Now that the causal link is broken, evolutionary forces would tend to favor people who want lots of babies in their own right. But evolution works on very long timescales. By the time it starts to catch up, I'm sure we'll be rewriting our genes at will. Evolution is therefore irrelevant to the fertility rates of modern humans in industrialized societies.
So what you're saying is that due to a magical reversal of of about... 3 billion years of evolution fixing procreation VERY strongly in place, that all that is just gone due to the formation the human mind. And that we now have... 1 generation (since directly influencing reproduction will cause a VERY fast reaction from natural selection) of relative normal population growth before natural selection kicks in again, and we all go back to killing eachother just like evolution likes it.
At best a few generations (and let's not forget that this started, not today, but over 50 years ago).
I wonder, how you get away with that, saying that some law of nature (in this case the fact that the future will be filled with whoever multiplies now) will somehow exempt you...
The future is filled with people who choose NOW, and in the future to have many kids this was true a thousand years ago, a million years ago, a billion years ago. It will still be true tonight, tomorrow, a hundred years from now, and a billion years from now.
Similarly, if the government taxes and in return provides valuable services and economic stimulus, it boosts the value of your remaining dollars. If you don't pay the amount you're supposed to, then you're stealing.
This is the "broken windows fallacy". You assume the government spends more efficiently than individuals. This is not just not true, but extremely untrue.
In reality it works like this : the government doesn't produce anything. So assuming there isn't a single corrupt politician, everyone happily works for free for the government, and nobody ever cheats, then 100% of the tax money is spent on "government services".
So what effect would this "hyper-good government" have on GDP ? Well nothing at all.
Every imperfection in government will LOWER the effect on GDP taxes have.
So in any real life situation taxes have a negative influence on everybody's life (this needs to be taken on average, obviously the bribed officials and dishonest "sponsor corporations" would fare better), and a negative influence on the country as a whole.
So they should be kept to an absolute minimum. Stuff like the military, defense, police and justice apparatus. Anything else, including stuff like education is an irrational cost.
That's because they have to be. The population in those countries grows. That's a fact, and nobody has the power to change that (and if someone elects to have fewer kids, they are immediately selected out, therefore you see very, very few of those). When it grows too large, a civil war ensues, usually months before people would really start starving.
And then you have, in most regions, 20-30 years before the population increases enough to re-cause the problem.
(isn't evolution grand ?)
But for any individual having children comes down to a simple choice : when (not if) the enemy comes (and in a civil war caused by famine, you don't have to think very long to see who is the enemy : anyone not closely related to you is the enemy*), do you want to face them alone, or with 20 kids, amongst which there will probably be about 10 young men. Not good odds, but a hell of a lot better than facing them alone, and there have been instances of villages growing fast enough to actually keep an army at a distance.
Even if that threat were somehow eliminated, kids are the only form of pension that exists in sub-saharan africa. It's like a 401(k) plan (and there are days one could rationally claim it works better, even in America).
In the villages, kids are power (the same is true, btw, in rural America). That's the only reason for a man to claim fatherhood over kids (in Africa, not in America) (yes this is also true for the northern "muslim" regions (visit them and you will understand exactly why that word needs quotes)).
At least those are the reasons a "taxi" (long term jungle taxi) driver in Congo stated when I asked him.
* you can find theories about this. In a fight over natural selection (ie. to the death) your friends and enemies are determined by a) opportunity. But these bands are loose and remade when a better opportunity arises. Treason occurs frequently and without remorse. b) number of genes shared with a person versus total population (in a small group you can not care that you're only distantly related to a person, in a sufficiently large group everything less related than a first cousin (and their kids) is an enemy, and you should try to kill him)
Within the field of economics there are many papers describing how a "rational atheist" (who wants to optimize his gene survival as per natural selection) would act. Or more to the point : who he would kill, who he would not care about, and who he would die for.
Today, there is NO country (in the west, I'm not talking about islamic dictatorships or communist hellholes) that lets poor people starve.
There simply isn't any laissez-faire capitalist state where the consequences to "too many mouths to feed" would be death. Doesn't exist. Therefore there isn't any country with a true break on population growth.
You know, even under the communist hellholes and islamic dictatorships there are few poor that starve (islamic dictatorships kill many of their own people, but it's a problem of killing, not of malnutricion).
Children only cost much in that their education costs much. Especially if you give them university education or more.
Other than that, children aren't anywhere near as expensive as you claim. Add to that the fact that, due to efficiency improvements as you learn to deal with kids, the second child is nearly free, and as you go further along the line, children become ever cheaper.
Muslims do it this way. Lots of kids, not even trying to send them to college (in fact many don't even make secondary education). A visit to any major european city will quickly convince even the most hardheaded sceptic how well this is working.
