"Public.Net would provide an icon, visible on your home computer. You would be under no obligation to click on it; indeed in a free society perhaps you should be permitted to remove the icon if you really do not like it."
Except when Microsoft does it, it's "anti-competitive."
That said, the people trashing Bush's plan seem to have no knowledge of economics. First of all, really rich (and even some moderately rich) people will be unaffected by the plan. They already dodge estate and income taxes through tax loopholes and offshore investments, etc.
Quite right. The billionaires in the article probably oppose the estate tax cut because it would make the middle class significantly more wealthy and make their billions less noteworthy.
Also, give me a break. A $1.6 trillion tax cut over 10 years is practically nothing. $160 billion a year ? The government's yearly budget is a few trillion dollars. The tax cut is a couple percentage points.. a drop in the bucket.
While this essay doesn't lay out how this market might work in practice...
One of the principle features of the free market is that the results will be wholly unpredictable. If you could anticipate how such a system would work, then it's actually an argument against the free market system. Dispose of the millions of different experiements you see in the free market and central plan it.
Of course the idea is that no _one_ person can discover the best solution to these (and lots of other) problems. But the free market will discover one or several that will stick.
One solution that only occured to me after reading slashdot today has been in use for years: The use of discount cards that people have to sign up for. Many people (including myself) are willing to offer information on their purchase habits for 5-10% off..
This is an endemic problem with working in the government sector. It is nearly impossible to fire anyone, and management has their hands tied regarding compensating their staff: They simply are not allowed, in general, to lower the salaries of those who don't pull their own weight, and they cannot compensate their outstanding workers adequately. In the end everyone gets paid (roughly) the same regardless of job content and performance. Furthermore, unlike in industry where a poor manager can get axed if his or her team doesn't perform, government agencies often have few reliable metrics by which to determine whether a team and a manager are doing their jobs
Another problem is that government bureaucracy tends to reward failure. If the situation isn't improving, obviously there's not enough money being thrown at the problem. For instance: the drug war, the DEA keeps getting bigger and bigger. Government education is another, the department of education keeps growing.
If I'm near the top of one of these big bureaucracies, and I get more money to play with, more people to boss around, and generally more power when the situation gets worse... What kind of incentive is that ? Say I'm in the DEA, if the drug problem went away, I would be out of a job! Job security is supposed to be a perk here, isn't it ?;)
Amazes me that we can discuss the differences between communist China and practically libertarian Hong Kong without acknowledging the fact that Hong Kong has had so much economic growth because of it's free market economy.
It's refreshing to see how wealthy a society can be without interference from the government.
IMO this shouldn't be considered hired work...it's more similar to a temporary "you scratch my back, i'll scratch your" agreement, and as long as both parties involved are satisfied, no intervention should be necessary....
If that's true, why do we have a minimum wage law to begin with? If someone is willing to work for $2, why should the government tell them that they can't?
If you still think that there should be a minimum wage law, then why doesn't it apply to volunteerism? What's the difference between being willing to work for $2 and being willing to work for $0 and some perks ?
One thing that would be really nice is if you could run more than one Java app in a VM, but right now you pretty much have to load one VM per application. It wouldn't be very hard to work up a solution to that problem, but no-one has done so yet...
This is very easy, I could write a class that would do this in about 10 minutes.
You need a Launcher class, something that spawns a new thread for each application you want to run, and simply calls the main method of the specified Java class in it's run method. It could be as simple as a little AWT text field and a "launch" button.
Poked around with this thing for an hour or so. Seems like if you just start enumerating all the pairs of prime numbers and sum them up you construct all the even numbers. That won't float by itself though, cause the primes logarithmically taper out as you go...
It's only 8 pages, and it seems pretty decent. I followed it till about page 4, and then I saw those capital pi product symbols and decided to run away.
If my cable company spent $100 million laying cables in my state so that I can have 1.5 MBit for $40/month, why should we (cable company and I) get penalized and have Joe company who spent $0 laying cable and other infrastructure have access to our bandwith?
