And the disadvantage is that if Anonymous gets names of innocent people on the list by accident, they've given them a death sentence (also all the non-innocents as well). The Zetas' rival gangs will probably kill (or at least try to) everyone on the list. Anon better be damned certain about those names they release, or they're no better than the drug gangs themselves, and will have bloodshed of innocents directly attributable to their actions.
Why is it that people never seem to be this concerned when courts put innocent people in prison or to death?
Making a mistake is the risk of any system of punishment. You do all you can; that's all you can do.
(Which will make it easy for the US government, among others, to declare Anonymous a terrorist group and start a serious crackdown.)
That isn't going to play well in the news. The media is thick on framing everything as good vs. evil. If Anonymous is fighting a drug cartel, there is no way you can paint the cartel as the good guys, which means the cartels are the bad guys and whoever is fighting them must be the good guys.
Who needs credibility? You have a list of names. It's independently verifiable information. You have internal affairs tap their phones and so forth. If the list is fiction then you spend a few man hours proving it. If four out of the first five random names you investigate turn out to be dirty then you start taking it seriously.
The cartels are as lawless, and as savage as any organization in the world.
The question is what happens when they have to leave their neighborhoods. Members of Anonymous don't all live in San Diego and El Paso. Mexican cartels don't exactly have a full-strength crew in Finland or the Ukraine.
Plus, "middle class kids in suburbia" are not exactly their usual targets even in the US. If they send a death squad to murder a whole family of yuppies on Long Island, they have to expect there to be more severe political consequences than when they burn down a couple of crack houses. They might be violent but they're not stupid.
That isn't to say that anyone who goes after a cartel under the flag of Anonymous is going to be "safe", but predictions of their collective demise seem a bit premature.
It depends what information you want someone not to be able to get. If you tell someone your name is "websoongi" then they might be able to find this post on Slashdot without any other information, but it's less likely that they can find your home address or social security number.
Whereas if you tell someone your name is "George" then they might not be able to find anything if that is all the information they have. But what if it isn't? If they have access to e.g. a mailing list roster and you're the only George on the list, they might get your last name and your email address, maybe your phone number or your city or something else. From there they can likely get your street address from public records, at which point they've pretty uniquely identified you and can create a whole dossier on your "real" identity rather than just your handle.
Well a robotic workforce would increase differences in wealth so yeah the majority would get less. Of course, in a properly functioning society that can be limited.
You're kind of assuming the conclusion there. You might be able to imagine a society such that a net social gain (more goods for less labor) causes the rich to take all of the gain and then use part of their profits to oppress the poor such that it strictly makes the poor worse off, but that isn't any excuse to assume that we do or must live in that sort of society.
More than that, if you have that sort of society then the problem isn't automation. It's the society's method of allocating its fruits. If Scrooge McDuck has the goose that lays the golden eggs and is selling the eggs to pay bribes and monopolize resources, the right solution is never to kill the goose.
You can't really believe that the carriers want to promote an old phone that can't use all that expensive new spectrum they've been buying.
More than that, I was making up numbers because the exact numbers don't matter. All that matters is that Apple charges AT&T more for an iPhone 4 or iPhone 5 than competitors charge them for a comparable Android phone, which means that when both cost $0 to the customer (or when both cost $200), the carrier will prefer to promote the one that costs the carrier less.
I don't know about that. Someone would produce a BSD-licensed implementation, which would make it cost close to nothing for software and device vendors to add support for it, and so they would because some customers would want it. Then a few years later when everything supports both it and MP3, there would be no reason to continue using MP3 for new audio.
There are iPhones that are free on contract at this point.
People keep telling me that the customers are the carriers rather than the subscribers. Which do you think they'll be encouraging their customers to buy? The "free" phone that costs them $600, or the "free" phone that costs them $400?
Public transport is not a "highly inefficient use of public resources".
Bus lanes are a highly inefficient use of public resources. The highway is a public resource, you block off one of the lanes in a high contention area for something that doesn't require anything close to its own lane, that's highly inefficient.
If more people were to take the bus, more frequent stops would be installed and more busses would run on more routes.