Why would anyone need an education in a welfare state ? I dare you to name 1 good reason.
Nor does it mean that resources are actually scarce.
Great. I'll be expecting my $100 million gold shipment tomorrow.
I'm absolutely sure you will do this since this will cost you nothing (relatively speaking) to provide this to me. After all, your resources are infinite, so denying my 0 (zero) % of your wealth, a socialist like couldn't possibly find something like that moral.
So it is with great anticipation that I await this gold shipment from you.
That may be true. However all of those countries are overpopulated.
And in all of those countries groups that do not share the low birthrate are taking over demographically.
Which is exactly what evolution predicts should happen if any group decides to limit births voluntary : that groups gets selected out (unless something is killing the other group). I once thought that would take ages, even with massive birth differences, but it doesn't.
Does a statement like that really need refuting ? This isn't Soviet Russia. Your money belongs to you.
Or wait, let's assume (against better judgement) that you are genuinly confused, instead of claiming communism is somehow just. Yes technically the money is their property. However the value that money represents is not. They can "take it away" legally only if they give that value in return, ie. if they let you spend it.
There is a huge problem with that. Unless, of course, you don't believe in evolution.
If evolution is true, meeting everyone's basic needs will lead to population expansion. (Since given the chance, genes will spread).
Keeping a human alive costs energy (about 500W average, peak loads can go up to 2kw), so it not only costs energy, but actually quite a bit of energy (500W is more than enough to keep a reasonably isolated apartment warm, so compare the heating bill of a normal apartment in New York, keeping a human alive is about the same cost).
So if we were to somehow do this, population would expand. Total energy, however, would remain limited.
So your "truly great society" is only possible if a) you adopt the forced abortion rule like in China (and accept that this may kill a number of women, a lot of children, and that it will necessitate taking children away from families who've done nothing wrong) b) you refuse to believe evolution is true and go on anyway (which is the current way America does it)
"There is no real scarcity of food, shelter and health care"... this should be rephrased to "not yet". Unless you're a fundamentalist Christian who fights evolution, and refuses to believe this is true.
So ultimately (if you are an atheist) this policy will fail. Given that oil is finite, we either discover fusion in the next 50 years, or we meet the absolute energy limits in the next 50 years and have to let people (including Americans) die. Or we postpone letting Americans die by 100 years by resuming massive coal mining and burning.
"Everything comes at a price" is a consequence of reality, not of capitalism. Do you seriously think everything is free in a communist (or whatever you think is a better system) ? It merely takes favors and bribes instead of money. Same goes for any type of dictatorship.
Fact, no matter how well we control nature, there are a number limits that remain, and there are always more of us, which means "the pie" needs to be cut into more slices every day.
Capitalism works by making "growing the pie" everyone's business, and rewards one directly in relation to how much the pie grows due to his/her efforts. Communism works by keeping production methods constant (that's what govt burocracy does in practice), which, due to (amongst other things) the constant changing environment, in fact shrinks the pie (because one can be sure as hell that what was an efficient factory yesterday won't be tomorrow). Since in communism the people at the top don't think their part of the pie is allowed to shrink, everyone loses (including them when they get strung up for being incompetent losers by the next batch of incompetent losers).
The way this is avoided in capitalism is by market forces. Capitalist politicians are every bit as crooked, corrupt, self-centered and greedy as communist politicians. But they are fighting the market, which will tend (in the very long run) to reward people with their actual worth, and if necessary will do so by inflation, making even a democratic senator's dream salary represent his actual worth to society.
Everything comes at the price. Blame (or thank) God for that. Or gaia. Or the climate. Or the flying spaghetti monster. Or barack obama if you like (but remember the real messiah doesn't spend his way out of a recession, you see Jesus saves).
Don't blame (or thank) capitalism for prices, it has nothing to do with prices. Capitalism is something that gives you an accurate estimate for the real worth of an object, which enables you to spend, work and live more efficiently than any human mind, or group of humans has ever been able to do without it (never mind living efficiently with so many on a planet so complicated and varied as ours).
The reason North Korea, Cuba and others aren't growing like South Korea (or any capitalist nation) is simple, the reason it's such a miserable country stuck in the middle ages is : it can't fix the problem. It's people have no idea which objects they need and which they can do without. They don't know what they can trade and what they should use, so they are terribly handicapped when they try to cooperate with one another.
Imagine there being a tomato country and a ranch-filled part of North Korea, like in, well every country. You'd think in the tomato region people would eat more pizza, spaghetti, and less meat, because transport costs would be high for meat and low for tomatoes. And on the other side, they'd eat more meat. That would be more efficient... wrong. Prices are mandated, and tomatoes are expensive where they're grown (because they pay for the transport costs as well). The same goes for the other side. Meat, in the house next to the farm is the same price. Suppose that price is low... well then every shop in the country becomes empty and doesn't sell tomatoes anymore. Suppose some disease spreads amongst the cattle... then nothing is done until some govt. bureaucrat decides it's more important to save cattle than pay for his next cadillac.
