Standard of living is an ends in itself (well, maybe for Americans), it's a measure of quality of life potential. However, quality of life can be raised by factors other than increase of income; factors such as a better environment or more available technology.
You don't try and feed a billion people by having them all sustinence farm -- you have a few of them farm and a few of them build fertilizer to help the farmers and a few of them build computers to help the chemists build the fertilizer to help the farmers and a few of them to build shiny things to trade for resources the engineers need to build the computers to help the chemists build the fertilizer to help the farmers. And how do you get better at building shiny things? Go to space.
The only reason capitalist governments need taxes, is that they need to buy stuff that's being produced by private industry. If all the production is public, then the government doesn't need to use money internally at all. A communist government redistributes the gains of labour the same way a socialist government redistributes income.
The US was very close to entering the war when Pearl Harbor occured. The only reason Yamamoto permitted Pearl Harbor is that he was hoping it would take out enough US hardware that Japan could hold out. If the Japanese believed that the US were going to stay out of the war, they would have happily let them.
I know you're kidding but Eastern and especially Communist collectivism is precisely why China could easily beat the West to a manned Mars mission: get the taikonauts to Mars without worrying how to bring them back. If you figure it out later: great, then you get to tell the West "I told you so". If not, give them the Order of Labour Glory or whatever.
I'd have to give it a mixed review. He discusses some ideas in the first third which seem really profound, until you realise that its something you were already familiar with and he is just really eloquent. The last third is almost entirely about the writing process, which I found pretty interesting but my girlfriend swears was boring. It might as well be a radio interview given how boring the back of the limo is -- they bluescreen the windows in order to do weird stuff with the outside, but it doesn't really help.
Personally I'd advise consuming it as you would a radio interview (while you're washing dishes or whatever) and in three parts (the DVD is mysteriously divided as such). I think that would have made it a more pleasurable experience.
Also, when I heard that Bono and The Edge were in it, I figured that guest'd be popping into the back of Gibson's limo, but instead they just intersperse some video of Bono reading from Neuromancer.
Bandwidth can only be properly throttled by the network stack in the kernel. Yes, many applications have approximate throttling, but if you're serious about it you should do it properly.
Is this really Flamebait? I think it's at least worthy of discussion (which would be much more likely if the AC put it with more tact, of course). What little I've read of the FreeNet architecture does not instill confidence in me. For example, building encryption, signing, and searching (have they done this yet?) into the low-level protocol, when we all know that the Internet is successful because the Internet is so stupid.
I can think of two reasons why central planning is superior to market economics for something like a space program:
The market is controlled by investors who are notoriously bad at long-term thinking. Space projects simply take too long to get properly valued on a market.
Markets are optimal at allocating resources to various projects, but space programs require a leap of faith in one single approach because funding too is impossible. Plus a major space program like a lunar landing requires a whole country behind it -- and therefore no allocation is necessary.
So I think bidding could be good on specifical components of space projects, but markets can't handle control of an entire space program.
Lets have some brainstorming: is there any way that the open source community itself (rather than a sometimes aligned company like IBM) could fund their own lobbyists?
Yes, damn those asskissing bastards in France, sucking up to their American masters.
The only reason some permanent members of the Security Council attempted to veto the Second Gulf War is that it didn't meet their economic and political interests (although I agree with the ends they were trying for, I am a realist about their intent). And all permanent members except China have a vested interested in the macroeconomic status quo -- in that they want they poor countries to stay poor. Ultimately the UN reflects the desires of its member governments rather than some intrinsic goal of progress and human rights.
I believe the reason that in the first 45 years the member governments were more altruistic and idealistic and therefore limited the General Assembly to serious resolutions. Since the end of the Cold War, the WTO has supplanted the UN.
When these kinds of tools first came out they were so bandwidth intensive that normal broadband could only handle two or three players -- have they improved since then?
But isn't the whole point of a website so people can see it? Seems to me like you're responding to the DDoS by effectively taking your site offline, thereby ensuring that the terrorists have already won. Why are the users coming to your site from somewhere other than/. more worthy? For that matter, don't the editors click on submitted link to check the site? Doesn't this ensure that you'll never be featured on any of those sites at all?
