Note the section that says, "Port Windows-based games to the Linux platform."
That could just be about dedicated servers, so I wouldn't get your hopes up too much. On the other hand, given Playstation 3 ports there's really no reason left *not* to do Linux (and Mac OS X) ports.
But I agree 100% - we need people educated for it to work.
When I said "naive democracy" I meant "the obvious implementation of democracy" rather than "democracy with uneducated people". A society needs to be able to make economic decisions, and I'm unaware of any democratic model that has been demonstrated to have the properties unnecessary to usefully fill that role.
The thing that you seem to be missing here is that both economic systems and democratic systems both have the same basic problem - complex systems have complex properties, and any system with the wrong properties will reach the wrong equilibrium. Just doing away with monetary capitalism because it obviously has the wrong properties solves nothing unless you can show that the system that you're replacing it with (pure democratic socialism apparently) has better properties - simply assuming that it has the properties that you want (because "democracy is good" or whatever) is wishful thinking.
Now, there are lots of systems that would work if you could get everyone to accept them at once. Consider the following ideal hybrid system for example:
Property (including money) belongs to human beings (rather than corporations).
When a person dies, their property goes into a pool administered by the state.
When a person becomes a full citizen of the society (i.e. turns 21), they receive a cut from the pool to get started with.
There is a state-run welfare system to catch people who go bankrupt.
This has most of the beneficial properties of monetary capitalism without a tendency to degrade into imperialism - a person simply can't accumulate enough wealth in a lifetime to cause much trouble. The big reason it's unlikely to work is transitioning from the real world to that model. The second largest problem with this system is democratic to economic disruption - the masses may inadvertently change something that breaks the beneficial properties of the system.
In fact in order to reach the functionality of DirectX, you need to include such goodies as SDL, OpenAL, OpenGL and more than likely a bunch of others.
So... what's the problem? When you use those things, along with that set of OpenGL extensions that are implemented in the video cards that people have, you've got basically the same capabilities as DirectX - minus the proprietary lock-in.
I can't entirely make out what your reasoning is because you haven't really expressed it, but I'd like to point out a couple of problems that you've probably overlooked:
Naive democracy doesn't seem to be any more "automatically stable" than naive capitalism is. Therefore, simply making your economic system "we'll do our resource allocation by hand democratically" is really just trading two problems for one extra-complicated problem.
You aren't differentiating between government behavior and market behavior. Some of the things you are attributing to market failures are really political failures - patents for example. It would be more obvious that that sort of political failure should be labeled "corruption" in a socialist economic system, but that doesn't mean they wouldn't happen.
As transitory systems, yes. But they aren't the end goal; just one possible means of getting there.
Hybrid systems are what has shown the best behavior in practice, and there are good arguments that they have the best behavior in theory too. Markets really are better at small scale resource allocation than trying to vote on every little thing.
That's definitely the argument, and it absolutely provides a clear description of what has happened to economic systems in the real world.
What I don't accept is your two camps premise. There may be forms of capitalism that don't degrade into imperialism. There are definitely different forms of socialism. There are a number possible hybrid systems. There are probably even other options (I keep thinking that there must be a way to do non-linear money).
What I am sure of is this: Pretty much anything works on a small scale, and I haven't seen a way to keep any democratic system practical on a large scale.
Step 1: Identify the problems.
Step 2: Come up with potential solutions.
Step 3: Don't give up when you realize that the potential solutions might be more radical than you expected.
The fact of the matter is that the economic system in the United States is very likely incompatible with democracy. I'm not yet convinced that some sort socialist model is the only thing that would work, but hybrid-socialist systems (as in Northern Europe) are the best solution that has been demonstrated in practice.
Even Ron Paul is more interested in ideology. I'm tired of visionaries; I want someone practical.
This is meaningless garbage. Without principles, there is no way to form a coherent structure of policies. "Practical" is what gets us such amazing policies as a law that requires people to buy health insurance as "health care reform".
I can't pick a random molecule, give it to a patient, see how horribly they die, and then come up with a better molecule.
Nope. That's what rats are for. And computer models.
Between animal testing, computer models, and simple knowledge of the field (chemistry, anatomy, etc) you can have a damn good idea what the effects of a drug or medical device will be before needing to screw around with human testing. There are a ton of ways that you can do testing on human tissue without actually risking a whole human too - and there would be more if medical ethicists didn't go into fits about artificially growing human bits.
Sure, you eventually have to test stuff in real people - and there are risks every time you do that - but the legitimate practical difficulties there are nowhere near enough to explain how crappy the pharmaceutical / medical device market is. I think we can explain that with the patent / wait / tweak / repatent cycle that lets the pharmacorps be wildly profitable forever without producing anything useful.
He may as well have asked why the aviation industry isn't getting new models of planes to market as fast as Intel is getting new chips to market.
