Name those costs. Universities already archive scientific journals as a service
The principal valid costs relate to storage and the provision of an access service, with the costs of operation covered for the next hundred years or so. It's easy to say "but these could be provided for free" but is quite a different story if you've got to guarantee access for that long; with volunteers, it's very easy to end up with nobody storing anything and the data just getting lost completely. You're also unlikely to persuade most university libraries to let anyone outside of their faculty access their collections (except under a quid pro quo arrangement); any general service has to be paid for and it has to be provisioned with cash to cover long term access. Storage costs are decreasing over time, and if you can afford to store for 10 years it's (probably) not that much more to make it to 50 or 100, but it's not free.
Whether all that should really cost $5000 or whatever, I wouldn't like to comment. I just would hate to trust the magic of free for anything very long term. (Heck, we can't even reliably keep all published versions of a piece of open-source software for 20 years.)
If we don't need hundreds and thousands of workers as cheap labor, then we don't need to outsource of jobs.
So what are you going to do with the people who can't hold down a high-tech/creative job? They don't magically vanish, and putting them all in prison would be horribly expensive.
There's also some very severe professional misconduct occurring there, because non-scientists are pretending to be scientifically competent and dictating school science curricula.
But is it professional misconduct for a professional liar to tell lies?
It's a threshold measurement. A person stays in good standing so long as they are below that threshold, but as soon as they transgress and go beyond it, it doesn't matter whether it's a small or huge violation; they lose the right to have the power conveyed by that profession.
But going sufficiently far beyond the threshold tends to attract additional penalties. Like fines and jail time. There's never just one threshold, but many layers of them. (Go far enough, and you'd better hope to get arrested and tried instead of just being ripped to shreds by an angry mob. Thankfully that's incredibly rare.)
I for one find missing support for SATA, USB and sound to be real problems.
While sound might be arguable (you can do a lot of useful work without it), without storage and input devices you've got electronic junk. SATA and USB (at least to support a keyboard, though a pointing device would also be nice) are really necessary in order to get the OS set up and usable, even if that use is over the network.
Unless they're planning to have everyone connect over an RS-232 serial line and restrict everyone to using disk hardware interconnect that is virtually gone...
However with current technology its not possible for a person to use more than a couple dozen megs for a uncompressed 3D hdtv stream. On average, most will use dramatically less.
Yes, but people keep coming up with more demanding applications. I remember when very few people could use as much as a 56k modem, but hardware got better and new applications came along. That's been the way for a long time, ever since people started hooking computers up to telecommunications equipment...
I'm not suggesting that there is a whole lot of corruption involved in siting highways - but it's pretty hard to deny that the people who own the land near the new interchanges end up winning big.
And the people with a major highway going past but no interchange lose (from the increased noise and pollution). They might gain more from other mechanisms, such as congestion alleviation on other roads, but it's a tricky balance.
On the other hand, it would also be wrong (well, retarded) to deny those people lucky enough to be able to develop their land a chance to profit. It's just that it is also fair to increase the amount of tax on the land in question to take into account its increased value. Shouldn't be so much as to stop the original owner from developing, but should get the public purse some payback for the opportunity provided.
Infrastructure is always going to benefit some more than others.
It's news for a reason. It seems unlikely he is strapped for cash, and as he's acting Executive Chairman of Google, a significant stock sale has to mean he's convinced the market capitalization for his Outfit has peaked.
Or it might just be that he's planning to do a substantial investment in something else and thinks this is a tax-advantageous way to raise the capital. (I've no idea what his acquisition price was, but you can bet it was a lot lower than now. It's not real profit until you sell.) There's no way to work it out for sure at the moment, since he's under no obligation to tell you what he'll be doing with the proceeds.
On the other hand, if he was truly worried he'd be actually looking to sell a larger fraction of his holding. If you're jumping off a sinking ship, it makes sense to not be tied to its anchor!
the citizens are given the implicit right and means for violent revolution should the government turn evil
Technically, they have the right independent of what the constitution says; it merely recognizes the fact and restricts what the government can do to change the fact. That's the way that the bill of rights works.
But you'd better believe that violent revolution or civil war will be painful and will result in a lot of deaths among those who consider themselves to be patriots. (Which would be both sides, of course...)
Epigenetics means the offspring inherits the factory as well as the blueprints.
Also some of the factory operator's notes on which bits to leave switched off anyway. That is, the fine-tuning of the genetics for particular environments seems to be at least partially heritable (and was a fair part of how epigenetic markers were found in the first place).
