Two sides of the wake-up coin: (OT, but nomadic moves me to comment)
Perhaps the real Obama was pretty obvious to some of you out there. But I cannot shake the whole image of legions of hopey-changemass troglodytes all swooning over "the one": during the campaign, after the election tally, fawing during his speeches from his Office of the President Elect, created new out thin air and pure smug... To my own friends, I'd railed against this man, but most of the Obama supporters in my circle, and I think quite a number generally, couldn't break free of the cult of personality. Individuals really ought to do a gut-check on those things, cults of personality almost always lead to terrible places.
Alas, I was no better. With a twinge I voted McCain. I wasn't hung up on the man. I felt a little ill about my vote as I cast it, but saw him then as at least more likely to be slower-acting. I did not believe a vote on pure principle would work. I now realize this is what some in politics depend on.
A small part of me is glad for our Obama presidency. It taught me to reject the last vestiges I had of American-style conservatism and embrace fully libertarian principles under the sound economics taught by the Austrian school. I was and am no Progressive, so I was never inclined to support someone like Obama. But I also learned over the last decade how Bush, who I thought was a good choice at the time (my Obama moment, if you will) was really a Progressive of a slightly different flavor. What a lesson on civic responsibility! I had no idea then what I was doing, mostly just hopes and impressions. To Obama supporters, I deserve your shame for my actions then. You perhaps deserve mine for your actions more recently.
I take more time now. At the polling place, I think ballot measures, referendums, and initiatives of the various sorts are far more important now than candidate officeholders. The measures shape law we have to live under, and are usually written to catch you unaware or lend to an emotional bias. I never walk in to vote without having spent at least a week with the sample ballot beforehand, researching and reflecting. I resolve to vote on principle now, and did so last election season. I don't listen to the politicos who say votes for certain candidates are just thrown away. It seems to me, either one day those votes will number enough to matter, or we won't really need to worry about it.
[...developed along these lines: 'H2O and CO2 would be converted to methane, would fuel electricity-producing power plants that generate more CO2 and H2O, to keep the process going.']
Uh, this sounds like a perpetual motion machine scam. These researchers might be deluding themselves. In the process, we'll waste (via gov't funding grants) asstons of money on pursuing an unfeasible, impractical, but tantalizing idea.
A few flashy startups will be created later, promising viable technology that's always "just ahead." You know...along the lines of hydrogen fuel cell scams. The technology will seem new to Wall St. analysts and newsies each time.
Channeling and paraphrasing the inimitable Lewis Black, "Green Jobs! Green Jobs! What can I say?!...back to you."
Hey, uuh, there's nothing immoral or unethical about purchasing the lice from the vendor.
Where you can start making these value judgments is when a purchaser subsequently decides to USE the previously purchased lice in some particular way you or society in general, might find objectionable.
To make the argument you'd made above, Anon Coward, is to misunderstand the subject. Free markets don't "fix" anything, sir. They are what has taken place when separate parties agree to do a deal. The "fix" is not to restrict free exchange, it is to protect property rights.
Most of the posts here had the understandable knee-jerk "eww, who would buy THAT?!" reaction...and I think this very fact shows how a free and unfettered market would normally act to keep this sort of activity very limited indeed.
As for the asshats who buy, and then use the lice thus obtained for the purpose of infesting someone against their will, or otherwise depriving them of property somehow as a result of the lice, now that's were natural law can come in. That's not a free market problem.
Anon Coward, you have to ask yourself carefully to define what a free market really is: It's the collection of _voluntary_ exchanges between parties. When the market is free, both sides want to do the trade, or it doesn't happen.
Wanting to kill a trade because you, as a non-party to the contract being undertaken, find it in some way objectionable in the end is the same sort of imposition upon another's natural rights as the case of someone using the lice they bought to infest YOU against your will.
Both YOU and HE then (if, and only if, he actually does go on to use the lice maliciously), ought to be made to suffer sanction. YOU for wanting to forbid all such voluntary exchanges because they offend you, and HE for choosing to do harm to you or deprive you of your rightful property by choosing to use the lice against you.
The <quote>Because someone is going to try to fuck someone else over</quote> part doesn't happen at the free/unfettered market level, because this is not an exchange. The malicious person spreading the lice he bought on your bath towel, thereby later infesting you, committed violence against you, and that's a matter of law.
Now, there can still be fraud in a free exchange, which is also a matter of law. Fraud is the intentional misrepresentation of the terms of an exchange, so as to create a false idea about what will actually be exchanged in the mind of one of the parties, usually with the object of depriving the misled party of property without the expected compensation.
The law's first duty is (should be) to enforce property rights. People often forget that you own (at least ought to) your own body too, so someone committing violence against you is, in essence, depriving you of the legitimate right to exercise control over your own property.
Laissez-faire capitalism is difficult to accomplish under true anarchy, because parties to exchanges can never have much confidence that their respective property rights would be upheld.
The first thing that societies interested in free-market exchange see is in their interest is standing up some sort of mutually agreed upon outside governance to assure enforcement of property rights. This allows markets to develop efficiently, as parties are relieved of the burden of maintaining each their own enforcement capabilities.
What would you call that system in London? It sounds like a Borda Count, but there I think you rank all the candidates from most favored to least.
Yes, I would love exploring such a mod of American elections.
In my case right now, I would vote 1) Barr and 2) McCain.
But the prospect this changes my thinking about past elections too. I have been very 2D with the conventional wisdom being to disregard the other parties because they don't really stand a change.
I went back over the 2000 choices. The Constitution Party has a very interesting platform. It might have been my #1 option, with Bush being #2.
I think it's not unrealistic to think that a Republican or Democrat choice would just about always be my #2, as least as those parties work currently.
The lens through which America views global affairs is granted not the same one with which many other countries and peoples view the world. We're shaped by our experiences, by the information we have, and by the credibility or lack thereof we might assign to its sources.
Much hay has been made about Iraq. Many Americans think we were justified to have gone there. Most, however, if given the benefit of knowing the sort of struggle it would be and its costs, would have chosen not to do it.