Oh, it only hurts that big conglomerate company. They don't deserve their "cable monopoly"
It hurts all of us. With open access there the incentive to provide high bandwidth solutions to your doorstep drop to near zero.
Instead of attacking those wonderful cable and phone companies for providing us cable modems and DSL, we should be thanking them for freeing us from the world of 56.6
Suppose that you've got a few big industrial nations that import raw materials from smaller, poorer countries. They take those materials and turn them into much more expensive goods. This way, they get lots of profit. The poor countries are stuck selling their cheap raw materials and importing expensive manufactured goods (created with the same materials they sold.) Thus they don't make enough money to start industrializing themselves, and it becomes a cycle.
The WTO is supposed to let the poor countries impose high tariffs on the manufactured goods from foreign nations. This way demand will be created for domestic industry to produce cheaper goods. With demand comes capital, and with capital comes industry. With industry comes being able to compete in the global marketplace.
You're economics here seem a little strange. Tariff's don't increase demand, they increase the price of goods. If steal comes out of a county, and could have come back as a $6,000 car, a $2,000 tariff will dive the price up, and thereby decrease demand. I'm not sure how you think otherwise. Therefore a tariff would have the effect of moving money from the people producing the raw materials to the government of the country. No different from any other tax really.
Tariffs are only ever a good deal for politicans and privleged industries who can sway those politicians.
When I first started reading this article, I thought that the French government was going to make it illegal to write closed source code. Only after hitting some of the posts did I understand that their government is thinking of using open source whereever possible.
The latter is a great idea, in general. While the former would have pretty terrible consequences.
Richard Gabriel:...Next week we will be deciding the democratic principles and processes by which all changes to Jini are made. (We don't use the Java Community Process)
Torvalds is a philosopher-king, let's say. Do you prefer that to a democracy?
Design by committee is a terrible way to go about working on a software product. The architecture would start looking like Frankenstein's monster.
It is in fact a key piece of open source projects that they have one person, or a small group of people at the core of the project, guiding the design and deciding which patches are integrated from the community.
I guess the thing about commentators discussing SCSL is that they usually don't check the facts, philosophy, etc., or talk to the principals. I suppose that's a problem that Sun needs to solve through publishing, and we're working on it.
Money is simply a way of fairly assigning value to the work one does, or the products one produces.
Also, money has been in electronic form for a long time, making it easy to throw around on the net. If you start bartering, you'll have to ship things to people, etc. Very uninternet like.
Of course, you could simply barter services. But the whole problem with assigning value to the code someone produces, is that it's difficult to determine whether a small amount of code has any value, or that a particular coders efforts will be worthwhile after all. This is, of course, one of the reaons why we have the open source model...
We have a linux router hooked up to Mediaone's cable modem service. Of course, they don't support linux. But they don't stop us from using it either.
Whenever I call up there tech support when I think the problem is on their end, I act as a Windows - Linux Translation layer:
Tech support guy: "Does your winipcfg box have all zeroes in it?" Windows-Me: "Not getting DHCP OFFER" Linux-Me: "Hmm, checking.... Nope, no offer message." Real-Me: "Yes, all zeroes. Give me an IP, damnit:)"
Some of the ideas suggested here, like only supporting certain communications protocols seems inpractical, unfortunatly. Tech support has to be able to reliably walk the _average_ user through a series of steps which will reliably fix the problem. Otherwise support costs spiral up.
I know, i know, linux users aren't average users. But, well damnit, we want linux on the desktop don't we?
Far too often you will see the government pondering how to improve governement education. And it amazes me that they always miss the simple connection that providing higher salaries to teachers would bring up the quality of teachers in the schools.
Instead they throw around meaningless policies like teacher testing, student testing etc. Ugh.
It pleases me that/. is approaching the question from the right angle.
Slashdot Mirror
Except when Microsoft does it, it's "anti-competitive."
