"That could certainly cause some problems. But famine can not be one of them. Famines happen when food prices are too high for people to afford feeding themselves. Making food prices lower can only work to lower the risks of famine, not the other way."
It makes perfect sense, you simply lack a basic understanding of economics.
Western subsidies produce huge overproduction, the result is cheap food, at far below cost. Excess cheap food is dumped on the third world, the market price drops, it becomes uneconomic to farm the land in the third world, large numbers of the farmers leave the land. Money floods abroad to buy food on international markets. Then, there is a bad year, the remaining local crop fails but there is now no buffer level of production. Aid floods in to the local market devaluing the local food prices further, more money leaves the local market and exits the country which becomes poorer still.
With a healthy local market, excesses can be sold within the country, the money stays within the country, land remains in production and people stay on the land farming instead of forming militias and massacring people.
You seem to be under the impression that third world countries have plenty of spare money around which they're happy to export in order to purchase food on the international markets. You simply have no conception of the economic reality. The fact is that the farmers who accept large subsidies to overproduce food in the US and EU are causing the deaths of tens of millions of people in the poorest countries in the world.
It is truly inpspiring that so many can work together so well towards a common goal, and it is truly stunning to take in the vast amount of software available which is written pretty much completely philanthropically.
Philanthropically? Um. no. Free and Open Source software is written because the author needs it. They requre the use of it. By allowing others to use it, the author loses nothing, they are not losing their time because they needed the software in the first place and the effort to copy it is negligible.
Writing Free and Open Source software is just as selfish as any other act. Software which is written with high ideals, for the betterment of man will not succeed because it isn't fulfilling a need.
But the problem is that few actually get paid to do this, it is done in spare time.
Simply not true. A huge amount of free and open source development work is performed by staff developers who are writing software which their organisations need.
Software is called soft because it's maleable, it can be moulded to fit the needs of the users. It's highly unlikely that any piece of software would exactly fit the needs of all users so there is a market out there for the customisation of almost all software, with free and open source software it's particularly easy, there is a market for customisation, service, support.
If you are a developer thinking of creating software for the benefit of mankind or the open source movement... Think again, there's enough abandonware out there already. Do it because you need it.
p.s. Free and Open Source software isn't having any trouble at all competing, it's filling niches left right and centre, though you may not see it filling your niche right now.
The real problem is Intellectual Property. The stuff is patented. It's entirely possible to contaminate a crop with patented seeds. You are then guilty of patent infringement unless you buy a license to grow the stuff.
As for the grandparent post "technology that can produce vast amounts of nutritious food that can feed people who may otherwise not have access to such a resoruce"
Naive bollocks. The current GM crops which are around are designed to sell extra weed killer. They are designed to marginally reduce the costs of producing the crop.
There is no problem growing conventional crops, we can grow the stuff easily. The problem is stopping western farmers dumping their products on third world markets at far below cost. Destroying the local market for locally produced food, thereby driving local farmers out of business and off the land. The famines, are caused by US and EU farming subsidies.
And everything to do with economics. Money never has. It's simply a commodity which allows the exchanging value between two parties. You are particularly naive to try to attribute morals or ethics to money.
If you don't want to pay the price, if you object, then bugger off elsewhere you'll fine cheaper domain names. It's how markets work.
ok. what's a potato worth? It depends who's doing the buying. To me, I'd take a look at their debt, their revenue, the wholesale copyright infringement and say not a whole lot.
um, if they accept it and pay you, does it matter if it's valid or not? If it's not valid then they can't take you to court for breach of contract. If they accept it and pay you it's pretty much a sign that they're happy with it.
As companies get bigger, the "IQ" of the company begins to regress to the average for the population at large. Decisions become poorer, profits lower. It's normal, wouldn't worry about it.
The weak point is the door frame. A while ago I forgot my keys, it took 8 seconds to open the door with my shoulder. I've since added a couple of mortice locks to distribute the force.
The Chinese pegged their currency at 1/8 of a dollar, thereby keeping their own people and products artificially cheap. The US government could have slapped tariffs onto the imported chinese products to make up for the fact that the Chinese don't allow their currency to float on the currency exchanges. Did they? Nope.
Network storage, a few wrapper scripts and you're away. Kick off pretty much any GUI app on "the grid" and have it plonk it's interface back on your display. With something like GridEngine you can designate some of the machines as OpenOffice servers, others as Thunderbird servers to take better advantage of shared libraries, filesystem buffers and CPU caches, or you can just have everything kick off on the least loaded machines. The result is that the user's GUI apps could be running on a dozen different machines completely transparently.