But we did go, and those of us who thought it was the right choice at the time now feel beholden to try our best to leave it a place better than we found it, for the benefit of her long suffering population. We remain fearful that as happened in Afghanistan, the country would become a safe haven for terror groups who would seek to do us ill.
The case for Afghanistan and Iraq are quite different, at least as Americans see them. The country had been under the control of the Taliban, and became the base from which Al-Qaeda developed and executed its 9/11 attack. We felt justified in first trying to destroy Al-Qaeda for that attack, then removing the foreign Taliban power and restoring the country to its civillian secular government.
Most of the Americans who have been steadfastly opposed to the Iraq conflict base their opposition in part to the belief that this diverted resources from our actions in Afghanistan. Some feel if we had followed through better there, we would have had more success in destroying the top Al Qaeda leadership, and a firmer hold in keeping the Taliban out.
I think that Being a fellow socialist, Chavez sees an ally in Obama. At least he's someone he can work with. Chavez has no particular designs on America, but we do present him an obstacle to expanding his power beyond Venezuela's borders. Chavez want's mainly to stay in power, and we simply unnerve him. I think a similar case could be made for Amadinejad.
Overall, I do think we get too involved in world affairs. The charges of being imperialist are overblown. Empires expand and hold territory for their own gain. Our borders have been largely unchanged since the mid-1800s.
Perhaps some of this comes out of the misguided belief that we must manage everything. Just as our own government is horribly overgrown and wants ever to manage increasing shares of our daily lives (and this would increase under an Obama administration, I believe), so too we want too much to manage the world.
I think our nation is large enough that we'll be hated by someone or other regardless of whatever we do.
Nationalization of industry is one economic aspect of some forms of socialism, but it's not necessary for a socialist philosophy to be in play. The big thing which I object to in Sen. Obama's brand of socialism would be the erosion of free choice for myself, and the belief that only government can solve our problems.
I am not sure Sen. Obama, if elected, or any future President could nationalize an industry or industry in general, at least not the way Hugo Chavez has, by fiat. At face-value, Americans I don't think would tolerate that in black-and-white terms. However, he would have tools at his disposal to chip away at this and cause the public to become more likely to acquiesce (begrudgingly, for some of us) to a nationalization by degree.
You mention banking. Developments here have been truly frightening me. It is going on by degree here. Scare tactics employed to make us compliant. Pres. Bush buys the scare and approves the action. That's very disappointing to me. I won't say more on that except to suggest checking out material by Ludwig von Mises for some background. I've also commented at length about those developments in my own blog. http://andrewskretvedt.blogspot.com/
Industry to work on nationalizing: Healthcare
It's a Democratic Party favorite. The first logical step is to subsidize insurance coverage, which Sen. Obama has talked about at length. The next step would be a gradual supplanting of private insurance companies with gov't sponsored insurance enterprises. Tax policy can be adjusted to make contribution to the gov't sponsored insurance mandatory. You could still pay for private insurance, you'd have that choice, but you'd be double-paying because you'd still be required to pay into the gov't plan via your taxes. This would soften the private insurance market and make it easier to push aside when the time came to move from gov't subsidized private insurance to gov't insurance outright.
Next, as with Medicare/Medicaid, regulation on insurance coverage can be used to manipulate the private market for healthcare practitioners. The bottom-line would be, if you don't play by the gov't rules, you won't be certified/used/authorized or what have you and couldn't see patients wishing to use the gov't insurance. The smaller private insurance market and private direct-pay market would make healthcare outside the government umbrella much more expensive.
Last I'd say on that would be: you won't get more of a thing by having gov't provide it. The most gov't can do is control how the thing gets allocated. You'll have two forces at work, a shrinking pool of healthcare supply against a growing pool of healthcare demand (because the coverage is universal against the population). Only one thing results from that: rationing.
It's a tired topic, but look at the UK's NHS as an example. Rationing resulted in steadily rising ER wait times until parliament acted by legislating a wait of no more than 30 minutes from arrival at the ER, before you're seen by a doc. Since you don't get more of a thing merely by saying, "Make it so," the unintended consequence became a shortage of ambulances and longer ambulance response times. Why? Because hospitals would refuse to allow patients arriving at the ER in ambulances to disembark if it meant they'd go over the 30 min limit. Care was triaged in the waiting ambulance, preventing it from becoming free to respond to follow-on calls.
Back to Sen. Obama:
Tax policy: moving wealth from folks who earned it to those who have not (he usually couches this as a tax cut on 95% of Americans, but he's told "Joe Plumber" on camera that he'll "spread the wealth around).
The proposed tax-cut would be implemented as a credit anyone can claim, but the criteria are such that even taxpayers who are already getting 100% of their income tax back can claim, making it a net payout for this voting block. Welfare in disguise.
Tax policy: only business' making $250K+ would see a tax increase
Ayn Rand's material gets a good deal of play from conservative media the likes of Beck, Limbaugh, and Levin, especially Beck. So I wonder if by liberal, you would mean "classically" liberal. About 75+ years ago what we would now assign the label of "conservative," then carried the label "liberal." Strange.
I don't want Obama, I have convinced myself he is a socialist, which is fine, but I don't want that. Errrrr, *gosh*, I don't really want McCain either. He's (R) but not a conservative. I'd trust his foreign policy, but his domestic policy would be some smarmy mish-mash of capitalist and socialist ideas that would get all fubar and result in just as much misery as I think Obama domestic policy would. I learned much too late that I really, really, liked Ron Paul. *snuffed* So now I'm thinking, Bob Barr? He seems like a reasonable second to Ron Paul, but I don't know if I care for his VP. I'd honestly rather have Palin in there.
Slashdot and Digg and all the high-tech Web 2.0 destinations are vibrant with Obama supporters, God love 'em. I wonder why these communities are so tilted that way?
To those folks, I'm still seeking an answer to a problem which has been troubling me throughout the campaign: All the nations' leaders who are in an adversarial relationship with us have publicly and openly voiced support for Obama, and continue to wish him well for the election. Is it possible to despise tyrants like Amadinejad and Chavez, but still root for an Obama victory alongside them? I keep asking myself what it is about Obama that makes dictators such as they want to give him their support? If Amadinejad comes to our United States and condemns the life all we Americans have worked so hard for (for generations) in front of the UN, and then proceeds to encourage us to vote for Obama, what exactly is the "change" which he's expecting to get? I am frightened at the prospect that in Obama, people like Mamoud and Hugo see someone whose governing policy is more aligned with theirs, and would push America in the directions which Iran and Venezuela have gone.
