I would not go for one of the variants not because someone somewhere is making money off of them. That does not bother me. But simply because none of them to date really offers anything to me or I think most Debian users.
I believe they do offer such a thing.
If you look at their goals, they plan their distro to be a tested collection of packages more up to date than Debian stable. This is one of the biggest complaints about Debian-- how you are left with the unpleasant choice of running well tested, but older software (stable) or be in the bleeding edge (unstable), with no intermediate choice. I am very seriously considering Progeny just because of this-- I really don't have the time or inclination anymore to keep up to date with unstable (and deal with the occassional breakage), but still would like something more up to date than stable.
Debian is an Open Source movement, not a specifically Free Software movement.
"Debian is a free, or Open Source, operating system (OS) for your computer." (http://www.debian.org/intro/about) Debian takes no position. But they call their distro "Debian GNU/Linux, and are developing a Hurd distro.
There are plenty of packages in Debian that are non-GPL.
But *all* of them must conform to Debian's guidelines, which basically coincide with the Open Source definition.
Now you make it sound as if the DFSG were based in the OSD. But it is the other way around-- the OSD was based on the DFSG. The DFSG was around long before the term Open Source or the OSF existed.
I would say that Debian, as a whole, shares more ideology with ESR than with RMS.
I already uncovered the huge distortion of the matter present here. ESR took the definition of Open Source from Debian, and woefully misapplied it (used it as a guide for corporations to write new licenses, instead of what it was meant for-- a guide for the Debian project to evaluate existing licenses.
In fact, Debian works a lot with the FSF, and SPI (Debian's parent nonprofit) had a legal fight with the OSF over the ownership of the now-defunct "Open Source" trademark.
apt-getting a new kernel every week is not a fun task IMHO
You are lying.
Different kernel versions in Debian are *different packages*-- apt-get upgrade won't upgrade you to a newer kernel release automatically.
There are different versions of the kernel *sources* package *for the same version kernel* that do get upgraded automatically. But you actually need to manually build a kernel package to get a newer kernel (of course, unless you write your own scripts to automate it).
There is an exception, though, which is if you run a stock kernel, this could be automatically upgraded. But if you don't know how to compile a custom kernel, Debian's not for you.
One of the wonderful things about the US is that their are no guards along state borders, no documentation is needed to travel inside our borders, and other things along these lines.
Oh yeah? Try being hispanic in the US. Or even worse, hispanic with Canadian passport, like me. First, you get stopped a lot more than the average WASP, because of racial profiling police practices. Second, they don't believe your documentation ("This guy has Canadian ID? Must be fake."), and call the INS on you.
The people at the Canadian consulate in L.A. know me very well-- they have to confirm I am who I claim I am all the time.
So you don't think that an investor is entitled to some return on his/her investment. Although it may not seem so these days, there is risk in investment, and the "lick of work" you mentioned is in fact that risk. The worker benefits from the fact that people invest in the company for which they work.
Ah, yeah, one of the classic arguments of how the capitalists "deserve" their riches.
First of all, if the argument worked, it would mean that the investors deserve to get some amount of the profits. Yet which amount they should get could be dependent on other social factors. One could argue that the current disparity in distribution of wealth is harmful towards society, and that, while investors deserve their "reward", this reward is currently too large for the common good.
But anyway, the "risk" argument has a major flaw in that, as an entity's economic power increases, the investment of equal amounts of money incurs in less and less risk (all other factors kept equal). Suppose a millionaire and a low-middle class divorced mother each invest $5000 on stocks. For the woman, this are her life savings. If the investments fail, she's screwed-- bye-bye down payment on new car. However, for the millionaire, if these fail, it's almost a throwaway-- it means that he'll have to wait a bit more before buying that new Armani suit.
So the woman risks far more than the millionaire. So if the investments were to work well, it stands to reason then that she should be rewarded proportionally more than the millionaire. But in practice, things are not like that.
Anyway, the biggest investors are not persons, but corporations. In what sense do corporations run "risks"? Certainly not in the same sense as people.
When you XOR three things, of which only one can be TRUE, the result is always TRUE.
What do you mean with "of which only one can be true"? Do you mean that there are three things, and it is a specific one of those three which is true? Or that, at any given moment, only one among the three can be true, but which specific one it is can vary at different moments? Or do you mean that two of them are necessarily false, while the remaining one is a contingency? (In the latter case, your statement would be true even if none of the 3 were actually true.)
Any odd number of true causes a result of TRUE.
If you define the tertiary XOR from the binary one: the XOR of 3 things as the XOR of the XOR of two of them with the third one. One could argue this definition does not correspond to the intuitive meaning of "exclusive disjunction".
