in general i agree with your point. high concentrations of people with legal and technical expertise will tend to be in affluent areas.
however, since money isn't the bottleneck, it would be possible for those same wealthy lawyers and systems analysts to volunteer to set up a co-op isp in another, low-income neighborhood.
furthermore, they could train interested parties in the skills to run it themselves.
this scenario might not happen very often. but compared to a situation where a lot of money is also required, this situation is preferable.
Following the Coase theorem might succeed in forcing marginal cost to include external costs, but it completely fails to develop sustainable systems.
Using your polluter and downwind landowner scenario: the polluter will have to buy the right to pollute off the landowner.
So, the pollution begins, and the landowner gets compensated for that pollution, but the environmental damage still exists!
People forget that compensating property owners is not the end of the story - we have to make sure we don't unknowingly destroy ourselves, even if we get a good price for it.
plus, in the real world, the true cost of some externalities is usually not known at the moment of pollution. Look at DDT - it was thought to be safe, and then later found to be poisonous. How would the Coase theorem work then, after the property rights have been transferred?
In most cases, unmanned exploration is cheaper, safer, and the better research tool.
However, human missions in space are a lot more exciting to the non-science community, and when it comes to getting funding, Congress doesn't care as much about good science as it does about good publicity.
So we underfund non-sexy stuff like supercolliders, oribiting telescopes, etc and yet we're always willing to dig deep to shoot John Glenn back up just for old times' sake.
Well, there's really nothing sexy about John Glenn, but hopefully you get the point.
When any firm chooses to hold cash rather than reinvest, it's a clear signal that the firm is not optimistic about its business outlook.
That $40Bn could have been spent on developing new business (improving XP, etc), but apparently, the expected return there was worse than cash, which is particularly bad in this interest rate climate.
To use an analogy, consider this cash holding as a huge 'escape pod' for the death star, which is drawing resources away from building more planet-crushing lasers.
If MS believed in itself, it would invest in itself.
The toll for the computer is high; when there was no Linux, the price of software made it higher still. Now that there is Linux, we're doing our part to raise the fee by requiring machines that many cannot afford.
I was sad to find absolutely no mention of anything besides KDE and Gnome. Fluxbox, Windowmaker, ICE, etc are all great low resource alternatives. Starting Gnome takes at least 45 seconds on my 233 with 64mb ram, but much less when I start up twm.
It would be a real shame if people start saying "whatever Intel/AMD gives, linux takes away".
Re:Im never gonna be good at the posting links gam
on
GNU-Friends Interviews
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· Score: 1
it was a joke - as in the the colonies in the new world.
Im never gonna be good at the posting links game
on
GNU-Friends Interviews
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· Score: 0, Troll
Silly me - I figured this wasn't really newsworthy since that site has been out for at least a month now.
Hey everybody - the colonies declared independence from Britain!
I read that link. I'm not a biblical scholar, so I can't really evaluate the statements made, and the fact that the hosting site is admittedly pro-Christian makes me a little wary of accepting it prima facie.
You said: Many ambitious people in and out of government are bypassing the rules that would otherwise make this country somewhat of a representative government.
So you're acknowledging that the current system is not "going according to plan".
Then you assert that the DMCA had nothing to do with citizens ignoring their public duties. But you don't offer any support.
Here's my assertion to counter your assertion: the citizenry doesn't mind that special interests can buy legislation. We vote in politicians that accept campaign contributions. Most people don't seek out alternate media sources - they get their world views from TV and they like it that way.
America is in decay. Ambitious people bypassing the rules is just a symptom not the cause.
The omission of the gospel of Thomas is a great example of how the early church selected books to shut down gnosticism.
Never mind the Council of Nicene that decided to send a bunch of Roman soldiers to butcher the remaining gnostics in Alexandria. All people remember about that now is the Nicene Creed.
Self-censorship is the real issue. Blame it on our education, parents, the media, whatever. People have accepted Candide's view of the world that this is as good as it can get.
Censorship is important only if you believe that people are really open to new ideas. Which I don't think they are. Sure, we CAN educate ourselves and communicate with eachother - but we don't. The net mostly clusters like-minded people together and encapsulates them safely - away from the rest of society.
So whoop-di-doo: I can look up censored materials at this guy's website. Is this going to change how the majority of Americans feel about anything? No.