I think most of our fine and earnest citizens of Iranian and Venezuelan heritage would say that such an alignment and transformation would be a terrible thing, and would be in keeping with the values and opportunities which motivated them to come here and become fellow Americans (please speak up and don't let me speak for you).
I'm fiscally conservative, and socially libertarian. I don't approve of the actions our gov't has taken with respect to creating this crisis, or the actions now purported to try to solve it. Free markets and deregulation were not to blame, because the market was not free to start with. Subsidy distorted it and disconnected, for the financial segment, the risk-reward relationship of a naturally free, open, and transparent market. Mostly Dems inflated subsidy, and mostly Repubs removed "select" regulations and clouded transparency. Both types of manipulation are contra to a free market. Hopefully the damage will end up being minimal, but we are eerily following in lock-step with the fiscal and social game plans which took a devastating, but short-lived stock market downturn, and transformed it into a crushing depression.
I believe that as an American, you are free to do what you will in your own private life. Whatever lifestyle you choose. Tempered with personal responsibility and respect for your neighbors.
Freedom doesn't mean free-for-all, which is an ironic sort of tyranny in itself. The highest degrees of freedom carry also the highest responsibilities. I want the freedom to act in my own self-interests, and I accept the responsibility to do right by my neighbors when decided when, where, and how to enjoy any particular freedom. But I want it to be my choice.
Our modern popular culture I think realizes the responsibilities necessary to grab hold of, but increasingly does not want to shoulder its burdens. The rationalization is that less true freedom may not feel soo great, but abdicating the burden of responsibility more than makes up for that loss. That kind of carefree "feels" better. Or, so such the culture believes.
My wager, is that such is a fools bargain. Carefree != freedom. Is there a harm in trying it? Yes, I believe there is,
You need to look into Windows Steady State. In combination with some additional storage on another drive or thumb-drive so the kids can store their personal data, your burden will be significantly lessened.
Windows Steady State. Check the show notes over at www.grc.com, Steve and Leo did a show on it.
Bless you, sir. That was a fine piece of analysis.
I would like to see some UN resolutions put forward in the Security Council by the US, just to see if Russia exercises her veto.
If that were to happen, it could provide a golden opportunity to reform the UN, or dismantle some of its major international missions (most of which have been proven time and again as ineffectual failures). Even Kofi Annan once admitted that pretty much the only lever of power at his disposal was talk.
I don't dislike some of the humanitarian missions the UN has taken up. But many other humanitarian missions are woefully inefficient and some have even made situations worse. Apart from this, the non-humanitarian side really just needs to go away forever. Nobody's fooling anyone, and of late it's only served to give a forum to tyrants.
I know the program is supposed to end in 2010. If, however, I had $1 million, I would wager that the shuttle will continue in at least some fashion until the U.S. can fly its intended replacement vehicle. Perhaps that means only a once or twice per year ISS servicing mission.
I will also make a side-bet (if I had another $1 million) that the arrival and placement into regular service of said vehicle won't come until after 2015.
If Vista's not optimized for these SSDs, are you going to now tell me that an earlier version of Windows IS?
No? Right.
Vista's just fine. It's everyone's favorite punching bag, but much of the bad rap is undeserved and reactive bandwagoning.
Hardware might be further behind. Gone are the days of the heady acceleration in hardware performance found during the 98->2K and 2K->XP transitions.
I've a beefy four year-old desktop which started life in XP and now runs Vista with an experience index of 4.8. That's better than almost all the PCs offered for sale right now! That's the sad bit. The hardware isn't as stupefyingly better in so short a time now, like it was in the past.
*sigh* What a disappointment. It's doubly tragic as RIAA is coming undone. EMI is cutting funding to them. Other labels will follow as their own businesses suck too fully for them to be able to afford to fund the RIAA. Implosion may just be imminent. But first, pay us a quarter-mil. That's alotta college tuition right there.
If a bandwidth shortage developed, with sufficiently significant effects in both span and scope, I think market forces would react and a number of effects would occur:
The prices we pay for access to bandwidth would increase, affecting both consumers and producers of data.
Services we are accustomed to using could degrade, if sufficiently enough, to cause us to seek alternatives.
Some users may be priced out of the market, causing demand to fall back and easing the effects of shortage.
Industry would begin innovate novel solutions and workarounds to alleviate the effects, such as improvements to the way data is modulated onto the fiber infrastucture, how network processes are automated and serviced by technicians, etc.
Ultimately, an equilibrium would be reached where bandwidth supply and demand re-balance. A change in the situation which originally caused the shortage to develop, be it a flu pandemic or something else, may cause the supply-demand equation to tip once more, deepen a shortage or creating a supply glut (and cheaper access!). Market forces again would act over time to equalize things (i.e. offering higher quality YouTube video if a sudden supply glut caused bandwidth access to get cheaper).
So in short, I would do nothing special, except react to my experience as I'm having it and adjust useage or find alternative to my activities as appropriate or as forced into by financial conditions (some people still use dial-up because they cannot afford cable-modem broadband service...thank God I'm not one of those!).
I love Slackware. Grew up in Linux with it. Started in 1996. Still using it today as my primary distro.
All my current PCs CPUs now use AMD64 instruction sets. I'm motivated to moving them toward more pure AMD64 software. I've owned Athlon 64 CPUs for three years now, and still no wide and mainstream support for AMD64. All the 64-bit options currently are not as mainstream or as polished or conflict free.
I've been experimenting with the unofficial Slamd64 port with modest success. Fred Emmott is really a great champion and I appreciate greatly all his work. Slamd64 still has plenty of rough edges and may only approach, but perhaps not exceed, the smoothness and polish of the official distribution.
In the meantime, I'm experimenting with Slamd64 but also branching to other distros which claim full AMD64 support (xubuntu, SuSE, Gentoo are my current areas of focus) to guage whether they seem more mainstream and have smoother support.
