I don't believe the central thrust of the book is that only countries that are physically located in the Western hemispheres are capable of sustaining workable capitalism. I think the point is more that one needs a Western-style legal system to do so.
I admit that I don't know enough about these Japan and South Korea to speak at length on their economies, but both are well known for "crony capitalism" where connections and political clout are far more important to the success of a business than the quality of its product or efficiency of production. One might argue that the US is quickly moving towards such a state, but that's another issue.
The punchline of this article comes toward the end, where Gilmore points out that really what the content distributors are doing is enforcing a scarcity-based, inefficient market, even when the potential exists to have a much larger, more accessible, more efficient market. This is perhaps the first time that I can think of where a vastly better technology was not adopted.
Yes, the removal of inefficiency will cause problems for those who are inefficient. That's too bad. As Bob Dylan said, "the times, they are a changin'"
That is incorrect. PCS sits on top of TDMA and CDMA, while GSM is an entirely different standard. If they were the same, why would they be advertising "world phones" that do GSM for $200 more than your standard Sprint PCS phone? Here's a link to a discussion of wireless coverage where they certainly make the distinction.
Politics. We have a test ban *now*, and lots of weapons waaay beyond their spec'd design lifetimes. Do you want to not know whether those weapons work till 2012? Imagine that you have a 1959 DeSoto (for those unfamiliar, one of those ridiculous heavily chromed American cars with huge fins and just generally totally out of date). It has been sitting in your garage along with 1000 other 1959 DeSotos. Your job is to make sure that when the time comes, you can start any one of them up, floor the gas pedal, and have it crash into the wall in front of it. Every once in a while, you start one up and it runs fine.
However, you have two problems. First, the DeSoto is getting old and wasn't meant to last this long. The companies that used to manufacture the parts aren't around anymore. The people who designed the thing in the first place are retiring. Second, someone comes along and says that you have to be absolutely sure the DeSoto will start up, but you're not allowed to actually start them up to check. What do you do?
If you've got a few billion dollars, you decide that the only realistic alternative is to push the state of the art in computer simulation ahead a few years. Thus you get ASCI and the move to "beat" Moore's Law.
16 in fact. One of the problems with programming for such a beast is that you have to use both types of parallel programming techinques techniques at once. Distributed memory, like MPI, to communicate between nodes, as well as shared memory, like Pthreads or pvm, within the node.
Yes, and also that cold things stay cold. Sure, an unbelievable amount of energy is being dumped into the filament, but it still takes a fraction of a second to heat to white hot. Conversely, after the current stops the white hot filament will take a while to radiate all the energy away. Personally, LED brake lights come on distractingly fast. They make me feel like I blinked as they were illuminating, even if I was watching carefully the whole time.
Dang crack-smoking moderators who don't read the post before moderating. Copyright expires when it expires, and not before, unlike trademark which you are probably thinking of. Right now this is approximately 80 years, or in video game time 39 million skillion eons.
The relevant section of the Constitution is that Congress shall have power "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Author and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective
Writings and Discoveries;" - United States Constitution, Article 1, Section 8. I will agree that this was written to promote innovation, but the part referring to writings (the relevant one in this case) is usually interpreted more generally to just be encouraging artistic expression.
Quoth the AC: Everyone knows that PARC invented Ethernet. What people don't know is that they are still using their 1 MB/s thicknet loop!
It just goes to show that the inventor of a breakthrough never figures out how to use it as successfully as subsequent users. Although Bob Metcalfe (the inventor) has moved on and is doing pretty well.
That's nothing. I interviewed with Adobe in May of this year and went to the trouble of putting my resume in PDF to send to them. They claimed to be pleased, but when I showed up each interviewer had a photocopy of a fax that was missing the bottom corner. This was *their own format*, and they couldn't even be bothered to use it. Not to mention they never called back to say they weren't interested.
Note that this system will produce a majority in every case, because in a worst-case scenario, all but two candidates will be eliminated, one at a time, and one of them will have >50% of the vote.
