I knew this day would come eventually. Although many of the members of the community may have been more receptive to donation solicitations a la erowid or PBS, token $20 per year for/. seems reasonable to me.
I see a lot of talk about perl filters and other technological solutions to the ad issue. What I don't understand is why anyone thinks it unreasonable to spend a sum of money that, on an individual level is absolutely nothing for the majority of well-paid/. readers. I routinely spend 5 times that in a single evening when I go out to a bar. Last weekend, I gave my waiter a $10 tip for the first found of drinks he brought us, and at the end of the night he ended up with more than $20 of my money in tips. And he didn't even come close to enriching my life the way that/. has over the past three years.
I've wasted hundreds of dollars over the course of my life on crap that I never use. I've seen people drop $25 and up on sachels of party favors that they consume in one evening. Twenty or so dollars per year is simply not a big deal, and/. is well worth it, IMHO.
Still, it would have been nice to have had the option of voluntary donation, instead of this carrot/stick strategy. I would've sent Taco et. al. more money under a donations regime.
The key difference being that VB is a procedural language, and VB.Net is an object-oriented language.
correct me if I'm wrong here, but... object-oriented programming is not a language so much as a development philosophy. "Procedural" Java code is certainly a reality, even if the language was not designed to be used in this way. And VBA within the Excel and Word object models sure seems like a proper OO language to me...
one must deeply fault Lomborg's cost-benefit analysis for not making a good attempt to elucidate the cost of environmental degradation per se but instead focusing on pure human property and health costs.
Instability of the Gulf Stream: $10,000.
10 million gallons of water melting from the North Pole Ice Shelf: $500,000
60 deg. F February average temperature in Boston: priceless.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it's not clear at all that M$ is a natural monopoly. The term natural monopoly designates a market in which a single vendor leads to the most efficient outcome (which is precisely defined within the context of any given economic model... within the traditional "Marshallian cross" micro model the most efficient outcome might be the one which maximizes the sum of consumer and producer surplus).
IIRC, in the case of, say, a TelCo considered to be a natural monopoly, the old-school supporting arguments centered around the idea that it's inefficient to have a redundant network of phone lines. The same notion was applied to utility companies. It's not clear at all to me that M$'s product development (and software development in general) is an analogous process (in terms of high infrastructure costs) to connecting phone lines or distributing electric power. To me, M$ is more of an old-school monopoly a la Standard Oil, that uses its market power to drive out competitors, even when they have arguably superior products.
If, by "open monopoly," Hrebejk means "everyone around the globe using open-source software for most of their computing" then I hope he's right, although that situation wouldn't be a true monopoly unless one company (Sun? Red Hat?) ends up controlling most of the software market.
and if the terrorists used their real names when boarding the planes (which they did, according to this month's Newsweek) then why don't we use large scale parallel database search algorithms to regularly scan airline company databases for known terrorist names or monikers, addresses, credit card accounts, etc.?
This might be cheaper and less inconvenient than implementing facial recognition systems, or at the very least would make an effective compliment to those systems to improve accuracy.
If we do implement facial recognition systems, perhaps we could put in some anti-government abuse measures, like deleting the records of the passenger's faces after a successful flight.
Obviously, given the disturbing unreadiness of our system of national defense, a Neanderthal-territorial attitude will do nothing if looney fanatics are responsible (especially if those loonies are residents of Israel). Shall we invade the state of Israel and take military control of the West Bank etc.? I don't want WWIII and neither does anyone else! Full scale war will not result in anything good, as far as I can tell, and as the country with the most to lose it is not in our best interest to start one. Particularly against a country that may not exist! The terrorists may have had Russian, Chinese, or American weapons and equipment for all we know. Maybe they were Americans.
We all despise these people and want them brought into the system so we can have our way with them, and that's fine, but content-free statements about getting tough and this incident "not standing" only bring disorder. Let's find them, bring them, and if the evidence convinces us, throw the motherfucking book at them. But let's do it with a level head, and save the barbarism for the execution.
A bigger problem: what to do about the hordes of Palestinians celebrating in the street over the tragic deaths of tens of thousands of Americans? These people are human beings, and any human easily grasps the "wrongness" of mass slaughter, so why are people happy about this?
The UN 4 Kids site:
What is the International Day of Peace? The International Day of Peace is observed each year on the opening day of the regular session of the United Nations General Assembly.