You keep mentioning Game Theory but I'm not sure how well you know it.
I'm not a game theorist, but I know a fair amount.
Game Theory is the economist's attempt at depicting the human side of what we have always called 'market forces'.
s/attempt/failure/
Just because individuals make what you label as stupid decision (based on your outside view) doesn't invalidate free market theory.
"Outside view"? Gee, I was just thinking of an actor not following the Nash-equilibrium strategy for such bogus reasons that they *really* should know better.
You must certainly be aware of the role that
perfect information plays in these theories?
I fail to see why it has to be necessarily as central as it is put. Game theory does not force you to assume agents know everything about the situation-- there are games of imperfect information, where you assume that there are some states that the actors can't distinguish between.
Market theories are based on a number of parameters that seldom align in the real world.
Translatation: market theory does not correspond to reality.
That doesn't mean that the theories are incorrect (or the models based on thsoe theories).
Of course, because you simply point out that you can't falsify the predictions the "theory" makes by pointing to contrary facts. But you can show that the assumptions of market theories (critically, game-theoretically rational actors) don't hold in the real world, and thus the theory is irrelevant to the real world.
If insufficient information is included, or if too few varibles are considered, the model will not predict behavior.
The model will not predict behavior simply because Game Theory is not a good theory of human action, period. It is, in some cases, a good theory of what the optimal course of action is, but it is not a theory of how human beings actually go about making their decisions. Economists don't use Game Theory, they abuse it.
For example, given a game, there is a theorem that guarantees there will be an optimal strategy for each player, which will lead to the Nash Equilibrium-- that is, it will lead to the best possible outcome that does not involve risking an outcome inferior to it. Actors are considered "rational" if they follow that strategy.
The optimal strategy is guaranteed to exist-- thus there will always be a "rational" course of action. But there is no guarantee that, given a starting position and the rules for a game, this strategy will be computable-- it may be undecidable, and there are indeed undecidable games. Thus, just by thinking about Game Theory computationally, we see that the theory itself implies that in certain situations it may just be impossible to tell what the "rational" choices are. This leaves a conclusion with a paradoxical air: there is always a "rational" choice, but there may be no way of choosing "rationally"!
And this is looking at Game Theory from the viewpoint of decidability. When you take computational complexity into account, and start considering the cost of making the "rational" choice (when this is a decidable problem), you run into even more problems.
This whole article tries to describe the effects of these court cases in the real world. However, the real world has nothing to do with the fantasy world that the economists describe with their "free" market "theories".
Decisions are always made by agents who don't conform to the game-theoretic concept of rationality that's so central to modern economics. (One would think that the "science" of economics would be interested in modern concepts of the Philosophy of Action, but they show a criminal disinterest to them.) The effect is that these theories predict that there "rational" course of action in a very artificial, stylized fictional world, but they absolutely fail to predict whether this course of action is computable, and much less will they ever make a prediction relevant to the real world.
This article is a further product of the superstructural institution of modern economics justifying the existing order. Nothing more, nothing less.
the UN is not anti-American as you naively claim, in fact, they are the lapdog of the US.
Not quite.
Note I never said "anti-American", I said "oppose timidly". There have been plenty of occasions in which the U.N. have been very critical of the U.S., e.g., the bombing of Serbia, to name a very recent one.
As for "military industrial complex", please tell me how the absurdly elitist, unresponsive, undemocratic, unaccountable UN is supposed to be an improvement over the corporate state??
Because representatives to the U.N. are, at least in theory, accountable to the governments of their countries, which are accountable to their people. Corporations are not accountable to the people, only to their stockholders. In practice, though, you are right, the difference can be minimal. But in practice, the difference between a totalitarian communist dictatorship and a capitalist "democratic" republic can also be minimal for the largest segments of a population.
And what would be a better way to promote world peace than finding an enemy in the sky that all of mankind can unite against?
Your argument would hold if you could establish that such a fight, in the end, would benefit all of personkind equally.
As the powerful always make the destitute fight their wars, and keep the spoils afterwards, using your argument is like wearing a rag with a big hole right in the middle; and given the kind of "peace" you advocate here, I'm not sure I want to know what shows through the hole...
After all, what other useful thing do you know that the U.N. has spent money on?
Although another poster has dealt with the factual rebuttal of your insincerly idiotic comment, I feel I must provide the moral rebuttal.
Your flippant attitude just gives away the fact that this seemingly innocent factual faux pas is indeed part of a deliberate slander campaign against the organizations like the UN, that oppose, albeit timidly, the arrogant, merciless power of today's world: the military-industrial-media complex of the inadequately named United States of America.
