I just finished reading Phillip K. Dick's "Man In The High Castle" which takes place in an alternate reality in which the Nazis and the Japanese won World War II. It takes place about 20 years after the war when things have settled down and the colonial empires of the Japanese and Germans are more or less up and running.
Someone asked me if the books was like 1984, Brave New World, or V for Vendetta. I told them that no it really wasn't at all. That's because the idea behind 1984 is that the government lies to the people about its nature and attempts to control people's perceptions about the past, present and future. The Nazis and the Japanese fascists didn't do that AFTER they had taken over (before that they did plenty of lying to gain power). They were sincere and forthright in their belief in their racial superiority and that they were going to take over the world for the greater glory of the Reich, kill everybody they didn't like or they thought was inferior, and they weren't ashamed of it.
I'm VERY glad we live in this world and not the world of "The Man in the High Castle" but it's disturbing how our current leadership is embarrassed about their ambitions. They dare not reveal them to the public and chose to hide them and play along with the democracy myth. It didn't used to be so bad but ever since the whole WMDs in Iraq thing and the torture scandal it's started to get to a point where political dialog has become a theater of the absurd.
You could have a infographic on the top of the website called the "bandwidth cost bar". Every day it starts at the top and slowly works its way down based on the amount of bandwidth the provider is able to pay for based on the revenue to the site for that day. If one clicks on it there will be a detailed breakdown of who they are paying for bandwidth, how much they are using and how much it costs and a top level summary of revenue and expenses.
The bar slowly gets used up until its completely used up for the day and then there are no more videos and all pages redirect to the same page explaining that all the bandwidth for the day has been used up and customers did not buy enough stuff so they had to shut down for the day.
When the market is going up, it keeps going up regularly. When the market confidence is broken thend the market is in crash mode, and the markets go down regularly and pessimism rules the day. The value of "market confidence" is a complicated human variable that switches from on to off at some point . The modelers had only seen the first case for the last 30 years so they only modeled for that and now assume that the current activity is a 10 standard deviations outside the norm and should only occur once every trillion years. That's because they refuse to admit that they made the error of leaving the crash scenario out of their use case.
So let me get this straight. I can buy windows 7 and not have to worry about it sucking more than XP because I can run XP in virtualization. So if I go back to XP I just paid for the privilege of running XP twice? Microsoft has really gone downhill lately. The upgrades seem to have negative marginal value these days. Who would have paid for the privilege to run Windows 3.1 in Windows 95? Where's the innovation? It seems like each release they just take features away and only give them back to you if you buy the "Ultimate" edition.
Geez... The reviewer was criticizing this netbook saying that this thing was "low-end" and a glorified cellphone. Well I have no idea what kinds of cellphone you can get with a QWERTY keyboard, an RJ45 Jack, USB, 3G, Wifi an SD card slot and an 800x600 screen for $100.
Well you raised a good question. Now you have to go deeper into it than just the surface level.
So if all you have to do to get paid 250 times what the average worker makes is be a ceo why doesn't the average worker go out, start a company and pay themselves 250 times what people who work for them make? If you can answer that question you might have a good chance of understanding the underlying causes of wealth inequality.
If you keep following the chain of questions all the way back to the beginning you will eventually wind up where so many of us have, In a nutshell, if you can get access to credit worth thousands of times what the common worker makes you can pay yourself 250x what that worker makes using the worker's own bank deposits. If you can get access to credit for 4% you can buy every single business in the world that has a profit margin of over 4% and make money virtually risk free using the business owners own bank despoits if you are good friends with his banker.
I think the anti-pattern I see in most companies that are weak in the technology area is the guy at the top is great at landing deals, public speaking, and sales but he can't figure out what those damned pesky nerds are doing and why they need to get paid so much money.
As a general rule, most successful tech companies are started and run by people with engineering and/or cs backgrounds (Google, Paypal, Ebay, Microsoft to name a few). Many companies these days, which are in the information handling business (finance, etc), have little competitive advantage over their competition except for their technology platform and are thus essentially tech companies, even though they might not know it yet. Now with the down economy they actually have to be better than the competition and can't just survive by endlessly rolling over credit lines. Hence, the greater need for engineers who can create a technological vision for the company instead of just doing what they are told to do by clueless bosses.
Low cortisol levels are probably being caused by something else -- enzyme deficiency, some unknown pollutant, genetic defect, etc. This root cause is what leads to Aspergers. As usual the researchers say it's all in your head and it's all the fault of the way the parents treated their children. What they really need to do is look further into the cortisol production mechanism in the body and see if that is damaged by something in Asperger sufferers.
