even though they have dramatically more material wealth. Indeed, the USA has some of the least happy people on Earth precisely because we all feel like we don't have "enough", while most South Americans and Western Europeans, who own less, work less, produce less, and depend more on collective provisioning of services, are all much happier.
Perhaps the real lesson is that you can't make people happy living in a system that doesn't fulfill their needs. If you want material goods, then capitalism will be important to you, but that doesn't mean socialism is ineffective at providing happiness to people with different priorities.
You've basically reinvented Gray Component Replacement (GCR) and Under Color Removal (UCR), and they have nothing to do with hiding information. Replacing colors on the press in what is a theoretically neutral way is already done for many reasons.
You're also depending on a perfect press, which doesn't exist (there are no bits or pixels on paper) -- you can't really swap ink mixtures in and out transparently. There is always a bit of difference due solely to the density of ink, humidity, paper, etc, so there are aesthetic reasons for replacing inks on the press in one way or the other.
99% of the full-color printers on Earth are set up for 4 colors -- Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black. The Yellow plate is the one we're least visually sensitive to, which is why they're using it to put information on. Your desktop printer is 4-color, not RGB (although it does all the processing in RGB). Adding extra plates or colors to printers is a hugely expensive and complicated undertaking, nobody is going to do it just to add something that isn't even visible.
I think the problem with Amazon's deal isn't really any different than walking into a store, taking something to the cashier, having the cashier just put it in a bag and leaving without paying. Even if the cashier says "just go ahead and take it", that doesn't make it right.
I've had exactly this happen at the store, several times in my life and I suspect most others have as well. You bring something to the checkout, it doesn't scan, and doesn't have a price marked. Often they'll ask if I know what the price is, if I do, I tell them, if I don't, then they send someone to the shelves to find the price. They frequently just ring everything else up and throw the item in for free if the guy they sent hasn't come back with the price yet.
Why? Because the automated system THEY set up was causing ME an inconvenience by not working properly and causing problems with the transaction (as well as slowing down their ability to serve other customers). Sounds like exactly what Amazon had happen. They seem to want all the benefits of automation while accepting none of the responsibility for failures, which is quite unlike most other stores I've shopped at.
If Microsoft wants to really get serious about security, they have to get it through their heads that it's not about locking everything down and popping up prompt after prompt after prompt to the user. It's about being smart, letting the user do normal things without interference or interruption, and having the level of alerts match the danger of what's being done.
I realized a while ago that Vista UAC came out exactly the way they wanted it. The goal is not to increase security, it is to place the blame for security failures on the user. Increasing security is hard to do, it requires really working with users and systems in such a way as to understand what operations are common and necessary and which ones are unusual or delicate enough to NEED to have some sort of confirmation/authentication.
MS has taken the RTFM approach -- instead of making the system better, they just want to be able to say that the user screwed up when something goes wrong. They can't be blamed if you clicked a confirmation dialog, therefore more confirmation dialogs mean less blame for them when something goes wrong. It isn't Microsoft's poor security at fault if your users aren't experts at telling the useless confirmations from the really critical ones.
Are you also entitled to a refund of a movie ticket if you didn't enjoy it?
Most theaters I know of will refund your ticket price or give you a free pass if you have any problem with a movie, yes. They make the money off popcorn and soda, so keeping customers happy to return to that cinema (as long as they aren't being jerks about it like complaining every day to see a new movie) is more important to them than beefing attendance numbers from misleading advertising.
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I have no idea what communism has to do with anything I've said.
Indeed, Kyoto may be the wrong policy -- I have no idea, as I've never read it nor have I advocated it.
But the notion that there is simply no way we can address large-scale problems without economic ruin is simply silly -- we've gone through much more dramatic economic and technological revolutions than voluntarily switching energy sources gradually to clean/renewable ones would require. Energy is so intimately tied to some of the most volatile yet critical political and economic issues today that any significant shift towards independence and efficiency would have dramatic benefits outside the energy sector, letting us save hundreds of billions in military costs as well as lowering the risk on many investments. Lowering risk is usually a pretty fantastic way to increase profit for ANY market.
And the solution is not to allow American industry to return to child labor, it's to continue to eliminate child labor elsewhere. It's a short-term economic solution that sacrifices significantly greater long-term benefits, both economic and social. But stockholders don't have to worry about the global economy, or the literacy rate in Cambodia, or the economic potential of customers from that region in 40 years.
All we can do is artificially increase the short-term monetary cost of such poor decisions so that the non-monetary cost can be taken into account by the market.
My friends and I stayed up all night long for days on end playing Dune 2, it was certainly the *eureka* moment for the RTS genre that later dominated the entire game industry. Starcraft was the pinnacle of the genre, but Dune 2 was clearly the moment it all began.
Yes, a it's bit like Citizen Kane that way
i find this notion fascinating -- I can't think of any other situation in which funneling research and development into more efficient and automated technology has resulted in anything other than economic progress. The entire western world is built on replacing the cheap, easy and obvious method of doing things with expensive but vastly more scalable and efficient technology.
