"but that's not the same amount of effort... it's about the amount of time... even within a single task people can give differing amounts of effort... they are worth exactly the same?"
Time is the usual unit to measure effort put in. Most salaries are paid on time already.
"who gets to decide who is the best of the best? who gets first pick... the market is self ordering... your model requires someone with nearly perfect information to guide this process."
Not true. The one employing get to choose who he wants to employ. He just can't use salary as a carrot to influence the one he is going emply, because the salary is set.
"Some lives have more intrinsic value to society.... there's no way to equalize that."
And so people get treated as slaves until they rebel, and then it begins over again.
"The employment market? sometimes its a buyers market... sometimes it's a sellers market... it's always a sellers market if you're one of the best at something."
Hah, it will never again be a sellers market, except for a few lucky (best of something) people. If it were, we wouldn't have all these people working at poverty wages in the first place.
"I wouldn't have worked them if I was getting paid by the hour.. I was making an investment in my future... I want to stop "working" all together as soon as possible based on my success now.. I don't want to work an hourly wage until I die..."
But if you worked hundred hour per week you could have saved it and retired much earlier. Nothing different than now, except of course that you wouldn't be able to exploit the minimum wage salary people by getting a disproportionate high compensation for your effort.
"none of it will happen because it would never work and it's completely against human nature..."
Market economy isn't human nature. It is an economic theory, and for goods you wil find few people that disagree with it. For salaries however, an increasing amount of people are growing tired of the explotation of the upper class. With the increasing wage differences in the US, it is a disaster waiting to happen. Human nature is not liking those that get more than you do for the same effort.
"we exchange our labor and make investments with our time"
And what I described is the same. You invest time and get paid for it. You just don't get paid more for your time than anyone else.
Amount as in effort put in, not how skilled you are.
No, not harder, less popular. The adjusment for popularity should also be an exception and only used if it is impossible to find anyone that is interested in doing the job.
"You're trying to force equality on labor! Who gets to decide how much floor sweeping is worth in engine repairs or safety management at a nuclear power plant? Neither people nor jobs are created equal."
One hour of floor sweeping is worth the same as one hour of engine repairs. It is the effort that matters.
"who makes that call in your model? the employer? the gov? It's difficult to find good people for any job... it's high compensation that gets you the best of the best."
This is the most difficult part. This is where the inefficency compared to market economy is visible. Different salaries should be an exception though, and only if there is a real problem getting workers for a certain occupation. Competing for the best of the best should be done by better working environments and problems, instead of salaries. If you are the best of best, you can pick and choose any job in your profession, while someone who isn't as good will have to choose between what is left. And if there is a boring job, that needs the best workers you are out of luck.
"I should make what the market will accept for my skills..."
I disagree. I stand by the idea that each human life is equally worth. By using a market you directly leave that idea behind. I also don't place that much faith in markets where the seller and buyer are so obviously on unequal footing.
"spent 4 years in college and several years of hundred hour work weeks to get where I am today..."
And you should have gotten paid for those 4 years in college and all those hundred hour weeks, at the same hourly rate as someone how began working directly. If you are willing to work 100 hours, you should be paid for 100 hours. You will make 2.5 times the person who only works 40 hours per week.
"should he be paid the same as some guy flying in air shows who doesn't risk his life"
This is actually an interesting question. Since the pilot actually puts in something more than effort (he gambles his life), he should probably be paid a risk bonus. Risk bonuses exists in real life today, and I find it hard to motivate the removal of them.
Finally, before I leave this topic for good I would like to say that you can rest assured that you will never see any of this happening. The ruling classes (politicians and buisness leaders at this time) would never agree to have the same salary as anyone under them. It unfortunally seems to be human nature to peck on those below you in all ways possible.
Apple is leveraging its itune monopoly (or atleast extreme marketshare) to sell ipods, by using DRM. This is a clear example of "Vertical tying", and is illegal in many countries. The only thing in question is if Apples itune marketshare is big enough, and a quick internet search suggest that it is pretty big.