When a political idea goes from a narrow focus to providing mandatory advice with regards to every single political decision an individual or society makes it becomes an ideology.
I think we are now at that point with Global Warming.
Next up - should you walk on the cracks in the sidewalk? What would a believer in Global Warming advise?
I am so sick of the "population control at any cost" meme. It turns up everywhere! The Godwin's Law equivalent in any debate about environmental policy, energy policy, food policy or how to aid developing countries is to call for "population control at any cost" as this is where all these debates wine up as any message board thread on these topics progresses.
IP is actually a matter of considerable debate among libertarians -- at least the ones who write for the academic journals. Lately the consensus has been toward a narrower interpretation of intellectual property.
* Against Intellectual Property, Spring 2001, Vol. 15, no. 2 Journal of Libertarian Studies, Stephan Kinsella
* In Defense of Napster and Against the Second Homesteading Rule, September 4, 2000, LewRockwell.com, Stephan Kinsella (summary version of some of the arguments presented in "Against Intellectual Property")
* Murray N. Rothbard, Man, Economy, and State and Power and Market, Scholars Edition, liv, 745-54, 1133-38, 1181-86
* Murray N. Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty, pp. 123ï½24.
Utilitarian Considerations
* Patents and Copyrights: Do the Benefits Exceed the Costs?, Fall 2001, Vol. 15 Num. 4 Journal of Libertarian Studies, Julio H. Cole
* On the Abuse of Patents as Economic Indicators, Winter 1998, Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics, Pierre Desrochers
* Ludwig von Mises, Human Action 3rd rev. ed. Chicago: Henry Regnery (1966), chap. 23, section 6, pp. 661ï½62; see also pp. 128, 364
* George Reisman, Capitalism, pp. 388-89 & 417-20; also 40, 96, 187, 216, 233.
The funny thing is is that people think the guys getting screwed are the homeowners who got to live in a home they never would have been able to afford in normal times.
The people who got screwed are all the foreigners that bought these assets thinking their money was safe AAA rated stuff. Now they are being told that they bought a bunch of worthless garbage.
The real problem now is that they have caused an incalculable amount of damage to the reputation of our financial system as being a safe place to invest money. The government has to bail all these people out to show that they will stand behind all these too big to fail crooks and make good on their lies in order to maintain confidence.
I brought an OLPC with me on vacation. With XBuntu the thing rocks! No moving parts, Water-proof when closed. Super wi-fi antennas. Hi-res daylight readable screen. Super light and easy to carry around.
Only prob is it's not too slow to run flash but a bit too slow for flash video:(. If they fixed that it would be a total dream though.
The RFID tag embedded in your forehead or wrist will be needed everytime you want to access the internet. The RFID signature will be present everytime you access in a website in the lower 64 bits of the ipv6 address you use to access the internet. Why else do you think they wanted such a ridiculous number of bits in the standard?
With laws like this, I might as well have more liberty in most regards in China. In China the government keeps the access logs of everything I do online for me, I can download all the pirated music, software and videos I want and I can get a cheap massage with "happy ending".
Even leaving out the political issues, Experts are few,and when well known, consider charging a lot for their work and would probably only devote time to getting published in a scholarly journal rather than some random website.
It would be like running an open source project where the only people who are allowed to work on it are those people who hold a PHD or are certified to have 10 years experience programming with a major corporation.
The sad part is that Feinstein, a senator from California, should be representing the business interests of that little California company known as Google which strongly supports net neutrality. Makes you wonder where the heck she's coming from...
Seriously, just go buy a Zimbra license. Runs on Linux, does everything exchange does, not too pricey and it works great with outlook clients. Shared calendar, great web gui, etc. Oh yeah and they are owned by Yahoo now so you can feel like you're supporting the newly crowned Internet underdog while you're at it.
It seems that this ideology of environmental pessimism -- in which man is deemed inevitably doomed to overpopulate and face regular famines and other related calamities -- started in Britain with Hobbes and Malthus.
I think the reason for this is that British culture was permanently traumatized by the famines and plagues of the 14th century.
During the Medieval Warm Period (the period prior to 1350) the population of Europe had exploded, reaching levels that were not matched again in some places until the nineteenth century (parts of France today are less populous than at the beginning of the fourteenth century). However, the yield ratios of wheat (the number of seeds one could eat per seed planted) had been dropping since 1280 and food prices had been climbing. In good weather the ratio could be as high as 7:1, while during bad years as low as 2:1â"that is, for every seed planted, two seeds were harvested, one for next year's seed, and one for food. By comparison, modern farming has ratios of 200:1 or more....