If the aviation industry had the same research budget that the pharmaceutical industry does, that'd be a damn good question. I'd want automatically-navigated one-man VTOL intercontinental jets or something.
For the majority of people in this thread, these statements are fairly obvious, and they are also mentioned by the parent, which is why I didn't spell them out. If it's not obvious to you while people and processors are not equally expendable, that's fine, but I think it'll be hard for us to have a meaningful conversation (at least about this subject).
Sure, people and processors aren't equally expendable, but I don't share your assumption that we're generating new medical tools and techniques as fast as possible given the current level of risk-taking. Further, I'm not willing to assume without question that the current level of risk-taking in the current areas that risks are taken is necessarily the right tradeoff.
What I am willing to assume is that more medical knowledge and more applications of that knowledge available to ordinary people are both worthy goals, and that those should be among the parameters to optimize for.
More like: The open source version would be slightly easier to use and more effective, but it wouldn't include one specific proprietary anti-allergy medicine and it would very occasionally ask the user to supply technical details when diagnosing rare conditions (most of which the propretary solution didn't recognize at all).
Just the fact that he's comparing getting a consumer product to market with getting a drug to market shows that he shouldn't be taken seriously.
Everyone should clearly recognize this as a basic fallacy by now. If there's some reason a comparison isn't appropriate, give that reason - don't just imply that it's obvious and think you've said something meaningful. Usually it's exactly the comparisons that seem non-obvious that produce some useful insight.
Not only are the stakes higher
That's an interesting difference, but it doesn't imply any specific conclusions.
but the processes are totally different.
Right. And the question being raised is whether or not that's a good thing. Just because things are one way at the moment doesn't mean that any other way is automatically wrong.
Tells me exactly that: it's focused on maximizing value (as in financial) and not on maximizing health or general well-being.
In order to apply a free market analysis to a situation you first need to establish that the market in question is free. Between the small set of pharmaceutical providers, FDA regulations, and patents the drug market is nowhere near free.
So the conclusion that there's a market that's producing an efficient result is absurd all by itself - and that's completely ignoring the point that public health is a public good that even a perfect free market might missallocate resources for.
Hah! Where did you see that? In the logs of slashdot?
I'm sure it's exactly where you saw the data that you're basing your "Ha!" reaction on - out of someone's ass.
The fact of the matter is that it's impossible to determine the exact overall installed base (which is different from market share) of the various operating systems - and even if you could the number would be meaningless for any of the stuff that you'd want to use it for (because the population distributions of subpopulations are different - the percentage of Linux using computer gamers isn't directly linked to the percentage of Linux using web developers).
The sort of statistic that would actually be useful is this: What percentage of people who play UT2004 online run Mac and Linux? Clearly it's high enough that Epic is releasing a native port of UT2007 for Linux. Same thing for Quake4 / Wolfenstien: Enemy Territory. I'd be really interested to see what those actual numbers are, because they would be meaningful.
Red, Blue -- what's the difference, the same guys are paying them at the end of the day.
There is a difference. The difference is just stupid.
Republicans: Tax breaks for the rich, increased government payouts to the defense industry, decreased government interference in the oil industry.
Democrats: Increased taxes for the poor, increased government payouts to the pharmaceutical industry, mandate the poor to pay the health insurance industry for poor health coverage.
Oh, and the Republicans will say that evolution, abortion, and gay marrige are bad without changing any policies, while the democrats will say that they're good (without changing any policies).
You can spell "republic" "representative democracy" if you want to.
A more relevant issue is this: The USA isn't democratic. Our system of government does not have the property that each citizen can influence government policy.
Get rid of party-based systems, and institute some a little more... democratic.
We don't necessarily have to abolish political parties. I'm not sure that's even possible in practice. What we do need is a system without the property that only one Democrat and one Republican have any shot at any given political office.
The best suggestion I've heard so far is this: Move to approval voting for the president and senators and to proportional representation for the house of representatives.
Dont think if they could get away with it with DRM and crap that they wouldnt try making you buy the same song for your computer, your iPod, Your Stereo, Your car and Your Radio.
You're not nearly greedy enough to work for the RIAA. If they got their way, songs would be 25 cents/play - you wouldn't get to "have a copy" ever.
If it were really "the age of the network", scene standards wouldn't be tied to physical formats.
Lots of people still have TVs that aren't connected to a computer, and want to be able to burn a disk to play on them. Further, it's a hell of a lot easier lend a DVD+R to a friend than to lend them your RAID array or try to send them the file over your slow-ass American consumer internet connection.
I probably failed 3 times before I started my first company that took off and became successful. If you ask many other business owners, you will see that they admit to have failed in the past too. It may not be their fault it failed but failing is failing. And it definately isn't jumping and attempting to grab the moon.