A much more reasonable solution would be to serve a lower-bandwidth version of the site, or add a message at the top of the site asking people to post mirrors. The coolest would be to replace the site with a link to a BitTorrent tracker with the contents (having a script to set that up on the fly would be very nifty).
I've been thinking about a tablet for the exact opposite purpose: reading eBooks on the run (well, actually on public transport). Palmtops have too small of a screen and lack features like font smoothing and pixel blending which should make reading on a monitor more comfortable (I have no idea if the lighting is comparable). Dedicated eBook readers never really caught on, so the last thing I'd want to do is tie my content into a proprietary platform. And I think the tablet/palmtop form-factor would be significantly superior to reading on a laptop to warrant the expense.
I think tablets have a lot to offer over dead trees, even if I don't get Wifi access on the subway. For example, the newspaper I currently read offers a PDF subscription for half the price of paper. Printing out RSS feeds is rather goofy. And on longer trips the tablet (especially if it transforms into a notebook) can be used to do real work.
IANALinguist, but from what I've read Sanskrit, as the term is used today, should basically be considered a constructed language. Panini took an already existing natural language, Prakrit, and squeezed it into his formal structure.
So yes, Panini's work is interesting from a historical perspective because he discovered context-sensitive and recursive grammars, but we can't make any claims about natural languages being valuable in the study of computer science. We can't even make claims about the cultural universality of certain grammar forms because Western linguists based a lot of their work on Panini.
Saying that Sanskrit is useful to computer science is like saying that Go is useful to mathematics. Yes, Go has very convenient formal properties, but that's because it's not a natural system!
Also, like a dirty Where's Waldo, can you spot the bis? I can see six. (Only two of whom, I might add, enjoy a stereotypically large number of partners.)
Aside: what would the explanation for the big cycle be in social terms? I see only three other cycles, but two of them are caused by frat spirit so they don't count.
Okay, you may still be the exception: upgrading every year might just be frequent enough to work. But most people might as well save the money of sockets and slots and solder the components to the motherboard.
I guess it's just because Moore's law has ramped up the speed of development, but it used to be that hardware designers had to try and eke out the best performance from the old infrastructure for each development, now they redesign the infrastructure to support the development. I guess it's kind of like the difference between console developers making games a few years after a console has been released and PC game developers pushing the limits of graphic card features.
It's so cute that people still believe they'll be able to upgrade their processor. Just reading the front-page of/. right now, not only are CPU sockets changing rapidly, but so are video card slots. You're also unlikely to be able to use your slow RAM after any upgrade and even power supplies are rapidly increasing in wattage.
Storage devices are just about the only thing that motherboards maintain backwards compatibility with. So sure you can use your old HD and case after you upgrade every other component!
You won't need a real estate agent if the only person in the country who can afford to buy your house is the well driller -- hopefully you kept their business card?
Seriously: why can't a well driller be replaced by a robot? Or by someone who flies in from overseas? Neither of them will want to buy your house.
Sure, it'll take a while before shipping is cheap enough that items as heavy as major appliances can be shipped for repairs, but it's not inconceivable. Right now, customers ship items as large as CRT monitors and microwaves back to the company for repairs. Sticking a fridge on a truck and driving it to Mexico is the next level.
There is no such thing as a permanent economic niche. The most you can hope for is that your occupation is not made obsolete until you retire.
Interesting article, but of course the easiest way to deal with multiple jurisdictions is to follow the regulations of the common denominator: if the companies can't be sure that their Canadian and American information is being kept separate, then they'll just have to apply Canadian standards to all their information. So maybe this Act will help out Americans, too!
The grandparent is correct to complain that it is an unstable mix due to the fact that both Wine and Mono are under rapid, and asynchronous development.
About 6 months ago, when I gave up on using Mono for development, the Windows.Forms implementation required applying custom patches to a specific nightly build of Wine which was so old that Mono was the only place to get it from. So maybe if you were successful in getting your patch into the main Wine tree, and maybe after Wine matures a lot, Mono will be worth another look.
Also, I understand that the Mono team is aiming for complete compatibility, but I'd be tempted to declare that platform-specific hooks are unacceptable in a VM. After all, SWT seems to have achived fine graphics control with a much more abstract solution.
