People still play Warcraft II. I don't think that open-source has had a significant impact on the longevity of Id's earlier games. The fact that they were solid games that many see as still worth playing is far more important. The original half-life, released a year after quake II, has orders of magnitude greater online presence, despite being closed source.
Firing a local employee and shipping his/her job overseas may not be a good thing. But it's not immoral. If the company lied to the employee, if a contract was violated, &c, that would be immoral. Moving jobs around, however, is entirely ethically sound.
China is doing "well" because they can do manufacturing for a ridiculously low amount of money.
They would probably be doing even better if they eliminated many of their protectionist policies-- as goods became cheaper, their standard of living would rise.
If you really think China is doing so well, would you like to switch places with a rural peasant?
Orkut doesn't really appear to be run by Google. Apart from the un-Googlesque design, and lack of interlinkage between the two sites, Orkut appears to be hosted (run a traceroute) by downloadtech.net , whereas google is self-hosted.
Also, the domain is registered to Orkut Buyukkokten, rather than Google Inc. (where both Google and its spinoff sites (froogle) are registereD), with an administrative e-mail contact at Stanford, and a mailing address in an apartment complex in Mountain View.
Yes, military spending gives a huge incentive to innovation. Yes, the government already spends lots of money, directly, subsidizing research.
However, what I think Gokubi was getting at was that building a plane doesn't stimulate research directly-- it's an indirect process. That money would be much more effective, were it spent on a grant regimen for simulating e.coli (see this month's wired), building a space elevator, or improving the efficiency of solar cells.
A grant system would give the money directly to those who can use it to research new and interesting things. A plane, on the other hand, only gives money to interesting research three or four levels down-- and they only get a small fraction of the original moneys spent.
Sorry, bad example on my part. But if all the villagers of a town revolted, each of them would get some measure of wealth, relatively directly. On the other hand, revolting on a local level has neglible personal gain in the modern world.
Tim McVeigh isn't a good example: historically, his was a non-trivial act, but not a major turning point. He didn't precipitate a rebellion.
You're always going to have weird stuff going on at the far end of the bell curve... but as long as the vast majority of people are unwilling to risk their personal status/wealth/livelihood/existance for a revolution, it's not going to happen. One catalyst for the French Revolution was that while not all of the people subscribed fully to the revolutionary doctrine, they continued with the revolution to their own ends. A farmer who ousts his landlord is better off-- a worker who throws down the factory owned may live to see better conditions, wages, &c. But going after today's elite probably wouldn't improve anyone's life in the short term. Any imposed change must come from the government above, not the people below. (admittedly, the people ostensibly control the government) Ours is not a time of revolution.
Hundreds of years ago, you could kill a lord, and take all of his gold. You then controlled most of the wealth of the lord. Nowadays, what would killing Bill Gates get you? Probably only a tiny percentage of his wealth-- the rest is socked away in stocks. The French Revolution was driven not only by the "will of the 3rd estate", but also rational self-interest of each individual.
Maybe people would kill the elite if they had a moral justification (at least to themselves), AND they stood to gain a significant amount of wealth. But without the profit motive, I don't think it's likely.
In my opinion, one of the cardinal goals of society is to improve the quality of life of its members. Keeping taxes low so everyone can buy McDonald's, X-boxen, &c, improves quality of life more than having everyone live out a spartan existance to fund the hypothetical moonbase.
You're right. A large portion of the moneys earned by people in the United States go to non-essentials. They go to things people want. Having these things (at least in theory) makes people happier. Even if it doesn't, it's what they want. Buying useless crap is one of the clearest expressions of liberty in a capitalistic society. Yes, people are stupid with their money. But they have the right to do whatever they like with their money (the War on Drugs is a whole different issue that I really don't feel like getting into at the moment).
Ultimately, it's not the people of a country that decide to build a moonbase. It's the government. And personally, I don't think that the government can justify increasing taxes, or cutting other programs in order to build a moonbase. Maybe in a few decades, there will be clear benefits to a moonbase-- clear benefits that will exceed the cost of building a moonbase. There might be benefits today, but they just aren't worth the expense.
Expense is a social construct, but it's a useful one. Your hypothetical society where everyone lives on a bare minimum might be spectacularly efficient, but I don't think many people would be very happy living without their high-speed internet access, big Macs, &c. I certainly wouldn't give up my computer to do my bit for a moonbase.