To reiterate:
Big enough marketshare in one market (legal downloadable music - itune) + is used to leverage sales of product in secondary market (music players - ipod) = Illegal
Who said anything about forcing equality on anyone. The thing under discussion is equal compensation for an equal amount of work. Something that is completly missing in todays society.
You would of course not be a fighter pilot, because someone else is better at it than you and would get the job. You should however have the same hourly salary as the fighter pilot. If it is difficult to find people qualified and willing to work in a certain occupation, that occupation could get higher salaries. What I am against however is the arbitary setting of salaries, based on the idea that those higher up in the hierarchy are worth more. It is feudal thinking and is most likely the biggest source of unrest in society.
Soviet Union was a command economy that use centralized planning to decided how much of each product to produce. This did indeed not work very well.
What needs to be recognized is that there is is to separate supply and demand areas is a society. There is supply and demand on labor, and there is supply and demand on products.
Very few people today would advocate, that using supply and demand on products is a bad thing. It is well proven that it provides a much more efficent society, where you don't have to line up to buy a toothbrush.
What the grand parent discussed was the idea to remove the supply and demand on labor. This would certainly result in a less efficent society, but the real question is how much less efficent it would be, and how much it would increase happiness due to less inequality.
Some adjustments on salary would probably have to be done based on how popular a job is, to get people to do the less popular jobs. As I mentioned in a another post, it would probably also be needed for the state to pay people to study.
I used the word probably a couple of times, because something like this has never been implemented in human history.
Personally, I am very much against using pure supply & demand for labor, while I am for using supply & demand for products. Does that make me a communist or a capitalist? I think the biggest problem in the world today is black & white thinking, and communism vs. capitalism is just one example.
I recognize the advantages of using supply & demand to distribute labor, but I feel that using it costs society too much in other ways. I am more for wages that are mostly based on amount of work done, with an adjustment for how popular the job is. Of course, in that kind of economy, studying would definitely have to be classified as a state paid job, or it wouldn't work.
This is of course an utopian vision, and how it would work in reality is impossible to know, because it has neven been implemented. It is just that todays increasingly capitalistic society is quickly moving away from the goal of an utopian society and I find that options needs to be explored. While reaching an utopian society may well be impossible, I feel that atleast trying to move towards one is imperative.
oops, my bad. I swear that I knew that. I must have just mixed them up when I began writing and the mixup stuck through my entire post. Thanks for posting the correction:)
That is indeed a beautiful scene. I think it was the first video game scene that made me cry.
The most emotional game I have ever played must be Kana, Little Sister (Review at http://forevergeek.com/articles/kana_little_sister .php/. It is a less well known game due to it being an adult (hentai) game, but it has an excellent and sad story that captivates the player.
The example I gave is a Visual Novel, which comes very close to being a book/movie. The same can be be said about cutscenes like in Wing Commander or Final Fantasy. There is however one big difference between watching a movie and playing a cutscene in a game. In a game, there is a much closer and personal relationship between the player and the antagonist. It is a relationship formed because the player is choosing the actions of antagonist. The antagonist's experience can actually become the player's experience.
This is of course very much dependent on the player. There are some people who never seem to get any closer than a third person view (like in books or movies), while other players actually take the role of the antagonist when playing. Most are probably somewhere inbetween. Even in pure fps games, it is possible to get this kind of emotional state. It is a matter convincing oneself that one actually is the character. It can raise the experience of a game with a captivating environment to a whole new level.
What I am looking forward to is search engines where I can choose to search specific types of pages, like forum discussions, blogs, news articles, product support pages, etc.
I also want search engines that ignores menus, or other things that aren't part of the main content of the page. Why should every page on slashdot be associated with Apple just because it appears in the sections menu?
Another thing that could use improving is the removing of pages with similar content. There is no need for there to be 50 wikipedia clone pages in the search results.
There are lots of useful improvements that could be done to current search engines, but adding useless gui features aren't one of them.
There only are three kinds of AIs: Cheating, Pattern and "Realistic"
Of those cheating AI is by far the worst. I hate playing car games that use rubber band AIs, or Civilization on harder difficulty levels where the enemy AI gets everything cheaper.
