120 Million is a pittance compared with what is spend by mainstream climate research (not even including lobbying). I don't have the exact figures, but I saw plenty of individual projects that cost around 50 million each.
I don't agree with the ideology of the conservative billionaires that drives them to either not believe in global warming, or want to convince other not to believe in it, but there is nothing especially bad or unusual about them spending their own money towards causes they believe in. If it was 120 billion, that would be more cause for concern to me.
Perhaps the best solution is to keep track of all spending of money, and all political activity in general, and then put people in jail for activity that goes against the public interest, like global warming denial, racism and other kinds of hate speech, homophobia, etc.
Of course some measure would have to be put in place to protect genuine political activists from excessive surveillance.
Please keep your crude racism out of this. We are trying to have a civil discussion about how Chinese can't think for themselves and Indians have no idea how to code and can't speak English.
If companies had an obligation never to make anyone worse off for every change they made to their business practices, there would be no economic growth. And morally, why does Nixon owe this man who has come to rely on them, anything. They never claimed that replacement parts would always be made available in the future.
Right now, royalty rates for internet radio are determined by judges in some commission, when they should be determined by the free market.
Set up an exchange, and let people buy contracts for 1000 plays directly from the owner of the music.
Either the government should run an exchange, or set up rules for such exchanges. That way, the market can set the price for music, just as it does with any other commodity.
You are advocating murder you fuckhead.
I know people like you think it's cute and funny to talk about murdering rich people, but at the end of the day, it's just murder.
Rich people are people like you and me, and they deserve to live just as much.
The kind of enforcement described in the article is unfair and stupid. If you want to enforce the rules more strictly, you need to do it in a way that is open and cannot be avoided, not sneakily and in a way that makes people paranoid and punishes the unwary. I mean for f*cks sake, they have a punitive system that a person can *opt out of* if they want to.
In Australia, you simply have to write down X employers that you contacted and their phone numbers. Then the govt agency can contact the employer and ask them if you turned down a job. Now monitoring the employer-employee interaction through online messaging (openly, using secure sign-in to an account, not through cookies), would be fine too. In fact it would be fairer on the job seeker since most low-end jobs have some conditions that are unlawful (e.g. below minimum wage, cash-in-hand, "contractor" positions that are really employer/employee relationships) and so it would be easy to see this and let the job-seeker off the hook. I know because I actually described a $10 an hour (minimum wage is about $15) job to the govt agency, and I was told I was free to take it but not required to.
You are completely ignoring competition for employees. If employers have to compete for employees (which they do) then wages would naturally rise to the level where employees were indifferent between working an extra hour/year and taking that time off for leisure.
Your claim that the only thing that causes wages to rise above some theoretical minimum is unions is false for this reason. The "force" that makes companies pay a certain wage comes from the market, not unions, in most cases.
E.g. my pay as a teaching assistant is above minimum wage despite there being no union that I'm aware of for teaching assistants.
You are missing an important point, which is that the main developers willingly went to work for Apple. Since they though this was advantageious, this implies that when they started out the project, the possibility of this happening would also have counted as a plus in their eyes. So this possibility presumably helped motivate people to become the main developers for BSD in the first place.
tl;dr you can't say "contribute to open source - it might get you a lucrative job" and "don't steal open source developers" at the same time.
I can't believe that a person who advertises a blog for their own new language, wouldn't already be familiar with such related features in popular languages like Java. So you must be mistaken.
Even though I agree with Khan and the Illinois governor that state pension plans are promises that shouldn't be broken (unless the state goes bankrupt and gets bailed out), I don't like the idea of paying someone to give an opinion or educational video. In such a case it will always be doubtful what the real opinion of the paid presenter is.
Let me say this as nicely as I can. 59% of rural votes went for Romeny. In my state, while Obama won the urban counties, the win in many rural counties was way North of 60%. Now, what were they voting for. Were they voting for smaller government and lower taxes, or just voting against minorities who steal tax dollars. I don't know, but the reality is that these people voting for a candidate who did not support the federal government building infrastructure that makes the US urban areas strong. So why do they expect the urban people to pay taxes so they can get cheap calls?