With Windows of course, your extra machines might as well be doorstops.
Most of the "secured" computers I've seen have 3, 4 or more firewalls installed and "working". If one firewall isn't stopping outbound connections, go install another one, you'll be twice as secure then.
and simply do more with less. The difference between writing documents on WordPerfect and on MS Office 2007 Vista EyeCandy edition(TM). More productive, spend less time f*cking about with fonts and layout and more time actually writing stuff but on 286 hardware which they got for free.
Actually, does anyone know of a word processor which doesn't use WYSIWYG mode by default?
Sorry, yes I know a dirty word around here, but it stops depression dead. Our body is designed to do physical work on a daily basis, if it doesn't get exercise all sorts of things start to go wrong, depression is just one of them, and not a minor one.
Use mmm, a bayesian classifier to rate news announcements for positivity/negativity towards a particular stock. Rather than trying to develop an AI, let evolution do it for you. Download the news, stock info, classify the news pages, hand all the info on the market to a couple of hundred thousand simple genetic algorithms, kill off the bottom 10% or so and mate & mutate the rest. Over the generations some sophisticated algorithms will develop which can use factors like news information and the likely response of the market to that information.
Huge amounts of CPU power and time required, but you end up with algorithms wandering the probability landscape of the market looking for money. Not necessarily intelligent, AI but pretty sophisticated and highly optimised nevertheless which "understand" the market as well as any human possibly can.
"The sad thing about capitalism is that there's always a fixed amount of money on the market, so to win somebody else has to loose."
You forgot that governments print money. They make it out of thin air and devalue currencies. The US government is doing exactly that right now. There are inputs to the economy, the sun, oil, human inventiveness which mean it isn't a zero sum game, it's only zero sum on the very shortest timescales.
In the end this could mean a good thing, and we can turn our attention from pure profit to things that really matters.
Sorry, you're young... You haven't yet figured out that markets, competition are all based on the desire to reproduce. It isn't ever going away while there are human beings.
Slashdot Mirror
It makes perfect sense, you simply lack a basic understanding of economics.
Western subsidies produce huge overproduction, the result is cheap food, at far below cost. Excess cheap food is dumped on the third world, the market price drops, it becomes uneconomic to farm the land in the third world, large numbers of the farmers leave the land. Money floods abroad to buy food on international markets. Then, there is a bad year, the remaining local crop fails but there is now no buffer level of production. Aid floods in to the local market devaluing the local food prices further, more money leaves the local market and exits the country which becomes poorer still.
With a healthy local market, excesses can be sold within the country, the money stays within the country, land remains in production and people stay on the land farming instead of forming militias and massacring people.
You seem to be under the impression that third world countries have plenty of spare money around which they're happy to export in order to purchase food on the international markets. You simply have no conception of the economic reality. The fact is that the farmers who accept large subsidies to overproduce food in the US and EU are causing the deaths of tens of millions of people in the poorest countries in the world.
Interesting that it's seen as a source of cost cutting in the US.
Still. Be happy. The world is happy to continue loaning you the money needed to buy their products. Don't you worry yourself about paying it back.
Philanthropically? Um. no. Free and Open Source software is written because the author needs it. They requre the use of it. By allowing others to use it, the author loses nothing, they are not losing their time because they needed the software in the first place and the effort to copy it is negligible.
Writing Free and Open Source software is just as selfish as any other act. Software which is written with high ideals, for the betterment of man will not succeed because it isn't fulfilling a need.
But the problem is that few actually get paid to do this, it is done in spare time.
Simply not true. A huge amount of free and open source development work is performed by staff developers who are writing software which their organisations need.
Software is called soft because it's maleable, it can be moulded to fit the needs of the users. It's highly unlikely that any piece of software would exactly fit the needs of all users so there is a market out there for the customisation of almost all software, with free and open source software it's particularly easy, there is a market for customisation, service, support.
If you are a developer thinking of creating software for the benefit of mankind or the open source movement... Think again, there's enough abandonware out there already. Do it because you need it.
p.s. Free and Open Source software isn't having any trouble at all competing, it's filling niches left right and centre, though you may not see it filling your niche right now.
Look it up.
The real problem is Intellectual Property. The stuff is patented. It's entirely possible to contaminate a crop with patented seeds. You are then guilty of patent infringement unless you buy a license to grow the stuff.
As for the grandparent post "technology that can produce vast amounts of nutritious food that can feed people who may otherwise not have access to such a resoruce"
Naive bollocks. The current GM crops which are around are designed to sell extra weed killer. They are designed to marginally reduce the costs of producing the crop.