This is only true if you assume that a voter is required to rank all candidates. Otherwise if I vote for myself as my first and only preference, then that vote is removed from any potential majority. I doubt it would be possible to convice voters to rank all the crazies that run for president (Natural Law, anyone?) but I think it would be statistically OK to just assign random rankings to the unranked candidates on any given ballot. All the small parties that aren't going to win would not gain any advantage over each other because they would each have an equal amount of added random votes.
I am still not clear that there is any substantive difference between the two ratios. Very few people I know are unable to support themselves and also under the retirement age (although that could change as it rises). I agree that there are many people who are not dependent on the SSA for their living expenses. But how does that change to amount of money that is needed to support people. Someone who lives 20 or 30 years after retirement but has no savings is going to be incredibly expensive to support. Especially since I think the productivity gains you speak of are probably mostly cancelled out by the fact that health care is increasing in cost much faster than productivity and inflation.
To lurch at least a little bit on-topic, I don't think it would be completely unheard of to increase the payroll tax for social security gradually, like they have finally agreed to do in Japan. I don't think it would have been political suicide a few years ago when people were feeling flush. Now, forget it.
I agree that it should be clear to any reasonable person that Social Security was never intended to be an investment system. Otherwise, why were people over 65 allowed to begin collecting benefits immediately when the system was instituted? They paid no taxes, but received benefits immediately, which would be impossible unless, as you point out, it's a huge intergenerational income transfer.
What I question is your claim that we have a relatively small beneficiary:payer ratio. I was under the impression that when the SSA was created the life expectancy was near to the age at which one was eligible to receive benefits. This points to the necessity of increasing costs substantially.
I think there's a point to be made that is the converse of the impossibility of overspecifing software. The reason governments spend $500 for a toilet seat is the same reason they will never accept an off-the-shelf solution, open-source or not. For instance, I distinctly remember the mil spec for an ashtray (of course called something silly and bureaucratic like "ash receptacle, glass") involving hitting the ashtray with a certain kind of hammer, on a certain kind of board, and counting the fragments to see if there were too many to meet the spec. Software that governments buy is the same way, put out for bid with a ludicrously detailed spec, because of course there is no room for common sense in the government procurement process. If the program meets the spec, the company gets paid, even if it has severe defects that are not explictly forbidden in the spec.
Now, maybe it would be to a government's advantage to require the source to accompany the binary, but certainly not for the purpose of sharing the product among different municipalities. They all have their own little twisted specs, which of course are all different and incompatible. Kind of reminds me of all the Open Source Licenses. Mostly do the same thing, but it doesn't stop them from being a huge pain the reconcile.
How many kids do you honestly think were killed in any given year. It's not more than a thousand, so it's probably statistically insignificant. There are only what, 30,000 murders in the whole US every year.
Del
P.S. Oooh, a 1% decrease in crime! That's got to be meaningful!
I doubt it. Probably the reason he used binding arbitration was because that's what e-trade makes you agree to when you open an account. Usually those types of contracts require everyone to go through arbitration separately, so no class-action. IANAL, and this is just one more time when/. could use the advice of one.
Grrrr, that is obnoxious. It's a little more sensical to be overly sensitive when protecting easily lost trademarks, but it is outrageous that they would come after you specifically. I think what we need is distributed protesting. You may not live anywhere near Trek, and I may not live anywhere near::/Digital\::/Convergence\::, but maybe someone else does. Think how embarrassing it would be to invite the local media to a demonstration outside DC's headquarters. Maybe you could feature someone writing the decoder from memory, and make them look like an idiot on the evening news. And of course it goes without saying that any physical addresses found in spam would be submitted for immediate firebombing.
Del
Slashdot Mirror
I don't believe the central thrust of the book is that only countries that are physically located in the Western hemispheres are capable of sustaining workable capitalism. I think the point is more that one needs a Western-style legal system to do so.