-Snoot
Quite right. The billionaires in the article probably oppose the estate tax cut because it would make the middle class significantly more wealthy and make their billions less noteworthy.
Also, give me a break. A $1.6 trillion tax cut over 10 years is practically nothing. $160 billion a year ? The government's yearly budget is a few trillion dollars. The tax cut is a couple percentage points.. a drop in the bucket.
-Snoot
One of the principle features of the free market is that the results will be wholly unpredictable. If you could anticipate how such a system would work, then it's actually an argument against the free market system. Dispose of the millions of different experiements you see in the free market and central plan it.
Of course the idea is that no _one_ person can discover the best solution to these (and lots of other) problems. But the free market will discover one or several that will stick.
One solution that only occured to me after reading slashdot today has been in use for years: The use of discount cards that people have to sign up for. Many people (including myself) are willing to offer information on their purchase habits for 5-10% off..
-Snoot
This is an endemic problem with working in the government sector. It is nearly impossible to fire anyone, and management has their hands tied regarding compensating their staff: They simply are not allowed, in general, to lower the salaries of those who don't pull their own weight, and they cannot compensate their outstanding workers adequately. In the end everyone gets paid (roughly) the same regardless of job content and performance. Furthermore, unlike in industry where a poor manager can get axed if his or her team doesn't perform, government agencies often have few reliable metrics by which to determine whether a team and a manager are doing their jobs
Another problem is that government bureaucracy tends to reward failure. If the situation isn't improving, obviously there's not enough money being thrown at the problem. For instance: the drug war, the DEA keeps getting bigger and bigger. Government education is another, the department of education keeps growing.
If I'm near the top of one of these big bureaucracies, and I get more money to play with, more people to boss around, and generally more power when the situation gets worse... What kind of incentive is that ? Say I'm in the DEA, if the drug problem went away, I would be out of a job! Job security is supposed to be a perk here, isn't it ? ;)
-Snoot
Experienced Users use AOL ???
-Snoot
Amazes me that we can discuss the differences between communist China and practically libertarian Hong Kong without acknowledging the fact that Hong Kong has had so much economic growth because of it's free market economy.
It's refreshing to see how wealthy a society can be without interference from the government.
-Snoot
If that's true, why do we have a minimum wage law to begin with? If someone is willing to work for $2, why should the government tell them that they can't?
If you still think that there should be a minimum wage law, then why doesn't it apply to volunteerism? What's the difference between being willing to work for $2 and being willing to work for $0 and some perks ?
-Snoot
If I take $50 / month away from you and then give you a 56kbps internet connection, did you just get a free internet connection ?
If not, than neither will the people in Costa Rica.
-Snoot
This is very easy, I could write a class that would do this in about 10 minutes.
You need a Launcher class, something that spawns a new thread for each application you want to run, and simply calls the main method of the specified Java class in it's run method. It could be as simple as a little AWT text field and a "launch" button.
-Snoot
Poked around with this thing for an hour or so. Seems like if you just start enumerating all the pairs of prime numbers and sum them up you construct all the even numbers. That won't float by itself though, cause the primes logarithmically taper out as you go...
I asked the google miester whether it had any ideas, and it came up with this site's proof.
It's only 8 pages, and it seems pretty decent. I followed it till about page 4, and then I saw those capital pi product symbols and decided to run away.
-Snoot
If my cable company spent $100 million laying cables in my state so that I can have 1.5 MBit for $40/month, why should we (cable company and I) get penalized and have Joe company who spent $0 laying cable and other infrastructure have access to our bandwith?
Oh, it only hurts that big conglomerate company. They don't deserve their "cable monopoly"
It hurts all of us. With open access there the incentive to provide high bandwidth solutions to your doorstep drop to near zero.