Hold up a second. Are you suggesting that which presidential candidate a particular geographical regions voted for, should affect federal spending on that region? That is seriously insane. And your insinuation that people living in rural areas are racist is also similarly ridiculous.
The professor's degree isn't really what is important, what is important is whether the issues belong to ethics or economics. E.g. would you say that the decision between using drug A and drug B to treat an illness was an ethical issue, because using the wrong one would cause less people to become better?
Economists are already addressing issues of fairness, maximizing welfare, etc.
Furthermore, you are making some wrong assumptions. E.g. you say that "The purpose of stock markets is to place capital in the hands of industry, not game the system." but if incorrect prices exist, then the wrong decisions will be made, and so people deserve a reward by trading on market fluctuations, if such trading tends to drive prices towards their correct values (and economics theory states that it does). That is, what you consider gaming the system is actually placing capital in the hands of the right people.
How is this an ethical matter? Or more precisely, how are people studying ethics qualified to speak about what is really a matter of finance or economics?
It's not like in (academic) finance and economics they ignore the overall net benefit of trading rules to society. In fact, this is usually all that is considered.
I work in this area. It is mainly the latter, that is bigger data sets and faster hardware. At first, people thought (based on fairly reasonable technical arguments) that deep networks could not be trained with backpropagation (which is the way gradient descent is implemented on neural networks). Now it turns out that with enough data, they can.
On the other hand there have been some theoretical advances by Hinton and others where networks can be trained on unsupervised data (e.g. the Google cats thing).
People are throwing the word "psychopath" around a lot, but it is basically a meaningless term, or a synonym for "asshole" which people incorrectly assume has a more scientific meaning.
I don't believe in Freudian psychoanalysis, even though it might sometimes provide interesting insights, and neither do I believe in the modern notions that people throw around like "psychopath", "bipolar", "schizophrenic" or even "depressed". Of course all these notions capture some cluster of correlated symptoms, but that is all that they do. The moment we start believing that they are more than that, e.g. that people can literally be classified as being a psychopath or not, we have strayed far beyond the realm of science, and might as well believe in "qi" or magic spirits.
At the end of the day, some people are less empathetic than others, some surprisingly so, but that's all it is. And maybe its also context dependent, so that one person might become a "psychopath" in certain circumstances, even though they normally weren't.
As for the global financial crisis, if you believe this had anything to do with "greed" or "sociopathy" then you need to pick up a textbook on economics now. There were a lot of mistakes made, and even some immoral decisions, but mostly it was just a giant bubble, everyone thinking the future was brighter than it really was, and when it burst the financial system turned out to be more brittle than people had imagined.
If the share drops the market Caps drops too. Right now Apple shares are in freefall so is there Market Cap.
Actually you are the one who is misunderstanding (but that's ok, most people don't get economics even though they think they do). There is almost certainly no such thing as "free fall" when it comes to share price. If there were, it would be simple to predict which shares will fall in price, and therefore simple to make money on the stock market.
The past changes of Apple's share price do not predict future changes. The expected change in Apples share price (ignoring technicalities like interest rates and dividends) is zero. And (again ignoring technicalities) the same goes for market cap. The market has estimated Apples present value, at its present market cap. Your (uninformed) guess that Apple's share price will go down in no way changes the fact that Apples' true present value is its market cap.
As to comparing iOS vs Android by comparing Apple vs Google, I wasn't doing that, I was simply pointing out that Apple can be a good company, and doing the right thing by its shareholders, even while ultimately losing the phone wars.
Yes but their market cap is still more than 2x Google's.
Of course shareholders were happier when the price was $700, but that doesn't change the point that companies don't aim to eventually dominate the market, they aim to maximize shareholder value.
While I agree that Android is the way of the future, because it is a better OS, the purpose of a company is to make money for its shareholders, and Apple's market cap is more than double Google's, so I think they are doing their job fine.
That doesn't make any sense. Per capita CO2 emissions means per capita yearly CO2 emissions, not total CO2 emissions up til now. So if China's argument is that their per capita emissions are less than the US and EU, then they could no longer make this argument if the EU and US reduced their emissions to 0.
