"Do you get art critical of the public funding of arts? Probably not."
We don't. But then again, you don't get tabloids critical of tabloid journalism, or celebrity gossip magazines critical of paparazzi activities. In fact, even with no government funding whatsoever, journalistic bias is a huge problem: Journalists are all over the map politically, but on a few issues, they have common interests as a class that go against the interests of the rest of us - particularly when it comes to rights to a private life. They wield great power to push these positions.
"the only artists getting the money are those artists who think it's ok to take money from taxpayers to pay for their art"
Which is most of them, as far as I can see. I think you underestimate artists' willingness to adopt specific political positions in order to make a living out of what they enjoy.
There are certainly some artists that can and do get by without government support; because they are famous, and had other means of support when they became so. None of them boast very loudly about it.
You know what surprises me even more? That news-for-nerds sites like slashdot write as if the pirate bay has gone the way of Napster.
Unless the site I currently get at thepiratebay.org is a huge MPAA sting, I can't really say that it has. There has been a lot of media circus, and the founders may be in trouble - but present day, present time, the pirate bay is the same as it's always been.
There is public funding of the arts in many countries - this does not produce pro-government art. Instead, it produces things that about five people in a million enjoy. With sufficient government funding, you would probably get something similar out of journalism...
Seriously, as long as it's structured right, government funding of newspapers isn't a disaster. It needs to be structured in such a way that the degree of support (or lack of it) is based on objective criteria, like the number of subscribers.
"Besides, if you feel that way about your iPhone, jailbreak it."
Apple probably feels that this is illegal. Just like Nintendo warns against operating an "illegal device" with your DS. (Companies at that size don't need to refer to actual laws. If someone interferes with their business plans, they are always criminals, now or when the laws get written.)
"But.. people DO choose to buy these things, knowing that Apple can be real assholes about controlling what you've bought from them."
No, they don't. Most people don't know about the issues, they don't know they are getting screwed. Some vaguely grasp it, but can scarcely imagine any other way.
There is a market, but not a particularly free one. Free markets need information to work. Sellers don't make markets free if they can help it, because with perfect competition, profits simply can't exist.
Since Nintendo in the eighties, we've quietly accepted that the maker of a device should have complete control over what runs on it. We shouldn't have. We should have said, "that's abusing a monopoly in one area [iphone-compatible hardware] to get a monopoly in another [iphone-compatible software]". We'd be better off if we had.
"You don't see people complaining that they can't just open up a booth to sell their own CDs in the local record store. "
Bad metaphor. When CD stores refuse to carry a popular band, because they are published by the "wrong" record company, it might be very reasonable to complain. Supermarket chains sell shelf space, instead of letting products fight on equal terms - we should definitively complain about that, because it hurts competition, and ultimately, consumers.
Common carriers are a good thing in general, not just for the net. Competition-strangling delivery channels of all sorts deny us the best products at the fair price.
> I don't remember reading anything in Locke about intelectual property rights.
Well, no, but in general, property rights are the libertarian answer to everything. So it would be surprising if they suddenly rejected propertization in favour of free access for anyone and everyone.
Or maybe it wouldn't. After all, the "libertarians" at the Heartland institute reject property rights as a solution to pollution problems - like many (most?) real-world libertarians, if the alternative would be upsetting the status quo power balance, they would rather not see a problem at all than propose a market-based solution to it.
"Yeah, been there done that. *My* fumble only brought 10,000 domains down for about 10 minutes, and no one noticed. (I think all the domains hosted only cat pictures anyway.)"
ICANN has cheezburger? (wow, someone has registered that domain already!)
This is MS research. Their crazy ivory tower. You know, the one that employs Simon Peyton-Jones of Haskell fame, and gave the world F#. No need to put innovation in scare quotes, they're doing it. Whether they will have the institutional courage to actually use it for something is another question.
Increase repair price/decrease loot, etc etc.... well add new taxes. If RL governments do so banks will move offshore or in other countries where taxes are acceptable (to their standard...).
Well, there are other MMOs. If your MMO is sophisticated to have attracted "private" banks, you don't want to lose them to a competitor...
Up to a point. They may design the rules, the central banks, the inflation/anti-inflation schemes, incentives against cheating and farming, a big lot of stuff.
But they can't design player behaviour. If players don't act as they think they do, those economist designers won't achieve their goals. It should be a very educational experience, designing an entire economic system and seeing if it behaves as you think it will.