Realistic AI is the most difficult to program and is most useful in 1vs1 or other even situtation. Quake/UT bots are good examples for these. The most difficult things is to create realistic AI that doesn't exploit the characteristics of computers (like perfect aim). It is also difficult to create realistic AI that varies its play.
Pattern AIs are best in situations where the computer has larger strength (boss) or numbers (minions). It is meant to be outsmarted by figuring out its patterns. The most difficult part in writing this kind of AI is that it is difficult to come up with interesting patterns that won't make the human player bored. The best examples I can think of is Serious Sam (very simple patterns that became interesting when combined in different ways) and Halflife.
This should be possible with the current opera. I'll describe how to add a shortcut key that launches the current webpage in internet explorer. If you want to add it to a gui element (like the right click menu) you will probably have to edit an ini file. Anyway, here is how to add it as a keyboard shortcut, step by step.
* Goto Tools->Preferences->Advanced->Shortcuts. * (Optional) Duplicate the current keyboard setup using the duplicate button. * Edit the keyboard setup you want to change. * Select the "application" entry in the list that appears and click the "New" Button * Enter the keyboard shortcut to the left. For example: i ctrl shift alt * To the right enter the following: Execute program, "iexplore.exe", "%u"
Now, whenever you click ctrl+shift+alt+i, internet explorer should launch using the current url as an argument.
The last is definatly NOT the bottleneck in internet traffic. The only last mile bottleneck that exists is the artificial caps on upload speeds that is there to prevent consumers from being producers.
The real bottlneck is the lines between the ISPs, and that bottleneck is mostly artifical constructed to keep bandwidth more expensive and valuable. Bittorrent clients will by nature prefer other clients within the same ISP because they can get good speed from them, and will therefore reduce the stress on those lines.
While bittorrent doesn't optimize by geographical areas automatically, it does so indirectly because clients will trade with those that give them the best speeds which often will be those nearby.
It would of course also be possible (and pretty simple) to write a tracker that tries to group clients primarly by their geographical location.
Doing what the boss above tells you and never question it. Accepting that everything that the boss/media tells you is the right thing. Knowing that your place in life is to earn as much money as possible by any means so you can spend it on shiny things. Realizing that anyone not confirming with these rules are evil or misguided. Understand implicitly that the world revolves around those that tell you what to do.
Unfortunally, what I wrote is only half a joke. Too often maturity is seen as becoming a cog in society and do/think what others tell you.
I love that Hitchhiker's Guide quote. It perfectly demonstrates the problem of using a system where only those that get the majority gets elected positions.
You get a state that is neither a Democracy (because it doesn't represent the people evenly) nor a Republic (because the people voted on doesn't get voted on to represent the voters, but instead to keep another person from getting voted on). Instead, the final result is an Aristocracy/Plutocracy, and if there is one thing history has taught us, it is that aristocracts never care about the common man.
Look at the pirate party in Sweden. To get political influence in Sweden they have to get 4% of the total votes. A pirate party candidate in the US would need to get somewhere between 33-50% (assuming a three person race) of the votes to get elected. While these votes only need to be from a limited region of the US, it doesn't change the fact that it is a very high percentage. It becomes even more difficult, considering the ease that it is to convince someone that voting on a third party is a "lost" vote.
There is of course also flaws in the proportional election system. A small party with only 4-5% of the votes can with luck get into a high influence position where its votes decides the outcome. This influence is however limited, because if the small party is to greedy, it will end up with nothing when the bigger parties compromises instead.
I know it is a joke, but I just felt like responding to it because lots of people seem to have trouble grasping the concept inifinity.
Just because there is an infinite number of universes, doesn't mean that every possible variant of the universe exists. There is for example an infinite number of even numbers. 5 is however not among those.
Another interesting property of infinity is that there exists as many even numbers as there does whole number. This is easily verified by the formula f(x) = 2*x. For every whole number you can find a matching even number. Therefore there is the same amount of both.
So the next time you hear infinity + 1, rest assured that the result is the exact same infinity.