Slashdot Mirror
Standard of living is an ends in itself (well, maybe for Americans), it's a measure of quality of life potential. However, quality of life can be raised by factors other than increase of income; factors such as a better environment or more available technology.
You don't try and feed a billion people by having them all sustinence farm -- you have a few of them farm and a few of them build fertilizer to help the farmers and a few of them build computers to help the chemists build the fertilizer to help the farmers and a few of them to build shiny things to trade for resources the engineers need to build the computers to help the chemists build the fertilizer to help the farmers. And how do you get better at building shiny things? Go to space.
The only reason capitalist governments need taxes, is that they need to buy stuff that's being produced by private industry. If all the production is public, then the government doesn't need to use money internally at all. A communist government redistributes the gains of labour the same way a socialist government redistributes income.
The US was very close to entering the war when Pearl Harbor occured. The only reason Yamamoto permitted Pearl Harbor is that he was hoping it would take out enough US hardware that Japan could hold out. If the Japanese believed that the US were going to stay out of the war, they would have happily let them.
Private land ownership has been legal in China since 1987. Yes, that's right, before it was legal in Russia.
I know you're kidding but Eastern and especially Communist collectivism is precisely why China could easily beat the West to a manned Mars mission: get the taikonauts to Mars without worrying how to bring them back. If you figure it out later: great, then you get to tell the West "I told you so". If not, give them the Order of Labour Glory or whatever.
I'm amazed how many replies praised your pedantism without pointing out that the correct word is actually "effected". :)
I'd have to give it a mixed review. He discusses some ideas in the first third which seem really profound, until you realise that its something you were already familiar with and he is just really eloquent. The last third is almost entirely about the writing process, which I found pretty interesting but my girlfriend swears was boring. It might as well be a radio interview given how boring the back of the limo is -- they bluescreen the windows in order to do weird stuff with the outside, but it doesn't really help.
Personally I'd advise consuming it as you would a radio interview (while you're washing dishes or whatever) and in three parts (the DVD is mysteriously divided as such). I think that would have made it a more pleasurable experience.
Also, when I heard that Bono and The Edge were in it, I figured that guest'd be popping into the back of Gibson's limo, but instead they just intersperse some video of Bono reading from Neuromancer.
Bandwidth can only be properly throttled by the network stack in the kernel. Yes, many applications have approximate throttling, but if you're serious about it you should do it properly.
Any advice to a soon-to-be-fresh grad on researching those positions to determine which are to my liking?
Is this really Flamebait? I think it's at least worthy of discussion (which would be much more likely if the AC put it with more tact, of course). What little I've read of the FreeNet architecture does not instill confidence in me. For example, building encryption, signing, and searching (have they done this yet?) into the low-level protocol, when we all know that the Internet is successful because the Internet is so stupid.
I can think of two reasons why central planning is superior to market economics for something like a space program:
So I think bidding could be good on specifical components of space projects, but markets can't handle control of an entire space program.
Lets have some brainstorming: is there any way that the open source community itself (rather than a sometimes aligned company like IBM) could fund their own lobbyists?
Yes, damn those asskissing bastards in France, sucking up to their American masters.
The only reason some permanent members of the Security Council attempted to veto the Second Gulf War is that it didn't meet their economic and political interests (although I agree with the ends they were trying for, I am a realist about their intent). And all permanent members except China have a vested interested in the macroeconomic status quo -- in that they want they poor countries to stay poor. Ultimately the UN reflects the desires of its member governments rather than some intrinsic goal of progress and human rights.
I believe the reason that in the first 45 years the member governments were more altruistic and idealistic and therefore limited the General Assembly to serious resolutions. Since the end of the Cold War, the WTO has supplanted the UN.
When these kinds of tools first came out they were so bandwidth intensive that normal broadband could only handle two or three players -- have they improved since then?
But isn't the whole point of a website so people can see it? Seems to me like you're responding to the DDoS by effectively taking your site offline, thereby ensuring that the terrorists have already won. Why are the users coming to your site from somewhere other than /. more worthy? For that matter, don't the editors click on submitted link to check the site? Doesn't this ensure that you'll never be featured on any of those sites at all?
A much more reasonable solution would be to serve a lower-bandwidth version of the site, or add a message at the top of the site asking people to post mirrors. The coolest would be to replace the site with a link to a BitTorrent tracker with the contents (having a script to set that up on the fly would be very nifty).