That's the alternative to capitalism. The only one.
Hey they have the support of the government, and therefore the largest army in the world. You gave them that (and I, even though I voted for the other guy).
What did you expect now they have paid off the guns ? A thank you note ?
The only fair way to distribute money taken at gunpoint, ie. taxes, is to not take the money away in the first place.
But since America loaned too much money in the recent past, you're government is solving that for you by forcing you (promising to send your future taxes to someone in trade for money now) to take out much more loans.
Yes. You read that right. The government is solving the problem of Americans (and others) loaning to much by making you loan more.
This is, according to a certain democrat "redivision of wealth" (from you to microsoft in this case). But don't worry, many large corporations, huge banks and rich senators are entitled to your money according to this democrat.
This is called government. Microsoft pays pays Barack, who gives money to microsoft. Your money. Oh and if you still want to use the whitehouse site You'll have to pay some more
Isn't government grand ? "Protection money". Even though yes, the government is generally prepared to protect you -just enough so you can keep working to pay some more to "your" next politician's bosses.
That depends on who issued it. Otherwise you'll find yourself under investigation with a warrant coming from dubai because you stated on your blog that women and men have equal rights or some other such clearly anti-islamic "racist" bullshit. (anti-islamic obviously does not belong withing quotation marks since equality IS against islam, it is also the opposite of racist... that can only mean that islam is in fact... but that's too much truth for any government to handle)
That's only a problem with big companies and government. In a small company where the boss does actual work this would not work.
Though I doubt Obama's going to use that argument (smaller = better) in his decision making any time soon. Neither are the CEO's paying him off going to do so.
2 huuuuuuge problems with your post. Let's look at them:
Huh? Why are people who have no interest in scientific methods (like peer review or testable theories) drawn to science?
For the same reason the UN has it's clutches in just about every university worldwide and is "sponsoring" specific things. The same goes for many other pressure groups. It is getting really bad : simply stating that there is no way to study climate that would fall under the "positive" sciences can get you into trouble, no matter how evident it is : if you can't experiment on the system at will, you can't use positive methods.
Science, in case you hadn't noticed, is politicized. Several fields have already been reduced to basically spouting the nonsense or propaganda of the highest bidder. Openly communist organisations sponsor "chairs" in economics. Creationist groups "chair" a number of biology departments, and are so extreme even the vatican goes against them. The list goes on.
History, philosophy and psychology seem to be especially vulnerable fields. The problem is that if you assume the UN is right, and all cultures are "equal" in all respects, you can't have a coherent vision of history. Psychology has the same problem. If you are not at liberty to research and publish about differences, especially cultural differences, you might as well close up shop. Especially the effects of different ways of raising kids (e.g. to explain why muslims have such a big terrorist problem while (nearly) every other religion was basically unfamiliar with the concept of suicide terror until very recently is utterly forbidden).
Christian science is an oxymoron,
Really ? Then how come that all the principles of just about existing field of study were invented an written down by priest (and/or monks).
Physics : Newton almost became a priest, and many claim he ended his research career because his religious feelings were stronger, and he didn't like what his research was used for (e.g. ship cannons). He's the father of both modern physics and modern maths (integration/derivation operators are from his hand, as is the concept "function"). And even the important non-catholics were believers : Einstein punched a German minister in the face because he claimed Einstein was atheist Optics : field created by a monk and a priest in Northern Italy (this guy first invented glasses, then made the first ever (wrong, but that's how science works) explanation of how they operate Maths : you might as well call it catholic studies (with contributions from a few hindus who were running from islamic massacres : e.g. "arabic" numerals), certainly until WWII. Even know most contributions come from catholic institutions Medicine : 50 years ago the score was : about 18000 catholic books on the subject, about 6 "atheist" (e.g. ancient greece), 2 islamic books
Just read the list of important people in each field and you will find the same in every field of study : they were created, built and taught by the catholic church. Some still are. There are even fields of study that are basically exclusive to members of the catholic hierarchy (e.g. ancient middle eastern languages, latin, bioethics, many lesser known or dying languages worldwide (which are critical to missionary work for obvious reasons),...).
There are at least 4 languages whose only trace left is a bible written in that language, probably a whole lot more than 4.
There are literally hundreds of years in history about which the vatican is the only organization that has any record from those times. E.g. just about everything we know about northern africa more than 300 years ago comes from the vatican, and not from northern african sources, because muslims destroyed all historical records (e.g. it was the muslim "pope" (caliph) that ordered the burning of the (catholic) library of alexandria, the biggest disaster ever to happen to scientific knowledge in known history
In my own research, I was able to find many examples of women having babies when it was definitely not good for the man, for the society, or even for the woman.