A big part of it is the result of the "Elite" mindset where the common citizen is seen as stupid and needs someone smarter and more intelligent to decide for him. The most common argument used to support this theory is "The tragedy of the commons"
Instead you get the opposite, "The tragedy of the wealthy", where all those not rich gets hurt by the decisions of the few rich in power.
RIAA/MIAA isn't losing $250 billion every year. The real truth is that society is gaining $250 billion/year because of file sharing. In other words, filesharing is very good for society. Without it, society would be a lot poorer.
The Supreme Court is indeed a good example of an insstitution that actually can remove laws. It is however not what I am looking for. The Supreme Court isn't elected and can only challenge laws based on constituional grounds. Removing laws is also not its primary purpose. Judging on the interpetation of laws is. It is also passive, meaning that it doesn't have any say on laws that doesn't pass before its eyes.
What is needed is something that activly searches through legislation and wants to remove it. That would include civil and economic legislation as well. Such a thing would of course never be allowed to exist, because pork barrel projects and other "scratch my back" legislation is too profitable for those involved.
It won't help if more people vote. The ones that get voted on never represents the voters, except for a couple of key issues that may differ from election to election. Someone who has never been unemployed can never represent the unemployed. Someone who is rich can't accurately represent the poor. I think the only solution is random democracy. Ever election a big lottery is held. Those that win gets elected. (Note: Using lottery to determine the president may not work that well, because 1 person isn't enough to create a statistical distribution)
For those that argue that it would be bad to get dumb people elected and that they would do a worse job, I beg to differ. Most people will vote in what they think is their own interest. This doesn't differ between the smart and dumb or rich and poor. Just look at the elected people today. They vote in their own interest. Their interest just don't coincide with the interest of those that elect them. By using random elections, you get a more accurate representation of the interests of the people.
Bloated law systems is a side effect of todays goverment systems, and is in no way specific to the US. In many ways it is very much the same as code bloat. Programmers get paid to write code. Politicians get paid to create laws. In both cases, the result is a bloated and bug filled mess.
I can think of two ways to resolve bloat. The first is to to do a complete code rewrite. In political terms that is called a revolution, and really isn't a very pleasent solution. It takes lots of time before the new system is up and running, and while the new system may run smoother, the real flaw hasn't be corrected. The new system will also become bloated in time.
The second solution is to divert manpower to remove the bloated parts and fix existing problems. In political terms, that would probably imply that you would have to have two seperate legislative parts. One that create laws, and another that removes laws.
C# has operator overloading (Some operators like the equal sign are of limits), as well as Unions (Although you need to use C#2.0 and have the code marked as unsafe to be able overlay arrays. For mor information search for StructLayout.Explicit).
I am not that well versed in C++, so I am hesitating on the meaning of globals. If you are talking about global variables, static variables are reasonably equivalent. C# don't have default parameters by purpose. This is compared with VB.Net that does have them. Someone else also mentioned passing by reference. C# supports that with the ref keyword.
Generics in C# and Java are much less flexible than templates in c++. From my experience, the C# and Java developers are very causious when it comes to implementing anything that can construed as macros. I would say that the biggest lack in both C# and Java is multiple inheritence. Both VM engines decided to go with single inheritence, supplemented by interfaces. The C++ const keyword is another thing missing.
Also, the C#2.0 runtime is 23 mb, not 300 mb (unless you are downloading the complete development kit, which only the developer should do)
The biggest problem I have seen with VM languages are bloated and slow GUI. I have written enough Console/Non gui applications in C# to know that performance rarely is an issue. The biggest speed ups that can't be done in C# comes from using SSE and other machine specific code. The C# compilers on the market could provide more optimization though. The Microsoft C# compiler (or maybe it is the VM), is in my opinion quite bad at optimizing nested loops with arrays.
I am personally using pdfcreator. It installs as a printer and when I print to it, it pops up a dialog that ask me where I want to save the file. I think it internally prints to ps first, but as a user it is nice not having to call ps2pdf manually. There are other printer drivers that do the same, but I prefer to use an open source one.
Slashdot Mirror
"but that's not the same amount of effort... it's about the amount of time... even within a single task people can give differing amounts of effort... they are worth exactly the same?"