Historians debate the toll but it is estimated that 10%-25% of the population of many cities and towns died. While the Black Death (1338â"1375) would kill more, for many the Great Famine was worse. While the plague swept through an area in a matter of months, the Great Famine lingered for years, drawing out the suffering of those who would slowly starve to death, face cannibalism, child-murder and rampant crime.
These were extreme famines caused by bad weather and other factors. They were exacerbated by a long period of technological stagnation and population growth, which lead to a situation much more along the lines of what Hobbes and Malthus where predicting would inevitably happen again.
We almost got roped into exchange at my job but I made them go with Zimbra. Zimbra acts like Exchange and windows users can't really tell the difference when using outlook. Now the windows people are happy and the Linux people are happy.
I think if we got an Exchange server it would have eventually sucked the whole company's IT infrastructure into Microsoft proprietary only. If there's one thing you can do at a new startup to save money it's to avoid MS Exchange and go with Zimbra. That's because once the camel's nose is under the tent the whole IT infrastructure gets sucked into the MS black hole and you're paying the yearly Microsoft tax on every component of your IT infrastructure. Zimbra helps limit the bottom line damage that the obligatory windows licenses create.
If I said this kind of thing on a mormon message board I'm sure I'd get flamed just the same but with an opposite political narrative.
You think I'm a brainwashed Rush Limbaugh listener. They'd think I'm a brainwashed left-winger atheist from the bay area.
That's what 95% of people are because they don't actually dig into the details of things and just listen to people who do their thinking for them and tell them what to think about.
Before Prop 8 there were 10,000 married gay couples, 0.21% of all California married couples who also apparently happen to have some kind of genius programming talent that makes Google desperate enough to support the prop 8 repeal.
I'm not against gay marriage I just think it's a big religious fundamentalist vs counter-culture circle jerk over what might as well be imaginary skittle sh*ting unicorns.
It seems that someone at Google found themselves unable to resist joining in yet another round of the great culture war circle jerk of negligible impact on the real world known as prop 8 while meanwhile we have two wars going, the economy that is spiraling into depression, banks are stealing the wealth of this country, and California is about to go BROKE. In fact the governor used his state of the state speech to talk about the enormous budget crisis we are now facing. All public works projects in California have stopped!!!! And all anyone wants to talk about is freakin' prop 8!
Above posted modded "interesting" should be modded "funny". For those that didn't get the joke, it appears to be an ironic attempt to apply the "El Naschie" technique in a Slashdot comment. He's basically throwing around a lot of unfounded complicated nonsense signifying nothing in an attempt to get modded up. Much as "El Naschie" does the same in his papers when really it's just, IMHO, a stream of conciousness drooling on the keyboard crackpot spew.
Slashdot Mirror
I just finished reading Phillip K. Dick's "Man In The High Castle" which takes place in an alternate reality in which the Nazis and the Japanese won World War II. It takes place about 20 years after the war when things have settled down and the colonial empires of the Japanese and Germans are more or less up and running.
Someone asked me if the books was like 1984, Brave New World, or V for Vendetta. I told them that no it really wasn't at all. That's because the idea behind 1984 is that the government lies to the people about its nature and attempts to control people's perceptions about the past, present and future. The Nazis and the Japanese fascists didn't do that AFTER they had taken over (before that they did plenty of lying to gain power). They were sincere and forthright in their belief in their racial superiority and that they were going to take over the world for the greater glory of the Reich, kill everybody they didn't like or they thought was inferior, and they weren't ashamed of it.
I'm VERY glad we live in this world and not the world of "The Man in the High Castle" but it's disturbing how our current leadership is embarrassed about their ambitions. They dare not reveal them to the public and chose to hide them and play along with the democracy myth. It didn't used to be so bad but ever since the whole WMDs in Iraq thing and the torture scandal it's started to get to a point where political dialog has become a theater of the absurd.
How many Microsoft programmers does it take to change a light bulb?
None, they just change the standard to darkness.
How about a new model based on transparency!
You could have a infographic on the top of the website called the "bandwidth cost bar". Every day it starts at the top and slowly works its way down based on the amount of bandwidth the provider is able to pay for based on the revenue to the site for that day. If one clicks on it there will be a detailed breakdown of who they are paying for bandwidth, how much they are using and how much it costs and a top level summary of revenue and expenses.