Outlawing child labor didn't result in an energy or manufacturing crisis, it resulted in a more educated society while causing all the industries that relied on child labor to invest in better tools that wound up being MORE effective and profitable.
All that environmental concerns accomplish is to change the economic incentives so that the market has the motivation to cover the startup costs of technologies we know will be more productive in the long run anyways. Building more efficient and cleaner power plants and vehicles is a great idea that we know will benefit all aspects of the economy and society. So why not make it profitable for the market to move to that stage sooner rather than later?
Why aren't modifications to data evenly distributed over the flash? That's much of the advancement in modern flash controllers, distributing those writes. Just because your metadata is initially written in the first chip doesn't mean the updates have to be written to that same chip. The controller can put it on whatever chip it fancies. We're not dealing with spinning disks and moving heads, there's no need to worry about the physical location of a sector to optimize data transfer.
The have limited cycles per sector, but the drives automagically allocate writes over the least-used sectors. In practice, a modern flash drive should have at least the same lifespan as a spinning disk if not longer.
True, but a lot more "things" get built than bridges, and most things don't require a PE. The software world has no reason to be different -- PEs could be required for some only segments or applications. You don't need an engineer to sign off on your homemade bookshelves, and you wouldn't need one to sign off on your shareware CD catalog program. But Red Hat and Microsoft might very well be expected to provide a certification that the kernel or cryptographic subsystem they provide are built to certain accepted development and code reviewing standards.
You don't have to take their word for it -- take the tests yourself. Or make your own, install ABX software and see if you can tell to any statistically significant consistency when you're listening to the original CD rip vs a 320kbps MP3. You'll be in a pretty small group if you can.
It's not like this is all being done in a dark room by a cabal somewhere. Put your ego where your mouth is -- lots of people "know" that they have to have the best possible quality, and then find out the hard way that they can't tell a 128kbps AAC from a DAT master when asked to prove it in a double-blind ABX test.
All the double-blind tests by audiophiles at Hydrogenaudio and other sites that due true ABX testing disagree with you. For most people, most of the time, with most types of music, pretty much every modern codec is transparent well below 256kbps.
Yes, people can train themselves to listen for the specific artifacts of different codecs, but if you're not an audio engineer, why would you want to?
Yeah, Drupal is the CMS for programmers who think that if HTML is easy, and PHP is flexible, then HTML+PHP put in a blender must be magnificent!
Because it can only fly when stabilised by the computer. Of course the flight systems and the navigation are totally separate, so having the location screwed up doesn't have any effect on the plane's ability to tell it is banking or flying straight and level.
They do have a limited read/write lifetime for each sector, BUT the controllers automatically distribute data over the least-used sectors (since there's no performance penalty to non-linear storage), and you wind up getting the maximum possible lifetime from well-built solid-state drives (assuming no other failures).
So in practice, the lifetime of modern solid state will be better than spinning disks as long as you aren't reading and writing every sector of the disk on a daily basis.
They called themselves socialist (because it was the cool thing at the time, much like China now call themselves a republic), but were fascist in their policies. The only "social" policies they advanced were ramping up industrial production, militarism, and trading on nationalist xenophobia to explain economic failures. There's nothing about workers owning the means of production, universal equality, elimination of the ruling class, or social services in any of the Nazi party's policies or actions.
They replaced democracy with totalitarianism, and it wasn't to provide universal health care or uniform wages.
And as I replied several messages upwards, there's no difference in being able to leave a modern democratic socialist state and a modern democratic capitalist state. Whether socialism inevitably leads to totalitarianism is obviously a good question, but there doesn't seem to be much evidence of it. All the major UNdemocratic communist states started out fairly authoritarian/totalitarian, they weren't democracies that were corrupted by socialism. The major corrupted democracy of the 20th century was a capitalist democracy -- Nazi Germany.
Yes, we as a society agree on all those principles of private property. Anyone who contradicts those agreements in their actions will be punished. That is true in whatever economic system you live under -- if you do not conform your actions to the agreed-upon structure, you will be punished. It is not unique to socialism.
I'm not complaining about anything, the original poster said socialism always fails because people are *forced* to participate in it. I was explaining that people are forced to live in *whatever* economy they are surrounded by, there's nothing unique about socialism that requires you to follow the rules or be punished.
Yes, you can, but then you're participating in the capitalist economy. You're agreeing with the notion that somebody owns food they didn't make on land they didn't make, and that you should have to buy it from them simply because they stood next to it first and claimed ownership.
Well, of course. There are no 100% capitalist societies or 100% socialist societies. I can't imagine any human group could function in either, they're abstract philosophies when reality demands a compromise of the two. That's why the 60/40, 40/60 societies believing one extreme or the other is right is so silly.
Of course not, but it plays a role. It also determines which advantages, disadvantages, and nuances you see most clearly -- the ones you actually live with. Depending on what makes you happy, that will make you very strongly agree or disagree with your local system, or have an unrealistically rosy or negative view of the system you don't live in. I was only offering one example of a disagreement (the one I see most commonly here), obviously there are pro-socialists living in pro-capitalist societies and vice-versa. But they are all forced to participate or be branded as outlaws. That's the nature of societies on a populated planet, not an attribute of capitalism or socialism.