Time is the usual unit to measure effort put in. Most salaries are paid on time already.
"who gets to decide who is the best of the best? who gets first pick... the market is self ordering... your model requires someone with nearly perfect information to guide this process."
Not true. The one employing get to choose who he wants to employ. He just can't use salary as a carrot to influence the one he is going emply, because the salary is set.
"Some lives have more intrinsic value to society.... there's no way to equalize that."
And so people get treated as slaves until they rebel, and then it begins over again.
"The employment market? sometimes its a buyers market... sometimes it's a sellers market... it's always a sellers market if you're one of the best at something."
Hah, it will never again be a sellers market, except for a few lucky (best of something) people. If it were, we wouldn't have all these people working at poverty wages in the first place.
"I wouldn't have worked them if I was getting paid by the hour.. I was making an investment in my future... I want to stop "working" all together as soon as possible based on my success now.. I don't want to work an hourly wage until I die..."
But if you worked hundred hour per week you could have saved it and retired much earlier. Nothing different than now, except of course that you wouldn't be able to exploit the minimum wage salary people by getting a disproportionate high compensation for your effort.
"none of it will happen because it would never work and it's completely against human nature..."
Market economy isn't human nature. It is an economic theory, and for goods you wil find few people that disagree with it. For salaries however, an increasing amount of people are growing tired of the explotation of the upper class. With the increasing wage differences in the US, it is a disaster waiting to happen. Human nature is not liking those that get more than you do for the same effort.
"we exchange our labor and make investments with our time"
And what I described is the same. You invest time and get paid for it. You just don't get paid more for your time than anyone else.
Amount as in effort put in, not how skilled you are.
No, not harder, less popular. The adjusment for popularity should also be an exception and only used if it is impossible to find anyone that is interested in doing the job.
I don't think we agree.
"You're trying to force equality on labor! Who gets to decide how much floor sweeping is worth in engine repairs or safety management at a nuclear power plant? Neither people nor jobs are created equal."
One hour of floor sweeping is worth the same as one hour of engine repairs. It is the effort that matters.
"who makes that call in your model? the employer? the gov? It's difficult to find good people for any job... it's high compensation that gets you the best of the best."
This is the most difficult part. This is where the inefficency compared to market economy is visible. Different salaries should be an exception though, and only if there is a real problem getting workers for a certain occupation. Competing for the best of the best should be done by better working environments and problems, instead of salaries. If you are the best of best, you can pick and choose any job in your profession, while someone who isn't as good will have to choose between what is left. And if there is a boring job, that needs the best workers you are out of luck.
"I should make what the market will accept for my skills..."
I disagree. I stand by the idea that each human life is equally worth. By using a market you directly leave that idea behind. I also don't place that much faith in markets where the seller and buyer are so obviously on unequal footing.
"spent 4 years in college and several years of hundred hour work weeks to get where I am today..."
And you should have gotten paid for those 4 years in college and all those hundred hour weeks, at the same hourly rate as someone how began working directly. If you are willing to work 100 hours, you should be paid for 100 hours. You will make 2.5 times the person who only works 40 hours per week.
"should he be paid the same as some guy flying in air shows who doesn't risk his life"
This is actually an interesting question. Since the pilot actually puts in something more than effort (he gambles his life), he should probably be paid a risk bonus. Risk bonuses exists in real life today, and I find it hard to motivate the removal of them.
Finally, before I leave this topic for good I would like to say that you can rest assured that you will never see any of this happening. The ruling classes (politicians and buisness leaders at this time) would never agree to have the same salary as anyone under them. It unfortunally seems to be human nature to peck on those below you in all ways possible.
Apple is leveraging its itune monopoly (or atleast extreme marketshare) to sell ipods, by using DRM. This is a clear example of "Vertical tying", and is illegal in many countries. The only thing in question is if Apples itune marketshare is big enough, and a quick internet search suggest that it is pretty big.