As for your final note about health care, &c: there was a really interesting article in the New Yorker a while ago. What it said is that as time goes on, certain industries become drastically more efficient: manufacturing, agriculture, &c. It takes fewer farmer hours to grow a tonne of wheat today than it did a hundred years ago, or even 50 years ago. However, other industries have essentially constant productivity: education, medicine, and so on. One teacher can only instruct so many students. Of course, you can attempt to increase productivity, by increasing class sizes, or decreasing the amount of time that a doctor spends with his patients. But ultimately, you can't increase efficiency in these sectors without hurting quality. Since some industries are becoming more efficient, they can afford to pay their workers more. The average auto factory worker has a far higher standard of living in 2003 than in 1910: it takes less worker hours to produce a car, so each worker's hour is more valuable. Because the workers' worth rises as their efficiency increases, the cost of the goods remain constant, or fall slightly. However, in sectors where efficiency is not increasing, workers have to be paid more as well, to avoid losing them to more profitable industries. So a teacher is paid more today than in 1910, as well. However, the teacher can only teach as many students as she would have taught in 1910: the cost of her services have to go up. Ultimately, this means that certain sectors of the economy are becoming more and more expensive as time goes on, at approximately the same rate as other sectors are becoming cheaper. Yes, medical care is going to cost significantly more in the future. However, because manufacturing will continue to become more and more efficient, things should even out. You'll still be spending more and more of your income on certain sectors, though.
This article claims that time wasted will cost businesses tens on millions of dollars. It seems to me that no matter how much spam/virus flooding/crap you get in your inbox, you only do so much work everyday. If you take five extra minutes to clean out your inbox, that's five minutes less of surfing slashdot or screwing around. Deadlines don't change for viruses-- people still have to work as much real work as ever.
Yes, it's probably possible to build a moonbase. But I don't think the return on investment is high enough, at this point in time. Whether that means that you're not going to get your $20bn back, or your 500000 man-years, it's still not profitable investment. Dollars are simply a less-complex means of determining this.
Yeah, I think that my statement about eliminating poverty was probably unfounded. A better description of the amount of money would be "enough to eliminate all homelessness in North America". It's not really a distribution problem. Where would moonbase money come from? Taxes. Where would poverty relief money come from? Taxes.
The current generation of spaceflight has no hope for mass emmigration from earth. In fact, the amount that it would cost to build a viable moonbase for a hundred people would probably be enough to eliminate all extreme poverty on earth.
The technology that may enable mankind to really "reach the stars" is still decades, if not centuries away. Sure, there have been some interesting developments resulting from manned space-flight. But things like modularized space stations aren't extremely helpful when spacecraft are built by nanobots.
No matter how much science fiction you read, sending people into space simply isn't worth the effort at this point in time. Yes, there are lessons that can be learned by manned exploration. But I don't know whether those lessons are going to be worth the tens of billions of dollars that they will cost.
There's more to things than just how much they cost; there's the benefit that society gets for that cost. Right now, that benefit isn't enough.
"Linux can be used as a file server/firewall/application server/web server/email server/DNS server/database server/all of the above at once without costing you nearly as much as an X-Serve.
You can do all of that with an iMac, if you wish."
Apple.com is not a demonstration of an iMac running a website. It's a demonstration of an Apple server running a website. The post requested a demonstration not of OSX itself, but OSX's serving capabilities on low-end hardware. This is quite probably irrelevant, but you should still answer the question directly, if at all.
366Mhz is not mid-range. It's the slowest chip that XLR8 sells. None of the boxes on Apple's site offer anything less than 800Mhz. Admittedly, Macs tend to have better performance per Mhz than PCs, but "upgrading" to 366 is ridiculous.
I originally bought MSFT stock as a form of voodoo investing. Given my horrible karma, any stock I buy goes down. I figure I've knocked a few billion off Gates' fortune... But four slurpees definitely redeems Microsoft in my eyes.
He3 is a byproduct of natural fusion in stars, &c. However, many people have speculated that it might be a good fuel for controlled fusion. H3 isn't very good for controlled fusion.
Windshare looks very interesting. However, I have a few questions...
How noisy is it? Have any of the neighbours complained? Have you had trouble with vandalism?
I'm also a little confused about your investmentment system. Why do people have to buy in chunks of $2500? Why can't someone buy more than $25k? What's the point of having seperate "membership shares"?
As many people have mentioned, Hydrogen is good for power transmission, not production. It helps if you think of hydrogen as a battery; you put energy in to create it, and get it back from fuel cells.