When exactly is this true ? America has on average 2.1 children/woman, this is just barely enough (ie. more would be preferable).
In europe birthrates are so low that they are on track to eradicate European presence in Europe before 2150 (and make Europeans a minority in Europe by 2050).
Are you contending such a thing would be good for either Europe or Europeans ? We need more babies, not less. Much, much more. Most places in Europe would be well served by a doubling or tripling of the number of native babies.
But seriously, maybe we should ban career politicians because they keep implementing foreign policy that angers people enough to start killing civilians to make a point. Just a thought.
Maybe we should outlaw making stupid statements like this. In just about all wars, one of the parties involved wasn't angered at all. Nearly all wars started with ficticious casi bellorum. (ie. made up by the attacker) Unless you're willing to accept that it really was Poland's "agression" towards Hitler that started WWII (who attacked while Poland was withdrawing troops from it's own borders).
That's obviously the great inconvenience with "peace for all on earth", if ONE country, or even a large enough group, disagrees... it's over. Just a single one.
So until you get Bin Laden and his victims happily dancing together (which would obviously necessitate abolishing one or two islamic "laws") you can't have peace.
Peace can only exist if every 2 parties that can attack one another refrain from doing so.
That would require quite a few ideologies to die, the most pressing one would seem to be islam (unless you consider the genocides founder of islam executed peaceful, or convince muslims to stop following him, to banish mohamed from their religion). And the list is (very) long. Until that is done, there can be no peace. No matter the career politicians.
And even if all people shared a single ideology and lived happily together, eventually the laws of physics themselves (specifically : scarcity) would cause conflict, and war.
That's just how natural selection works : everybody is always working to exterminate everyone else (either directly by attacking, or indirectly by using up resources (merely for being alive, you require about 500W, that's before you get to drive an SUV)). So if you believe in evolution, war is just the "above ground" part of natural selection in humans. The part we don't try to hide.
Let's not forget that the only consequence of delayed allocation is the write-out delay changing. Instead of data being "guaranteed" on disk in 5 seconds, that becomes 60 seconds.
Oh dear God, someone inform the president ! Data that is NEVER guaranteed to be on disk according to spec is only guaranteed on disk after 60 seconds.
You should not write your application to depend on filesystem-specific behavior. You should write them to the standard, and that means fsync(). No call to fsync, look it up in the documentation (man 2 write).
The rest of what Ted T'so is saying is optimization, speeding up the boot time for gnome/kde, it is not necessary for correct workings.
Please don't FUD.
You know I'll look up the docs for you :
(quote from man 2 write)
NOTES
A successful return from write() does not make any guarantee that data has been committed to disk. In fact, on some buggy implementations, it does not even guarantee
that space has successfully been reserved for the data. The only way to be sure is to call fsync(2) after you are done writing all your data.
If a write() is interrupted by a signal handler before any bytes are written, then the call fails with the error EINTR; if it is interrupted after at least one byte has
been written, the call succeeds, and returns the number of bytes written.
That brings up another point, almost nobody is ready for the second remark either (write might return after a partial write, necessitating a second call)
So the normal case for a "reliable write" would be this code :
size_t written = 0; int r = write(fd, &data, sizeof(data)) while (r >= 0 && r + written sizeof(data)) {
written += r;
r = write(fd, &data, sizeof(data)); } if (r 0) {// error handling code, at the very least looking at EIO, ENOSPC and EPIPE for network sockets }
and *NOT*
write(fd, data, sizeof(data));// will probably work
Just because programmers continuously use the second method (just check a few sf.net projects) doesn't make it the right method (and as there is *NO* way to fix write to make that call reliable in all cases you're going to have to shut up about it eventually)
Hell, even firefox doesn't check for either EIO or ENOSPC and certainly doesn't handle either of them gracefully, at least not for downloads.
Actually give some credit. Pulling of a DDOS, without lots of money, is quite hard (and even when you have money, there are lots of dumb ways that won't work, such as buying bandwidth somewhere and have a server-farm do the ddossing).
Well, isn't "liberal" government grand ? Let's just hope the American lefties, like a certain Barack O, don't feel inspired at this latest "societal correction" Britain's left felt fit to impose on society.
Slashdot Mirror
So the solution is not better economics, but just genocide.
Well that's what just about every leftist government did in the 20th century.
Now that the causal link is broken, evolutionary forces would tend to favor people who want lots of babies in their own right. But evolution works on very long timescales. By the time it starts to catch up, I'm sure we'll be rewriting our genes at will. Evolution is therefore irrelevant to the fertility rates of modern humans in industrialized societies.