I have nothing against people spending their time trying to accomplish things that are hard. Just people wasting time on the impossible. If you think that making political progress in the USA by simply voting for a candidate that you agree with on "the issues" falls in the former category then you have misunderstood the situation.
You realize that it's been years now, right? And that there hasn't been a winner yet. A PS3 is like $400. A HDDVD player is like $200. If you buy either and the associated media format fades into obscurity it's not that big a deal - especially compared to the nice HDTV you'd have to get to make it matter at all.
To be the president of the United States, you either need to run as a Democrat or a Republican. There are various mathematical and social reasons why this is the case - but if you want evidence, go take a look at when the last president from a party besides those two was elected. I'll give you a hint: The president before him owned slaves.
You would at least want to look back and be able to say "at least I tried"
Wasting time trying when there's no chance of success is idiotic. It's like jumping up in the air at night trying to touch the moon.
There may be politically useful actions that US citizens can take. Voting in presidential elections isn't one of them - and insisting that it is just distracts people from trying to figure out what their other options are.
Slashdot Mirror
That could just be about dedicated servers, so I wouldn't get your hopes up too much. On the other hand, given Playstation 3 ports there's really no reason left *not* to do Linux (and Mac OS X) ports.
When I said "naive democracy" I meant "the obvious implementation of democracy" rather than "democracy with uneducated people". A society needs to be able to make economic decisions, and I'm unaware of any democratic model that has been demonstrated to have the properties unnecessary to usefully fill that role.
The thing that you seem to be missing here is that both economic systems and democratic systems both have the same basic problem - complex systems have complex properties, and any system with the wrong properties will reach the wrong equilibrium. Just doing away with monetary capitalism because it obviously has the wrong properties solves nothing unless you can show that the system that you're replacing it with (pure democratic socialism apparently) has better properties - simply assuming that it has the properties that you want (because "democracy is good" or whatever) is wishful thinking.
Now, there are lots of systems that would work if you could get everyone to accept them at once. Consider the following ideal hybrid system for example:
This has most of the beneficial properties of monetary capitalism without a tendency to degrade into imperialism - a person simply can't accumulate enough wealth in a lifetime to cause much trouble. The big reason it's unlikely to work is transitioning from the real world to that model. The second largest problem with this system is democratic to economic disruption - the masses may inadvertently change something that breaks the beneficial properties of the system.
So... what's the problem? When you use those things, along with that set of OpenGL extensions that are implemented in the video cards that people have, you've got basically the same capabilities as DirectX - minus the proprietary lock-in.
I can't entirely make out what your reasoning is because you haven't really expressed it, but I'd like to point out a couple of problems that you've probably overlooked:
Hybrid systems are what has shown the best behavior in practice, and there are good arguments that they have the best behavior in theory too. Markets really are better at small scale resource allocation than trying to vote on every little thing.
That's definitely the argument, and it absolutely provides a clear description of what has happened to economic systems in the real world.
What I don't accept is your two camps premise. There may be forms of capitalism that don't degrade into imperialism. There are definitely different forms of socialism. There are a number possible hybrid systems. There are probably even other options (I keep thinking that there must be a way to do non-linear money).
What I am sure of is this: Pretty much anything works on a small scale, and I haven't seen a way to keep any democratic system practical on a large scale.
Step 1: Identify the problems.
Step 2: Come up with potential solutions.
Step 3: Don't give up when you realize that the potential solutions might be more radical than you expected.
The fact of the matter is that the economic system in the United States is very likely incompatible with democracy. I'm not yet convinced that some sort socialist model is the only thing that would work, but hybrid-socialist systems (as in Northern Europe) are the best solution that has been demonstrated in practice.
This is meaningless garbage. Without principles, there is no way to form a coherent structure of policies. "Practical" is what gets us such amazing policies as a law that requires people to buy health insurance as "health care reform".
Nope. That's what rats are for. And computer models.
Between animal testing, computer models, and simple knowledge of the field (chemistry, anatomy, etc) you can have a damn good idea what the effects of a drug or medical device will be before needing to screw around with human testing. There are a ton of ways that you can do testing on human tissue without actually risking a whole human too - and there would be more if medical ethicists didn't go into fits about artificially growing human bits.
Sure, you eventually have to test stuff in real people - and there are risks every time you do that - but the legitimate practical difficulties there are nowhere near enough to explain how crappy the pharmaceutical / medical device market is. I think we can explain that with the patent / wait / tweak / repatent cycle that lets the pharmacorps be wildly profitable forever without producing anything useful.
If the aviation industry had the same research budget that the pharmaceutical industry does, that'd be a damn good question. I'd want automatically-navigated one-man VTOL intercontinental jets or something.
Sure, people and processors aren't equally expendable, but I don't share your assumption that we're generating new medical tools and techniques as fast as possible given the current level of risk-taking. Further, I'm not willing to assume without question that the current level of risk-taking in the current areas that risks are taken is necessarily the right tradeoff.