There is no problem growing conventional crops, we can grow the stuff easily. The problem is stopping western farmers dumping their products on third world markets at far below cost. Destroying the local market for locally produced food, thereby driving local farmers out of business and off the land. The famines, are caused by US and EU farming subsidies.
Yay! That way we can stamp out anything but the average, the mediocre and the banal.
The majority, most of the people out there see it as ownership of the name, or at least the right to use it.
And everything to do with economics. Money never has. It's simply a commodity which allows the exchanging value between two parties. You are particularly naive to try to attribute morals or ethics to money.
If you don't want to pay the price, if you object, then bugger off elsewhere you'll fine cheaper domain names. It's how markets work.
What monopoly? Are you trying to say there is just one top level domain?
There's now likely to be high demand for the name google, so it's value is high.
As I said. Supply and demand. If Google don't like it they can bugger off and use another top level domain instead.
It has nothing to do with right or wrong, it only has to do with supply and demand, if it isn't worth it to them, then they won't pay.
Either the domain registrars will make the money or domain squatters will. Choose.
Personally I reckon they should auction names rather than selling them at a flat rate.
ok. what's a potato worth? It depends who's doing the buying. To me, I'd take a look at their debt, their revenue, the wholesale copyright infringement and say not a whole lot.
um, if they accept it and pay you, does it matter if it's valid or not? If it's not valid then they can't take you to court for breach of contract. If they accept it and pay you it's pretty much a sign that they're happy with it.
As companies get bigger, the "IQ" of the company begins to regress to the average for the population at large. Decisions become poorer, profits lower. It's normal, wouldn't worry about it.
The weak point is the door frame. A while ago I forgot my keys, it took 8 seconds to open the door with my shoulder. I've since added a couple of mortice locks to distribute the force.
The Chinese pegged their currency at 1/8 of a dollar, thereby keeping their own people and products artificially cheap. The US government could have slapped tariffs onto the imported chinese products to make up for the fact that the Chinese don't allow their currency to float on the currency exchanges. Did they? Nope.
Network storage, a few wrapper scripts and you're away. Kick off pretty much any GUI app on "the grid" and have it plonk it's interface back on your display. With something like GridEngine you can designate some of the machines as OpenOffice servers, others as Thunderbird servers to take better advantage of shared libraries, filesystem buffers and CPU caches, or you can just have everything kick off on the least loaded machines. The result is that the user's GUI apps could be running on a dozen different machines completely transparently.
With Windows of course, your extra machines might as well be doorstops.
Most of the "secured" computers I've seen have 3, 4 or more firewalls installed and "working". If one firewall isn't stopping outbound connections, go install another one, you'll be twice as secure then.
and simply do more with less. The difference between writing documents on WordPerfect and on MS Office 2007 Vista EyeCandy edition(TM). More productive, spend less time f*cking about with fonts and layout and more time actually writing stuff but on 286 hardware which they got for free.
Actually, does anyone know of a word processor which doesn't use WYSIWYG mode by default?
Sorry, yes I know a dirty word around here, but it stops depression dead. Our body is designed to do physical work on a daily basis, if it doesn't get exercise all sorts of things start to go wrong, depression is just one of them, and not a minor one.
Otherwise explain flared jeans... Go on.
Use mmm, a bayesian classifier to rate news announcements for positivity/negativity towards a particular stock. Rather than trying to develop an AI, let evolution do it for you. Download the news, stock info, classify the news pages, hand all the info on the market to a couple of hundred thousand simple genetic algorithms, kill off the bottom 10% or so and mate & mutate the rest. Over the generations some sophisticated algorithms will develop which can use factors like news information and the likely response of the market to that information.
Huge amounts of CPU power and time required, but you end up with algorithms wandering the probability landscape of the market looking for money. Not necessarily intelligent, AI but pretty sophisticated and highly optimised nevertheless which "understand" the market as well as any human possibly can.
You forgot that governments print money. They make it out of thin air and devalue currencies. The US government is doing exactly that right now. There are inputs to the economy, the sun, oil, human inventiveness which mean it isn't a zero sum game, it's only zero sum on the very shortest timescales.
Sorry, you're young... You haven't yet figured out that markets, competition are all based on the desire to reproduce. It isn't ever going away while there are human beings.
It bugs me no end, they turn up even if you don't select the option.
There are several. (Yeah, that'd be no sympathy) It's ebay's job to make the shareholders rich.