I've been thinking about a tablet for the exact opposite purpose: reading eBooks on the run (well, actually on public transport). Palmtops have too small of a screen and lack features like font smoothing and pixel blending which should make reading on a monitor more comfortable (I have no idea if the lighting is comparable). Dedicated eBook readers never really caught on, so the last thing I'd want to do is tie my content into a proprietary platform. And I think the tablet/palmtop form-factor would be significantly superior to reading on a laptop to warrant the expense.
I think tablets have a lot to offer over dead trees, even if I don't get Wifi access on the subway. For example, the newspaper I currently read offers a PDF subscription for half the price of paper. Printing out RSS feeds is rather goofy. And on longer trips the tablet (especially if it transforms into a notebook) can be used to do real work.
IANALinguist, but from what I've read Sanskrit, as the term is used today, should basically be considered a constructed language. Panini took an already existing natural language, Prakrit, and squeezed it into his formal structure.
So yes, Panini's work is interesting from a historical perspective because he discovered context-sensitive and recursive grammars, but we can't make any claims about natural languages being valuable in the study of computer science. We can't even make claims about the cultural universality of certain grammar forms because Western linguists based a lot of their work on Panini.
Saying that Sanskrit is useful to computer science is like saying that Go is useful to mathematics. Yes, Go has very convenient formal properties, but that's because it's not a natural system!
Also, like a dirty Where's Waldo, can you spot the bis? I can see six. (Only two of whom, I might add, enjoy a stereotypically large number of partners.)
Aside: what would the explanation for the big cycle be in social terms? I see only three other cycles, but two of them are caused by frat spirit so they don't count.
Okay, you may still be the exception: upgrading every year might just be frequent enough to work. But most people might as well save the money of sockets and slots and solder the components to the motherboard.
I guess it's just because Moore's law has ramped up the speed of development, but it used to be that hardware designers had to try and eke out the best performance from the old infrastructure for each development, now they redesign the infrastructure to support the development. I guess it's kind of like the difference between console developers making games a few years after a console has been released and PC game developers pushing the limits of graphic card features.
It's so cute that people still believe they'll be able to upgrade their processor. Just reading the front-page of /. right now, not only are CPU sockets changing rapidly, but so are video card slots. You're also unlikely to be able to use your slow RAM after any upgrade and even power supplies are rapidly increasing in wattage.
Storage devices are just about the only thing that motherboards maintain backwards compatibility with. So sure you can use your old HD and case after you upgrade every other component!
Why do you need to drive anywhere if the robots will go there and do whatever it is for you?
Of course the real question is: will they be able to outsource the building and maintenance of our robot overlords?
You won't need a real estate agent if the only person in the country who can afford to buy your house is the well driller -- hopefully you kept their business card?
Seriously: why can't a well driller be replaced by a robot? Or by someone who flies in from overseas? Neither of them will want to buy your house.
Sure, it'll take a while before shipping is cheap enough that items as heavy as major appliances can be shipped for repairs, but it's not inconceivable. Right now, customers ship items as large as CRT monitors and microwaves back to the company for repairs. Sticking a fridge on a truck and driving it to Mexico is the next level.
There is no such thing as a permanent economic niche. The most you can hope for is that your occupation is not made obsolete until you retire.
Interesting article, but of course the easiest way to deal with multiple jurisdictions is to follow the regulations of the common denominator: if the companies can't be sure that their Canadian and American information is being kept separate, then they'll just have to apply Canadian standards to all their information. So maybe this Act will help out Americans, too!
The grandparent is correct to complain that it is an unstable mix due to the fact that both Wine and Mono are under rapid, and asynchronous development.
About 6 months ago, when I gave up on using Mono for development, the Windows.Forms implementation required applying custom patches to a specific nightly build of Wine which was so old that Mono was the only place to get it from. So maybe if you were successful in getting your patch into the main Wine tree, and maybe after Wine matures a lot, Mono will be worth another look.
Also, I understand that the Mono team is aiming for complete compatibility, but I'd be tempted to declare that platform-specific hooks are unacceptable in a VM. After all, SWT seems to have achived fine graphics control with a much more abstract solution.