More like they have developed a theory of economics that has been proven to predict results over and over again, including the current state of the economy. keynesians keep claiming that Austrian school is old, outdated, discredited. And yet their own theories of how they should be able to use central planning to produce bust-free perpetual growth somehow never works.
Somehow, I feel like I look at a post that was written three years ago.
As a member of the IT department, I share your desire for systems that I can "actually use, troubleshoot, and modify if necessary" but what's more important in the end is that the systems serve their users well, not that they serve me well.
Well, look at it this way: assuming we're actually worth what we're paid, we help all sorts of "real" productivity down the line... what lets us do our job efficiently, makes us better at letting others do their jobs efficiently. Don't talk down your (our) product... IT matters, and our non-IT bosses know it.
Thing is, just as the story says, Sharepoint is a prime example of a technology often chosen as the default. You grab it to do something, build a sort of system on it to get things done... and then it has to grow, or accomodate changes, or integrate with something else... and you find that your options for doing that aren't as many as you would have liked. The lock-in creeps up on you.
In such cases, everyone should consider taking a few steps back and doing things right from there. It can save money.
I think major auto companies know the risks. They probably do in fact consider HR and hiring costs, too.
3. All languages either are in that category, or will come into it shortly (unless they're really not "good enough")
4. - not inherently. Maybe in some standard libraries, but calling any C-syntax language "verbose" is nonsense. You can't have seen Ada. ( I like Ada, BTW.)
5. Compiled? Well, not entirely, not always. Not like COBOL is compiled, anyway.
6. Goes for just about all languages except maybe Javascript...
"The researchers found that certain traits, such as knowing what groups people belonged to or their favorite music, were quite predictive of political affiliation."
Right. If someone listens to country music and is a member of the facebook group "petition for Obama to show his birth certificate", I might make an better than random guess about their political affiliation. And maybe their intelligence, while I'm at it. Prejudices, aren't they useful!
Slashdot Mirror
"Do you get art critical of the public funding of arts? Probably not."
We don't. But then again, you don't get tabloids critical of tabloid journalism, or celebrity gossip magazines critical of paparazzi activities. In fact, even with no government funding whatsoever, journalistic bias is a huge problem: Journalists are all over the map politically, but on a few issues, they have common interests as a class that go against the interests of the rest of us - particularly when it comes to rights to a private life. They wield great power to push these positions.
"the only artists getting the money are those artists who think it's ok to take money from taxpayers to pay for their art"
Which is most of them, as far as I can see. I think you underestimate artists' willingness to adopt specific political positions in order to make a living out of what they enjoy.
There are certainly some artists that can and do get by without government support; because they are famous, and had other means of support when they became so. None of them boast very loudly about it.
You know what surprises me even more? That news-for-nerds sites like slashdot write as if the pirate bay has gone the way of Napster.
Unless the site I currently get at thepiratebay.org is a huge MPAA sting, I can't really say that it has. There has been a lot of media circus, and the founders may be in trouble - but present day, present time, the pirate bay is the same as it's always been.
There is public funding of the arts in many countries - this does not produce pro-government art. Instead, it produces things that about five people in a million enjoy. With sufficient government funding, you would probably get something similar out of journalism...
Seriously, as long as it's structured right, government funding of newspapers isn't a disaster. It needs to be structured in such a way that the degree of support (or lack of it) is based on objective criteria, like the number of subscribers.
"Besides, if you feel that way about your iPhone, jailbreak it."
Apple probably feels that this is illegal. Just like Nintendo warns against operating an "illegal device" with your DS. (Companies at that size don't need to refer to actual laws. If someone interferes with their business plans, they are always criminals, now or when the laws get written.)
"But.. people DO choose to buy these things, knowing that Apple can be real assholes about controlling what you've bought from them."
No, they don't. Most people don't know about the issues, they don't know they are getting screwed. Some vaguely grasp it, but can scarcely imagine any other way.
There is a market, but not a particularly free one. Free markets need information to work. Sellers don't make markets free if they can help it, because with perfect competition, profits simply can't exist.
Since Nintendo in the eighties, we've quietly accepted that the maker of a device should have complete control over what runs on it. We shouldn't have. We should have said, "that's abusing a monopoly in one area [iphone-compatible hardware] to get a monopoly in another [iphone-compatible software]". We'd be better off if we had.
"You don't see people complaining that they can't just open up a booth to sell their own CDs in the local record store. "
Bad metaphor. When CD stores refuse to carry a popular band, because they are published by the "wrong" record company, it might be very reasonable to complain. Supermarket chains sell shelf space, instead of letting products fight on equal terms - we should definitively complain about that, because it hurts competition, and ultimately, consumers.