Readers, why do you think there is no "official" effort to bring Slack to AMD64? Do you think this may change?
I know Patrick has commented previously on this. To turn a blind eye to AMD64 seems to me to shortchange the future of the distro. Slack was founded on i386 and has maintained steadfast focus on that architecture, and though AMD64 isn't so greatly different, i386 won't be with us always. What becomes of Slack then?
I would like to see Fred's fine start folded into a greater official port to lift out of the level of just being a curious project and to get the backing of a larger community.
Congratulations to Apple for using the strats, taking a page from Microsoft's playbook, and working to bring in leagues of new users with some of the same classic co-option techniques MS itself used in the heyday of Windows.
I myself was swept up by Microsoft in the late 90s, having been a stalwart Apple zealot from System 5 to System 7.1. But then, I found Windows 95, and commodity PC hardware. Bang, zoom, switch!!
I've been a PC/Windows user from 1996-present, and really a Linux enthusiast at the same time.
I have been transitioning off Windows very slowly for some time, in favor of my favorite Linux distro. Slackware. Presently, I keep XP around mostly for gaming.
I see the attraction to OSX. I've not tried it, but I have previously die-hard Windows/Linux coworkers who have tried the hacked-for-x86-PCs versions, and have grown fond of it (even in the half-dead state that hacking it to run from a commodity PC caused).
Unless Vista is a real showstopper, and espcially if the MacOS were one day permitted on any PC (prolly never happen), I might flip back!
But think about it, this Apple move just SMELLS like something Microsoft would do, doesn't it?
Hey, it's a yin-yang situation here. Once Apple was king and MS was nipping heels, then Apple was near death and MS was Emperor, now... the cycle continues.
I think this is a bad move for the Azureus team. The need to make some money is turning the team away from building the best generalized BitTorrent implementation, so that it can become something that can generate some cash. I think that will ultimately kill it in it's new form, but it's present for may live on under new developers.
I don't mind that the team has this desire to profit from their work, they should. But this new development is unfortunate (for we users of current Azureus).
The community who has made Azureus popular has done so because the program is a really novel and effective implementation of the BitTorrent protocol for general purposes. It's supremely useful.
What they (the Azureus team) want to do with it now is very different and more narrowly defined. I don't think they understand that the audience which made their program popular is not necessarily the same (not at all the same IMHO) audience that might enjoy a P2P client with pay-per-download content.
I think many will bail to other general BitTorrent clients, and/or the source of Azureus will fork and a new crop of developers will continue to carry forward the original mission of the program: to make it the best and most portable general BitTorrent implementation.
Don't confuse protocol with application. It's not that people may want to bend BitTorrent to p2p use, this is what BitTorrent does! It implements p2p data transfer. How you apply that ability is up to you as an application developer.
It happens to be the case for the most part that most applications implementing BitTorrent have the purpose of enabling file transfer in general. New novel applications however embed BitTorrent transport functionality for a specific purpose, say a Podcast catcher, for example.
It would be more corrent to say that the people behind Azureus development may be looking to build a media P2P application using the BitTorrent protocol.
Or, future Azureus releases could look more like a pay-to-play movie player, offering a menu of content for you to pick, buy, and watch, having been transferred to you using the BitTorrent protocol.
Many comments in this topic are making reference to what Kansas just did as an advancement of conservativism, part of the neo-con adjenda, typical of conservative Republican thinking, or various other greater and lesser permutations thereof.
For my own part, I am a Republican, and consider myself to be conservative (while at the same time ever striving to keep on top of what that moniker "conservative" truly means).
I consider myself spiritual, but not religious. I am a supporter of science, its practice, its achievements and advancement for humankind. I am for stricter interpretation of the US Constitution, separation of powers (i.e. anti-judicial activism), lighter tax burdens, smaller government, wiser spending with less pork (something the President has been terrible about), right to carry concealed weapons (for those who pass an official training course and have no criminal past), anti-DMCA, anti-special interest and corporate special interest influence, gosh I could go on, but you see the picture.
I'd be willing to guess that a majority of the minority of Slashdotters here who consider themselves conserative (based on a few past Slashdot polls with light political topics) think along similar lines.
I support Science, I disdain the "skulls full of mush" ideological virus that is Intelligent Design, and I am offended by being lumped in with the other supposed conservatives down there in Kansas and other places, who are trying to push stuff like this.
ID isn't conservative. At least not to me.
"And that's the Word"
Skulls full of mush phrase stolen from the Rush Limbaugh program; and that's the Word phrase stolen from the Colbert Report and used without permission but with great delight.
I don't think it's so much that Intel's chips are throttled. The X2 3800+ uses PowerNow, and so it too throttles back and drops voltage down when idle.
I believe the real story goes back to earlier architecture choices Intel and AMD made with the P4 and original Athlon chips.
AMD decided for SMP ops it would be better to design the link between CPU and chipset with a star topology, so each CPU gets its own comm lines.
Intel chose to stick to the simpler bus topology for SMP ops, which reduced motherboard complexity and simplified chip design.
This still applies into the dual-core arena, although everything is moved on die. Intel's cores talk to the system on a bus, meaning that under load bus contention creates a bottleneck as each core tries to move data around. On the AMD platform, each core can talk independently, and contention issues are minimized.
Worse still, some Intel chip designs examined on tomshardware show they tom's calls: double-core, where two separate cpu cores are mounted on the same chip carrier, rather than having two cores as one die. This means that cheaper CPUs can be made because the dies are smaller, but each die much be matched so that they'll run well together under a common heat spreader. And again, their sharing data lines.
I'm too lazy to break out reference URL's for your examination, so I may have some factual errors, but I belive the general idea here is accurate.
Slashdot Mirror
Two sides of the wake-up coin: (OT, but nomadic moves me to comment)
Perhaps the real Obama was pretty obvious to some of you out there. But I cannot shake the whole image of legions of hopey-changemass troglodytes all swooning over "the one": during the campaign, after the election tally, fawing during his speeches from his Office of the President Elect, created new out thin air and pure smug... To my own friends, I'd railed against this man, but most of the Obama supporters in my circle, and I think quite a number generally, couldn't break free of the cult of personality. Individuals really ought to do a gut-check on those things, cults of personality almost always lead to terrible places.