[Regulation of derivatives] should have been done in the 1990s when derivatives took off but ex-industry people in government opposed it.
Not just ex-industry people, and not just the ones in government. Wall St spent a lot of time and effort persuading the rest of government (administration and congress, both parties) that this was all a tremendous idea and nobody needed to worry at all. Magic money for everyone! What could possibly go wrong?
No matter how much you want to blame others, pin it on the financiers first. Every last bit of this whole crisis can be traced to them. They were the ones who pressed for deregulation. They were the ones who should have known they were doing dangerous things; it was their job to know this. They were the ones who lied and connived and conspired and tried their damnedest to stop anyone else from knowing just how bad things were getting.
We can always keep some rope back for the politicians, but our dislike for them shouldn't stop us from dealing with the actual culprits.
So it's all politicians fault for putting pressure on the poor bankers?
Whether or not the politicians have any fault, the bankers did wrong and knew it at the time. Either that, or they were stunningly stupid. Take your pick.
I'm not sure about this, but an organization might not be regarded as a legal person in EU law. (It certainly isn't in tax law: corporations are taxed using a completely separate set of taxes to actual people.) That said, it would also be wrong to restrict organizations except in accordance with the other basic principles from having freedom of (collective) speech. That is, all restrictions have to be necessary to support democractic society, as prescribed in law, and following a legitimate aim (the aims that are legitimate are set out elsewhere). The "necessary to support democratic society" part is critical: it stops a lot of possible abuses.
Especially when combined with "no non-alphanumeric characters, case-insensitive". I've even seen worse than that (split into 7 character groups; use last group, which could be as short as 1! Aaaaaaaah!) but that was a while ago now.
The amount of stupid out there is pretty high. If Deloitte can persuade some of the worst offenders (i.e., banks) to shift even a little towards better practices, they'll still have done something good. Not that I'm holding my breath.
While I agree that the overhead costs of the system must be balanced against the benefit gained, it is very hard to measure the indirect overheads or indirect benefits (the direct costs — basically, for running the Patent Office — are tiny by comparison with the benefits of allowing a market in patents, which is taxable). That's why you get economists to do the measuring, and not accountants.
So when an independent inventor sues a megacorp for copying his invention and he ends up getting out-lawyered by the megacorp's rockstar lawyers, he can be responsible for paying millions of dollars for the megacorp's lawyers. It would be safer to just let them copy your idea than to potentially be responsible for paying their lawyers' astronomical salaries.
Typically, costs in a European court are subject to a "reasonableness" test; crudely put, if you over-spend on lawyers, you get to pay them yourself irrespective of who wins the case (unless the other side is just as stupid/bull-headed; a civil trial between two Russian oligarchs can involve stupendous fees). Or at least that's how it works in an English court (where lawyer fees are generally handled through the judge's responsibilities for equitable relief); the details are likely different in the other legal systems in use in Europe, but the net effect is pretty similar.
Not that winning such a case is likely to be easy for the independent inventor in either system.
Half the time when I've tried to have a logical discussion on/. someone causes it to devolve into meaningless bickering over inconsequential details, or derisive ad-hominem attacks
So learn to ignore the parts that are value-free. There's no point in mud-wrestling a pig into submission as you just get covered in mud and the pig loves it.
The discussion threading is terrible, and there's no keyboard navigation, not even as good as on slashdot (which is not good either). It's also got a very noisy design, with lots of colors and complexity. In short, Jeff appears to be learning all the wrong lessons from other sites.
I think I'll stick with other systems for now. There's no value proposition in being involved yet.
Using the threat of imprisonment seems to be a poor deterrent for crime.
You're correct. That's why you've also got to bankrupt all their family (and other suitable agents) too, and — if you're not imposing life-without-parole — permanently prohibit the individuals responsible from holding company directorships or shareholdings. You probably need to also limit the amount that can be returned to shareholders very strongly, perhaps to no more than 10% of the nominal value pre-collapse, and there needs to be similar things to spread the pain to bondholders and other fancy-pants contingent financial instruments.
The aim is to ensure that the people who are in charge of organizations such as large banks that are systemically important, act in a way that is respectful of not just their own benefit and to stop them from squirreling the money away immediately prior to the crash. It also ensures that no shareholder thinks that it's a fiduciary interest issue to take action leading to a crash. If it makes the individuals concerned a lot more risk-averse, that's OK: it's the whole damn point. If they want to take more risks, they should do so with smaller corporations whose loss would not be so big a problem (and so who can be cleaned up after by normal market mechanisms).