Common carriers are a good thing in general, not just for the net. Competition-strangling delivery channels of all sorts deny us the best products at the fair price.
With sufficiently many copies, you might even be able to engineer a false watermark to implicate some poor random guy.
Hearland isn't really libertarian, it just says the sort of things its corporate sponsors like to hear.
For instance, they denied any negative effects of second-hand smoking, and are at the forefront of AGW denial.
But then again, it seems most people who call themselves libertarian do that.
> I don't remember reading anything in Locke about intelectual property rights.
Well, no, but in general, property rights are the libertarian answer to everything. So it would be surprising if they suddenly rejected propertization in favour of free access for anyone and everyone.
Or maybe it wouldn't. After all, the "libertarians" at the Heartland institute reject property rights as a solution to pollution problems - like many (most?) real-world libertarians, if the alternative would be upsetting the status quo power balance, they would rather not see a problem at all than propose a market-based solution to it.
"The competitors also wear earplugs and headphones during the chess rounds to help with concentration. "
Maybe it would have been more aproppriate with Chess Wrestling.
"Yeah, been there done that. *My* fumble only brought 10,000 domains down for about 10 minutes, and no one noticed. (I think all the domains hosted only cat pictures anyway.)"
ICANN has cheezburger? (wow, someone has registered that domain already!)
Is there any need for that safe=off in your query string?
we don't have to only rely on MS "innovation"
This is MS research. Their crazy ivory tower. You know, the one that employs Simon Peyton-Jones of Haskell fame, and gave the world F#. No need to put innovation in scare quotes, they're doing it. Whether they will have the institutional courage to actually use it for something is another question.
Increase repair price/decrease loot, etc etc.... well add new taxes. If RL governments do so banks will move offshore or in other countries where taxes are acceptable (to their standard...).
Well, there are other MMOs. If your MMO is sophisticated to have attracted "private" banks, you don't want to lose them to a competitor...
Up to a point. They may design the rules, the central banks, the inflation/anti-inflation schemes, incentives against cheating and farming, a big lot of stuff.
But they can't design player behaviour. If players don't act as they think they do, those economist designers won't achieve their goals. It should be a very educational experience, designing an entire economic system and seeing if it behaves as you think it will.
More like they have developed a theory of economics that has been proven to predict results over and over again, including the current state of the economy. keynesians keep claiming that Austrian school is old, outdated, discredited. And yet their own theories of how they should be able to use central planning to produce bust-free perpetual growth somehow never works.
Somehow, I feel like I look at a post that was written three years ago.
That the article still got the "woo" and "antivac" tags says how eager some people are to "defend science" before looking.
Really, people. Don't throw around accusations like these, it doesn't help in the fight against real woo and antivac ideas.
As a member of the IT department, I share your desire for systems that I can "actually use, troubleshoot, and modify if necessary" but what's more important in the end is that the systems serve their users well, not that they serve me well.
Well, look at it this way: assuming we're actually worth what we're paid, we help all sorts of "real" productivity down the line... what lets us do our job efficiently, makes us better at letting others do their jobs efficiently. Don't talk down your (our) product... IT matters, and our non-IT bosses know it.
Thing is, just as the story says, Sharepoint is a prime example of a technology often chosen as the default. You grab it to do something, build a sort of system on it to get things done... and then it has to grow, or accomodate changes, or integrate with something else... and you find that your options for doing that aren't as many as you would have liked. The lock-in creeps up on you.
In such cases, everyone should consider taking a few steps back and doing things right from there. It can save money.
I think major auto companies know the risks. They probably do in fact consider HR and hiring costs, too.
Calm down, joaommp...
2. Runs on all noteworthy non-embedded platforms.
3. All languages either are in that category, or will come into it shortly (unless they're really not "good enough")
4. - not inherently. Maybe in some standard libraries, but calling any C-syntax language "verbose" is nonsense. You can't have seen Ada. ( I like Ada, BTW.)
5. Compiled? Well, not entirely, not always. Not like COBOL is compiled, anyway.
6. Goes for just about all languages except maybe Javascript...
whoosh
Does this count?
Tricky!
Yeah, I'm not too impressed by this:
"The researchers found that certain traits, such as knowing what groups people belonged to or their favorite music, were quite predictive of political affiliation."
Right. If someone listens to country music and is a member of the facebook group "petition for Obama to show his birth certificate", I might make an better than random guess about their political affiliation. And maybe their intelligence, while I'm at it. Prejudices, aren't they useful!