According to the Boston Metro, today is International Peace Day.
Anti-trust laws don't work. Look at M$. Look at the modern Petrol industry. We tried breaking up the mega-monopoly Standard Oil in the early 20th century, and look where we are now: Exxon-Mobil et. al. AOL-Time-Warner and consolidation aren't the problem: people willing to turn over control of their lives to a company and pay for the privilege of doing so is the real issue. Perhaps private interests encouraging this kind of neo-slavery (serfdom?) should be discouraged from it, but we certainly won't affect positive change from your implied (correct me if I'm wrong) Neanderthal approach of nuking every increasingly complex corporation just because they have a shitload of capital and appear to be "buying up the world" (tell me you'd act differently if you were on the board of, say, AOL).
You speak as if the state-capitalist system in the UK were better. Obviously, any system run by the same government that so deftly handled foot and mouth is superior to what we have over in Unistat.
I assure you, there is nothing daring about this. The people who control these companies are working hand-in-hand with legislators to make this consolidation smooth for all the controlling parties. The real dare is to their client base: to stand up and learn how to use products that cede control to the end user and not to the originating corporation.
I would be much more willing to pay for content that empowers me to create my own content rather than consuming the output of other's creativity in a first-order manner. Most content that I have seen is this kind of "first-order" stuff - i.e. it is designed to be consumed exactly as it is with no required participation on the part of the user (like a music recording).
W.R.T. the ringtone example, instead of charging me $0.076 for a ring tone, charge me $5 for an app that allows me to design my own ringtones. Bringing the consumer closer to the creative process would increase the average consumer's understanding and appreciation of that process and thus make them more willing to pay for content in general (both first and second order).
GDP only shows how much money is
exchanging hands; it does not reflect qualitatively on what's actually going on.
Be careful. Making outright assertions without proof because you were convinced by someone else's ideas and have taken them to be fact is dangerous. The amount of money changing hands does, in part, reflect qualitatively "what's going on" in the economy- that is to say it can be used as a proxy of total "welfare" or "happiness" or "utility," or whatever ethical benchmark you wish to use to judge whether or not we are becoming "better off" over time.
GDP is an approximate measure of the amount of production in an economy, including things such as computer hardware sales (which in some way accounts for the improvement that hardware brings to the lives of agents in the economy, though perhaps not accurately). The "standard of living" (or "welfare," etc.) for the average human is thought to increase with positive economic growth, which is defined as an increase in production over time. One reason we think GDP can be used as a proxy for improvement in the "standard of living" is that GDP equals income (there is discrepancy in the practical measurements of production and income, but they're small (order of 10^10 dollars) in relation to GDP (on the order of 10^12 dollars)), and people seem to have more "utility" (or "happiness," etc.) when they make more money. This is obviously not the whole story, and we do not yet have data that purports to measure things like spiritual fulfillment or mental enslavement. Would you like to help me construct the "enslavement index?" The equation could be something like:
#enslaved=totalTVsales + totalM$productsales + some average of the marketcaps of (say) the 10 largest corporations + some index representing the number of ludicrous laws and court cases that arise in a given year
Yes, in practice production is measured by accounting for "money changing hands." This is of course fraught with problems, such as the extreme and hackneyed example that takes the form: if we mow each other's lawn, GDP increases, but "real" production remains the same since each of us would have mowed his own lawn without pay anyway and that wouldn't have increased GDP. In practice, cases like this (of which there are probably no real life examples) contribute *much* less to GDP than actual productive activity represented by consumption of (and investment in) goods and services that contribute something new and presumably beneficial to the economic system. It is this productive activity that is believed to improve peoples lives, and it is measured better by GDP than by anything else we've used so far. We've only been collecting data since the late 1940's you know. Prior to that there was no GDP.
GDP isn't completely useless as a benchmark against which to compare economic activity over time to determine if things are "improving." It does reflect in large part "real" economic growth, and it is not simply a measure of how well we have learned to move money without actually producing anything new. GDP is not the whole story of improvement of course, it doesn't consider the income gap, psychological happiness, the rate of divorce, crime, unethical (but not illegal) business practices, unacceptable government policies, etc., but it is an important part of the picture that shouldn't be ignored simply because it is incomplete. If you have a better idea of how to measure economic improvement (or how to define it) please let me know. Until then we will keep using GDP to give us some idea of what is qualitatively going on. We started taking these data because we wanted to avoid another depression like the 1930's, and they have certainly helped us do that. Keep that in mind.
solving this "distribution problem" means leveling the
consumption of an average American to the level of "an average human", at least to a quarter of
the present, probably much more.