So what you're saying is that due to a magical reversal of of about ... 3 billion years of evolution fixing procreation VERY strongly in place, that all that is just gone due to the formation the human mind. And that we now have ... 1 generation (since directly influencing reproduction will cause a VERY fast reaction from natural selection) of relative normal population growth before natural selection kicks in again, and we all go back to killing eachother just like evolution likes it.
At best a few generations (and let's not forget that this started, not today, but over 50 years ago).
I wonder, how you get away with that, saying that some law of nature (in this case the fact that the future will be filled with whoever multiplies now) will somehow exempt you ...
The future is filled with people who choose NOW, and in the future to have many kids this was true a thousand years ago, a million years ago, a billion years ago. It will still be true tonight, tomorrow, a hundred years from now, and a billion years from now.
Similarly, if the government taxes and in return provides valuable services and economic stimulus, it boosts the value of your remaining dollars. If you don't pay the amount you're supposed to, then you're stealing.
This is the "broken windows fallacy". You assume the government spends more efficiently than individuals. This is not just not true, but extremely untrue.
In reality it works like this : the government doesn't produce anything. So assuming there isn't a single corrupt politician, everyone happily works for free for the government, and nobody ever cheats, then 100% of the tax money is spent on "government services".
So what effect would this "hyper-good government" have on GDP ? Well nothing at all.
Every imperfection in government will LOWER the effect on GDP taxes have.
So in any real life situation taxes have a negative influence on everybody's life (this needs to be taken on average, obviously the bribed officials and dishonest "sponsor corporations" would fare better), and a negative influence on the country as a whole.
So they should be kept to an absolute minimum. Stuff like the military, defense, police and justice apparatus. Anything else, including stuff like education is an irrational cost.
That's because they have to be. The population in those countries grows. That's a fact, and nobody has the power to change that (and if someone elects to have fewer kids, they are immediately selected out, therefore you see very, very few of those). When it grows too large, a civil war ensues, usually months before people would really start starving.
And then you have, in most regions, 20-30 years before the population increases enough to re-cause the problem.
(isn't evolution grand ?)
But for any individual having children comes down to a simple choice : when (not if) the enemy comes (and in a civil war caused by famine, you don't have to think very long to see who is the enemy : anyone not closely related to you is the enemy*), do you want to face them alone, or with 20 kids, amongst which there will probably be about 10 young men. Not good odds, but a hell of a lot better than facing them alone, and there have been instances of villages growing fast enough to actually keep an army at a distance.
Even if that threat were somehow eliminated, kids are the only form of pension that exists in sub-saharan africa. It's like a 401(k) plan (and there are days one could rationally claim it works better, even in America).
In the villages, kids are power (the same is true, btw, in rural America). That's the only reason for a man to claim fatherhood over kids (in Africa, not in America) (yes this is also true for the northern "muslim" regions (visit them and you will understand exactly why that word needs quotes)).
At least those are the reasons a "taxi" (long term jungle taxi) driver in Congo stated when I asked him.
* you can find theories about this. In a fight over natural selection (ie. to the death) your friends and enemies are determined by
a) opportunity. But these bands are loose and remade when a better opportunity arises. Treason occurs frequently and without remorse.
b) number of genes shared with a person versus total population (in a small group you can not care that you're only distantly related to a person, in a sufficiently large group everything less related than a first cousin (and their kids) is an enemy, and you should try to kill him)
Within the field of economics there are many papers describing how a "rational atheist" (who wants to optimize his gene survival as per natural selection) would act. Or more to the point : who he would kill, who he would not care about, and who he would die for.
Today, there is NO country (in the west, I'm not talking about islamic dictatorships or communist hellholes) that lets poor people starve.
There simply isn't any laissez-faire capitalist state where the consequences to "too many mouths to feed" would be death. Doesn't exist. Therefore there isn't any country with a true break on population growth.
You know, even under the communist hellholes and islamic dictatorships there are few poor that starve (islamic dictatorships kill many of their own people, but it's a problem of killing, not of malnutricion).
Children only cost much in that their education costs much. Especially if you give them university education or more.
Other than that, children aren't anywhere near as expensive as you claim. Add to that the fact that, due to efficiency improvements as you learn to deal with kids, the second child is nearly free, and as you go further along the line, children become ever cheaper.
Muslims do it this way. Lots of kids, not even trying to send them to college (in fact many don't even make secondary education). A visit to any major european city will quickly convince even the most hardheaded sceptic how well this is working.
Why would anyone need an education in a welfare state ? I dare you to name 1 good reason.
Nor does it mean that resources are actually scarce.
Great. I'll be expecting my $100 million gold shipment tomorrow.