The bar slowly gets used up until its completely used up for the day and then there are no more videos and all pages redirect to the same page explaining that all the bandwidth for the day has been used up and customers did not buy enough stuff so they had to shut down for the day.
Mathematical modeling of markets assumes that people in markets behave in a manner that can be reflected in smooth continuous mathematical functions.
People don't behave like that. They behave in a boolean fashion.
An example of a boolean function would be something like
r= ( gaussian random number between 0 and 1)
if ( marketConfidence gt 1 ) { //bubble .95) { //topping .05 + ( .1 * r) //crash
return yesterday + (.1 * r)
} else if (marketConfidence lt 1 and marketConfidence gt
return yesterday -
}
else {
return yesterday - (.5 * r)
}
When the market is going up, it keeps going up regularly. When the market confidence is broken thend the market is in crash mode, and the markets go down regularly and pessimism rules the day. The value of "market confidence" is a complicated human variable that switches from on to off at some point . The modelers had only seen the first case for the last 30 years so they only modeled for that and now assume that the current activity is a 10 standard deviations outside the norm and should only occur once every trillion years. That's because they refuse to admit that they made the error of leaving the crash scenario out of their use case.
So let me get this straight. I can buy windows 7 and not have to worry about it sucking more than XP because I can run XP in virtualization. So if I go back to XP I just paid for the privilege of running XP twice? Microsoft has really gone downhill lately. The upgrades seem to have negative marginal value these days. Who would have paid for the privilege to run Windows 3.1 in Windows 95? Where's the innovation? It seems like each release they just take features away and only give them back to you if you buy the "Ultimate" edition.
Geez... The reviewer was criticizing this netbook saying that this thing was "low-end" and a glorified cellphone. Well I have no idea what kinds of cellphone you can get with a QWERTY keyboard, an RJ45 Jack, USB, 3G, Wifi an SD card slot and an 800x600 screen for $100.
Well you raised a good question. Now you have to go deeper into it than just the surface level.
So if all you have to do to get paid 250 times what the average worker makes is be a ceo why doesn't the average worker go out, start a company and pay themselves 250 times what people who work for them make? If you can answer that question you might have a good chance of understanding the underlying causes of wealth inequality.
If you keep following the chain of questions all the way back to the beginning you will eventually wind up where so many of us have, In a nutshell, if you can get access to credit worth thousands of times what the common worker makes you can pay yourself 250x what that worker makes using the worker's own bank deposits. If you can get access to credit for 4% you can buy every single business in the world that has a profit margin of over 4% and make money virtually risk free using the business owners own bank despoits if you are good friends with his banker.
The core service platform at LinkedIn runs on Java
They do have a Facebook application that runs on Ruby.
I think the anti-pattern I see in most companies that are weak in the technology area is the guy at the top is great at landing deals, public speaking, and sales but he can't figure out what those damned pesky nerds are doing and why they need to get paid so much money.
As a general rule, most successful tech companies are started and run by people with engineering and/or cs backgrounds (Google, Paypal, Ebay, Microsoft to name a few). Many companies these days, which are in the information handling business (finance, etc), have little competitive advantage over their competition except for their technology platform and are thus essentially tech companies, even though they might not know it yet. Now with the down economy they actually have to be better than the competition and can't just survive by endlessly rolling over credit lines. Hence, the greater need for engineers who can create a technological vision for the company instead of just doing what they are told to do by clueless bosses.
Low cortisol levels are probably being caused by something else -- enzyme deficiency, some unknown pollutant, genetic defect, etc. This root cause is what leads to Aspergers. As usual the researchers say it's all in your head and it's all the fault of the way the parents treated their children. What they really need to do is look further into the cortisol production mechanism in the body and see if that is damaged by something in Asperger sufferers.
When a political idea goes from a narrow focus to providing mandatory advice with regards to every single political decision an individual or society makes it becomes an ideology.
I think we are now at that point with Global Warming.
Next up - should you walk on the cracks in the sidewalk? What would a believer in Global Warming advise?
I am so sick of the "population control at any cost" meme. It turns up everywhere! The Godwin's Law equivalent in any debate about environmental policy, energy policy, food policy or how to aid developing countries is to call for "population control at any cost" as this is where all these debates wine up as any message board thread on these topics progresses.
IP is actually a matter of considerable debate among libertarians -- at least the ones who write for the academic journals. Lately the consensus has been toward a narrower interpretation of intellectual property.
http://blog.mises.org/archives/001771.asp
The funny thing is is that people think the guys getting screwed are the homeowners who got to live in a home they never would have been able to afford in normal times.