Every time I hear about what some of those villains were up to, like using insurance on loans against bad debt as collateral for more loans, my blood boils. The amount of WRONG is just staggering.
That's not what Keynesian economists tell us. Though this is what Austrian economists tell us. Funny that the majority of the world runs on Keynesian economics and is suffering badly for it.
A major part of the problem is that the thing that macro-economists study, the economy of the world, changes its behavior in response to the reported observations of the economists. Though the problem happens to some extent with other sciences (from physics to biology to sociology), it's at its most extreme in economics due to the massive incentives for behavioral screwing around. (Micro-economics has fewer problems because the incentives for gaming it are so much smaller.)
The other part of the problem (and your strawman) is that there are several major models for how macro-economics should work, notably the Keynesian models and the Friedmanite models. They give radically different predictions, but they're just models and that's a fact that people often lose sight of. Like all models, they have particular domains of applicability (and different models have different domains!) and are poor reflections of reality. Their weaknesses are also their strength, as they allow the model to be tractable enough to make predictions with them, but they are just models. People tend to lose sight of that basic fact.
So while the right thing to do is to use a model, you've got to keep in mind that the model might be totally wrong in the current situation: if the models predictions don't align with reality, you must change which model you use. That's the scientific approach. Pity the various zealots don't grasp that...
Couldn't they just pre-record the game on a Hollywood back-lot and send the tapes to the subs before they go on patrol? It's just sports so it isn't like the outcome actually matters.
Do you honestly mean to tell me that governments have been implementing these expensive systems before researching them thoroughly enough to find out whether they will actually have the intended effect? I'm shocked!
There's good research on it, but it's often based in jurisdictions where the organization that receives the fine is not the organization that specifies where the cameras should go. If the cameras were set by municipalities but the fines went to state coffers, there'd be little reason to play nasty games to increase revenue.
Also, you guys use way too many lights anyway. But that's a whole different matter.
Slashdot Mirror
Name those costs. Universities already archive scientific journals as a service
The principal valid costs relate to storage and the provision of an access service, with the costs of operation covered for the next hundred years or so. It's easy to say "but these could be provided for free" but is quite a different story if you've got to guarantee access for that long; with volunteers, it's very easy to end up with nobody storing anything and the data just getting lost completely. You're also unlikely to persuade most university libraries to let anyone outside of their faculty access their collections (except under a quid pro quo arrangement); any general service has to be paid for and it has to be provisioned with cash to cover long term access. Storage costs are decreasing over time, and if you can afford to store for 10 years it's (probably) not that much more to make it to 50 or 100, but it's not free.
Whether all that should really cost $5000 or whatever, I wouldn't like to comment. I just would hate to trust the magic of free for anything very long term. (Heck, we can't even reliably keep all published versions of a piece of open-source software for 20 years.)
If we don't need hundreds and thousands of workers as cheap labor, then we don't need to outsource of jobs.
So what are you going to do with the people who can't hold down a high-tech/creative job? They don't magically vanish, and putting them all in prison would be horribly expensive.
There's also some very severe professional misconduct occurring there, because non-scientists are pretending to be scientifically competent and dictating school science curricula.
But is it professional misconduct for a professional liar to tell lies?
It's a threshold measurement. A person stays in good standing so long as they are below that threshold, but as soon as they transgress and go beyond it, it doesn't matter whether it's a small or huge violation; they lose the right to have the power conveyed by that profession.
But going sufficiently far beyond the threshold tends to attract additional penalties. Like fines and jail time. There's never just one threshold, but many layers of them. (Go far enough, and you'd better hope to get arrested and tried instead of just being ripped to shreds by an angry mob. Thankfully that's incredibly rare.)
I for one find missing support for SATA, USB and sound to be real problems.
While sound might be arguable (you can do a lot of useful work without it), without storage and input devices you've got electronic junk. SATA and USB (at least to support a keyboard, though a pointing device would also be nice) are really necessary in order to get the OS set up and usable, even if that use is over the network.
Unless they're planning to have everyone connect over an RS-232 serial line and restrict everyone to using disk hardware interconnect that is virtually gone...
However with current technology its not possible for a person to use more than a couple dozen megs for a uncompressed 3D hdtv stream. On average, most will use dramatically less.
Yes, but people keep coming up with more demanding applications. I remember when very few people could use as much as a 56k modem, but hardware got better and new applications came along. That's been the way for a long time, ever since people started hooking computers up to telecommunications equipment...