Nick states here that their code doesn't link against any symbols marked GPL only, and according to the lkml itself, this defines what is permitted for non-GPL code. Of course, like you say, this interpretation hasn't been tested in court, but it does seem help RTS's case.
If you look carefully at the third picture you'll see that the graphics cards are hooked up to a green pcb like thing, and if you look at the first picture, you'll see that this green thing is plugged into the powers supply on the left. And in the second picture you see 3 power cords plugged into the power supply. I dunno where you buy this stuff (or if AMD built it themselves), but I really want one.
Slashdot Mirror
120 Million is a pittance compared with what is spend by mainstream climate research (not even including lobbying). I don't have the exact figures, but I saw plenty of individual projects that cost around 50 million each. I don't agree with the ideology of the conservative billionaires that drives them to either not believe in global warming, or want to convince other not to believe in it, but there is nothing especially bad or unusual about them spending their own money towards causes they believe in. If it was 120 billion, that would be more cause for concern to me.
Perhaps the best solution is to keep track of all spending of money, and all political activity in general, and then put people in jail for activity that goes against the public interest, like global warming denial, racism and other kinds of hate speech, homophobia, etc.
Of course some measure would have to be put in place to protect genuine political activists from excessive surveillance.
Please keep your crude racism out of this. We are trying to have a civil discussion about how Chinese can't think for themselves and Indians have no idea how to code and can't speak English.
If companies had an obligation never to make anyone worse off for every change they made to their business practices, there would be no economic growth. And morally, why does Nixon owe this man who has come to rely on them, anything. They never claimed that replacement parts would always be made available in the future.
Right now, royalty rates for internet radio are determined by judges in some commission, when they should be determined by the free market.
Set up an exchange, and let people buy contracts for 1000 plays directly from the owner of the music.
Either the government should run an exchange, or set up rules for such exchanges. That way, the market can set the price for music, just as it does with any other commodity.
You are advocating murder you fuckhead. I know people like you think it's cute and funny to talk about murdering rich people, but at the end of the day, it's just murder. Rich people are people like you and me, and they deserve to live just as much.
An airoplane on autopilot kills 4 kids. Who goes to jail?
In Australia, you simply have to write down X employers that you contacted and their phone numbers. Then the govt agency can contact the employer and ask them if you turned down a job. Now monitoring the employer-employee interaction through online messaging (openly, using secure sign-in to an account, not through cookies), would be fine too. In fact it would be fairer on the job seeker since most low-end jobs have some conditions that are unlawful (e.g. below minimum wage, cash-in-hand, "contractor" positions that are really employer/employee relationships) and so it would be easy to see this and let the job-seeker off the hook. I know because I actually described a $10 an hour (minimum wage is about $15) job to the govt agency, and I was told I was free to take it but not required to.
You are completely ignoring competition for employees. If employers have to compete for employees (which they do) then wages would naturally rise to the level where employees were indifferent between working an extra hour/year and taking that time off for leisure. Your claim that the only thing that causes wages to rise above some theoretical minimum is unions is false for this reason. The "force" that makes companies pay a certain wage comes from the market, not unions, in most cases. E.g. my pay as a teaching assistant is above minimum wage despite there being no union that I'm aware of for teaching assistants.
You are missing an important point, which is that the main developers willingly went to work for Apple. Since they though this was advantageious, this implies that when they started out the project, the possibility of this happening would also have counted as a plus in their eyes. So this possibility presumably helped motivate people to become the main developers for BSD in the first place. tl;dr you can't say "contribute to open source - it might get you a lucrative job" and "don't steal open source developers" at the same time.
I can't believe that a person who advertises a blog for their own new language, wouldn't already be familiar with such related features in popular languages like Java. So you must be mistaken.
Even though I agree with Khan and the Illinois governor that state pension plans are promises that shouldn't be broken (unless the state goes bankrupt and gets bailed out), I don't like the idea of paying someone to give an opinion or educational video. In such a case it will always be doubtful what the real opinion of the paid presenter is.