Best answer ever :)
I offered the example of thieves and trespassers, both of which rely on the notion of private ownership without any inherent basis. Why should one person be allowed to say "this river is mine" or "this field is mine"? They didn't build it. It was there a thousand years before they were born, and will continue to be there a thousand years from their death. Why does a child inherit from parents? The child didn't make the money, the child didn't labor to build the company. If I go to a field and take corn, I am a thief -- but what option do I have if I am not participating in the capitalist agreement? All the land capable of growing corn has been fenced off by others as private property, even though the land and the corn existed before them.
All the places I could sleep, or hunt, or live are either private property or public property where you aren't allowed to do those things. If you try to do them, you'll be arrested. So even if I take naturally occurring food from a naturally occurring plant or animal, and sleep in an empty space, I'll still be breaking laws left and right.
We're ALL forced into participating in our economic system, regardless of whether it is capitalism or communism or something else. If we break the rules of the system we're in, we'll be punished.
I think you'll find it's just as easy to leave the socialistic democracies as it is to leave capitalistic democracies. Of course there aren't any truly capitalist countries, or truly socialist countries. That's why i think it's so funny that someone from a 60% capitalist/ 40% socialist country will come on here and talk about how evil socialism is, while someone from a 60% socialist/40% capitalist country argues just as strongly against capitalism.
But how is that any different than Capitalism, or any other system of economic distribution of scarce resources (including "might makes right")? Ultimately you get the majority of people to agree on a system and punish anyone who goes outside it. In a capitalist society, anyone who goes outside the market is called a thief/trespasser and jailed or shot.
There's certainly no inherent reason other than tradition and law that a person should "own" a plot of land, other than the fact that the owner can defend the land with force. Yet the ownership of capital is the most fundamental economic principle we have, based on nothing more than us all agreeing to let each other use force.
In any society, everyone will do the bare minimum that they have to in order to reach whatever level of happiness they consider acceptable. Perhaps capitalism is more efficient at meeting the needs of more people, or perhaps communism leads to fewer material desires in general. International happiness surveys certainly don't show that people in successful market economies are happier than those in successful socialist societies, even though they have dramatically more material wealth. Indeed, the USA has some of the least happy people on Earth precisely because we all feel like we don't have "enough", while most South Americans and Western Europeans, who own less, work less, produce less, and depend more on collective provisioning of services, are all much happier.
Perhaps the real lesson is that you can't make people happy living in a system that doesn't fulfill their needs. If you want material goods, then capitalism will be important to you, but that doesn't mean socialism is ineffective at providing happiness to people with different priorities.
You've basically reinvented Gray Component Replacement (GCR) and Under Color Removal (UCR), and they have nothing to do with hiding information. Replacing colors on the press in what is a theoretically neutral way is already done for many reasons.
You're also depending on a perfect press, which doesn't exist (there are no bits or pixels on paper) -- you can't really swap ink mixtures in and out transparently. There is always a bit of difference due solely to the density of ink, humidity, paper, etc, so there are aesthetic reasons for replacing inks on the press in one way or the other.
99% of the full-color printers on Earth are set up for 4 colors -- Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black. The Yellow plate is the one we're least visually sensitive to, which is why they're using it to put information on. Your desktop printer is 4-color, not RGB (although it does all the processing in RGB). Adding extra plates or colors to printers is a hugely expensive and complicated undertaking, nobody is going to do it just to add something that isn't even visible.
I've had exactly this happen at the store, several times in my life and I suspect most others have as well. You bring something to the checkout, it doesn't scan, and doesn't have a price marked. Often they'll ask if I know what the price is, if I do, I tell them, if I don't, then they send someone to the shelves to find the price. They frequently just ring everything else up and throw the item in for free if the guy they sent hasn't come back with the price yet.
Why? Because the automated system THEY set up was causing ME an inconvenience by not working properly and causing problems with the transaction (as well as slowing down their ability to serve other customers). Sounds like exactly what Amazon had happen. They seem to want all the benefits of automation while accepting none of the responsibility for failures, which is quite unlike most other stores I've shopped at.
I realized a while ago that Vista UAC came out exactly the way they wanted it. The goal is not to increase security, it is to place the blame for security failures on the user. Increasing security is hard to do, it requires really working with users and systems in such a way as to understand what operations are common and necessary and which ones are unusual or delicate enough to NEED to have some sort of confirmation/authentication.
MS has taken the RTFM approach -- instead of making the system better, they just want to be able to say that the user screwed up when something goes wrong. They can't be blamed if you clicked a confirmation dialog, therefore more confirmation dialogs mean less blame for them when something goes wrong. It isn't Microsoft's poor security at fault if your users aren't experts at telling the useless confirmations from the really critical ones.
Most theaters I know of will refund your ticket price or give you a free pass if you have any problem with a movie, yes. They make the money off popcorn and soda, so keeping customers happy to return to that cinema (as long as they aren't being jerks about it like complaining every day to see a new movie) is more important to them than beefing attendance numbers from misleading advertising.