Alas, I was no better. With a twinge I voted McCain. I wasn't hung up on the man. I felt a little ill about my vote as I cast it, but saw him then as at least more likely to be slower-acting. I did not believe a vote on pure principle would work. I now realize this is what some in politics depend on.
A small part of me is glad for our Obama presidency. It taught me to reject the last vestiges I had of American-style conservatism and embrace fully libertarian principles under the sound economics taught by the Austrian school. I was and am no Progressive, so I was never inclined to support someone like Obama. But I also learned over the last decade how Bush, who I thought was a good choice at the time (my Obama moment, if you will) was really a Progressive of a slightly different flavor. What a lesson on civic responsibility! I had no idea then what I was doing, mostly just hopes and impressions. To Obama supporters, I deserve your shame for my actions then. You perhaps deserve mine for your actions more recently.
I take more time now. At the polling place, I think ballot measures, referendums, and initiatives of the various sorts are far more important now than candidate officeholders. The measures shape law we have to live under, and are usually written to catch you unaware or lend to an emotional bias. I never walk in to vote without having spent at least a week with the sample ballot beforehand, researching and reflecting. I resolve to vote on principle now, and did so last election season. I don't listen to the politicos who say votes for certain candidates are just thrown away. It seems to me, either one day those votes will number enough to matter, or we won't really need to worry about it.
WINNING!
(slips on John C. Dvorak buzzkill hat...)
...back to you."
[...developed along these lines: 'H2O and CO2 would be converted to methane, would fuel electricity-producing power plants that generate more CO2 and H2O, to keep the process going.']
Uh, this sounds like a perpetual motion machine scam. These researchers might be deluding themselves. In the process, we'll waste (via gov't funding grants) asstons of money on pursuing an unfeasible, impractical, but tantalizing idea.
A few flashy startups will be created later, promising viable technology that's always "just ahead." You know...along the lines of hydrogen fuel cell scams. The technology will seem new to Wall St. analysts and newsies each time.
Channeling and paraphrasing the inimitable Lewis Black, "Green Jobs! Green Jobs! What can I say?!
Hey, uuh, there's nothing immoral or unethical about purchasing the lice from the vendor.
Where you can start making these value judgments is when a purchaser subsequently decides to USE the previously purchased lice in some particular way you or society in general, might find objectionable.
To make the argument you'd made above, Anon Coward, is to misunderstand the subject. Free markets don't "fix" anything, sir. They are what has taken place when separate parties agree to do a deal. The "fix" is not to restrict free exchange, it is to protect property rights.
Most of the posts here had the understandable knee-jerk "eww, who would buy THAT?!" reaction...and I think this very fact shows how a free and unfettered market would normally act to keep this sort of activity very limited indeed.
As for the asshats who buy, and then use the lice thus obtained for the purpose of infesting someone against their will, or otherwise depriving them of property somehow as a result of the lice, now that's were natural law can come in. That's not a free market problem.
Anon Coward, you have to ask yourself carefully to define what a free market really is: It's the collection of _voluntary_ exchanges between parties. When the market is free, both sides want to do the trade, or it doesn't happen.
Wanting to kill a trade because you, as a non-party to the contract being undertaken, find it in some way objectionable in the end is the same sort of imposition upon another's natural rights as the case of someone using the lice they bought to infest YOU against your will.
Both YOU and HE then (if, and only if, he actually does go on to use the lice maliciously), ought to be made to suffer sanction. YOU for wanting to forbid all such voluntary exchanges because they offend you, and HE for choosing to do harm to you or deprive you of your rightful property by choosing to use the lice against you.
The <quote>Because someone is going to try to fuck someone else over</quote> part doesn't happen at the free/unfettered market level, because this is not an exchange. The malicious person spreading the lice he bought on your bath towel, thereby later infesting you, committed violence against you, and that's a matter of law.
Now, there can still be fraud in a free exchange, which is also a matter of law. Fraud is the intentional misrepresentation of the terms of an exchange, so as to create a false idea about what will actually be exchanged in the mind of one of the parties, usually with the object of depriving the misled party of property without the expected compensation.
The law's first duty is (should be) to enforce property rights. People often forget that you own (at least ought to) your own body too, so someone committing violence against you is, in essence, depriving you of the legitimate right to exercise control over your own property.
Laissez-faire capitalism is difficult to accomplish under true anarchy, because parties to exchanges can never have much confidence that their respective property rights would be upheld.
The first thing that societies interested in free-market exchange see is in their interest is standing up some sort of mutually agreed upon outside governance to assure enforcement of property rights. This allows markets to develop efficiently, as parties are relieved of the burden of maintaining each their own enforcement capabilities.
Here here.
Woot!
What would you call that system in London? It sounds like a Borda Count, but there I think you rank all the candidates from most favored to least.
Yes, I would love exploring such a mod of American elections.
In my case right now, I would vote 1) Barr and 2) McCain.
But the prospect this changes my thinking about past elections too. I have been very 2D with the conventional wisdom being to disregard the other parties because they don't really stand a change.
I went back over the 2000 choices. The Constitution Party has a very interesting platform. It might have been my #1 option, with Bush being #2.
I think it's not unrealistic to think that a Republican or Democrat choice would just about always be my #2, as least as those parties work currently.
Neat.
I would mod your post: +1 Insightful.
The lens through which America views global affairs is granted not the same one with which many other countries and peoples view the world. We're shaped by our experiences, by the information we have, and by the credibility or lack thereof we might assign to its sources.
Much hay has been made about Iraq. Many Americans think we were justified to have gone there. Most, however, if given the benefit of knowing the sort of struggle it would be and its costs, would have chosen not to do it.
But we did go, and those of us who thought it was the right choice at the time now feel beholden to try our best to leave it a place better than we found it, for the benefit of her long suffering population. We remain fearful that as happened in Afghanistan, the country would become a safe haven for terror groups who would seek to do us ill.