The people in their cars just haven't realized yet that public transport only gets better and better when more and more people use it.
That isn't it at all. The problem is that I can't get on the bus, today, and have it bring me to where I'm going. The fact that if 10,000 other people took the bus then the bus would go where I want to go is completely irrelevant to my present inability to use it to get where I'm going.
Your argument is apparently that we should promote use of mass transit. But your method is defective. You ought not to do it by artificially crippling its competitors, you ought to do it by making mass transit more attractive than it is. A bus lane doesn't get people to take the bus if the bus doesn't go where they want to go, all it does is piss people off and create more pollution because it takes that much longer for the same number of cars to get where they're going and shut off their engines.
Even if it did cause more people to take the bus, it's still the wrong way to do it. The government spends however many million dollars paving and maintaining the bus lane that sees minimal usage. They could instead have used the same money to subsidize mass transit fares or increase the number of routes, which would increase the number of people who actually want to take mass transit rather than torturing them into it, and that would allow congestion-free car traffic with the smaller number of highway lanes for those that mass transit still doesn't adequately serve.
I've never seen any TV type commercials for the Dell Streak.
That's kind of missing the point. Obviously you can buy something having never seen a commercial for it. But the point of the commercial is so that when you're in the market for the advertiser's product, you don't neglect to consider it in your purchasing decision. And maybe having looked it up to see if it's any good, you realize that it's suitable for your purpose and decide to buy it rather than spend any more of your precious time doing more research, notwithstanding that the competitor might be slightly better or less expensive, just not enough to be worth reading any more reviews.
One of the assumptions for decades, even centuries, is that a collective of irrational actors evens out on the large scale to "appear" rational. This still persists publicly, I don't know if modern economists still believe that.
The basis of that is natural selection. If you define "rational" as "making money" and "irrational" as "losing money" then you might have irrational actors, but if you do they eventually fall out of the market because they either change their behavior or lose all their money. Likewise, the "most" rational actors will make the most profits and become the dominant force in the economy.
The principle is fairly sound, where it tends to fail is that sometimes natural selection takes a while. The model is inaccurate to the extent that the irrational, while dying, are not yet dead.
People are buying gold as a hedge against inflation, because the interest rates on most even moderately safe investments are currently so low that they're below the rate of inflation. As soon as interest rates go back up, gold is going to crash. The optimal strategy is to hold it until the second before it crashes (which is what causes the crash, since everybody knows that). But nobody knows exactly when that is going to happen.
You might as well just block off another lane in the highway and then say "if you don't like it take the subway." Never mind that the closest mass transit stop is a mile from where you're going, we want to increase mass transit usage by artificially promoting highly inefficient use of public resources.
You're ignoring the original point, which is that software patents create a whole new degree of wasteful litigation on top of what you already get with copyright and contracts.
On top of that, judges are pretty good at interpreting contracts. They do it all the time and it doesn't really require them to be software developers. Whereas trying to determine whether a software patent is "obvious to someone having ordinary skill in the art at the time of the invention" or whether a linked list and an array are "equivalent" in a particular context for purposes of the doctrine of equivalents, kind of does. Which leads to results that are wildly unpredictable and subjective, and that is the primary ingredient in the recipe for wasteful litigation.
So I highly doubt at least some lazy engenier at Google did copy code and played a bit with spacing and variable names.
This is what a header file looks like: // Sort array "array[]" and put result in "sortedArray[]", each of size "size" void ArraySort(int array[], int sortedArray[], int size);
// Sort array "array[]" of size "size" in place void ArraySortInPlace(int array[], int size);
// Sort linked list in place whose first element is "head" void ListSortInPlace(ListElement* head);
(etc.)
I defy anyone to rewrite such a thing so that you implement each of the original functions in a way that they can be used as a replacement library for the original (i.e. with the same function signature) and do more than change the variable names, comments and whitespace.
Give me a break. Think about it from a political perspective. If the rich are building "mega-yachts" while everyone else is starving and homeless, there will very quickly be a revolution. Which means that it won't happen, because the rich aren't that stupid.