The telescope will (at least theoretically) be looking for other planets, not just intelligent life. Finding other (possibly human-habitable) planets is a good long term goal. It should make the paranoid (who think that earth will not survive mankind) happy.
I'll be accused of repeating myself here, but I'll say this once more: imagine that, in the year 3,000, an alien civilization were to happen upon the ruins of personkind, which had disappeared hundreds of years before, due to the consumption of all their available energy sources. They explore and research this barren planet, with its countless artifacts of civilization gone, and discover and decipher this one particular phenomenon: SETI. What would you, as one of these alien anthropologists, say? "They claimed to care for life, and to value the possibility of life in other worlds. But this claim was empty, as is evidenced by how they failed to apply those resources to discovering that the love of life must start locally, and only after it conquers the local can it conquer the remote."
"Professor Peter Wilkinson, a senior astronomer at Jodrell Bank, Britain's renowned radio telescope centre, said that the SKA could enable humanity to protect itself from [asteriod's] impact." That should make the common man (not to mention the politicos) happy.
Quoth your hypothetical "common man": "Yeah, now we can go back to worrying about whether we'll die nuked."
Quoth your "politicos": "Good, back to oppressing the masses. What do we privatize next? The police, right?"
This is the last straw. The United Nations should stick to important things, dammit, like the nuclear arms race, hunger, preventable diseases, refugee situations, and such. Hell, it was created to maintain world peace.
As I've said plenty of times before, SETI is just a wasteful g**k project whose avid pursual by the said technocratic minority shows a gross disregard for the kind of life we already know, personkind, and the problems that afflict it. The time and resources wasted on this is a shame upon all of us.
Then: the FBI did a whole lot of things. Nobody really knows what they did. They did get away with a whole lot more. And it's not just the FBI and the police. Now: they have to account for their actions a whole lot more - and have gotten very cautious about not breaking laws themselves but THEY KNOW it will blow up in their face.
You just baldly assert this, and set to prove it with an "example". Explain to me what are the institutional measures that are in place since the 70s that ensure that the FBI can't get away with as much as they always have. If there are no such measures, then we must assume they can do as much as they always have.
An example from current events: that whole carnivore thing. The FBI is getting their ass chewed on this one, they just lost a case in court that will require them to describe in great details how it all works - and they may have to release source code.
A single example does not proof make. And the FBI has been documented to have done plenty of plainly illegal wiretapping and surveillance in the past. Sure they'd love it for their carnivore system to be legal, but when have laws stopped the FBI? Laws don't apply to them like they do to you and me-- they see themselves above the law, and act accordingly. The FBI's self image has also been extensively documented, with interviews from plenty of ex-agents that show their fragrant disrespect for the law.
So, it's very nice of us to remind us of history (some of us may call it "ancient history") but time has changed.
If you see the 60-70s as "ancient history", you have problems. This was almost yesterday. The people who back then were breaking into homes, planting illegal wiretaps, gathering files on people to damage them for their ideology, and such, are now high-ranking officers in the FBI, training and commanding the new agents.
But, to associate that which happened in Philadelphia to Puerto Rico is absurb.
What is the precise content of implicit assumption that I "associated what happened in Philly and PR"?
I said that police squads all over the US have been trained by the FBI in "anti-subversive methods". I used PR as an example because my wife is puerto rican, and that's the case I know best. But hell, pick your favorite big city in the US. A good deal many would work as well in the argument.
I, for one, am glad to see how are police handled the demonstrators. The peaceful ones received full protection of the law (as they should). The distrupters and violent protestors are now in jail and charged with many things (like feloneous assult on a police officer).
I must say this again: torture is a crime against humanity. Acts like these were part of what the US used as justification to bomb Serbia, for instance. (Since you have shown to be reading-impaired already, note I didn't say that this was all of the justification behind the bombing.)
I would doubt that their civil rights are being violated (given the publicity of these events).
And if you call "publicity" the fact that a few TV chains that contribute money to the Republican Party cover it, you have serious troubles.
But, I do believe that the individuals still in jail are there because a) they refuse to cooperate and give their names b) they are charged with serious crimes.
c) they are being denied legal assistance, d) their bail has been set to unrealistically high levels, e) they are being denied the right to make a phone call to get assistance from families and friends.
Puerto Rico is a commonwealth. Puerto Rico does not really play with the same rules as the the United States (Puerto Rico is not a state) - eventhough it has a lot of the benefits of being associated with the US.
PR has to play by pretty much every federal law the states have to. The only major exception I can think is federal income taxes.
The FBI certainly has as much authority in PR as anywhere else in the US. And a higher interest than average.