The case for Afghanistan and Iraq are quite different, at least as Americans see them. The country had been under the control of the Taliban, and became the base from which Al-Qaeda developed and executed its 9/11 attack. We felt justified in first trying to destroy Al-Qaeda for that attack, then removing the foreign Taliban power and restoring the country to its civillian secular government.
Most of the Americans who have been steadfastly opposed to the Iraq conflict base their opposition in part to the belief that this diverted resources from our actions in Afghanistan. Some feel if we had followed through better there, we would have had more success in destroying the top Al Qaeda leadership, and a firmer hold in keeping the Taliban out.
I think that Being a fellow socialist, Chavez sees an ally in Obama. At least he's someone he can work with. Chavez has no particular designs on America, but we do present him an obstacle to expanding his power beyond Venezuela's borders. Chavez want's mainly to stay in power, and we simply unnerve him. I think a similar case could be made for Amadinejad.
Overall, I do think we get too involved in world affairs. The charges of being imperialist are overblown. Empires expand and hold territory for their own gain. Our borders have been largely unchanged since the mid-1800s.
Perhaps some of this comes out of the misguided belief that we must manage everything. Just as our own government is horribly overgrown and wants ever to manage increasing shares of our daily lives (and this would increase under an Obama administration, I believe), so too we want too much to manage the world.
I think our nation is large enough that we'll be hated by someone or other regardless of whatever we do.
Unintended consequences hurt us on both fronts.
Nationalization of industry is one economic aspect of some forms of socialism, but it's not necessary for a socialist philosophy to be in play. The big thing which I object to in Sen. Obama's brand of socialism would be the erosion of free choice for myself, and the belief that only government can solve our problems.
I am not sure Sen. Obama, if elected, or any future President could nationalize an industry or industry in general, at least not the way Hugo Chavez has, by fiat. At face-value, Americans I don't think would tolerate that in black-and-white terms. However, he would have tools at his disposal to chip away at this and cause the public to become more likely to acquiesce (begrudgingly, for some of us) to a nationalization by degree.
You mention banking. Developments here have been truly frightening me. It is going on by degree here. Scare tactics employed to make us compliant. Pres. Bush buys the scare and approves the action. That's very disappointing to me. I won't say more on that except to suggest checking out material by Ludwig von Mises for some background. I've also commented at length about those developments in my own blog. http://andrewskretvedt.blogspot.com/
Industry to work on nationalizing: Healthcare
It's a Democratic Party favorite. The first logical step is to subsidize insurance coverage, which Sen. Obama has talked about at length. The next step would be a gradual supplanting of private insurance companies with gov't sponsored insurance enterprises. Tax policy can be adjusted to make contribution to the gov't sponsored insurance mandatory. You could still pay for private insurance, you'd have that choice, but you'd be double-paying because you'd still be required to pay into the gov't plan via your taxes. This would soften the private insurance market and make it easier to push aside when the time came to move from gov't subsidized private insurance to gov't insurance outright.
Next, as with Medicare/Medicaid, regulation on insurance coverage can be used to manipulate the private market for healthcare practitioners. The bottom-line would be, if you don't play by the gov't rules, you won't be certified/used/authorized or what have you and couldn't see patients wishing to use the gov't insurance. The smaller private insurance market and private direct-pay market would make healthcare outside the government umbrella much more expensive.
Last I'd say on that would be: you won't get more of a thing by having gov't provide it. The most gov't can do is control how the thing gets allocated. You'll have two forces at work, a shrinking pool of healthcare supply against a growing pool of healthcare demand (because the coverage is universal against the population). Only one thing results from that: rationing.
It's a tired topic, but look at the UK's NHS as an example. Rationing resulted in steadily rising ER wait times until parliament acted by legislating a wait of no more than 30 minutes from arrival at the ER, before you're seen by a doc. Since you don't get more of a thing merely by saying, "Make it so," the unintended consequence became a shortage of ambulances and longer ambulance response times. Why? Because hospitals would refuse to allow patients arriving at the ER in ambulances to disembark if it meant they'd go over the 30 min limit. Care was triaged in the waiting ambulance, preventing it from becoming free to respond to follow-on calls.
Back to Sen. Obama:
Tax policy: moving wealth from folks who earned it to those who have not (he usually couches this as a tax cut on 95% of Americans, but he's told "Joe Plumber" on camera that he'll "spread the wealth around).
The proposed tax-cut would be implemented as a credit anyone can claim, but the criteria are such that even taxpayers who are already getting 100% of their income tax back can claim, making it a net payout for this voting block. Welfare in disguise.
Tax policy: only business' making $250K+ would see a tax increase
This is a canard because roughly 75% of
Ayn Rand's material gets a good deal of play from conservative media the likes of Beck, Limbaugh, and Levin, especially Beck. So I wonder if by liberal, you would mean "classically" liberal. About 75+ years ago what we would now assign the label of "conservative," then carried the label "liberal." Strange.
And that must be the result of being Libertarian!
I don't want Obama, I have convinced myself he is a socialist, which is fine, but I don't want that.
Errrrr, *gosh*, I don't really want McCain either. He's (R) but not a conservative. I'd trust his foreign policy, but his domestic policy would be some smarmy mish-mash of capitalist and socialist ideas that would get all fubar and result in just as much misery as I think Obama domestic policy would.
I learned much too late that I really, really, liked Ron Paul. *snuffed*
So now I'm thinking, Bob Barr? He seems like a reasonable second to Ron Paul, but I don't know if I care for his VP. I'd honestly rather have Palin in there.
Slashdot and Digg and all the high-tech Web 2.0 destinations are vibrant with Obama supporters, God love 'em. I wonder why these communities are so tilted that way?
To those folks, I'm still seeking an answer to a problem which has been troubling me throughout the campaign: All the nations' leaders who are in an adversarial relationship with us have publicly and openly voiced support for Obama, and continue to wish him well for the election. Is it possible to despise tyrants like Amadinejad and Chavez, but still root for an Obama victory alongside them? I keep asking myself what it is about Obama that makes dictators such as they want to give him their support? If Amadinejad comes to our United States and condemns the life all we Americans have worked so hard for (for generations) in front of the UN, and then proceeds to encourage us to vote for Obama, what exactly is the "change" which he's expecting to get? I am frightened at the prospect that in Obama, people like Mamoud and Hugo see someone whose governing policy is more aligned with theirs, and would push America in the directions which Iran and Venezuela have gone.