I'm not suggesting that there is a whole lot of corruption involved in siting highways - but it's pretty hard to deny that the people who own the land near the new interchanges end up winning big.
And the people with a major highway going past but no interchange lose (from the increased noise and pollution). They might gain more from other mechanisms, such as congestion alleviation on other roads, but it's a tricky balance.
On the other hand, it would also be wrong (well, retarded) to deny those people lucky enough to be able to develop their land a chance to profit. It's just that it is also fair to increase the amount of tax on the land in question to take into account its increased value. Shouldn't be so much as to stop the original owner from developing, but should get the public purse some payback for the opportunity provided.
Infrastructure is always going to benefit some more than others.
Very true.
It's news for a reason. It seems unlikely he is strapped for cash, and as he's acting Executive Chairman of Google, a significant stock sale has to mean he's convinced the market capitalization for his Outfit has peaked.
Or it might just be that he's planning to do a substantial investment in something else and thinks this is a tax-advantageous way to raise the capital. (I've no idea what his acquisition price was, but you can bet it was a lot lower than now. It's not real profit until you sell.) There's no way to work it out for sure at the moment, since he's under no obligation to tell you what he'll be doing with the proceeds.
On the other hand, if he was truly worried he'd be actually looking to sell a larger fraction of his holding. If you're jumping off a sinking ship, it makes sense to not be tied to its anchor!
the citizens are given the implicit right and means for violent revolution should the government turn evil
Technically, they have the right independent of what the constitution says; it merely recognizes the fact and restricts what the government can do to change the fact. That's the way that the bill of rights works.
But you'd better believe that violent revolution or civil war will be painful and will result in a lot of deaths among those who consider themselves to be patriots. (Which would be both sides, of course...)
Epigenetics means the offspring inherits the factory as well as the blueprints.
Also some of the factory operator's notes on which bits to leave switched off anyway. That is, the fine-tuning of the genetics for particular environments seems to be at least partially heritable (and was a fair part of how epigenetic markers were found in the first place).
[Regulation of derivatives] should have been done in the 1990s when derivatives took off but ex-industry people in government opposed it.
Not just ex-industry people, and not just the ones in government. Wall St spent a lot of time and effort persuading the rest of government (administration and congress, both parties) that this was all a tremendous idea and nobody needed to worry at all. Magic money for everyone! What could possibly go wrong?
No matter how much you want to blame others, pin it on the financiers first. Every last bit of this whole crisis can be traced to them. They were the ones who pressed for deregulation. They were the ones who should have known they were doing dangerous things; it was their job to know this. They were the ones who lied and connived and conspired and tried their damnedest to stop anyone else from knowing just how bad things were getting.
We can always keep some rope back for the politicians, but our dislike for them shouldn't stop us from dealing with the actual culprits.
So it's all politicians fault for putting pressure on the poor bankers?
Whether or not the politicians have any fault, the bankers did wrong and knew it at the time. Either that, or they were stunningly stupid. Take your pick.
Bremen 1483
I should move to sunny Bremen. They get nearly 20% more sun per year than my home town does (1250 hours per year, average)...
An organisation has freedom of expression?
I'm not sure about this, but an organization might not be regarded as a legal person in EU law. (It certainly isn't in tax law: corporations are taxed using a completely separate set of taxes to actual people.) That said, it would also be wrong to restrict organizations except in accordance with the other basic principles from having freedom of (collective) speech. That is, all restrictions have to be necessary to support democractic society, as prescribed in law, and following a legitimate aim (the aims that are legitimate are set out elsewhere). The "necessary to support democratic society" part is critical: it stops a lot of possible abuses.
What the blaze is a six digit company? Ranked in Fortune 999999, or something?
You seriously underestimate the size of the economy. A mom-and-pop store is a six-digit company...
8 characters? yeah, that's broke.
Especially when combined with "no non-alphanumeric characters, case-insensitive". I've even seen worse than that (split into 7 character groups; use last group, which could be as short as 1! Aaaaaaaah!) but that was a while ago now.
The amount of stupid out there is pretty high. If Deloitte can persuade some of the worst offenders (i.e., banks) to shift even a little towards better practices, they'll still have done something good. Not that I'm holding my breath.
While I agree that the overhead costs of the system must be balanced against the benefit gained, it is very hard to measure the indirect overheads or indirect benefits (the direct costs — basically, for running the Patent Office — are tiny by comparison with the benefits of allowing a market in patents, which is taxable). That's why you get economists to do the measuring, and not accountants.