And what your police (with and without FBI training) did in the 70's (and I can't confirm or deny what you said happen) has little relevance to what police does nowadays. The police (and FBI) just can't get away with the same stuff anymore.
What the police and the FBI did in the 70s is relevant, because what they used were standard methods that are still being taught and used. Who got went to jail from the FBI because of being involved in this sort of thing in the 60s and 70s? Who got ascended, and is holding relatively high positions now?
Thinking that the FBI nowadays is fundamentally different is a grave error. The FBI has never been reformed, the criminals within were never exposed and made to pay for their crimes, so the only rational thing to expect is that they continue to be just the same.
So you're trying to compare Philadelphia to Puerto Rico? Why don't you compare Philadelphia to Cuba while you're at it?
Because Cuba is not under US jurisdiction, and even less US influence, you moron.
The Puerto Rico Special Investigations Division of the local police department was trained by the FBI, and they worked in close collaboration. And this relation was in no way special-- the FBI has relations like that with many police departments across the US.
That was the content of a warehouse that was raided by the police, thanks to tips from the secret service. The content was shown on TV. I have no reason to believe that the police planted that stuff in the warehouse if that's what you're implying.
Planting such things is standard "anti-subversive" training that the FBI has given out in the past to special police units. In Puerto Rico, for instance, the police Special Investigations Division during the 70s committed actual bombings, in order to blame leftist groups for them.
This would be very strange. The ACLU has a report on Police misbehavior in the WTO protests in Seattle where they found that exactly what the activists claimed had happened was what happened, and the claims about mistreatment in Philly right now are of the same nature.
I have to disagree. Ghandi realized, as did Martin Luther King Jr, and many many other protestors that there actions were and are illegal. They took the consequences. Laying down in the road is illegal. Refusing to cease to block traffic is illegal. It doesnt matter if they werent violent.
But torture is a crime against humanity, according to international treaties the US has signed. Do you believe the police should torture people who break the law in a nonviolent manner to express their opinions? (Read the reports. Police have engaged in what clearly is torture in Seattle, DC and Philly, without any cop being prosecuted.)
Detainees, also, have certain rights under US law-- right to a lawyer, for instance. Do you think the police should deny somebody this right because they broke the law nonviolently?
Also, do you think the police should make frivolous arrests of people it can't bring charges against? What do you make of the fact that most of the detainees in Seattle, Washington, and Philly were released without having charges filed against them?
The completely informed, completely rational consumer with no external pressures of time or demands on attention is one of the great myths of the 'perfectly operating market.' The truth is that people can't afford the time or energy to be completely informed on all the purchases they make, especially with the current rate of consumption. We allocate our attention and our intake of information as well as we reasonably can, but we have a distinctly finite bandwidth for that process.
You, sir, are very right.
In my opinion, this is a consequence of the so-called "science" of (mainstream) economics being nothing but a religion to justify the wealth of the privileged few.
I think there is a more deep point that can be made, that's behind your argument, and the point concerns Game Theory and its unsuitability as a model of the workings of a free market.
Modern economic "theory" makes extensive use of Game Theory to model economic phenomena. One of the fundamental assumptions behind Game Theory is that the actors ("players") in a game are rational, in a very particular theoretical sense. Game-theoretic rationality means that the actors in a game will choose the moves that lead towards the Nash equilibrium, that is, the maximum payoff that can be achieved without risking a smaller payoff. This assumption of rationality is fundamental to most economic theorizing. ("Perfect information", however, is not a fundamental assumption. You can design games where actors have imperfect information about the state of the game.)
Of course, you point out very correctly that making choices actually comes at a cost, which is a problem for most economic models. But still, one could argue it is not a fundamental problem-- you could incorporate the costs of decision making into the game-theoretic models. So you could penalize actors that take too much time to consider their moves, even though their move might have been the rational one in the earlier, simpler games.
This does not solve the problem for two reasons:
It merely shifts the problem one level back. There is the meta-problem that while this new game considers explicitly the costs of making moves in the first game, it doesn't consider the cost of making a move in the new game itself.
I can't think right now if it would be possible for a game to incorporate the calculations of the cost of making a move in itself-- my guess is no, but I haven't even bothered to think about it, because of the next point.
Game theory guarantees that, for any game, there will be optimal strategies; however, it does not guarantee that the optimal strategy is decidable. Thus we are left with a result of a certain paradoxical air-- in every game there will indeed be a rational course of action, which if followed, guarantees the best possible outcome, but still, there may be no way to act "rationally" in the sense that the only way to pick that course of action will be heuristically (which will be guaranteed to fail some ratio of the times it is used), or just by the sheer luck of stumbling upon the optimal strategy.