It's exciting to see all the different open-source office apps getting developed. The thing that bugs me is the lack of standardization going on.
It's great that kwrite/star office/every other similar project can open and write documents in MS word's native format, or save them in their own format; But this still leads to balkanized document formats. It's less bad, because at least the formatting is open rather than proprietary, but it seems like needless duplication for each project to develop its own markup system.
The ideal solution is an HTML-like approach where anybody can use whatever WYSIWYG front-end they like the best to write docs. The office app's job is to insert the correct standardized markup codes.
Sadly, although this is exactly the sort of problem XML can handle effectively, not too much is going on.
i ran asteroid mining too! that's before we switched to unmanned probes to pluto. both of these plans, btw, were vital to preventing the human race from being wiped out by nuclear war and/or environmental collapse.
yep, i built super-excellent logical reasoning skills in those years.
In a completely relativistic universe, nothing can be found to be absolutely right or wrong. So I can't argue with you if that's how you see things.
But unless you're willing to say that there's nothing intrinsically bad about people committing crimes or living in poverty, then my point is still valid.
I modded your post to insightful after i saw somebody set it to "troll", because it makes me mad when i see moderators injecting their own politics into their mods.
But your garden-variety libertarian logic is flawed: the social security dilemma facing western europe and the US has really nothing to do with subsidized education, and everything to do with an aging work force. Read _Generational Accounting_ by lan J. Auerbach and Laurence J. Kotlikoff if you don't believe me.
And while I'm at it, leaving education to the private sector only makes sense if you believe there are NO external societal benefits to be gained from having an educated populace.
But if society benefits by educating its members, ie people commit less crime and practice healthier lifestyles, then the government has a perfectly logical reason to subsidize education. The market system will fail to provide the pareto optimal level.
Scientific inquiry relies on peer review to validate research, and when corporations/the government/research try to prevent scientists from publishing research, they short-circuit the process.
Is this really all that different to what happened to Galileo? His scientific research was perceived as a threat to the established power structure.
Add in the increasing corporate sponsorship to fill in for diminishing budgets for research, and we're headed toward a world with no concept of the public domain.
Patents are not meant to allow firms hoard research indefinitely, but now that's what they have become. Now, instead of giving a reward for furthering the knowledge base for everyone, we've got a system where firms stake out concepts (like gene patents - don't get me started on those!) and prevent anyone else from trying to duplicate the work.
All this is happening just at a time when it is slowly becoming possible for everyone on this planet to share ideas with every other person. What a shame we're all gonna get hamstrung.
I'm waiting for my ISP to claim partial ownership of anything I transmit on their network. Why shouldn't I have to click "I agree" to giving away an interest in anything? It's their network, after all.
The US has a postal system is run by the government and not the private sector in order to make sure ALL citizens get some degree of service, or "connectivity" in/. parlance.
Note how the Postal Service provides a "baseline" for all citizens, but doen't hold a monopoly. If you want to send a package faster, pay a little more and use UPS or a bike courier.
Having a government agency run the show guarantees that everyone can at least send a package somehow. There's no "sorry, your neighborhood just isn't rich enough for us to lay fiber / put in a mail route" going on.
Free markets don't always come to the socially optimal outcome, and they certainly can't be relied on to distribute resources equitably.
Sure, it won't be free, but if we really care about this "digital divide" then this will bridge it a lot faster than waiting for Verizon.
I just bought this book and I'm slowly working through it. I really like how the first sections show to use gcc, make, and CVS. However, it is sort of incongruous how the next chapters immediately jump into code examples that use pointers and structures.
Anyway, it'd be nice if there was a newsgroup or a BBS for people reading this book. I, for one, haven't had the easiest time getting SDL working.
Slashdot Mirror
wow - this is probably the most interesting question submitted.
slashdotter heads will explode when they are faced with an ace programmer that is, of all things, also a christian.
i really hope this topic gets discussed.
the only thing i could imagine that would top that would be if Larry Wall goes on an anti-p2p rant.
in general i agree with your point. high concentrations of people with legal and technical expertise will tend to be in affluent areas.
however, since money isn't the bottleneck, it would be possible for those same wealthy lawyers and systems analysts to volunteer to set up a co-op isp in another, low-income neighborhood.
furthermore, they could train interested parties in the skills to run it themselves.
this scenario might not happen very often. but compared to a situation where a lot of money is also required, this situation is preferable.