I'm absolutely sure you will do this since this will cost you nothing (relatively speaking) to provide this to me. After all, your resources are infinite, so denying my 0 (zero) % of your wealth, a socialist like couldn't possibly find something like that moral.
So it is with great anticipation that I await this gold shipment from you.
That may be true. However all of those countries are overpopulated.
And in all of those countries groups that do not share the low birthrate are taking over demographically.
Which is exactly what evolution predicts should happen if any group decides to limit births voluntary : that groups gets selected out (unless something is killing the other group). I once thought that would take ages, even with massive birth differences, but it doesn't.
Does a statement like that really need refuting ? This isn't Soviet Russia. Your money belongs to you.
Or wait, let's assume (against better judgement) that you are genuinly confused, instead of claiming communism is somehow just. Yes technically the money is their property. However the value that money represents is not. They can "take it away" legally only if they give that value in return, ie. if they let you spend it.
There is a huge problem with that. Unless, of course, you don't believe in evolution.
If evolution is true, meeting everyone's basic needs will lead to population expansion. (Since given the chance, genes will spread).
Keeping a human alive costs energy (about 500W average, peak loads can go up to 2kw), so it not only costs energy, but actually quite a bit of energy (500W is more than enough to keep a reasonably isolated apartment warm, so compare the heating bill of a normal apartment in New York, keeping a human alive is about the same cost).
So if we were to somehow do this, population would expand. Total energy, however, would remain limited.
So your "truly great society" is only possible if
a) you adopt the forced abortion rule like in China (and accept that this may kill a number of women, a lot of children, and that it will necessitate taking children away from families who've done nothing wrong)
b) you refuse to believe evolution is true and go on anyway (which is the current way America does it)
"There is no real scarcity of food, shelter and health care" ... this should be rephrased to "not yet". Unless you're a fundamentalist Christian who fights evolution, and refuses to believe this is true.
So ultimately (if you are an atheist) this policy will fail. Given that oil is finite, we either discover fusion in the next 50 years, or we meet the absolute energy limits in the next 50 years and have to let people (including Americans) die. Or we postpone letting Americans die by 100 years by resuming massive coal mining and burning.
"Everything comes at a price" is a consequence of reality, not of capitalism. Do you seriously think everything is free in a communist (or whatever you think is a better system) ? It merely takes favors and bribes instead of money. Same goes for any type of dictatorship.
Fact, no matter how well we control nature, there are a number limits that remain, and there are always more of us, which means "the pie" needs to be cut into more slices every day.
Capitalism works by making "growing the pie" everyone's business, and rewards one directly in relation to how much the pie grows due to his/her efforts. Communism works by keeping production methods constant (that's what govt burocracy does in practice), which, due to (amongst other things) the constant changing environment, in fact shrinks the pie (because one can be sure as hell that what was an efficient factory yesterday won't be tomorrow). Since in communism the people at the top don't think their part of the pie is allowed to shrink, everyone loses (including them when they get strung up for being incompetent losers by the next batch of incompetent losers).
The way this is avoided in capitalism is by market forces. Capitalist politicians are every bit as crooked, corrupt, self-centered and greedy as communist politicians. But they are fighting the market, which will tend (in the very long run) to reward people with their actual worth, and if necessary will do so by inflation, making even a democratic senator's dream salary represent his actual worth to society.
Everything comes at the price. Blame (or thank) God for that. Or gaia. Or the climate. Or the flying spaghetti monster. Or barack obama if you like (but remember the real messiah doesn't spend his way out of a recession, you see Jesus saves).
Don't blame (or thank) capitalism for prices, it has nothing to do with prices. Capitalism is something that gives you an accurate estimate for the real worth of an object, which enables you to spend, work and live more efficiently than any human mind, or group of humans has ever been able to do without it (never mind living efficiently with so many on a planet so complicated and varied as ours).
The reason North Korea, Cuba and others aren't growing like South Korea (or any capitalist nation) is simple, the reason it's such a miserable country stuck in the middle ages is : it can't fix the problem. It's people have no idea which objects they need and which they can do without. They don't know what they can trade and what they should use, so they are terribly handicapped when they try to cooperate with one another.
Imagine there being a tomato country and a ranch-filled part of North Korea, like in, well every country. You'd think in the tomato region people would eat more pizza, spaghetti, and less meat, because transport costs would be high for meat and low for tomatoes. And on the other side, they'd eat more meat. That would be more efficient ... wrong. Prices are mandated, and tomatoes are expensive where they're grown (because they pay for the transport costs as well). The same goes for the other side. Meat, in the house next to the farm is the same price. Suppose that price is low ... well then every shop in the country becomes empty and doesn't sell tomatoes anymore. Suppose some disease spreads amongst the cattle ... then nothing is done until some govt. bureaucrat decides it's more important to save cattle than pay for his next cadillac.