And even when the rational strategy for a game is decidable, the problem of finding it may be in an intractable complexity class. This is a fundamental problem that no amount of fiddling around the design of your models will solve you.
I think this all is a fine illustration of why all the thinking about "free markets" and their potential for "optimal distribution of resources" spouted by the typical Randian/Libertarian religious g**k from slashbot.borg, and for that matter mainstream economics, is a load of bullshit. The whole way of thinking embodied in capitalist economic theory just doesn't stand up to serious theoretical or empirical examination. The fact that it is the orthodox thinking shows more about the power that a privileged few hold in society than about anything else.
Does anyone seriously think the FBI is going to reveal what's inside the Carnivore machine and its "modus operandi"?
More importantly, does anyone seriously believe that Carnivore was invented by the FBI at all?
Face it, "Carnivore" is nothing but the NSA giving some of their Echelon systems to the FBI. How can we know that? All we need to observe is the fact that similar things are coming up in all the Echelon countries right now-- England's RIP, the New Zealand thing from a few days back, and Australia's net laws.
Those "early adopters" helped settle the "New World" a few hundred years ago.
Your white supremacist mentality really sickens me. Didn't you fucking know that America was settled when the Europeans came? What the fuck are you thinking? Do you think the early European colonists would have gotten anywhere without help from the natives?
In fact, the early european colonies only made it because the natives helped out the early colonizersand taught them how to make use of the local environment, which was very different from Europe.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe they do offer such a thing.
If you look at their goals, they plan their distro to be a tested collection of packages more up to date than Debian stable. This is one of the biggest complaints about Debian-- how you are left with the unpleasant choice of running well tested, but older software (stable) or be in the bleeding edge (unstable), with no intermediate choice. I am very seriously considering Progeny just because of this-- I really don't have the time or inclination anymore to keep up to date with unstable (and deal with the occassional breakage), but still would like something more up to date than stable.
Is it too large to fit on the boot diskettes? (maybe a "light" compile option?) For all I care, dselect can go already.
"Debian is a free, or Open Source, operating system (OS) for your computer." (http://www.debian.org/intro/about) Debian takes no position. But they call their distro "Debian GNU/Linux, and are developing a Hurd distro.
There are plenty of packages in Debian that are non-GPL.
There are plenty of packages adopted by the FSF for GNU which are non-GPL. (http :// www.gnu.org/software/software.html#DescriptionsOfO therNonGPLSoftware. So? The FSF may prefer that software be copylefted, but they happily use any free software.
But *all* of them must conform to Debian's guidelines, which basically coincide with the Open Source definition.
Now you make it sound as if the DFSG were based in the OSD. But it is the other way around-- the OSD was based on the DFSG. The DFSG was around long before the term Open Source or the OSF existed.
I would say that Debian, as a whole, shares more ideology with ESR than with RMS.
I already uncovered the huge distortion of the matter present here. ESR took the definition of Open Source from Debian, and woefully misapplied it (used it as a guide for corporations to write new licenses, instead of what it was meant for-- a guide for the Debian project to evaluate existing licenses.
In fact, Debian works a lot with the FSF, and SPI (Debian's parent nonprofit) had a legal fight with the OSF over the ownership of the now-defunct "Open Source" trademark.
You are lying.
Different kernel versions in Debian are *different packages*-- apt-get upgrade won't upgrade you to a newer kernel release automatically.
There are different versions of the kernel *sources* package *for the same version kernel* that do get upgraded automatically. But you actually need to manually build a kernel package to get a newer kernel (of course, unless you write your own scripts to automate it).
There is an exception, though, which is if you run a stock kernel, this could be automatically upgraded. But if you don't know how to compile a custom kernel, Debian's not for you.
Oh yeah? Try being hispanic in the US. Or even worse, hispanic with Canadian passport, like me. First, you get stopped a lot more than the average WASP, because of racial profiling police practices. Second, they don't believe your documentation ("This guy has Canadian ID? Must be fake."), and call the INS on you.
The people at the Canadian consulate in L.A. know me very well-- they have to confirm I am who I claim I am all the time.
Well, I've got a couple of accounts under 1k. I could sell you one for $500. Interested?
Ah, yeah, one of the classic arguments of how the capitalists "deserve" their riches.
First of all, if the argument worked, it would mean that the investors deserve to get some amount of the profits. Yet which amount they should get could be dependent on other social factors. One could argue that the current disparity in distribution of wealth is harmful towards society, and that, while investors deserve their "reward", this reward is currently too large for the common good.