Following the Coase theorem might succeed in forcing marginal cost to include external costs, but it completely fails to develop sustainable systems.
Using your polluter and downwind landowner scenario: the polluter will have to buy the right to pollute off the landowner.
So, the pollution begins, and the landowner gets compensated for that pollution, but the environmental damage still exists!
People forget that compensating property owners is not the end of the story - we have to make sure we don't unknowingly destroy ourselves, even if we get a good price for it.
plus, in the real world, the true cost of some externalities is usually not known at the moment of pollution. Look at DDT - it was thought to be safe, and then later found to be poisonous. How would the Coase theorem work then, after the property rights have been transferred?
In most cases, unmanned exploration is cheaper, safer, and the better research tool.
However, human missions in space are a lot more exciting to the non-science community, and when it comes to getting funding, Congress doesn't care as much about good science as it does about good publicity.
So we underfund non-sexy stuff like supercolliders, oribiting telescopes, etc and yet we're always willing to dig deep to shoot John Glenn back up just for old times' sake.
Well, there's really nothing sexy about John Glenn, but hopefully you get the point.
the more i think about your post the less sense it makes.
you make the big assumption that since he posts how he feels here, on /., that he behaves in the same way in his class room.
that assumption doesn't make a lot of sense. we all say stuff here that we don't spout all the time at work. this is a completely different forum.
i suspect you're transferring some resentment caused by some other teacher towards an inappropriate target.
this teacher sounds like one of the few that is actually interested in doing a good job and it would be a shame to discourage that.
When any firm chooses to hold cash rather than reinvest, it's a clear signal that the firm is not optimistic about its business outlook.
That $40Bn could have been spent on developing new business (improving XP, etc), but apparently, the expected return there was worse than cash, which is particularly bad in this interest rate climate.
To use an analogy, consider this cash holding as a huge 'escape pod' for the death star, which is drawing resources away from building more planet-crushing lasers.
If MS believed in itself, it would invest in itself.
i'm glad i'm not the only one that noticed that.
Favorite quote from the article:
The toll for the computer is high; when there was no Linux, the price of software made it higher still. Now that there is Linux, we're doing our part to raise the fee by requiring machines that many cannot afford.
I was sad to find absolutely no mention of anything besides KDE and Gnome. Fluxbox, Windowmaker, ICE, etc are all great low resource alternatives. Starting Gnome takes at least 45 seconds on my 233 with 64mb ram, but much less when I start up twm.
It would be a real shame if people start saying "whatever Intel/AMD gives, linux takes away".
it was a joke - as in the the colonies in the new world.
Silly me - I figured this wasn't really newsworthy since that site has been out for at least a month now.
Hey everybody - the colonies declared independence from Britain!
cool dead milkmen signature. they rocked.
I read that link. I'm not a biblical scholar, so I can't really evaluate the statements made, and the fact that the hosting site is admittedly pro-Christian makes me a little wary of accepting it prima facie.
But I agree it is not ENTIRELY without basis.
You said: Many ambitious people in and out of government are bypassing the rules that would otherwise make this country somewhat of a representative government.
So you're acknowledging that the current system is not "going according to plan".
Then you assert that the DMCA had nothing to do with citizens ignoring their public duties. But you don't offer any support.
Here's my assertion to counter your assertion: the citizenry doesn't mind that special interests can buy legislation. We vote in politicians that accept campaign contributions. Most people don't seek out alternate media sources - they get their world views from TV and they like it that way.
America is in decay. Ambitious people bypassing the rules is just a symptom not the cause.
Hey - why don't you use a login?
Where would our nation, and even the world be if Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was not free to challenge his people to practice nonviolent protest?
Wait - he wasn't free. Go read "Letter from Birmingham Jail" which he wrote while in Birmingham Jail.
The "system" fights every reform and then when it loses, and progress is made, it says "see - the system works!" and we all get taken in by it.
IAAA Also.
The omission of the gospel of Thomas is a great example of how the early church selected books to shut down gnosticism.
Never mind the Council of Nicene that decided to send a bunch of Roman soldiers to butcher the remaining gnostics in Alexandria. All people remember about that now is the Nicene Creed.
Self-censorship is the real issue. Blame it on our education, parents, the media, whatever. People have accepted Candide's view of the world that this is as good as it can get.