What I am willing to assume is that more medical knowledge and more applications of that knowledge available to ordinary people are both worthy goals, and that those should be among the parameters to optimize for.
More like: The open source version would be slightly easier to use and more effective, but it wouldn't include one specific proprietary anti-allergy medicine and it would very occasionally ask the user to supply technical details when diagnosing rare conditions (most of which the propretary solution didn't recognize at all).
How many more or less lives will be saved in that case? For how much money? What are the other considerations?
Making no argument is not a valid argument for a position.
Everyone should clearly recognize this as a basic fallacy by now. If there's some reason a comparison isn't appropriate, give that reason - don't just imply that it's obvious and think you've said something meaningful. Usually it's exactly the comparisons that seem non-obvious that produce some useful insight.
That's an interesting difference, but it doesn't imply any specific conclusions.
Right. And the question being raised is whether or not that's a good thing. Just because things are one way at the moment doesn't mean that any other way is automatically wrong.
In order to apply a free market analysis to a situation you first need to establish that the market in question is free. Between the small set of pharmaceutical providers, FDA regulations, and patents the drug market is nowhere near free.
So the conclusion that there's a market that's producing an efficient result is absurd all by itself - and that's completely ignoring the point that public health is a public good that even a perfect free market might missallocate resources for.
I'm sure it's exactly where you saw the data that you're basing your "Ha!" reaction on - out of someone's ass.
The fact of the matter is that it's impossible to determine the exact overall installed base (which is different from market share) of the various operating systems - and even if you could the number would be meaningless for any of the stuff that you'd want to use it for (because the population distributions of subpopulations are different - the percentage of Linux using computer gamers isn't directly linked to the percentage of Linux using web developers).
The sort of statistic that would actually be useful is this: What percentage of people who play UT2004 online run Mac and Linux? Clearly it's high enough that Epic is releasing a native port of UT2007 for Linux. Same thing for Quake4 / Wolfenstien: Enemy Territory. I'd be really interested to see what those actual numbers are, because they would be meaningful.
That sort of question gives you really interesting answers like this one: http://www.happypenguin.org/forums/viewtopic.php?=&p=18972.
I guess my overall point is this: You need to get the right numbers to know anything, and even the wrong numbers aren't especially available.
There is a difference. The difference is just stupid.
Republicans: Tax breaks for the rich, increased government payouts to the defense industry, decreased government interference in the oil industry.
Democrats: Increased taxes for the poor, increased government payouts to the pharmaceutical industry, mandate the poor to pay the health insurance industry for poor health coverage.
Oh, and the Republicans will say that evolution, abortion, and gay marrige are bad without changing any policies, while the democrats will say that they're good (without changing any policies).
You can spell "republic" "representative democracy" if you want to.
A more relevant issue is this: The USA isn't democratic. Our system of government does not have the property that each citizen can influence government policy.
We don't necessarily have to abolish political parties. I'm not sure that's even possible in practice. What we do need is a system without the property that only one Democrat and one Republican have any shot at any given political office.
The best suggestion I've heard so far is this: Move to approval voting for the president and senators and to proportional representation for the house of representatives.
You're not nearly greedy enough to work for the RIAA. If they got their way, songs would be 25 cents/play - you wouldn't get to "have a copy" ever.
If it were really "the age of the network", scene standards wouldn't be tied to physical formats.
Lots of people still have TVs that aren't connected to a computer, and want to be able to burn a disk to play on them. Further, it's a hell of a lot easier lend a DVD+R to a friend than to lend them your RAID array or try to send them the file over your slow-ass American consumer internet connection.
I have nothing against people spending their time trying to accomplish things that are hard. Just people wasting time on the impossible. If you think that making political progress in the USA by simply voting for a candidate that you agree with on "the issues" falls in the former category then you have misunderstood the situation.
The pirate community has made a decision: h.264 files on DVD+Rs.
So if that's your criteria, you just need to get a DVD player that can playback 1080p h.264.
You realize that it's been years now, right? And that there hasn't been a winner yet. A PS3 is like $400. A HDDVD player is like $200. If you buy either and the associated media format fades into obscurity it's not that big a deal - especially compared to the nice HDTV you'd have to get to make it matter at all.
To be the president of the United States, you either need to run as a Democrat or a Republican. There are various mathematical and social reasons why this is the case - but if you want evidence, go take a look at when the last president from a party besides those two was elected. I'll give you a hint: The president before him owned slaves.
Wasting time trying when there's no chance of success is idiotic. It's like jumping up in the air at night trying to touch the moon.
There may be politically useful actions that US citizens can take. Voting in presidential elections isn't one of them - and insisting that it is just distracts people from trying to figure out what their other options are.