But anyway, the "risk" argument has a major flaw in that, as an entity's economic power increases, the investment of equal amounts of money incurs in less and less risk (all other factors kept equal). Suppose a millionaire and a low-middle class divorced mother each invest $5000 on stocks. For the woman, this are her life savings. If the investments fail, she's screwed-- bye-bye down payment on new car. However, for the millionaire, if these fail, it's almost a throwaway-- it means that he'll have to wait a bit more before buying that new Armani suit.
So the woman risks far more than the millionaire. So if the investments were to work well, it stands to reason then that she should be rewarded proportionally more than the millionaire. But in practice, things are not like that.
Anyway, the biggest investors are not persons, but corporations. In what sense do corporations run "risks"? Certainly not in the same sense as people.
What do you mean with "of which only one can be true"? Do you mean that there are three things, and it is a specific one of those three which is true? Or that, at any given moment, only one among the three can be true, but which specific one it is can vary at different moments? Or do you mean that two of them are necessarily false, while the remaining one is a contingency? (In the latter case, your statement would be true even if none of the 3 were actually true.)
Any odd number of true causes a result of TRUE.
If you define the tertiary XOR from the binary one: the XOR of 3 things as the XOR of the XOR of two of them with the third one. One could argue this definition does not correspond to the intuitive meaning of "exclusive disjunction".
Please leave logic to the logicians.
I'm not a game theorist, but I know a fair amount.
Game Theory is the economist's attempt at depicting the human side of what we have always called 'market forces'.
s/attempt/failure/
Just because individuals make what you label as stupid decision (based on your outside view) doesn't invalidate free market theory.
"Outside view"? Gee, I was just thinking of an actor not following the Nash-equilibrium strategy for such bogus reasons that they *really* should know better.
You must certainly be aware of the role that perfect information plays in these theories?
I fail to see why it has to be necessarily as central as it is put. Game theory does not force you to assume agents know everything about the situation-- there are games of imperfect information, where you assume that there are some states that the actors can't distinguish between.
Market theories are based on a number of parameters that seldom align in the real world.
Translatation: market theory does not correspond to reality.
That doesn't mean that the theories are incorrect (or the models based on thsoe theories).
Of course, because you simply point out that you can't falsify the predictions the "theory" makes by pointing to contrary facts. But you can show that the assumptions of market theories (critically, game-theoretically rational actors) don't hold in the real world, and thus the theory is irrelevant to the real world.
If insufficient information is included, or if too few varibles are considered, the model will not predict behavior.
The model will not predict behavior simply because Game Theory is not a good theory of human action, period. It is, in some cases, a good theory of what the optimal course of action is, but it is not a theory of how human beings actually go about making their decisions. Economists don't use Game Theory, they abuse it.
For example, given a game, there is a theorem that guarantees there will be an optimal strategy for each player, which will lead to the Nash Equilibrium-- that is, it will lead to the best possible outcome that does not involve risking an outcome inferior to it. Actors are considered "rational" if they follow that strategy.
The optimal strategy is guaranteed to exist-- thus there will always be a "rational" course of action. But there is no guarantee that, given a starting position and the rules for a game, this strategy will be computable-- it may be undecidable, and there are indeed undecidable games. Thus, just by thinking about Game Theory computationally, we see that the theory itself implies that in certain situations it may just be impossible to tell what the "rational" choices are. This leaves a conclusion with a paradoxical air: there is always a "rational" choice, but there may be no way of choosing "rationally"!
And this is looking at Game Theory from the viewpoint of decidability. When you take computational complexity into account, and start considering the cost of making the "rational" choice (when this is a decidable problem), you run into even more problems.
Decisions are always made by agents who don't conform to the game-theoretic concept of rationality that's so central to modern economics. (One would think that the "science" of economics would be interested in modern concepts of the Philosophy of Action, but they show a criminal disinterest to them.) The effect is that these theories predict that there "rational" course of action in a very artificial, stylized fictional world, but they absolutely fail to predict whether this course of action is computable, and much less will they ever make a prediction relevant to the real world.
This article is a further product of the superstructural institution of modern economics justifying the existing order. Nothing more, nothing less.
Not quite.
Note I never said "anti-American", I said "oppose timidly". There have been plenty of occasions in which the U.N. have been very critical of the U.S., e.g., the bombing of Serbia, to name a very recent one.
As for "military industrial complex", please tell me how the absurdly elitist, unresponsive, undemocratic, unaccountable UN is supposed to be an improvement over the corporate state??
Because representatives to the U.N. are, at least in theory, accountable to the governments of their countries, which are accountable to their people. Corporations are not accountable to the people, only to their stockholders. In practice, though, you are right, the difference can be minimal. But in practice, the difference between a totalitarian communist dictatorship and a capitalist "democratic" republic can also be minimal for the largest segments of a population.