One big advantage of Hydrogen is that, for the time being, we can strip it relatively cheaply from Natural Gas. Sure, you get Carbon Dioxide, but much fewer unpleasant, smog-causing gasses. But, a few years down the line, we'll be able to produce Hydrogen Gas by electrolysis using newfangled alternative energy sources.
By beginning to convert to a hydrogen infrastructure now, we'll be more prepared to exploit Hydrogen when it has become dirt cheap.
The only way you can tell how much you've used is by the gas meter. And it doesn't distinguish between Hydrogen that's been used in a fuel cell and hydrogen that's leaked into the atmosphere. So you won't know that you've used 1 unit and leaked 2. You'll just think that you used 3. Ultimately, this helps solve the problem. Just as people look at the miles per gallon of gasoline, they'll eventually check the amount of joules produced per amount of H2 gas-- and this figure will be based on both leakage and waste.
While I like the idea of increased taxes for using congested roads, this is built into the existing gas-tax system: Getting stuck in traffic for an hour is going to use more fuel than a ten minute commute.
Yes, but if you are consuming more calories than you're eating, on a regular basis, your metabolism will slow to compensate. The result: you'll be hungry, tired, and won't really lose that much weight. And when you give up on the diet, your slower metabolism will take a while to compensate for increased intake-- so you'll gain your fat back.
Protectionism is a refuge of the selfish. Why should you deny Indians (or whoever else they decide to outsource programming to) jobs? Are they somehow inferior to the citizens of your own country?
If Microsoft decided to outsource half their workforce to India, what would happen? A few thousand programmers would go on the job market-- highly qualified programmers, whatever you say about Microsoft. The average programmer's wage would probably go down some, and, after a while, the numbers of new coders coming out of college would decrease to compensate. The programmers that lost their jobs would hardly be starving in the streets-- IT workers are generally adaptable people-- they could go back to school, become teachers, or something else that's needed.
However, for the 3rd world worker, an IT job seems far more important than to a (relatively) wealthy American. For them, a job programming could mean the difference between food on the table, and the gutter.
There are other, more tangible, disadvantages to protectionism. If the US is taxing Indian Software, India will probably return fire. Trade wars like these could be devastating to all sides.
Slashdot Mirror
People still play Warcraft II. I don't think that open-source has had a significant impact on the longevity of Id's earlier games. The fact that they were solid games that many see as still worth playing is far more important. The original half-life, released a year after quake II, has orders of magnitude greater online presence, despite being closed source.
Firing a local employee and shipping his/her job overseas may not be a good thing. But it's not immoral. If the company lied to the employee, if a contract was violated, &c, that would be immoral. Moving jobs around, however, is entirely ethically sound.
China is doing "well" because they can do manufacturing for a ridiculously low amount of money.
They would probably be doing even better if they eliminated many of their protectionist policies-- as goods became cheaper, their standard of living would rise.
If you really think China is doing so well, would you like to switch places with a rural peasant?
Orkut doesn't really appear to be run by Google. Apart from the un-Googlesque design, and lack of interlinkage between the two sites, Orkut appears to be hosted (run a traceroute) by downloadtech.net , whereas google is self-hosted.
Also, the domain is registered to Orkut Buyukkokten, rather than Google Inc. (where both Google and its spinoff sites (froogle) are registereD), with an administrative e-mail contact at Stanford, and a mailing address in an apartment complex in Mountain View.
So Ununnilium was only a temporary name? I always like that name.
You missed the point.
Yes, military spending gives a huge incentive to innovation. Yes, the government already spends lots of money, directly, subsidizing research.
However, what I think Gokubi was getting at was that building a plane doesn't stimulate research directly-- it's an indirect process. That money would be much more effective, were it spent on a grant regimen for simulating e.coli (see this month's wired), building a space elevator, or improving the efficiency of solar cells.
A grant system would give the money directly to those who can use it to research new and interesting things. A plane, on the other hand, only gives money to interesting research three or four levels down-- and they only get a small fraction of the original moneys spent.
Sorry, bad example on my part. But if all the villagers of a town revolted, each of them would get some measure of wealth, relatively directly. On the other hand, revolting on a local level has neglible personal gain in the modern world.
Tim McVeigh isn't a good example: historically, his was a non-trivial act, but not a major turning point. He didn't precipitate a rebellion.