That's the alternative to capitalism. The only one.
Hey they have the support of the government, and therefore the largest army in the world. You gave them that (and I, even though I voted for the other guy).
What did you expect now they have paid off the guns ? A thank you note ?
The only fair way to distribute money taken at gunpoint, ie. taxes, is to not take the money away in the first place.
But since America loaned too much money in the recent past, you're government is solving that for you by forcing you (promising to send your future taxes to someone in trade for money now) to take out much more loans.
Yes. You read that right. The government is solving the problem of Americans (and others) loaning to much by making you loan more.
This is, according to a certain democrat "redivision of wealth" (from you to microsoft in this case). But don't worry, many large corporations, huge banks and rich senators are entitled to your money according to this democrat.
This is called government. Microsoft pays pays Barack, who gives money to microsoft. Your money. Oh and if you still want to use the whitehouse site You'll have to pay some more
Isn't government grand ? "Protection money". Even though yes, the government is generally prepared to protect you -just enough so you can keep working to pay some more to "your" next politician's bosses.
That depends on who issued it. Otherwise you'll find yourself under investigation with a warrant coming from dubai because you stated on your blog that women and men have equal rights or some other such clearly anti-islamic "racist" bullshit. (anti-islamic obviously does not belong withing quotation marks since equality IS against islam, it is also the opposite of racist ... that can only mean that islam is in fact ... but that's too much truth for any government to handle)
That's only a problem with big companies and government. In a small company where the boss does actual work this would not work.
Though I doubt Obama's going to use that argument (smaller = better) in his decision making any time soon. Neither are the CEO's paying him off going to do so.
If that's true, companies that use the KLOC metric will fail, be replaced and all will be well.
Assuming obviously a certain B. O. doesn't start using words like "too big to fail". Then we're stuck with the KLOC metric until the next revolution.
2 huuuuuuge problems with your post. Let's look at them :
Huh? Why are people who have no interest in scientific methods (like peer review or testable theories) drawn to science?
For the same reason the UN has it's clutches in just about every university worldwide and is "sponsoring" specific things. The same goes for many other pressure groups. It is getting really bad : simply stating that there is no way to study climate that would fall under the "positive" sciences can get you into trouble, no matter how evident it is : if you can't experiment on the system at will, you can't use positive methods.
Science, in case you hadn't noticed, is politicized. Several fields have already been reduced to basically spouting the nonsense or propaganda of the highest bidder. Openly communist organisations sponsor "chairs" in economics. Creationist groups "chair" a number of biology departments, and are so extreme even the vatican goes against them. The list goes on.
History, philosophy and psychology seem to be especially vulnerable fields. The problem is that if you assume the UN is right, and all cultures are "equal" in all respects, you can't have a coherent vision of history. Psychology has the same problem. If you are not at liberty to research and publish about differences, especially cultural differences, you might as well close up shop. Especially the effects of different ways of raising kids (e.g. to explain why muslims have such a big terrorist problem while (nearly) every other religion was basically unfamiliar with the concept of suicide terror until very recently is utterly forbidden).
Christian science is an oxymoron,
Really ? Then how come that all the principles of just about existing field of study were invented an written down by priest (and/or monks).
Physics : Newton almost became a priest, and many claim he ended his research career because his religious feelings were stronger, and he didn't like what his research was used for (e.g. ship cannons). He's the father of both modern physics and modern maths (integration/derivation operators are from his hand, as is the concept "function"). And even the important non-catholics were believers : Einstein punched a German minister in the face because he claimed Einstein was atheist
Optics : field created by a monk and a priest in Northern Italy (this guy first invented glasses, then made the first ever (wrong, but that's how science works) explanation of how they operate
Maths : you might as well call it catholic studies (with contributions from a few hindus who were running from islamic massacres : e.g. "arabic" numerals), certainly until WWII. Even know most contributions come from catholic institutions
Medicine : 50 years ago the score was : about 18000 catholic books on the subject, about 6 "atheist" (e.g. ancient greece), 2 islamic books
Just read the list of important people in each field and you will find the same in every field of study : they were created, built and taught by the catholic church. Some still are. There are even fields of study that are basically exclusive to members of the catholic hierarchy (e.g. ancient middle eastern languages, latin, bioethics, many lesser known or dying languages worldwide (which are critical to missionary work for obvious reasons), ...).
There are at least 4 languages whose only trace left is a bible written in that language, probably a whole lot more than 4.
There are literally hundreds of years in history about which the vatican is the only organization that has any record from those times. E.g. just about everything we know about northern africa more than 300 years ago comes from the vatican, and not from northern african sources, because muslims destroyed all historical records (e.g. it was the muslim "pope" (caliph) that ordered the burning of the (catholic) library of alexandria, the biggest disaster ever to happen to scientific knowledge in known history
In my own research, I was able to find many examples of women having babies when it was definitely not good for the man, for the society, or even for the woman.