The US population's rate of growth is quite low.
Your argument would hold if you could establish that such a fight, in the end, would benefit all of personkind equally.
As the powerful always make the destitute fight their wars, and keep the spoils afterwards, using your argument is like wearing a rag with a big hole right in the middle; and given the kind of "peace" you advocate here, I'm not sure I want to know what shows through the hole...
Although another poster has dealt with the factual rebuttal of your insincerly idiotic comment, I feel I must provide the moral rebuttal.
Your flippant attitude just gives away the fact that this seemingly innocent factual faux pas is indeed part of a deliberate slander campaign against the organizations like the UN, that oppose, albeit timidly, the arrogant, merciless power of today's world: the military-industrial-media complex of the inadequately named United States of America.
The telescope will (at least theoretically) be looking for other planets, not just intelligent life. Finding other (possibly human-habitable) planets is a good long term goal. It should make the paranoid (who think that earth will not survive mankind) happy.
I'll be accused of repeating myself here, but I'll say this once more: imagine that, in the year 3,000, an alien civilization were to happen upon the ruins of personkind, which had disappeared hundreds of years before, due to the consumption of all their available energy sources. They explore and research this barren planet, with its countless artifacts of civilization gone, and discover and decipher this one particular phenomenon: SETI. What would you, as one of these alien anthropologists, say? "They claimed to care for life, and to value the possibility of life in other worlds. But this claim was empty, as is evidenced by how they failed to apply those resources to discovering that the love of life must start locally, and only after it conquers the local can it conquer the remote."
"Professor Peter Wilkinson, a senior astronomer at Jodrell Bank, Britain's renowned radio telescope centre, said that the SKA could enable humanity to protect itself from [asteriod's] impact." That should make the common man (not to mention the politicos) happy.
Quoth your hypothetical "common man": "Yeah, now we can go back to worrying about whether we'll die nuked."
Quoth your "politicos": "Good, back to oppressing the masses. What do we privatize next? The police, right?"
As I've said plenty of times before, SETI is just a wasteful g**k project whose avid pursual by the said technocratic minority shows a gross disregard for the kind of life we already know, personkind, and the problems that afflict it. The time and resources wasted on this is a shame upon all of us.
You just baldly assert this, and set to prove it with an "example". Explain to me what are the institutional measures that are in place since the 70s that ensure that the FBI can't get away with as much as they always have. If there are no such measures, then we must assume they can do as much as they always have.
An example from current events: that whole carnivore thing. The FBI is getting their ass chewed on this one, they just lost a case in court that will require them to describe in great details how it all works - and they may have to release source code.
A single example does not proof make. And the FBI has been documented to have done plenty of plainly illegal wiretapping and surveillance in the past. Sure they'd love it for their carnivore system to be legal, but when have laws stopped the FBI? Laws don't apply to them like they do to you and me-- they see themselves above the law, and act accordingly. The FBI's self image has also been extensively documented, with interviews from plenty of ex-agents that show their fragrant disrespect for the law.
So, it's very nice of us to remind us of history (some of us may call it "ancient history") but time has changed.
If you see the 60-70s as "ancient history", you have problems. This was almost yesterday. The people who back then were breaking into homes, planting illegal wiretaps, gathering files on people to damage them for their ideology, and such, are now high-ranking officers in the FBI, training and commanding the new agents.
What is the precise content of implicit assumption that I "associated what happened in Philly and PR"?
I said that police squads all over the US have been trained by the FBI in "anti-subversive methods". I used PR as an example because my wife is puerto rican, and that's the case I know best. But hell, pick your favorite big city in the US. A good deal many would work as well in the argument.
I, for one, am glad to see how are police handled the demonstrators. The peaceful ones received full protection of the law (as they should). The distrupters and violent protestors are now in jail and charged with many things (like feloneous assult on a police officer).
I must say this again: torture is a crime against humanity. Acts like these were part of what the US used as justification to bomb Serbia, for instance. (Since you have shown to be reading-impaired already, note I didn't say that this was all of the justification behind the bombing.)
I would doubt that their civil rights are being violated (given the publicity of these events). And if you call "publicity" the fact that a few TV chains that contribute money to the Republican Party cover it, you have serious troubles.
But, I do believe that the individuals still in jail are there because a) they refuse to cooperate and give their names b) they are charged with serious crimes.
c) they are being denied legal assistance, d) their bail has been set to unrealistically high levels, e) they are being denied the right to make a phone call to get assistance from families and friends.