You're always going to have weird stuff going on at the far end of the bell curve... but as long as the vast majority of people are unwilling to risk their personal status/wealth/livelihood/existance for a revolution, it's not going to happen. One catalyst for the French Revolution was that while not all of the people subscribed fully to the revolutionary doctrine, they continued with the revolution to their own ends. A farmer who ousts his landlord is better off-- a worker who throws down the factory owned may live to see better conditions, wages, &c. But going after today's elite probably wouldn't improve anyone's life in the short term. Any imposed change must come from the government above, not the people below. (admittedly, the people ostensibly control the government) Ours is not a time of revolution.
Hundreds of years ago, you could kill a lord, and take all of his gold. You then controlled most of the wealth of the lord. Nowadays, what would killing Bill Gates get you? Probably only a tiny percentage of his wealth-- the rest is socked away in stocks. The French Revolution was driven not only by the "will of the 3rd estate", but also rational self-interest of each individual.
Maybe people would kill the elite if they had a moral justification (at least to themselves), AND they stood to gain a significant amount of wealth. But without the profit motive, I don't think it's likely.
In my opinion, one of the cardinal goals of society is to improve the quality of life of its members. Keeping taxes low so everyone can buy McDonald's, X-boxen, &c, improves quality of life more than having everyone live out a spartan existance to fund the hypothetical moonbase.
You're right. A large portion of the moneys earned by people in the United States go to non-essentials. They go to things people want. Having these things (at least in theory) makes people happier. Even if it doesn't, it's what they want. Buying useless crap is one of the clearest expressions of liberty in a capitalistic society. Yes, people are stupid with their money. But they have the right to do whatever they like with their money (the War on Drugs is a whole different issue that I really don't feel like getting into at the moment).
Ultimately, it's not the people of a country that decide to build a moonbase. It's the government. And personally, I don't think that the government can justify increasing taxes, or cutting other programs in order to build a moonbase. Maybe in a few decades, there will be clear benefits to a moonbase-- clear benefits that will exceed the cost of building a moonbase. There might be benefits today, but they just aren't worth the expense.
Expense is a social construct, but it's a useful one. Your hypothetical society where everyone lives on a bare minimum might be spectacularly efficient, but I don't think many people would be very happy living without their high-speed internet access, big Macs, &c. I certainly wouldn't give up my computer to do my bit for a moonbase.
As for your final note about health care, &c: there was a really interesting article in the New Yorker a while ago. What it said is that as time goes on, certain industries become drastically more efficient: manufacturing, agriculture, &c. It takes fewer farmer hours to grow a tonne of wheat today than it did a hundred years ago, or even 50 years ago. However, other industries have essentially constant productivity: education, medicine, and so on. One teacher can only instruct so many students. Of course, you can attempt to increase productivity, by increasing class sizes, or decreasing the amount of time that a doctor spends with his patients. But ultimately, you can't increase efficiency in these sectors without hurting quality. Since some industries are becoming more efficient, they can afford to pay their workers more. The average auto factory worker has a far higher standard of living in 2003 than in 1910: it takes less worker hours to produce a car, so each worker's hour is more valuable. Because the workers' worth rises as their efficiency increases, the cost of the goods remain constant, or fall slightly. However, in sectors where efficiency is not increasing, workers have to be paid more as well, to avoid losing them to more profitable industries. So a teacher is paid more today than in 1910, as well. However, the teacher can only teach as many students as she would have taught in 1910: the cost of her services have to go up. Ultimately, this means that certain sectors of the economy are becoming more and more expensive as time goes on, at approximately the same rate as other sectors are becoming cheaper. Yes, medical care is going to cost significantly more in the future. However, because manufacturing will continue to become more and more efficient, things should even out. You'll still be spending more and more of your income on certain sectors, though.
This article claims that time wasted will cost businesses tens on millions of dollars. It seems to me that no matter how much spam/virus flooding/crap you get in your inbox, you only do so much work everyday. If you take five extra minutes to clean out your inbox, that's five minutes less of surfing slashdot or screwing around. Deadlines don't change for viruses-- people still have to work as much real work as ever.
Yes, it's probably possible to build a moonbase. But I don't think the return on investment is high enough, at this point in time. Whether that means that you're not going to get your $20bn back, or your 500000 man-years, it's still not profitable investment. Dollars are simply a less-complex means of determining this.
Yeah, I think that my statement about eliminating poverty was probably unfounded. A better description of the amount of money would be "enough to eliminate all homelessness in North America". It's not really a distribution problem. Where would moonbase money come from? Taxes. Where would poverty relief money come from? Taxes.