I admit that I don't know enough about these Japan and South Korea to speak at length on their economies, but both are well known for "crony capitalism" where connections and political clout are far more important to the success of a business than the quality of its product or efficiency of production. One might argue that the US is quickly moving towards such a state, but that's another issue.
Del
The punchline of this article comes toward the end, where Gilmore points out that really what the content distributors are doing is enforcing a scarcity-based, inefficient market, even when the potential exists to have a much larger, more accessible, more efficient market. This is perhaps the first time that I can think of where a vastly better technology was not adopted.
Yes, the removal of inefficiency will cause problems for those who are inefficient. That's too bad. As Bob Dylan said, "the times, they are a changin'"
Del
That is incorrect. PCS sits on top of TDMA and CDMA, while GSM is an entirely different standard. If they were the same, why would they be advertising "world phones" that do GSM for $200 more than your standard Sprint PCS phone? Here's a link to a discussion of wireless coverage where they certainly make the distinction.
Del
Politics. We have a test ban *now*, and lots of weapons waaay beyond their spec'd design lifetimes. Do you want to not know whether those weapons work till 2012? Imagine that you have a 1959 DeSoto (for those unfamiliar, one of those ridiculous heavily chromed American cars with huge fins and just generally totally out of date). It has been sitting in your garage along with 1000 other 1959 DeSotos. Your job is to make sure that when the time comes, you can start any one of them up, floor the gas pedal, and have it crash into the wall in front of it. Every once in a while, you start one up and it runs fine.
However, you have two problems. First, the DeSoto is getting old and wasn't meant to last this long. The companies that used to manufacture the parts aren't around anymore. The people who designed the thing in the first place are retiring. Second, someone comes along and says that you have to be absolutely sure the DeSoto will start up, but you're not allowed to actually start them up to check. What do you do?
If you've got a few billion dollars, you decide that the only realistic alternative is to push the state of the art in computer simulation ahead a few years. Thus you get ASCI and the move to "beat" Moore's Law.
Del
16 in fact. One of the problems with programming for such a beast is that you have to use both types of parallel programming techinques techniques at once. Distributed memory, like MPI, to communicate between nodes, as well as shared memory, like Pthreads or pvm, within the node.
Del
Yes, and also that cold things stay cold. Sure, an unbelievable amount of energy is being dumped into the filament, but it still takes a fraction of a second to heat to white hot. Conversely, after the current stops the white hot filament will take a while to radiate all the energy away. Personally, LED brake lights come on distractingly fast. They make me feel like I blinked as they were illuminating, even if I was watching carefully the whole time.
Walt
Dang crack-smoking moderators who don't read the post before moderating. Copyright expires when it expires, and not before, unlike trademark which you are probably thinking of. Right now this is approximately 80 years, or in video game time 39 million skillion eons.
The relevant section of the Constitution is that Congress shall have power "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Author and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective
Writings and Discoveries;" - United States Constitution, Article 1, Section 8. I will agree that this was written to promote innovation, but the part referring to writings (the relevant one in this case) is usually interpreted more generally to just be encouraging artistic expression.
Del
Quoth the AC: Everyone knows that PARC invented Ethernet. What people don't know is that they are still using their 1 MB/s thicknet loop!
It just goes to show that the inventor of a breakthrough never figures out how to use it as successfully as subsequent users. Although Bob Metcalfe (the inventor) has moved on and is doing pretty well.
Del
That's nothing. I interviewed with Adobe in May of this year and went to the trouble of putting my resume in PDF to send to them. They claimed to be pleased, but when I showed up each interviewer had a photocopy of a fax that was missing the bottom corner. This was *their own format*, and they couldn't even be bothered to use it. Not to mention they never called back to say they weren't interested.
Del
Note that this system will produce a majority in every case, because in a worst-case scenario, all but two candidates will be eliminated, one at a time, and one of them will have >50% of the vote.