To reiterate:
Big enough marketshare in one market (legal downloadable music - itune)
+
is used to leverage sales of product in secondary market (music players - ipod)
=
Illegal
Who said anything about forcing equality on anyone. The thing under discussion is equal compensation for an equal amount of work. Something that is completly missing in todays society.
You would of course not be a fighter pilot, because someone else is better at it than you and would get the job. You should however have the same hourly salary as the fighter pilot. If it is difficult to find people qualified and willing to work in a certain occupation, that occupation could get higher salaries. What I am against however is the arbitary setting of salaries, based on the idea that those higher up in the hierarchy are worth more. It is feudal thinking and is most likely the biggest source of unrest in society.
Soviet Union was a command economy that use centralized planning to decided how much of each product to produce. This did indeed not work very well.
What needs to be recognized is that there is is to separate supply and demand areas is a society. There is supply and demand on labor, and there is supply and demand on products.
Very few people today would advocate, that using supply and demand on products is a bad thing. It is well proven that it provides a much more efficent society, where you don't have to line up to buy a toothbrush.
What the grand parent discussed was the idea to remove the supply and demand on labor. This would certainly result in a less efficent society, but the real question is how much less efficent it would be, and how much it would increase happiness due to less inequality.
Some adjustments on salary would probably have to be done based on how popular a job is, to get people to do the less popular jobs. As I mentioned in a another post, it would probably also be needed for the state to pay people to study.
I used the word probably a couple of times, because something like this has never been implemented in human history.
Personally, I am very much against using pure supply & demand for labor, while I am for using supply & demand for products. Does that make me a communist or a capitalist? I think the biggest problem in the world today is black & white thinking, and communism vs. capitalism is just one example.
I recognize the advantages of using supply & demand to distribute labor, but I feel that using it costs society too much in other ways. I am more for wages that are mostly based on amount of work done, with an adjustment for how popular the job is. Of course, in that kind of economy, studying would definitely have to be classified as a state paid job, or it wouldn't work.
This is of course an utopian vision, and how it would work in reality is impossible to know, because it has neven been implemented. It is just that todays increasingly capitalistic society is quickly moving away from the goal of an utopian society and I find that options needs to be explored. While reaching an utopian society may well be impossible, I feel that atleast trying to move towards one is imperative.
oops, my bad. I swear that I knew that. I must have just mixed them up when I began writing and the mixup stuck through my entire post. Thanks for posting the correction :)
That is indeed a beautiful scene. I think it was the first video game scene that made me cry.
r .php/. It is a less well known game due to it being an adult (hentai) game, but it has an excellent and sad story that captivates the player.
The most emotional game I have ever played must be Kana, Little Sister (Review at http://forevergeek.com/articles/kana_little_siste
The example I gave is a Visual Novel, which comes very close to being a book/movie. The same can be be said about cutscenes like in Wing Commander or Final Fantasy. There is however one big difference between watching a movie and playing a cutscene in a game. In a game, there is a much closer and personal relationship between the player and the antagonist. It is a relationship formed because the player is choosing the actions of antagonist. The antagonist's experience can actually become the player's experience.
This is of course very much dependent on the player. There are some people who never seem to get any closer than a third person view (like in books or movies), while other players actually take the role of the antagonist when playing. Most are probably somewhere inbetween. Even in pure fps games, it is possible to get this kind of emotional state. It is a matter convincing oneself that one actually is the character. It can raise the experience of a game with a captivating environment to a whole new level.
What I am looking forward to is search engines where I can choose to search specific types of pages, like forum discussions, blogs, news articles, product support pages, etc.
I also want search engines that ignores menus, or other things that aren't part of the main content of the page. Why should every page on slashdot be associated with Apple just because it appears in the sections menu?
Another thing that could use improving is the removing of pages with similar content. There is no need for there to be 50 wikipedia clone pages in the search results.
There are lots of useful improvements that could be done to current search engines, but adding useless gui features aren't one of them.
There only are three kinds of AIs: Cheating, Pattern and "Realistic"
Of those cheating AI is by far the worst. I hate playing car games that use rubber band AIs, or Civilization on harder difficulty levels where the enemy AI gets everything cheaper.