The majority of users will choose Android one way or another. But if Nokia gives them the choice, they might choose Android-on-Nokia rather than Android-on-[Samsung | HTC | Motorola | whatever].
First, on a large scale this could lead to deflation thus destabilizing the economy.
Preventing deflation is trivial. The government prints more money. The historical problems with deflation were a result of government not understanding how problematic it is and consequently not even attempting to prevent it.
Second, the big costs of living - accomodation, food and energy - can't be made that much cheaper with automation. How cheap houses and food can get is limited by the appropriate spots/land and robots won't be able to produce energy.
You're missing the forest for the trees. The non-labor component of housing and natural resources is just other people bidding up the price. It only costs as much as people, on average, are willing and able to pay. You can't realistically have a situation where a majority of the population is unable to afford housing, because the land is there and someone will have it. The rich aren't going to buy up all the houses and then refuse to let anyone live in them just so they can laugh at all the homeless people.
And robots can't create "energy" but they can conceivably create solar panels, solar thermal plants, wind turbines and power distribution networks.
If you own enough great land where the weather is nice and there's no scarcity of water, you make money by renting to people who want to live there.
Only if there is nowhere else with those characteristics willing to price compete with you, which seems unlikely given how much land there is in general. And if it happens that there comes to be a monopoly on land, well, that's why we have antitrust laws and/or regulation.
That stuff only has value because there is demand for it. The richest man in the world has no use for eleven million tons of steel other than as a commodity to sell to everyone else. If, as we are speculating, people have no jobs then there is minimal demand and the price will be likewise minimal.
The owner of the widget factory might go out and buy a gadget, but when that gadget was built via automation, that doesn't create jobs.
Yes it does. Someone has to make the machine that makes that widget. Someone has to see that it continues functioning properly. Someone has to guard the factory where they're built. Someone has to drive the truck to get it to the customer, etc.
In theory you could ultimately replace all of those jobs by machine, but at that point the cost of goods will be so low that you can just have a government collect $2 in taxes from whoever still has the last job and use it to buy food and shelter for all of humanity forever.
The owner DOES stick the money in his mattress. The big corporations have an absurd amount of money that isn't being spent and is being hoarded.
That's not actually cash. They call it "cash" but what they mean is liquid assets. They have that amount in investment securities: Stocks, bonds, etc. They would have to be completely incompetent to hold it as actual cash when they have the alternative of getting at least some interest on it.
Incidentally, the reason they're doing it is the preposterous tax system. When an investor invests in e.g. Microsoft and Microsoft sells a million copies of Windows, if they don't have anything good to do with the money they are (in theory) supposed to issue it as a dividend to the investors. Then the investors can do something useful with it, either invest in something useful or spend it. The problem is that the tax code taxes dividends immediately, but it doesn't tax increases in stock price until the stock is sold.
What that means is that the majority of investors prefer the company to hold onto the money and invest it for them, because the investors who would only take the dividend and reinvest it get the same result but put off paying the taxes indefinitely. And the investors who want the money now can still get it just as easily by selling some shares (which are each worth that much more money as a result of the corporation having the extra "cash"), with the bonus that they can deduct what they paid for the stock when they bought it rather than paying tax on the full amount.
That wasn't caused by automation, it was caused by globalization. You're now competing with Chinese peasants for a job where you weren't 50 years ago, which drives down wages.
The situation is one that automation can help. We replaced several million middle class American jobs with a similar number of peasant class Chinese jobs. And we all know Chinese peasants don't buy American-made goods whatsoever. All that demand fell out of the American economy and contributed to the unemployment we see today. If we converted all those millions of Chinese jobs back into 10% as many middle class American jobs in automated facilities, we get back some of the demand. Several million Americans go back to work. Then those people spend the money they earn and increase demand even more. It creates a virtuous cycle that gets us out of the recession.
The apparent alternative is to keep losing middle class jobs to outsourcing until we no longer have a middle class. Automation is not the enemy.