Not true. In 2000, the US government paid out almost $22 billion in agricultural subsidies. These subsides in part are used to compensate farmers for intentionally underproducing to restrict supply and keep commodity prices up so they can better meet their operating costs (exactly what the economic sense of this is is beyond me... please correct me if I'm wrong). Take that plus the fact that the US produces significant portions of the total global wheat, corn and soy supply, and there is clearly the potential for plenty of food production for everybody! The fundamentals of the agriculture market are what needs to change, not the level of consumption of the average consumer in the US.
-rene
economic uncertainty with the collapse of the euro
Collapse? What are you talking about? The Euro is doing fine. In fact, the euro/us$ exchange rate was on the decline between october 2000 and january 2000 (i.e. the euro was strengthening). Although it has been rising since February of this year, in March (according to morgan stanley) it was trading at 1.09 euros per US$. That's hardly a collapse. The economy of the EU is also doing fine; real GDP for the EU grew 3.4% in 2000. That's much higher than the growth one expects from a region on the verge of an economic failure. Maybe you know better than me from personal experience, but none of the data I have seen support the idea that the EU has made any serious blunders in its economic policy.
rene
Re:This was played out in a video game
on
Hacking Biology
·
· Score: 1
I don't remember the plot of Metal Gear Solid having anything to do with DNA-computing or modeling cellular processes. The soldiers, protagonist, and antagonist were the products of genetic-engineering... Engineering entire organisms and DNA computing/cellular modeling seem rather different to me, but I know very little about these things.
I think he's referring to the idea that the end of the so-called "modern" era will be (is currently?) marked by the decline of the nation-state as the basic unit of global political affairs. That's not to say that the nation-state is bad, but simply that its disintegration represents political or social evolution (I suppose he means to imply evolution to a presumably better arrangement).
...take notice of environmental phenomena and bend it to human will. Isn't this what mathematics itself does, no less than any other science?
Mathematics is more a way of describing phenomena that cannot be described any other way than something extant solely to bend nature to our will. Newton's law of gravitation, for example, allows us to describe the behavior of massive bodies but says nothing about how they can be manipulated for our benefit. That is within the domain of engineering.
Perhaps less abstract than the laws which math describes are the mathematical contrivances that allow us to make these descriptions. Newton's invention of what is now known to us as Calculus is a method for solving mathematical problems and deriving laws of nature. While no one doubts these laws are not patentable , perhaps some creative language akin to that of Amazon's notorious 1-click patent might convince the PTO that recently invented mathematical techniques are fair game.
Slashdot Mirror
I see a lot of talk about perl filters and other technological solutions to the ad issue. What I don't understand is why anyone thinks it unreasonable to spend a sum of money that, on an individual level is absolutely nothing for the majority of well-paid /. readers. I routinely spend 5 times that in a single evening when I go out to a bar. Last weekend, I gave my waiter a $10 tip for the first found of drinks he brought us, and at the end of the night he ended up with more than $20 of my money in tips. And he didn't even come close to enriching my life the way that /. has over the past three years.
I've wasted hundreds of dollars over the course of my life on crap that I never use. I've seen people drop $25 and up on sachels of party favors that they consume in one evening. Twenty or so dollars per year is simply not a big deal, and /. is well worth it, IMHO.
Still, it would have been nice to have had the option of voluntary donation, instead of this carrot/stick strategy. I would've sent Taco et. al. more money under a donations regime.
-Rene
correct me if I'm wrong here, but... object-oriented programming is not a language so much as a development philosophy. "Procedural" Java code is certainly a reality, even if the language was not designed to be used in this way. And VBA within the Excel and Word object models sure seems like a proper OO language to me...
-rene
Instability of the Gulf Stream: $10,000.
10 million gallons of water melting from the North Pole Ice Shelf: $500,000
60 deg. F February average temperature in Boston: priceless.
Am I missing something? I don't recall any "two legitimate uses" clause in the DMCA.
Does anyone know what they're referring to? And, if this "two use" exception exists, was it brought up during the DeCSS proceedings?