Realistic AI is the most difficult to program and is most useful in 1vs1 or other even situtation. Quake/UT bots are good examples for these. The most difficult things is to create realistic AI that doesn't exploit the characteristics of computers (like perfect aim). It is also difficult to create realistic AI that varies its play.
Pattern AIs are best in situations where the computer has larger strength (boss) or numbers (minions). It is meant to be outsmarted by figuring out its patterns. The most difficult part in writing this kind of AI is that it is difficult to come up with interesting patterns that won't make the human player bored. The best examples I can think of is Serious Sam (very simple patterns that became interesting when combined in different ways) and Halflife.
This should be possible with the current opera. I'll describe how to add a shortcut key that launches the current webpage in internet explorer. If you want to add it to a gui element (like the right click menu) you will probably have to edit an ini file. Anyway, here is how to add it as a keyboard shortcut, step by step.
* Goto Tools->Preferences->Advanced->Shortcuts.
* (Optional) Duplicate the current keyboard setup using the duplicate button.
* Edit the keyboard setup you want to change.
* Select the "application" entry in the list that appears and click the "New" Button
* Enter the keyboard shortcut to the left. For example: i ctrl shift alt
* To the right enter the following: Execute program, "iexplore.exe", "%u"
Now, whenever you click ctrl+shift+alt+i, internet explorer should launch using the current url as an argument.
The last is definatly NOT the bottleneck in internet traffic. The only last mile bottleneck that exists is the artificial caps on upload speeds that is there to prevent consumers from being producers.
The real bottlneck is the lines between the ISPs, and that bottleneck is mostly artifical constructed to keep bandwidth more expensive and valuable. Bittorrent clients will by nature prefer other clients within the same ISP because they can get good speed from them, and will therefore reduce the stress on those lines.
While bittorrent doesn't optimize by geographical areas automatically, it does so indirectly because clients will trade with those that give them the best speeds which often will be those nearby.
It would of course also be possible (and pretty simple) to write a tracker that tries to group clients primarly by their geographical location.
And here is society's definition of Adulthood
Doing what the boss above tells you and never question it.
Accepting that everything that the boss/media tells you is the right thing.
Knowing that your place in life is to earn as much money as possible by any means so you can spend it on shiny things.
Realizing that anyone not confirming with these rules are evil or misguided.
Understand implicitly that the world revolves around those that tell you what to do.
Unfortunally, what I wrote is only half a joke. Too often maturity is seen as becoming a cog in society and do/think what others tell you.
I love that Hitchhiker's Guide quote. It perfectly demonstrates the problem of using a system where only those that get the majority gets elected positions.
You get a state that is neither a Democracy (because it doesn't represent the people evenly) nor a Republic (because the people voted on doesn't get voted on to represent the voters, but instead to keep another person from getting voted on). Instead, the final result is an Aristocracy/Plutocracy, and if there is one thing history has taught us, it is that aristocracts never care about the common man.
Look at the pirate party in Sweden. To get political influence in Sweden they have to get 4% of the total votes.
A pirate party candidate in the US would need to get somewhere between 33-50% (assuming a three person race) of the votes to get elected. While these votes only need to be from a limited region of the US, it doesn't change the fact that it is a very high percentage. It becomes even more difficult, considering the ease that it is to convince someone that voting on a third party is a "lost" vote.
There is of course also flaws in the proportional election system. A small party with only 4-5% of the votes can with luck get into a high influence position where its votes decides the outcome. This influence is however limited, because if the small party is to greedy, it will end up with nothing when the bigger parties compromises instead.
I know it is a joke, but I just felt like responding to it because lots of people seem to have trouble grasping the concept inifinity.
Just because there is an infinite number of universes, doesn't mean that every possible variant of the universe exists. There is for example an infinite number of even numbers. 5 is however not among those.
Another interesting property of infinity is that there exists as many even numbers as there does whole number. This is easily verified by the formula f(x) = 2*x. For every whole number you can find a matching even number. Therefore there is the same amount of both.
So the next time you hear infinity + 1, rest assured that the result is the exact same infinity.
the same could be said about "pro-lifers". They seem to be pro quantity of life, but against quality of life.