The current generation of spaceflight has no hope for mass emmigration from earth. In fact, the amount that it would cost to build a viable moonbase for a hundred people would probably be enough to eliminate all extreme poverty on earth.
The technology that may enable mankind to really "reach the stars" is still decades, if not centuries away. Sure, there have been some interesting developments resulting from manned space-flight. But things like modularized space stations aren't extremely helpful when spacecraft are built by nanobots.
No matter how much science fiction you read, sending people into space simply isn't worth the effort at this point in time. Yes, there are lessons that can be learned by manned exploration. But I don't know whether those lessons are going to be worth the tens of billions of dollars that they will cost.
There's more to things than just how much they cost; there's the benefit that society gets for that cost. Right now, that benefit isn't enough.
404 in Chinese :D
You can do all of that with an iMac, if you wish. "
Apple.com is not a demonstration of an iMac running a website. It's a demonstration of an Apple server running a website. The post requested a demonstration not of OSX itself, but OSX's serving capabilities on low-end hardware. This is quite probably irrelevant, but you should still answer the question directly, if at all.
366Mhz is not mid-range. It's the slowest chip that XLR8 sells. None of the boxes on Apple's site offer anything less than 800Mhz. Admittedly, Macs tend to have better performance per Mhz than PCs, but "upgrading" to 366 is ridiculous.
I originally bought MSFT stock as a form of voodoo investing. Given my horrible karma, any stock I buy goes down. I figure I've knocked a few billion off Gates' fortune... But four slurpees definitely redeems Microsoft in my eyes.
He3 is a byproduct of natural fusion in stars, &c. However, many people have speculated that it might be a good fuel for controlled fusion. H3 isn't very good for controlled fusion.
Windshare looks very interesting. However, I have a few questions...
How noisy is it? Have any of the neighbours complained? Have you had trouble with vandalism?
I'm also a little confused about your investmentment system. Why do people have to buy in chunks of $2500? Why can't someone buy more than $25k? What's the point of having seperate "membership shares"?
As many people have mentioned, Hydrogen is good for power transmission, not production. It helps if you think of hydrogen as a battery; you put energy in to create it, and get it back from fuel cells.
One big advantage of Hydrogen is that, for the time being, we can strip it relatively cheaply from Natural Gas. Sure, you get Carbon Dioxide, but much fewer unpleasant, smog-causing gasses. But, a few years down the line, we'll be able to produce Hydrogen Gas by electrolysis using newfangled alternative energy sources.
By beginning to convert to a hydrogen infrastructure now, we'll be more prepared to exploit Hydrogen when it has become dirt cheap.
The only way you can tell how much you've used is by the gas meter. And it doesn't distinguish between Hydrogen that's been used in a fuel cell and hydrogen that's leaked into the atmosphere. So you won't know that you've used 1 unit and leaked 2. You'll just think that you used 3. Ultimately, this helps solve the problem. Just as people look at the miles per gallon of gasoline, they'll eventually check the amount of joules produced per amount of H2 gas-- and this figure will be based on both leakage and waste.
AAC@Everything2
While I like the idea of increased taxes for using congested roads, this is built into the existing gas-tax system: Getting stuck in traffic for an hour is going to use more fuel than a ten minute commute.
Yes, but if you are consuming more calories than you're eating, on a regular basis, your metabolism will slow to compensate. The result: you'll be hungry, tired, and won't really lose that much weight. And when you give up on the diet, your slower metabolism will take a while to compensate for increased intake-- so you'll gain your fat back.
Protectionism is a refuge of the selfish. Why should you deny Indians (or whoever else they decide to outsource programming to) jobs? Are they somehow inferior to the citizens of your own country?
If Microsoft decided to outsource half their workforce to India, what would happen? A few thousand programmers would go on the job market-- highly qualified programmers, whatever you say about Microsoft. The average programmer's wage would probably go down some, and, after a while, the numbers of new coders coming out of college would decrease to compensate. The programmers that lost their jobs would hardly be starving in the streets-- IT workers are generally adaptable people-- they could go back to school, become teachers, or something else that's needed.
However, for the 3rd world worker, an IT job seems far more important than to a (relatively) wealthy American. For them, a job programming could mean the difference between food on the table, and the gutter.
There are other, more tangible, disadvantages to protectionism. If the US is taxing Indian Software, India will probably return fire. Trade wars like these could be devastating to all sides.
Apparently, this was suggested last may on the Xbox-linux mailing list.