-Rene Ruiz
IIRC, in the case of, say, a TelCo considered to be a natural monopoly, the old-school supporting arguments centered around the idea that it's inefficient to have a redundant network of phone lines. The same notion was applied to utility companies. It's not clear at all to me that M$'s product development (and software development in general) is an analogous process (in terms of high infrastructure costs) to connecting phone lines or distributing electric power. To me, M$ is more of an old-school monopoly a la Standard Oil, that uses its market power to drive out competitors, even when they have arguably superior products.
If, by "open monopoly," Hrebejk means "everyone around the globe using open-source software for most of their computing" then I hope he's right, although that situation wouldn't be a true monopoly unless one company (Sun? Red Hat?) ends up controlling most of the software market.
-Rene
This might be cheaper and less inconvenient than implementing facial recognition systems, or at the very least would make an effective compliment to those systems to improve accuracy.
It may already be here.
If we do implement facial recognition systems, perhaps we could put in some anti-government abuse measures, like deleting the records of the passenger's faces after a successful flight.
-Rene
Obviously, given the disturbing unreadiness of our system of national defense, a Neanderthal-territorial attitude will do nothing if looney fanatics are responsible (especially if those loonies are residents of Israel). Shall we invade the state of Israel and take military control of the West Bank etc.? I don't want WWIII and neither does anyone else! Full scale war will not result in anything good, as far as I can tell, and as the country with the most to lose it is not in our best interest to start one. Particularly against a country that may not exist! The terrorists may have had Russian, Chinese, or American weapons and equipment for all we know. Maybe they were Americans.
We all despise these people and want them brought into the system so we can have our way with them, and that's fine, but content-free statements about getting tough and this incident "not standing" only bring disorder. Let's find them, bring them, and if the evidence convinces us, throw the motherfucking book at them. But let's do it with a level head, and save the barbarism for the execution.
A bigger problem: what to do about the hordes of Palestinians celebrating in the street over the tragic deaths of tens of thousands of Americans? These people are human beings, and any human easily grasps the "wrongness" of mass slaughter, so why are people happy about this?
The true issue falls along these lines.
-Rene
According to the Boston Metro, today is International Peace Day.
-Rene
This isn't about backbone.
Anti-trust laws don't work. Look at M$. Look at the modern Petrol industry. We tried breaking up the mega-monopoly Standard Oil in the early 20th century, and look where we are now: Exxon-Mobil et. al. AOL-Time-Warner and consolidation aren't the problem: people willing to turn over control of their lives to a company and pay for the privilege of doing so is the real issue. Perhaps private interests encouraging this kind of neo-slavery (serfdom?) should be discouraged from it, but we certainly won't affect positive change from your implied (correct me if I'm wrong) Neanderthal approach of nuking every increasingly complex corporation just because they have a shitload of capital and appear to be "buying up the world" (tell me you'd act differently if you were on the board of, say, AOL).
You speak as if the state-capitalist system in the UK were better. Obviously, any system run by the same government that so deftly handled foot and mouth is superior to what we have over in Unistat.
I assure you, there is nothing daring about this. The people who control these companies are working hand-in-hand with legislators to make this consolidation smooth for all the controlling parties. The real dare is to their client base: to stand up and learn how to use products that cede control to the end user and not to the originating corporation.
Cheers,
Rene
I would be much more willing to pay for content that empowers me to create my own content rather than consuming the output of other's creativity in a first-order manner. Most content that I have seen is this kind of "first-order" stuff - i.e. it is designed to be consumed exactly as it is with no required participation on the part of the user (like a music recording).
W.R.T. the ringtone example, instead of charging me $0.076 for a ring tone, charge me $5 for an app that allows me to design my own ringtones. Bringing the consumer closer to the creative process would increase the average consumer's understanding and appreciation of that process and thus make them more willing to pay for content in general (both first and second order).
-Rene
Be careful. Making outright assertions without proof because you were convinced by someone else's ideas and have taken them to be fact is dangerous. The amount of money changing hands does, in part, reflect qualitatively "what's going on" in the economy- that is to say it can be used as a proxy of total "welfare" or "happiness" or "utility," or whatever ethical benchmark you wish to use to judge whether or not we are becoming "better off" over time.