Censorship is important only if you believe that people are really open to new ideas. Which I don't think they are. Sure, we CAN educate ourselves and communicate with eachother - but we don't. The net mostly clusters like-minded people together and encapsulates them safely - away from the rest of society.
So whoop-di-doo: I can look up censored materials at this guy's website. Is this going to change how the majority of Americans feel about anything? No.
We get the government that we deserve.
It's exciting to see all the different open-source office apps getting developed. The thing that bugs me is the lack of standardization going on.
It's great that kwrite/star office/every other similar project can open and write documents in MS word's native format, or save them in their own format; But this still leads to balkanized document formats. It's less bad, because at least the formatting is open rather than proprietary, but it seems like needless duplication for each project to develop its own markup system.
The ideal solution is an HTML-like approach where anybody can use whatever WYSIWYG front-end they like the best to write docs. The office app's job is to insert the correct standardized markup codes.
Sadly, although this is exactly the sort of problem XML can handle effectively, not too much is going on.
Or maybe i just don't know about it.
i ran asteroid mining too! that's before we switched to unmanned probes to pluto. both of these plans, btw, were vital to preventing the human race from being wiped out by nuclear war and/or environmental collapse.
yep, i built super-excellent logical reasoning skills in those years.
mod this up so other debaters can chime in.
i'm putting together my rez right this minute - goodbye dreary finance meetings and hello checking 'adult pleasure devices' for prior art!
Who defines what is "good for society"?
The people - that's who.
In a completely relativistic universe, nothing can be found to be absolutely right or wrong. So I can't argue with you if that's how you see things.
But unless you're willing to say that there's nothing intrinsically bad about people committing crimes or living in poverty, then my point is still valid.
I modded your post to insightful after i saw somebody set it to "troll", because it makes me mad when i see moderators injecting their own politics into their mods.
But your garden-variety libertarian logic is flawed: the social security dilemma facing western europe and the US has really nothing to do with subsidized education, and everything to do with an aging work force. Read _Generational Accounting_ by lan J. Auerbach and Laurence J. Kotlikoff if you don't believe me.
And while I'm at it, leaving education to the private sector only makes sense if you believe there are NO external societal benefits to be gained from having an educated populace.
But if society benefits by educating its members, ie people commit less crime and practice healthier lifestyles, then the government has a perfectly logical reason to subsidize education. The market system will fail to provide the pareto optimal level.
Your move.
Scientific inquiry relies on peer review to validate research, and when corporations/the government/research try to prevent scientists from publishing research, they short-circuit the process.
Is this really all that different to what happened to Galileo? His scientific research was perceived as a threat to the established power structure.
Add in the increasing corporate sponsorship to fill in for diminishing budgets for research, and we're headed toward a world with no concept of the public domain.
Patents are not meant to allow firms hoard research indefinitely, but now that's what they have become. Now, instead of giving a reward for furthering the knowledge base for everyone, we've got a system where firms stake out concepts (like gene patents - don't get me started on those!) and prevent anyone else from trying to duplicate the work.
All this is happening just at a time when it is slowly becoming possible for everyone on this planet to share ideas with every other person. What a shame we're all gonna get hamstrung.
I'm waiting for my ISP to claim partial ownership of anything I transmit on their network. Why shouldn't I have to click "I agree" to giving away an interest in anything? It's their network, after all.
Because it's really the same thing.
/. parlance.
The US has a postal system is run by the government and not the private sector in order to make sure ALL citizens get some degree of service, or "connectivity" in
Note how the Postal Service provides a "baseline" for all citizens, but doen't hold a monopoly. If you want to send a package faster, pay a little more and use UPS or a bike courier.
Having a government agency run the show guarantees that everyone can at least send a package somehow. There's no "sorry, your neighborhood just isn't rich enough for us to lay fiber / put in a mail route" going on.
Free markets don't always come to the socially optimal outcome, and they certainly can't be relied on to distribute resources equitably.
Sure, it won't be free, but if we really care about this "digital divide" then this will bridge it a lot faster than waiting for Verizon.
I just bought this book and I'm slowly working through it. I really like how the first sections show to use gcc, make, and CVS. However, it is sort of incongruous how the next chapters immediately jump into code examples that use pointers and structures.
Anyway, it'd be nice if there was a newsgroup or a BBS for people reading this book. I, for one, haven't had the easiest time getting SDL working.