Instead of attacking those wonderful cable and phone companies for providing us cable modems and DSL, we should be thanking them for freeing us from the world of 56.6
-Snoot
Suppose that you've got a few big industrial nations that import raw materials from smaller, poorer countries. They take those materials and turn them into much more expensive goods. This way, they get lots of profit. The poor countries are stuck selling their cheap raw materials and importing expensive manufactured goods (created with the same materials they sold.) Thus they don't make enough money to start industrializing themselves, and it becomes a cycle.
The WTO is supposed to let the poor countries impose high tariffs on the manufactured goods from foreign nations. This way demand will be created for domestic industry to produce cheaper goods. With demand comes capital, and with capital comes industry. With industry comes being able to compete in the global marketplace.
You're economics here seem a little strange. Tariff's don't increase demand, they increase the price of goods. If steal comes out of a county, and could have come back as a $6,000 car, a $2,000 tariff will dive the price up, and thereby decrease demand. I'm not sure how you think otherwise. Therefore a tariff would have the effect of moving money from the people producing the raw materials to the government of the country. No different from any other tax really.
Tariffs are only ever a good deal for politicans and privleged industries who can sway those politicians.
-Snoot
When I first started reading this article, I thought that the French government was going to make it illegal to write closed source code. Only after hitting some of the posts did I understand that their government is thinking of using open source whereever possible.
The latter is a great idea, in general. While the former would have pretty terrible consequences.
Maybe I got confused cause I just woke up :)
-Snoot
Richard Gabriel: ...Next week we will be deciding the democratic principles and processes by which all changes to Jini are made. (We don't use the Java Community Process)
Torvalds is a philosopher-king, let's say. Do you prefer that to a democracy?
Design by committee is a terrible way to go about working on a software product. The architecture would start looking like Frankenstein's monster.
It is in fact a key piece of open source projects that they have one person, or a small group of people at the core of the project, guiding the design and deciding which patches are integrated from the community.
I guess the thing about commentators discussing SCSL is that they usually don't check the facts, philosophy, etc., or talk to the principals. I suppose that's a problem that Sun needs to solve through publishing, and we're working on it.
I guess he's being self-referential here!
-Snoot
This feels pretty ass-backwards.
Money is simply a way of fairly assigning value to the work one does, or the products one produces.
Also, money has been in electronic form for a long time, making it easy to throw around on the net. If you start bartering, you'll have to ship things to people, etc. Very uninternet like.
Of course, you could simply barter services. But the whole problem with assigning value to the code someone produces, is that it's difficult to determine whether a small amount of code has any value, or that a particular coders efforts will be worthwhile after all. This is, of course, one of the reaons why we have the open source model...
-Snoot
We have a linux router hooked up to Mediaone's cable modem service. Of course, they don't support linux. But they don't stop us from using it either.
:)"
Whenever I call up there tech support when I think the problem is on their end, I act as a Windows - Linux Translation layer:
Tech support guy: "Does your winipcfg box have all zeroes in it?"
Windows-Me: "Not getting DHCP OFFER"
Linux-Me: "Hmm, checking.... Nope, no offer message."
Real-Me: "Yes, all zeroes. Give me an IP, damnit
Some of the ideas suggested here, like only supporting certain communications protocols seems inpractical, unfortunatly. Tech support has to be able to reliably walk the _average_ user through a series of steps which will reliably fix the problem. Otherwise support costs spiral up.
I know, i know, linux users aren't average users. But, well damnit, we want linux on the desktop don't we?
-Snoot
There should be the option for moderators to label posts as "Question", for those posts that pose new and interesting questions.
This would compliment "Informative" posts well.
-Snoot
Far too often you will see the government pondering how to improve governement education. And it amazes me that they always miss the simple connection that providing higher salaries to teachers would bring up the quality of teachers in the schools.
Instead they throw around meaningless policies like teacher testing, student testing etc. Ugh.
It pleases me that /. is approaching the question from the right angle.
-Snoot
I put up a mirror for the windows client
here.
-Snoot
---
:)
the US govt is gridlocked, but the US is a pretty damned productive country.
if its not due to democracy, what is it due to?
---
Capitalism!
-Snoot