GDP is an approximate measure of the amount of production in an economy, including things such as computer hardware sales (which in some way accounts for the improvement that hardware brings to the lives of agents in the economy, though perhaps not accurately). The "standard of living" (or "welfare," etc.) for the average human is thought to increase with positive economic growth, which is defined as an increase in production over time. One reason we think GDP can be used as a proxy for improvement in the "standard of living" is that GDP equals income (there is discrepancy in the practical measurements of production and income, but they're small (order of 10^10 dollars) in relation to GDP (on the order of 10^12 dollars)), and people seem to have more "utility" (or "happiness," etc.) when they make more money. This is obviously not the whole story, and we do not yet have data that purports to measure things like spiritual fulfillment or mental enslavement. Would you like to help me construct the "enslavement index?" The equation could be something like:
#enslaved=totalTVsales + totalM$productsales + some average of the marketcaps of (say) the 10 largest corporations + some index representing the number of ludicrous laws and court cases that arise in a given year
Yes, in practice production is measured by accounting for "money changing hands." This is of course fraught with problems, such as the extreme and hackneyed example that takes the form: if we mow each other's lawn, GDP increases, but "real" production remains the same since each of us would have mowed his own lawn without pay anyway and that wouldn't have increased GDP. In practice, cases like this (of which there are probably no real life examples) contribute *much* less to GDP than actual productive activity represented by consumption of (and investment in) goods and services that contribute something new and presumably beneficial to the economic system. It is this productive activity that is believed to improve peoples lives, and it is measured better by GDP than by anything else we've used so far. We've only been collecting data since the late 1940's you know. Prior to that there was no GDP.
GDP isn't completely useless as a benchmark against which to compare economic activity over time to determine if things are "improving." It does reflect in large part "real" economic growth, and it is not simply a measure of how well we have learned to move money without actually producing anything new. GDP is not the whole story of improvement of course, it doesn't consider the income gap, psychological happiness, the rate of divorce, crime, unethical (but not illegal) business practices, unacceptable government policies, etc., but it is an important part of the picture that shouldn't be ignored simply because it is incomplete. If you have a better idea of how to measure economic improvement (or how to define it) please let me know. Until then we will keep using GDP to give us some idea of what is qualitatively going on. We started taking these data because we wanted to avoid another depression like the 1930's, and they have certainly helped us do that. Keep that in mind.
-Rene Ruiz
Not true. In 2000, the US government paid out almost $22 billion in agricultural subsidies. These subsides in part are used to compensate farmers for intentionally underproducing to restrict supply and keep commodity prices up so they can better meet their operating costs (exactly what the economic sense of this is is beyond me... please correct me if I'm wrong). Take that plus the fact that the US produces significant portions of the total global wheat, corn and soy supply, and there is clearly the potential for plenty of food production for everybody! The fundamentals of the agriculture market are what needs to change, not the level of consumption of the average consumer in the US. -rene
Collapse? What are you talking about? The Euro is doing fine. In fact, the euro/us$ exchange rate was on the decline between october 2000 and january 2000 (i.e. the euro was strengthening). Although it has been rising since February of this year, in March (according to morgan stanley) it was trading at 1.09 euros per US$. That's hardly a collapse. The economy of the EU is also doing fine; real GDP for the EU grew 3.4% in 2000. That's much higher than the growth one expects from a region on the verge of an economic failure. Maybe you know better than me from personal experience, but none of the data I have seen support the idea that the EU has made any serious blunders in its economic policy.
rene
I don't remember the plot of Metal Gear Solid having anything to do with DNA-computing or modeling cellular processes. The soldiers, protagonist, and antagonist were the products of genetic-engineering... Engineering entire organisms and DNA computing/cellular modeling seem rather different to me, but I know very little about these things.
rene
Peace,
rene
Mathematics is more a way of describing phenomena that cannot be described any other way than something extant solely to bend nature to our will. Newton's law of gravitation, for example, allows us to describe the behavior of massive bodies but says nothing about how they can be manipulated for our benefit. That is within the domain of engineering.
Perhaps less abstract than the laws which math describes are the mathematical contrivances that allow us to make these descriptions. Newton's invention of what is now known to us as Calculus is a method for solving mathematical problems and deriving laws of nature. While no one doubts these laws are not patentable , perhaps some creative language akin to that of Amazon's notorious 1-click patent might convince the PTO that recently invented mathematical techniques are fair game.
Peace,
rene
Would you care to elaborate on this? Specifically, how does US life seem brainfucked and what do you find superior about life in your country?
with apologies for the offtopic post,
rene