I think most of our fine and earnest citizens of Iranian and Venezuelan heritage would say that such an alignment and transformation would be a terrible thing, and would be in keeping with the values and opportunities which motivated them to come here and become fellow Americans (please speak up and don't let me speak for you).
I'm fiscally conservative, and socially libertarian. I don't approve of the actions our gov't has taken with respect to creating this crisis, or the actions now purported to try to solve it. Free markets and deregulation were not to blame, because the market was not free to start with. Subsidy distorted it and disconnected, for the financial segment, the risk-reward relationship of a naturally free, open, and transparent market. Mostly Dems inflated subsidy, and mostly Repubs removed "select" regulations and clouded transparency. Both types of manipulation are contra to a free market. Hopefully the damage will end up being minimal, but we are eerily following in lock-step with the fiscal and social game plans which took a devastating, but short-lived stock market downturn, and transformed it into a crushing depression.
I believe that as an American, you are free to do what you will in your own private life. Whatever lifestyle you choose. Tempered with personal responsibility and respect for your neighbors.
Freedom doesn't mean free-for-all, which is an ironic sort of tyranny in itself. The highest degrees of freedom carry also the highest responsibilities. I want the freedom to act in my own self-interests, and I accept the responsibility to do right by my neighbors when decided when, where, and how to enjoy any particular freedom. But I want it to be my choice.
Our modern popular culture I think realizes the responsibilities necessary to grab hold of, but increasingly does not want to shoulder its burdens. The rationalization is that less true freedom may not feel soo great, but abdicating the burden of responsibility more than makes up for that loss. That kind of carefree "feels" better. Or, so such the culture believes.
My wager, is that such is a fools bargain. Carefree != freedom. Is there a harm in trying it? Yes, I believe there is,
You need to look into Windows Steady State. In combination with some additional storage on another drive or thumb-drive so the kids can store their personal data, your burden will be significantly lessened.
Windows Steady State. Check the show notes over at www.grc.com, Steve and Leo did a show on it.
Bless you, sir. That was a fine piece of analysis.
I would like to see some UN resolutions put forward in the Security Council by the US, just to see if Russia exercises her veto.
If that were to happen, it could provide a golden opportunity to reform the UN, or dismantle some of its major international missions (most of which have been proven time and again as ineffectual failures). Even Kofi Annan once admitted that pretty much the only lever of power at his disposal was talk.
I don't dislike some of the humanitarian missions the UN has taken up. But many other humanitarian missions are woefully inefficient and some have even made situations worse. Apart from this, the non-humanitarian side really just needs to go away forever. Nobody's fooling anyone, and of late it's only served to give a forum to tyrants.
I know the program is supposed to end in 2010. If, however, I had $1 million, I would wager that the shuttle will continue in at least some fashion until the U.S. can fly its intended replacement vehicle. Perhaps that means only a once or twice per year ISS servicing mission.
I will also make a side-bet (if I had another $1 million) that the arrival and placement into regular service of said vehicle won't come until after 2015.
If Vista's not optimized for these SSDs, are you going to now tell me that an earlier version of Windows IS?
No? Right.
Vista's just fine. It's everyone's favorite punching bag, but much of the bad rap is undeserved and reactive bandwagoning.
Hardware might be further behind. Gone are the days of the heady acceleration in hardware performance found during the 98->2K and 2K->XP transitions.
I've a beefy four year-old desktop which started life in XP and now runs Vista with an experience index of 4.8. That's better than almost all the PCs offered for sale right now! That's the sad bit. The hardware isn't as stupefyingly better in so short a time now, like it was in the past.
*sigh* What a disappointment. It's doubly tragic as RIAA is coming undone. EMI is cutting funding to them. Other labels will follow as their own businesses suck too fully for them to be able to afford to fund the RIAA. Implosion may just be imminent. But first, pay us a quarter-mil. That's alotta college tuition right there.
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The prices we pay for access to bandwidth would increase, affecting both consumers and producers of data.
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Services we are accustomed to using could degrade, if sufficiently enough, to cause us to seek alternatives.
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Some users may be priced out of the market, causing demand to fall back and easing the effects of shortage.
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Industry would begin innovate novel solutions and workarounds to alleviate the effects, such as improvements to the way data is modulated onto the fiber infrastucture, how network processes are automated and serviced by technicians, etc.
Ultimately, an equilibrium would be reached where bandwidth supply and demand re-balance. A change in the situation which originally caused the shortage to develop, be it a flu pandemic or something else, may cause the supply-demand equation to tip once more, deepen a shortage or creating a supply glut (and cheaper access!). Market forces again would act over time to equalize things (i.e. offering higher quality YouTube video if a sudden supply glut caused bandwidth access to get cheaper). So in short, I would do nothing special, except react to my experience as I'm having it and adjust useage or find alternative to my activities as appropriate or as forced into by financial conditions (some people still use dial-up because they cannot afford cable-modem broadband service...thank God I'm not one of those!).I love Slackware. Grew up in Linux with it. Started in 1996. Still using it today as my primary distro.
All my current PCs CPUs now use AMD64 instruction sets. I'm motivated to moving them toward more pure AMD64 software. I've owned Athlon 64 CPUs for three years now, and still no wide and mainstream support for AMD64. All the 64-bit options currently are not as mainstream or as polished or conflict free.
I've been experimenting with the unofficial Slamd64 port with modest success. Fred Emmott is really a great champion and I appreciate greatly all his work. Slamd64 still has plenty of rough edges and may only approach, but perhaps not exceed, the smoothness and polish of the official distribution.
In the meantime, I'm experimenting with Slamd64 but also branching to other distros which claim full AMD64 support (xubuntu, SuSE, Gentoo are my current areas of focus) to guage whether they seem more mainstream and have smoother support.
Readers, why do you think there is no "official" effort to bring Slack to AMD64? Do you think this may change?