Slashdot Mirror
And the disadvantage is that if Anonymous gets names of innocent people on the list by accident, they've given them a death sentence (also all the non-innocents as well). The Zetas' rival gangs will probably kill (or at least try to) everyone on the list. Anon better be damned certain about those names they release, or they're no better than the drug gangs themselves, and will have bloodshed of innocents directly attributable to their actions.
Why is it that people never seem to be this concerned when courts put innocent people in prison or to death?
Making a mistake is the risk of any system of punishment. You do all you can; that's all you can do.
(Which will make it easy for the US government, among others, to declare Anonymous a terrorist group and start a serious crackdown.)
That isn't going to play well in the news. The media is thick on framing everything as good vs. evil. If Anonymous is fighting a drug cartel, there is no way you can paint the cartel as the good guys, which means the cartels are the bad guys and whoever is fighting them must be the good guys.
Who needs credibility? You have a list of names. It's independently verifiable information. You have internal affairs tap their phones and so forth. If the list is fiction then you spend a few man hours proving it. If four out of the first five random names you investigate turn out to be dirty then you start taking it seriously.
The cartels are as lawless, and as savage as any organization in the world.
The question is what happens when they have to leave their neighborhoods. Members of Anonymous don't all live in San Diego and El Paso. Mexican cartels don't exactly have a full-strength crew in Finland or the Ukraine.
Plus, "middle class kids in suburbia" are not exactly their usual targets even in the US. If they send a death squad to murder a whole family of yuppies on Long Island, they have to expect there to be more severe political consequences than when they burn down a couple of crack houses. They might be violent but they're not stupid.
That isn't to say that anyone who goes after a cartel under the flag of Anonymous is going to be "safe", but predictions of their collective demise seem a bit premature.
It depends what information you want someone not to be able to get. If you tell someone your name is "websoongi" then they might be able to find this post on Slashdot without any other information, but it's less likely that they can find your home address or social security number.
Whereas if you tell someone your name is "George" then they might not be able to find anything if that is all the information they have. But what if it isn't? If they have access to e.g. a mailing list roster and you're the only George on the list, they might get your last name and your email address, maybe your phone number or your city or something else. From there they can likely get your street address from public records, at which point they've pretty uniquely identified you and can create a whole dossier on your "real" identity rather than just your handle.
Well a robotic workforce would increase differences in wealth so yeah the majority would get less. Of course, in a properly functioning society that can be limited.
You're kind of assuming the conclusion there. You might be able to imagine a society such that a net social gain (more goods for less labor) causes the rich to take all of the gain and then use part of their profits to oppress the poor such that it strictly makes the poor worse off, but that isn't any excuse to assume that we do or must live in that sort of society.
More than that, if you have that sort of society then the problem isn't automation. It's the society's method of allocating its fruits. If Scrooge McDuck has the goose that lays the golden eggs and is selling the eggs to pay bribes and monopolize resources, the right solution is never to kill the goose.
You can't really believe that the carriers want to promote an old phone that can't use all that expensive new spectrum they've been buying.
More than that, I was making up numbers because the exact numbers don't matter. All that matters is that Apple charges AT&T more for an iPhone 4 or iPhone 5 than competitors charge them for a comparable Android phone, which means that when both cost $0 to the customer (or when both cost $200), the carrier will prefer to promote the one that costs the carrier less.
I don't know about that. Someone would produce a BSD-licensed implementation, which would make it cost close to nothing for software and device vendors to add support for it, and so they would because some customers would want it. Then a few years later when everything supports both it and MP3, there would be no reason to continue using MP3 for new audio.
There are iPhones that are free on contract at this point.
People keep telling me that the customers are the carriers rather than the subscribers. Which do you think they'll be encouraging their customers to buy? The "free" phone that costs them $600, or the "free" phone that costs them $400?
Public transport is not a "highly inefficient use of public resources".
Bus lanes are a highly inefficient use of public resources. The highway is a public resource, you block off one of the lanes in a high contention area for something that doesn't require anything close to its own lane, that's highly inefficient.
If more people were to take the bus, more frequent stops would be installed and more busses would run on more routes.