PR has to play by pretty much every federal law the states have to. The only major exception I can think is federal income taxes.
The FBI certainly has as much authority in PR as anywhere else in the US. And a higher interest than average.
And what your police (with and without FBI training) did in the 70's (and I can't confirm or deny what you said happen) has little relevance to what police does nowadays. The police (and FBI) just can't get away with the same stuff anymore.
What the police and the FBI did in the 70s is relevant, because what they used were standard methods that are still being taught and used. Who got went to jail from the FBI because of being involved in this sort of thing in the 60s and 70s? Who got ascended, and is holding relatively high positions now?
Thinking that the FBI nowadays is fundamentally different is a grave error. The FBI has never been reformed, the criminals within were never exposed and made to pay for their crimes, so the only rational thing to expect is that they continue to be just the same.
Because Cuba is not under US jurisdiction, and even less US influence, you moron.
The Puerto Rico Special Investigations Division of the local police department was trained by the FBI, and they worked in close collaboration. And this relation was in no way special-- the FBI has relations like that with many police departments across the US.
Planting such things is standard "anti-subversive" training that the FBI has given out in the past to special police units. In Puerto Rico, for instance, the police Special Investigations Division during the 70s committed actual bombings, in order to blame leftist groups for them.
This would be very strange. The ACLU has a report on Police misbehavior in the WTO protests in Seattle where they found that exactly what the activists claimed had happened was what happened, and the claims about mistreatment in Philly right now are of the same nature.
But torture is a crime against humanity, according to international treaties the US has signed. Do you believe the police should torture people who break the law in a nonviolent manner to express their opinions? (Read the reports. Police have engaged in what clearly is torture in Seattle, DC and Philly, without any cop being prosecuted.)
Detainees, also, have certain rights under US law-- right to a lawyer, for instance. Do you think the police should deny somebody this right because they broke the law nonviolently?
Also, do you think the police should make frivolous arrests of people it can't bring charges against? What do you make of the fact that most of the detainees in Seattle, Washington, and Philly were released without having charges filed against them?
You, sir, are very right.
In my opinion, this is a consequence of the so-called "science" of (mainstream) economics being nothing but a religion to justify the wealth of the privileged few.
I think there is a more deep point that can be made, that's behind your argument, and the point concerns Game Theory and its unsuitability as a model of the workings of a free market.
Modern economic "theory" makes extensive use of Game Theory to model economic phenomena. One of the fundamental assumptions behind Game Theory is that the actors ("players") in a game are rational, in a very particular theoretical sense. Game-theoretic rationality means that the actors in a game will choose the moves that lead towards the Nash equilibrium, that is, the maximum payoff that can be achieved without risking a smaller payoff. This assumption of rationality is fundamental to most economic theorizing. ("Perfect information", however, is not a fundamental assumption. You can design games where actors have imperfect information about the state of the game.)
Of course, you point out very correctly that making choices actually comes at a cost, which is a problem for most economic models. But still, one could argue it is not a fundamental problem-- you could incorporate the costs of decision making into the game-theoretic models. So you could penalize actors that take too much time to consider their moves, even though their move might have been the rational one in the earlier, simpler games.
This does not solve the problem for two reasons:
I can't think right now if it would be possible for a game to incorporate the calculations of the cost of making a move in itself-- my guess is no, but I haven't even bothered to think about it, because of the next point.
And even when the rational strategy for a game is decidable, the problem of finding it may be in an intractable complexity class. This is a fundamental problem that no amount of fiddling around the design of your models will solve you.
I think this all is a fine illustration of why all the thinking about "free markets" and their potential for "optimal distribution of resources" spouted by the typical Randian/Libertarian religious g**k from slashbot.borg, and for that matter mainstream economics, is a load of bullshit. The whole way of thinking embodied in capitalist economic theory just doesn't stand up to serious theoretical or empirical examination. The fact that it is the orthodox thinking shows more about the power that a privileged few hold in society than about anything else.
More importantly, does anyone seriously believe that Carnivore was invented by the FBI at all?
Face it, "Carnivore" is nothing but the NSA giving some of their Echelon systems to the FBI. How can we know that? All we need to observe is the fact that similar things are coming up in all the Echelon countries right now-- England's RIP, the New Zealand thing from a few days back, and Australia's net laws.
Your white supremacist mentality really sickens me. Didn't you fucking know that America was settled when the Europeans came? What the fuck are you thinking? Do you think the early European colonists would have gotten anywhere without help from the natives?
In fact, the early european colonies only made it because the natives helped out the early colonizersand taught them how to make use of the local environment, which was very different from Europe.
Mars, on the other hand, is truly unsettled.