A big part of it is the result of the "Elite" mindset where the common citizen is seen as stupid and needs someone smarter and more intelligent to decide for him. The most common argument used to support this theory is "The tragedy of the commons"
Instead you get the opposite, "The tragedy of the wealthy", where all those not rich gets hurt by the decisions of the few rich in power.
RIAA/MIAA isn't losing $250 billion every year. The real truth is that society is gaining $250 billion/year because of file sharing. In other words, filesharing is very good for society. Without it, society would be a lot poorer.
The Supreme Court is indeed a good example of an insstitution that actually can remove laws. It is however not what I am looking for. The Supreme Court isn't elected and can only challenge laws based on constituional grounds. Removing laws is also not its primary purpose. Judging on the interpetation of laws is. It is also passive, meaning that it doesn't have any say on laws that doesn't pass before its eyes.
What is needed is something that activly searches through legislation and wants to remove it. That would include civil and economic legislation as well. Such a thing would of course never be allowed to exist, because pork barrel projects and other "scratch my back" legislation is too profitable for those involved.
It won't help if more people vote. The ones that get voted on never represents the voters, except for a couple of key issues that may differ from election to election. Someone who has never been unemployed can never represent the unemployed. Someone who is rich can't accurately represent the poor. I think the only solution is random democracy. Ever election a big lottery is held. Those that win gets elected. (Note: Using lottery to determine the president may not work that well, because 1 person isn't enough to create a statistical distribution)
For those that argue that it would be bad to get dumb people elected and that they would do a worse job, I beg to differ. Most people will vote in what they think is their own interest. This doesn't differ between the smart and dumb or rich and poor. Just look at the elected people today. They vote in their own interest. Their interest just don't coincide with the interest of those that elect them. By using random elections, you get a more accurate representation of the interests of the people.
Bloated law systems is a side effect of todays goverment systems, and is in no way specific to the US. In many ways it is very much the same as code bloat. Programmers get paid to write code. Politicians get paid to create laws. In both cases, the result is a bloated and bug filled mess.
I can think of two ways to resolve bloat. The first is to to do a complete code rewrite. In political terms that is called a revolution, and really isn't a very pleasent solution. It takes lots of time before the new system is up and running, and while the new system may run smoother, the real flaw hasn't be corrected. The new system will also become bloated in time.
The second solution is to divert manpower to remove the bloated parts and fix existing problems. In political terms, that would probably imply that you would have to have two seperate legislative parts. One that create laws, and another that removes laws.
C# has operator overloading (Some operators like the equal sign are of limits), as well as Unions (Although you need to use C#2.0 and have the code marked as unsafe to be able overlay arrays. For mor information search for StructLayout.Explicit).
I am not that well versed in C++, so I am hesitating on the meaning of globals. If you are talking about global variables, static variables are reasonably equivalent. C# don't have default parameters by purpose. This is compared with VB.Net that does have them. Someone else also mentioned passing by reference. C# supports that with the ref keyword.
Generics in C# and Java are much less flexible than templates in c++. From my experience, the C# and Java developers are very causious when it comes to implementing anything that can construed as macros. I would say that the biggest lack in both C# and Java is multiple inheritence. Both VM engines decided to go with single inheritence, supplemented by interfaces. The C++ const keyword is another thing missing.
Also, the C#2.0 runtime is 23 mb, not 300 mb (unless you are downloading the complete development kit, which only the developer should do)
The biggest problem I have seen with VM languages are bloated and slow GUI. I have written enough Console/Non gui applications in C# to know that performance rarely is an issue. The biggest speed ups that can't be done in C# comes from using SSE and other machine specific code. The C# compilers on the market could provide more optimization though. The Microsoft C# compiler (or maybe it is the VM), is in my opinion quite bad at optimizing nested loops with arrays.
I am personally using pdfcreator. It installs as a printer and when I print to it, it pops up a dialog that ask me where I want to save the file. I think it internally prints to ps first, but as a user it is nice not having to call ps2pdf manually. There are other printer drivers that do the same, but I prefer to use an open source one.