The people in their cars just haven't realized yet that public transport only gets better and better when more and more people use it.
That isn't it at all. The problem is that I can't get on the bus, today, and have it bring me to where I'm going. The fact that if 10,000 other people took the bus then the bus would go where I want to go is completely irrelevant to my present inability to use it to get where I'm going.
Your argument is apparently that we should promote use of mass transit. But your method is defective. You ought not to do it by artificially crippling its competitors, you ought to do it by making mass transit more attractive than it is. A bus lane doesn't get people to take the bus if the bus doesn't go where they want to go, all it does is piss people off and create more pollution because it takes that much longer for the same number of cars to get where they're going and shut off their engines.
Even if it did cause more people to take the bus, it's still the wrong way to do it. The government spends however many million dollars paving and maintaining the bus lane that sees minimal usage. They could instead have used the same money to subsidize mass transit fares or increase the number of routes, which would increase the number of people who actually want to take mass transit rather than torturing them into it, and that would allow congestion-free car traffic with the smaller number of highway lanes for those that mass transit still doesn't adequately serve.
I've never seen any TV type commercials for the Dell Streak.
That's kind of missing the point. Obviously you can buy something having never seen a commercial for it. But the point of the commercial is so that when you're in the market for the advertiser's product, you don't neglect to consider it in your purchasing decision. And maybe having looked it up to see if it's any good, you realize that it's suitable for your purpose and decide to buy it rather than spend any more of your precious time doing more research, notwithstanding that the competitor might be slightly better or less expensive, just not enough to be worth reading any more reviews.
One of the assumptions for decades, even centuries, is that a collective of irrational actors evens out on the large scale to "appear" rational. This still persists publicly, I don't know if modern economists still believe that.
The basis of that is natural selection. If you define "rational" as "making money" and "irrational" as "losing money" then you might have irrational actors, but if you do they eventually fall out of the market because they either change their behavior or lose all their money. Likewise, the "most" rational actors will make the most profits and become the dominant force in the economy.
The principle is fairly sound, where it tends to fail is that sometimes natural selection takes a while. The model is inaccurate to the extent that the irrational, while dying, are not yet dead.
People are buying gold as a hedge against inflation, because the interest rates on most even moderately safe investments are currently so low that they're below the rate of inflation. As soon as interest rates go back up, gold is going to crash. The optimal strategy is to hold it until the second before it crashes (which is what causes the crash, since everybody knows that). But nobody knows exactly when that is going to happen.
How does that make bus lanes not a stupid idea?
You might as well just block off another lane in the highway and then say "if you don't like it take the subway." Never mind that the closest mass transit stop is a mile from where you're going, we want to increase mass transit usage by artificially promoting highly inefficient use of public resources.
You're ignoring the original point, which is that software patents create a whole new degree of wasteful litigation on top of what you already get with copyright and contracts.
On top of that, judges are pretty good at interpreting contracts. They do it all the time and it doesn't really require them to be software developers. Whereas trying to determine whether a software patent is "obvious to someone having ordinary skill in the art at the time of the invention" or whether a linked list and an array are "equivalent" in a particular context for purposes of the doctrine of equivalents, kind of does. Which leads to results that are wildly unpredictable and subjective, and that is the primary ingredient in the recipe for wasteful litigation.
So I highly doubt at least some lazy engenier at Google did copy code and played a bit with spacing and variable names.
This is what a header file looks like:
// Sort array "array[]" and put result in "sortedArray[]", each of size "size"
void ArraySort(int array[], int sortedArray[], int size);
// Sort array "array[]" of size "size" in place
void ArraySortInPlace(int array[], int size);
// Sort linked list in place whose first element is "head"
void ListSortInPlace(ListElement* head);
(etc.)
I defy anyone to rewrite such a thing so that you implement each of the original functions in a way that they can be used as a replacement library for the original (i.e. with the same function signature) and do more than change the variable names, comments and whitespace.
Please, refrain from elaborating. That makes everyone understand what you're talking about.
Give me a break. Think about it from a political perspective. If the rich are building "mega-yachts" while everyone else is starving and homeless, there will very quickly be a revolution. Which means that it won't happen, because the rich aren't that stupid.