When exactly is this true ? America has on average 2.1 children/woman, this is just barely enough (ie. more would be preferable).
In europe birthrates are so low that they are on track to eradicate European presence in Europe before 2150 (and make Europeans a minority in Europe by 2050).
Are you contending such a thing would be good for either Europe or Europeans ? We need more babies, not less. Much, much more. Most places in Europe would be well served by a doubling or tripling of the number of native babies.
But seriously, maybe we should ban career politicians because they keep implementing foreign policy that angers people enough to start killing civilians to make a point. Just a thought.
Maybe we should outlaw making stupid statements like this. In just about all wars, one of the parties involved wasn't angered at all. Nearly all wars started with ficticious casi bellorum. (ie. made up by the attacker) Unless you're willing to accept that it really was Poland's "agression" towards Hitler that started WWII (who attacked while Poland was withdrawing troops from it's own borders).
That's obviously the great inconvenience with "peace for all on earth", if ONE country, or even a large enough group, disagrees ... it's over. Just a single one.
So until you get Bin Laden and his victims happily dancing together (which would obviously necessitate abolishing one or two islamic "laws") you can't have peace.
Peace can only exist if every 2 parties that can attack one another refrain from doing so.
That would require quite a few ideologies to die, the most pressing one would seem to be islam (unless you consider the genocides founder of islam executed peaceful, or convince muslims to stop following him, to banish mohamed from their religion). And the list is (very) long. Until that is done, there can be no peace. No matter the career politicians.
And even if all people shared a single ideology and lived happily together, eventually the laws of physics themselves (specifically : scarcity) would cause conflict, and war.
That's just how natural selection works : everybody is always working to exterminate everyone else (either directly by attacking, or indirectly by using up resources (merely for being alive, you require about 500W, that's before you get to drive an SUV)). So if you believe in evolution, war is just the "above ground" part of natural selection in humans. The part we don't try to hide.
If you do that for such a stupid reason, you *might* get away with it once or twice, but you'll get caught.
Plus most assholes that do this are actually stupid enough to brag about it.
You're only partially right. EAGAIN cannot occur unless I asked for it first (and modified my error catching accordingly).
But you're right about EINTR causing unwarranted disruption. I should ignore that one in the while loop.
Let's not forget that the only consequence of delayed allocation is the write-out delay changing. Instead of data being "guaranteed" on disk in 5 seconds, that becomes 60 seconds.
Oh dear God, someone inform the president ! Data that is NEVER guaranteed to be on disk according to spec is only guaranteed on disk after 60 seconds.
You should not write your application to depend on filesystem-specific behavior. You should write them to the standard, and that means fsync(). No call to fsync, look it up in the documentation (man 2 write).
The rest of what Ted T'so is saying is optimization, speeding up the boot time for gnome/kde, it is not necessary for correct workings.
Please don't FUD.
You know I'll look up the docs for you :
(quote from man 2 write)
NOTES
A successful return from write() does not make any guarantee that data has been committed to disk. In fact, on some buggy implementations, it does not even guarantee
that space has successfully been reserved for the data. The only way to be sure is to call fsync(2) after you are done writing all your data.
If a write() is interrupted by a signal handler before any bytes are written, then the call fails with the error EINTR; if it is interrupted after at least one byte has
been written, the call succeeds, and returns the number of bytes written.
That brings up another point, almost nobody is ready for the second remark either (write might return after a partial write, necessitating a second call)
So the normal case for a "reliable write" would be this code :
size_t written = 0; // error handling code, at the very least looking at EIO, ENOSPC and EPIPE for network sockets
int r = write(fd, &data, sizeof(data))
while (r >= 0 && r + written sizeof(data)) {
written += r;
r = write(fd, &data, sizeof(data));
}
if (r 0) {
}
and *NOT*
write(fd, data, sizeof(data)); // will probably work
Just because programmers continuously use the second method (just check a few sf.net projects) doesn't make it the right method (and as there is *NO* way to fix write to make that call reliable in all cases you're going to have to shut up about it eventually)
Hell, even firefox doesn't check for either EIO or ENOSPC and certainly doesn't handle either of them gracefully, at least not for downloads.
Actually give some credit. Pulling of a DDOS, without lots of money, is quite hard (and even when you have money, there are lots of dumb ways that won't work, such as buying bandwidth somewhere and have a server-farm do the ddossing).
Well, isn't "liberal" government grand ? Let's just hope the American lefties, like a certain Barack O, don't feel inspired at this latest "societal correction" Britain's left felt fit to impose on society.