So when an independent inventor sues a megacorp for copying his invention and he ends up getting out-lawyered by the megacorp's rockstar lawyers, he can be responsible for paying millions of dollars for the megacorp's lawyers. It would be safer to just let them copy your idea than to potentially be responsible for paying their lawyers' astronomical salaries.
Typically, costs in a European court are subject to a "reasonableness" test; crudely put, if you over-spend on lawyers, you get to pay them yourself irrespective of who wins the case (unless the other side is just as stupid/bull-headed; a civil trial between two Russian oligarchs can involve stupendous fees). Or at least that's how it works in an English court (where lawyer fees are generally handled through the judge's responsibilities for equitable relief); the details are likely different in the other legal systems in use in Europe, but the net effect is pretty similar.
Not that winning such a case is likely to be easy for the independent inventor in either system.
Half the time when I've tried to have a logical discussion on /. someone causes it to devolve into meaningless bickering over inconsequential details, or derisive ad-hominem attacks
So learn to ignore the parts that are value-free. There's no point in mud-wrestling a pig into submission as you just get covered in mud and the pig loves it.
Did you take a look at it?
The discussion threading is terrible, and there's no keyboard navigation, not even as good as on slashdot (which is not good either). It's also got a very noisy design, with lots of colors and complexity. In short, Jeff appears to be learning all the wrong lessons from other sites.
I think I'll stick with other systems for now. There's no value proposition in being involved yet.
Using the threat of imprisonment seems to be a poor deterrent for crime.
You're correct. That's why you've also got to bankrupt all their family (and other suitable agents) too, and — if you're not imposing life-without-parole — permanently prohibit the individuals responsible from holding company directorships or shareholdings. You probably need to also limit the amount that can be returned to shareholders very strongly, perhaps to no more than 10% of the nominal value pre-collapse, and there needs to be similar things to spread the pain to bondholders and other fancy-pants contingent financial instruments.
The aim is to ensure that the people who are in charge of organizations such as large banks that are systemically important, act in a way that is respectful of not just their own benefit and to stop them from squirreling the money away immediately prior to the crash. It also ensures that no shareholder thinks that it's a fiduciary interest issue to take action leading to a crash. If it makes the individuals concerned a lot more risk-averse, that's OK: it's the whole damn point. If they want to take more risks, they should do so with smaller corporations whose loss would not be so big a problem (and so who can be cleaned up after by normal market mechanisms).
Every time I hear about what some of those villains were up to, like using insurance on loans against bad debt as collateral for more loans, my blood boils. The amount of WRONG is just staggering.
That's not what Keynesian economists tell us. Though this is what Austrian economists tell us. Funny that the majority of the world runs on Keynesian economics and is suffering badly for it.
A major part of the problem is that the thing that macro-economists study, the economy of the world, changes its behavior in response to the reported observations of the economists. Though the problem happens to some extent with other sciences (from physics to biology to sociology), it's at its most extreme in economics due to the massive incentives for behavioral screwing around. (Micro-economics has fewer problems because the incentives for gaming it are so much smaller.)
The other part of the problem (and your strawman) is that there are several major models for how macro-economics should work, notably the Keynesian models and the Friedmanite models. They give radically different predictions, but they're just models and that's a fact that people often lose sight of. Like all models, they have particular domains of applicability (and different models have different domains!) and are poor reflections of reality. Their weaknesses are also their strength, as they allow the model to be tractable enough to make predictions with them, but they are just models. People tend to lose sight of that basic fact.
So while the right thing to do is to use a model, you've got to keep in mind that the model might be totally wrong in the current situation: if the models predictions don't align with reality, you must change which model you use. That's the scientific approach. Pity the various zealots don't grasp that...
Couldn't they just pre-record the game on a Hollywood back-lot and send the tapes to the subs before they go on patrol? It's just sports so it isn't like the outcome actually matters.
No.
Easy, isn't it?
Do you honestly mean to tell me that governments have been implementing these expensive systems before researching them thoroughly enough to find out whether they will actually have the intended effect? I'm shocked!
There's good research on it, but it's often based in jurisdictions where the organization that receives the fine is not the organization that specifies where the cameras should go. If the cameras were set by municipalities but the fines went to state coffers, there'd be little reason to play nasty games to increase revenue.
Also, you guys use way too many lights anyway. But that's a whole different matter.