The majority of users will choose Android one way or another. But if Nokia gives them the choice, they might choose Android-on-Nokia rather than Android-on-[Samsung | HTC | Motorola | whatever].
First, on a large scale this could lead to deflation thus destabilizing the economy.
Preventing deflation is trivial. The government prints more money. The historical problems with deflation were a result of government not understanding how problematic it is and consequently not even attempting to prevent it.
Second, the big costs of living - accomodation, food and energy - can't be made that much cheaper with automation. How cheap houses and food can get is limited by the appropriate spots/land and robots won't be able to produce energy.
You're missing the forest for the trees. The non-labor component of housing and natural resources is just other people bidding up the price. It only costs as much as people, on average, are willing and able to pay. You can't realistically have a situation where a majority of the population is unable to afford housing, because the land is there and someone will have it. The rich aren't going to buy up all the houses and then refuse to let anyone live in them just so they can laugh at all the homeless people.
And robots can't create "energy" but they can conceivably create solar panels, solar thermal plants, wind turbines and power distribution networks.
If you own enough great land where the weather is nice and there's no scarcity of water, you make money by renting to people who want to live there.
Only if there is nowhere else with those characteristics willing to price compete with you, which seems unlikely given how much land there is in general. And if it happens that there comes to be a monopoly on land, well, that's why we have antitrust laws and/or regulation.
That stuff only has value because there is demand for it. The richest man in the world has no use for eleven million tons of steel other than as a commodity to sell to everyone else. If, as we are speculating, people have no jobs then there is minimal demand and the price will be likewise minimal.
The owner of the widget factory might go out and buy a gadget, but when that gadget was built via automation, that doesn't create jobs.
Yes it does. Someone has to make the machine that makes that widget. Someone has to see that it continues functioning properly. Someone has to guard the factory where they're built. Someone has to drive the truck to get it to the customer, etc.
In theory you could ultimately replace all of those jobs by machine, but at that point the cost of goods will be so low that you can just have a government collect $2 in taxes from whoever still has the last job and use it to buy food and shelter for all of humanity forever.
The owner DOES stick the money in his mattress. The big corporations have an absurd amount of money that isn't being spent and is being hoarded.
That's not actually cash. They call it "cash" but what they mean is liquid assets. They have that amount in investment securities: Stocks, bonds, etc. They would have to be completely incompetent to hold it as actual cash when they have the alternative of getting at least some interest on it.
Incidentally, the reason they're doing it is the preposterous tax system. When an investor invests in e.g. Microsoft and Microsoft sells a million copies of Windows, if they don't have anything good to do with the money they are (in theory) supposed to issue it as a dividend to the investors. Then the investors can do something useful with it, either invest in something useful or spend it. The problem is that the tax code taxes dividends immediately, but it doesn't tax increases in stock price until the stock is sold.
What that means is that the majority of investors prefer the company to hold onto the money and invest it for them, because the investors who would only take the dividend and reinvest it get the same result but put off paying the taxes indefinitely. And the investors who want the money now can still get it just as easily by selling some shares (which are each worth that much more money as a result of the corporation having the extra "cash"), with the bonus that they can deduct what they paid for the stock when they bought it rather than paying tax on the full amount.
I'm afraid I'm not familiar
FYI
That wasn't caused by automation, it was caused by globalization. You're now competing with Chinese peasants for a job where you weren't 50 years ago, which drives down wages.
The situation is one that automation can help. We replaced several million middle class American jobs with a similar number of peasant class Chinese jobs. And we all know Chinese peasants don't buy American-made goods whatsoever. All that demand fell out of the American economy and contributed to the unemployment we see today. If we converted all those millions of Chinese jobs back into 10% as many middle class American jobs in automated facilities, we get back some of the demand. Several million Americans go back to work. Then those people spend the money they earn and increase demand even more. It creates a virtuous cycle that gets us out of the recession.
The apparent alternative is to keep losing middle class jobs to outsourcing until we no longer have a middle class. Automation is not the enemy.