Hold up a second. Are you suggesting that which presidential candidate a particular geographical regions voted for, should affect federal spending on that region? That is seriously insane. And your insinuation that people living in rural areas are racist is also similarly ridiculous.
Economists are already addressing issues of fairness, maximizing welfare, etc.
Furthermore, you are making some wrong assumptions. E.g. you say that "The purpose of stock markets is to place capital in the hands of industry, not game the system." but if incorrect prices exist, then the wrong decisions will be made, and so people deserve a reward by trading on market fluctuations, if such trading tends to drive prices towards their correct values (and economics theory states that it does). That is, what you consider gaming the system is actually placing capital in the hands of the right people.
It's not like in (academic) finance and economics they ignore the overall net benefit of trading rules to society. In fact, this is usually all that is considered.
On the other hand there have been some theoretical advances by Hinton and others where networks can be trained on unsupervised data (e.g. the Google cats thing).
I don't believe in Freudian psychoanalysis, even though it might sometimes provide interesting insights, and neither do I believe in the modern notions that people throw around like "psychopath", "bipolar", "schizophrenic" or even "depressed". Of course all these notions capture some cluster of correlated symptoms, but that is all that they do. The moment we start believing that they are more than that, e.g. that people can literally be classified as being a psychopath or not, we have strayed far beyond the realm of science, and might as well believe in "qi" or magic spirits.
At the end of the day, some people are less empathetic than others, some surprisingly so, but that's all it is. And maybe its also context dependent, so that one person might become a "psychopath" in certain circumstances, even though they normally weren't.
As for the global financial crisis, if you believe this had anything to do with "greed" or "sociopathy" then you need to pick up a textbook on economics now. There were a lot of mistakes made, and even some immoral decisions, but mostly it was just a giant bubble, everyone thinking the future was brighter than it really was, and when it burst the financial system turned out to be more brittle than people had imagined.
If the share drops the market Caps drops too. Right now Apple shares are in freefall so is there Market Cap.
Actually you are the one who is misunderstanding (but that's ok, most people don't get economics even though they think they do). There is almost certainly no such thing as "free fall" when it comes to share price. If there were, it would be simple to predict which shares will fall in price, and therefore simple to make money on the stock market.
The past changes of Apple's share price do not predict future changes. The expected change in Apples share price (ignoring technicalities like interest rates and dividends) is zero. And (again ignoring technicalities) the same goes for market cap. The market has estimated Apples present value, at its present market cap. Your (uninformed) guess that Apple's share price will go down in no way changes the fact that Apples' true present value is its market cap.
As to comparing iOS vs Android by comparing Apple vs Google, I wasn't doing that, I was simply pointing out that Apple can be a good company, and doing the right thing by its shareholders, even while ultimately losing the phone wars.
Yes but their market cap is still more than 2x Google's. Of course shareholders were happier when the price was $700, but that doesn't change the point that companies don't aim to eventually dominate the market, they aim to maximize shareholder value.
While I agree that Android is the way of the future, because it is a better OS, the purpose of a company is to make money for its shareholders, and Apple's market cap is more than double Google's, so I think they are doing their job fine.
That doesn't make any sense. Per capita CO2 emissions means per capita yearly CO2 emissions, not total CO2 emissions up til now. So if China's argument is that their per capita emissions are less than the US and EU, then they could no longer make this argument if the EU and US reduced their emissions to 0.
Nick states here that their code doesn't link against any symbols marked GPL only, and according to the lkml itself, this defines what is permitted for non-GPL code. Of course, like you say, this interpretation hasn't been tested in court, but it does seem help RTS's case.
Interesting, do you have any sources on this? Wikipedia only mentions issues with MIPS and not x86 licensing.
Update: The case is Colfax CXT8000 which has 3 1200W power supplies.
A thing of beauty indeed.
If you look carefully at the third picture you'll see that the graphics cards are hooked up to a green pcb like thing, and if you look at the first picture, you'll see that this green thing is plugged into the powers supply on the left. And in the second picture you see 3 power cords plugged into the power supply. I dunno where you buy this stuff (or if AMD built it themselves), but I really want one.