The people who got screwed are all the foreigners that bought these assets thinking their money was safe AAA rated stuff. Now they are being told that they bought a bunch of worthless garbage.
The real problem now is that they have caused an incalculable amount of damage to the reputation of our financial system as being a safe place to invest money. The government has to bail all these people out to show that they will stand behind all these too big to fail crooks and make good on their lies in order to maintain confidence.
I brought an OLPC with me on vacation. With XBuntu the thing rocks! No moving parts, Water-proof when closed. Super wi-fi antennas. Hi-res daylight readable screen. Super light and easy to carry around.
Only prob is it's not too slow to run flash but a bit too slow for flash video :(. If they fixed that it would be a total dream though.
The RFID tag embedded in your forehead or wrist will be needed everytime you want to access the internet. The RFID signature will be present everytime you access in a website in the lower 64 bits of the ipv6 address you use to access the internet. Why else do you think they wanted such a ridiculous number of bits in the standard?
With laws like this, I might as well have more liberty in most regards in China. In China the government keeps the access logs of everything I do online for me, I can download all the pirated music, software and videos I want and I can get a cheap massage with "happy ending".
Even leaving out the political issues, Experts are few ,and when well known, consider charging a lot for their work and would probably only devote time to getting published in a scholarly journal rather than some random website.
It would be like running an open source project where the only people who are allowed to work on it are those people who hold a PHD or are certified to have 10 years experience programming with a major corporation.
The sad part is that Feinstein, a senator from California, should be representing the business interests of that little California company known as Google which strongly supports net neutrality. Makes you wonder where the heck she's coming from...
Seriously, just go buy a Zimbra license. Runs on Linux, does everything exchange does, not too pricey and it works great with outlook clients. Shared calendar, great web gui, etc. Oh yeah and they are owned by Yahoo now so you can feel like you're supporting the newly crowned Internet underdog while you're at it.
It seems that this ideology of environmental pessimism -- in which man is deemed inevitably doomed to overpopulate and face regular famines and other related calamities -- started in Britain with Hobbes and Malthus.
I think the reason for this is that British culture was permanently traumatized by the famines and plagues of the 14th century.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_of_1315-1317
These were extreme famines caused by bad weather and other factors. They were exacerbated by a long period of technological stagnation and population growth, which lead to a situation much more along the lines of what Hobbes and Malthus where predicting would inevitably happen again.
We almost got roped into exchange at my job but I made them go with Zimbra. Zimbra acts like Exchange and windows users can't really tell the difference when using outlook. Now the windows people are happy and the Linux people are happy.
I think if we got an Exchange server it would have eventually sucked the whole company's IT infrastructure into Microsoft proprietary only. If there's one thing you can do at a new startup to save money it's to avoid MS Exchange and go with Zimbra. That's because once the camel's nose is under the tent the whole IT infrastructure gets sucked into the MS black hole and you're paying the yearly Microsoft tax on every component of your IT infrastructure. Zimbra helps limit the bottom line damage that the obligatory windows licenses create.
If I said this kind of thing on a mormon message board I'm sure I'd get flamed just the same but with an opposite political narrative.
You think I'm a brainwashed Rush Limbaugh listener. They'd think I'm a brainwashed left-winger atheist from the bay area.
That's what 95% of people are because they don't actually dig into the details of things and just listen to people who do their thinking for them and tell them what to think about.
Before Prop 8 there were 10,000 married gay couples, 0.21% of all California married couples who also apparently happen to have some kind of genius programming talent that makes Google desperate enough to support the prop 8 repeal.
I'm not against gay marriage I just think it's a big religious fundamentalist vs counter-culture circle jerk over what might as well be imaginary skittle sh*ting unicorns.
It seems that someone at Google found themselves unable to resist joining in yet another round of the great culture war circle jerk of negligible impact on the real world known as prop 8 while meanwhile we have two wars going, the economy that is spiraling into depression, banks are stealing the wealth of this country, and California is about to go BROKE. In fact the governor used his state of the state speech to talk about the enormous budget crisis we are now facing. All public works projects in California have stopped!!!! And all anyone wants to talk about is freakin' prop 8!
Above posted modded "interesting" should be modded "funny". For those that didn't get the joke, it appears to be an ironic attempt to apply the "El Naschie" technique in a Slashdot comment. He's basically throwing around a lot of unfounded complicated nonsense signifying nothing in an attempt to get modded up. Much as "El Naschie" does the same in his papers when really it's just, IMHO, a stream of conciousness drooling on the keyboard crackpot spew.