I know Patrick has commented previously on this. To turn a blind eye to AMD64 seems to me to shortchange the future of the distro. Slack was founded on i386 and has maintained steadfast focus on that architecture, and though AMD64 isn't so greatly different, i386 won't be with us always. What becomes of Slack then?
I would like to see Fred's fine start folded into a greater official port to lift out of the level of just being a curious project and to get the backing of a larger community.
Please share your views.
Congratulations to Apple for using the strats, taking a page from Microsoft's playbook, and working to bring in leagues of new users with some of the same classic co-option techniques MS itself used in the heyday of Windows.
I myself was swept up by Microsoft in the late 90s, having been a stalwart Apple zealot from System 5 to System 7.1. But then, I found Windows 95, and commodity PC hardware. Bang, zoom, switch!!
I've been a PC/Windows user from 1996-present, and really a Linux enthusiast at the same time.
I have been transitioning off Windows very slowly for some time, in favor of my favorite Linux distro. Slackware. Presently, I keep XP around mostly for gaming.
I see the attraction to OSX. I've not tried it, but I have previously die-hard Windows/Linux coworkers who have tried the hacked-for-x86-PCs versions, and have grown fond of it (even in the half-dead state that hacking it to run from a commodity PC caused).
Unless Vista is a real showstopper, and espcially if the MacOS were one day permitted on any PC (prolly never happen), I might flip back!
But think about it, this Apple move just SMELLS like something Microsoft would do, doesn't it?
Hey, it's a yin-yang situation here. Once Apple was king and MS was nipping heels, then Apple was near death and MS was Emperor, now... the cycle continues.
I think this is a bad move for the Azureus team. The need to make some money is turning the team away from building the best generalized BitTorrent implementation, so that it can become something that can generate some cash. I think that will ultimately kill it in it's new form, but it's present for may live on under new developers.
I don't mind that the team has this desire to profit from their work, they should. But this new development is unfortunate (for we users of current Azureus).
The community who has made Azureus popular has done so because the program is a really novel and effective implementation of the BitTorrent protocol for general purposes. It's supremely useful.
What they (the Azureus team) want to do with it now is very different and more narrowly defined. I don't think they understand that the audience which made their program popular is not necessarily the same (not at all the same IMHO) audience that might enjoy a P2P client with pay-per-download content.
I think many will bail to other general BitTorrent clients, and/or the source of Azureus will fork and a new crop of developers will continue to carry forward the original mission of the program: to make it the best and most portable general BitTorrent implementation.
Don't confuse protocol with application. It's not that people may want to bend BitTorrent to p2p use, this is what BitTorrent does! It implements p2p data transfer. How you apply that ability is up to you as an application developer.
It happens to be the case for the most part that most applications implementing BitTorrent have the purpose of enabling file transfer in general. New novel applications however embed BitTorrent transport functionality for a specific purpose, say a Podcast catcher, for example.
It would be more corrent to say that the people behind Azureus development may be looking to build a media P2P application using the BitTorrent protocol.
Or, future Azureus releases could look more like a pay-to-play movie player, offering a menu of content for you to pick, buy, and watch, having been transferred to you using the BitTorrent protocol.
Many comments in this topic are making reference to what Kansas just did as an advancement of conservativism, part of the neo-con adjenda, typical of conservative Republican thinking, or various other greater and lesser permutations thereof.
For my own part, I am a Republican, and consider myself to be conservative (while at the same time ever striving to keep on top of what that moniker "conservative" truly means).
I consider myself spiritual, but not religious. I am a supporter of science, its practice, its achievements and advancement for humankind. I am for stricter interpretation of the US Constitution, separation of powers (i.e. anti-judicial activism), lighter tax burdens, smaller government, wiser spending with less pork (something the President has been terrible about), right to carry concealed weapons (for those who pass an official training course and have no criminal past), anti-DMCA, anti-special interest and corporate special interest influence, gosh I could go on, but you see the picture.
I'd be willing to guess that a majority of the minority of Slashdotters here who consider themselves conserative (based on a few past Slashdot polls with light political topics) think along similar lines.
I support Science, I disdain the "skulls full of mush" ideological virus that is Intelligent Design, and I am offended by being lumped in with the other supposed conservatives down there in Kansas and other places, who are trying to push stuff like this.
ID isn't conservative. At least not to me.
"And that's the Word"
Skulls full of mush phrase stolen from the Rush Limbaugh program; and that's the Word phrase stolen from the Colbert Report and used without permission but with great delight.
The Flying Spaghetti Monster is my Homeboy!
Pirate populations are rising!
May you be forever touched by His noodly appendage, Kansas bored.
Science officially redefined as Pseudoscience. +1 to L. Ron Hubbard Assimilation Skills
Uugh, someone get a bucket, I think I'm gonna TRUTH!
I don't think it's so much that Intel's chips are throttled. The X2 3800+ uses PowerNow, and so it too throttles back and drops voltage down when idle.
I believe the real story goes back to earlier architecture choices Intel and AMD made with the P4 and original Athlon chips.
AMD decided for SMP ops it would be better to design the link between CPU and chipset with a star topology, so each CPU gets its own comm lines.
Intel chose to stick to the simpler bus topology for SMP ops, which reduced motherboard complexity and simplified chip design.
This still applies into the dual-core arena, although everything is moved on die. Intel's cores talk to the system on a bus, meaning that under load bus contention creates a bottleneck as each core tries to move data around. On the AMD platform, each core can talk independently, and contention issues are minimized.
Worse still, some Intel chip designs examined on tomshardware show they tom's calls: double-core, where two separate cpu cores are mounted on the same chip carrier, rather than having two cores as one die. This means that cheaper CPUs can be made because the dies are smaller, but each die much be matched so that they'll run well together under a common heat spreader. And again, their sharing data lines.
I'm too lazy to break out reference URL's for your examination, so I may have some factual errors, but I belive the general idea here is accurate.
Hmm, let's see:
* Bible code? -check-
* Nostradamus? -check-
* this thingy -check-
"When your model predicts something only after it has happened then you have instead made a 'postdiction.'" - Neil DeGrasse Tyson