This is only true if you assume that a voter is required to rank all candidates. Otherwise if I vote for myself as my first and only preference, then that vote is removed from any potential majority. I doubt it would be possible to convice voters to rank all the crazies that run for president (Natural Law, anyone?) but I think it would be statistically OK to just assign random rankings to the unranked candidates on any given ballot. All the small parties that aren't going to win would not gain any advantage over each other because they would each have an equal amount of added random votes.
Del
I am still not clear that there is any substantive difference between the two ratios. Very few people I know are unable to support themselves and also under the retirement age (although that could change as it rises). I agree that there are many people who are not dependent on the SSA for their living expenses. But how does that change to amount of money that is needed to support people. Someone who lives 20 or 30 years after retirement but has no savings is going to be incredibly expensive to support. Especially since I think the productivity gains you speak of are probably mostly cancelled out by the fact that health care is increasing in cost much faster than productivity and inflation.
To lurch at least a little bit on-topic, I don't think it would be completely unheard of to increase the payroll tax for social security gradually, like they have finally agreed to do in Japan. I don't think it would have been political suicide a few years ago when people were feeling flush. Now, forget it.
Del
others would find punitive taxation fair (e.g. 98% income tax in the >$500,000 bracket. Has been tried in Europe long time ago).
Try again. It was tried in the US around 50 years ago. The page seems to have been taken down, but you can check out Google's cache. 92%!!!
Del
I agree that it should be clear to any reasonable person that Social Security was never intended to be an investment system. Otherwise, why were people over 65 allowed to begin collecting benefits immediately when the system was instituted? They paid no taxes, but received benefits immediately, which would be impossible unless, as you point out, it's a huge intergenerational income transfer.
What I question is your claim that we have a relatively small beneficiary:payer ratio. I was under the impression that when the SSA was created the life expectancy was near to the age at which one was eligible to receive benefits. This points to the necessity of increasing costs substantially.
Del
I think there's a point to be made that is the converse of the impossibility of overspecifing software. The reason governments spend $500 for a toilet seat is the same reason they will never accept an off-the-shelf solution, open-source or not. For instance, I distinctly remember the mil spec for an ashtray (of course called something silly and bureaucratic like "ash receptacle, glass") involving hitting the ashtray with a certain kind of hammer, on a certain kind of board, and counting the fragments to see if there were too many to meet the spec. Software that governments buy is the same way, put out for bid with a ludicrously detailed spec, because of course there is no room for common sense in the government procurement process. If the program meets the spec, the company gets paid, even if it has severe defects that are not explictly forbidden in the spec.
Now, maybe it would be to a government's advantage to require the source to accompany the binary, but certainly not for the purpose of sharing the product among different municipalities. They all have their own little twisted specs, which of course are all different and incompatible. Kind of reminds me of all the Open Source Licenses. Mostly do the same thing, but it doesn't stop them from being a huge pain the reconcile.
--Del
How many kids do you honestly think were killed in any given year. It's not more than a thousand, so it's probably statistically insignificant. There are only what, 30,000 murders in the whole US every year.
Del
P.S. Oooh, a 1% decrease in crime! That's got to be meaningful!
I doubt it. Probably the reason he used binding arbitration was because that's what e-trade makes you agree to when you open an account. Usually those types of contracts require everyone to go through arbitration separately, so no class-action. IANAL, and this is just one more time when /. could use the advice of one.
Walt
Grrrr, that is obnoxious. It's a little more sensical to be overly sensitive when protecting easily lost trademarks, but it is outrageous that they would come after you specifically. I think what we need is distributed protesting. You may not live anywhere near Trek, and I may not live anywhere near ::/Digital\::/Convergence\::, but maybe someone else does. Think how embarrassing it would be to invite the local media to a demonstration outside DC's headquarters. Maybe you could feature someone writing the decoder from memory, and make them look like an idiot on the evening news. And of course it goes without saying that any physical addresses found in spam would be submitted for immediate firebombing.
Del
I completely disagree. And furthermore, under the 1964... (This post continued on companion floppy disk) Del