No, he's pointing out that the free market is a myth, and never has operated (and never will operate) the way its proponents claim.
Not while a government is around with their thumbs on the scales. You can find plenty of free markets, say at a local Farmers' Market, flea market, or a so-called 'black market' (though governments create artificially high prices there). Areas without much government, eBay, Craigslist, etc. The biggest corporate warlords in most geographic areas have taken control over the majority of commerce, though. There are exceptions - in Egypt, for instance, the black market is larger than the regulated market.
We don't have a free market, we have what we've always had -- industry writes the rules and the rest of us can eat shit.
Agreed, except that 'always' fails to recognize the increasing degree to which this has been true over the 20th and 21st Centuries.
These wonderful free market forces you talk are mostly about big players trying to get an advantage and screw us all over.
No, that's the opposite of a free market - that's a government controlled market.
The people claiming how wonder the free market is are either full of shit or self deluded. But people still cling to it like it's the best thing ever.
Well, it certainly could be. We haven't built the necessary systems (exchange, reputation, etc.) yet to do it right (n.b. business opportunities, cypherpunk entrepreneurs). Bitcoin may be the solution to the exchange problem, which is probably why governments are now trying to smash it.
He's pointing out that we're only a few steps away from an oligarchy in which corporations run the show.
Agreed, though unfortunately, most people don't understand that without the coercive force of government backing these government-creations known as 'corporations', they'd just be a bunch of spoiled brats that would quickly go out of business, in favor of companies with better business models.
Something as non-essential and ephemeral as the entertainment "industry" doesn't deserve a minute of face time with our government. There are important matters to be dealt with, going after filesharers doesn't even register on the importance-scale.
The only importance scale, in reality, is who has the most money for lobbyists and bribes.
Is anyone really entertaining the delusions of these detached, clueless, dinosaurs?
Is anybody still believing that fairy tale taught in grade school that Government is "of the People, by the People, and for the people?" If it were a peered reviewed paper, it would be thrown out for the overwhelming contradictory evidence available.
This is shameful, and I really hope the lawmakers tell them a big "no friggin' way".
The lawmakers will tell them, "wow, this will be tough to get through. And I'm very busy with my reelection campaign and fundraising right, now - it's very hard to do fundraising in this economy. If only I didn't need to spend so much time fundraising I might be able to work on this."
We shouldn't defend anybody polluting private water wells - that's an affront to property rights - but it's also silly to think that any of those wells contain 'pure water'. Every ground well has some minerals in it, and it's often those 'impurities' that give the local food products their unique character.
We also shouldn't be paying attention to any 500-year-old rules that have something to say about chemistry...
I ungenerously assumed he might have been the guy who wrote the docs, but that was a bad assumption:
14. Acknowledgments. As should be obvious from the above, the outside of Lex is patterned on Yacc and the inside on Aho's string matching routines. Therefore, both S. C. Johnson and A. V. Aho are really originators of much of Lex, as well as debuggers of it. Many thanks are due to both.
The code of the current version of Lex was designed, written, and debugged by Eric Schmidt.
I watched the debate between Schmidt and Thiel, and he came off as a reasonable, fairly sharp fellow, perhaps with some of the sharper parts rounded over by experience. With that kind of experience and his successful stint at Google, I'm unlikely to dismiss his insights out of hand. To do so would be to assume that my experience and insights are superior to his, and I have no basis to make such an assumption, and a fair degree of data to show that I probably ought to carefully scrutinize what he has to say before dismissing it. Teenage basement-dwellers, take note and mind the hubris.
Whereby "restrictive" means "d to respect the rights of end users" and where "lawsuits" means "usually settle once the license is complied with."
Let's be clear - GPL, BSD, and Apache are based on copyright which is an artificial monopoly granted by a government. If all else fails, men with guns will come and kill those who violate your license (the same end-game of every government threat). That outcome is unlikely, but a built-in possibility with copyright-enforceed licenses.
Devs who aren't OK with that should use something like WTFPL and understand that the possibility exists that some people will disrespect their wishes without the "intellectual property" construct in play (though oddly enough that happens with licenses too). It's funny - sometimes you'll see a post here where the author is both against imaginary property and pro-GPL. Their hearts are in the right place, but they really don't understand what they're saying. It gives opponents something to latch onto as well.
Of course, people releasing Free Software should just expect to have their license violated while proprietary software vendors shouldn't, right?
From the above perspective, the two-wrongs-don't-make-a-right fallacy comes into play here.
Which is fine, really. A smarter company will out-compete them, benefiting both the market generally and GPL'ed software specifically. Those smarter companies have competent attorneys who can understand licenses, for one.
Wait, maybe one of your competitors got that meme placed into your company.
So it'll take the AI's to outpace the regulators that keep us from using the technology we have available to us today?
The Terminator view of Skynet is very 80's - today's version would have a nano- tech or bio-tech plague that would just wipe everybody out. Terminators and HK's are a very inefficient perspective.
Normally government is just designed to take money from the middle class and give it to the poor, to protect the rich from the poor (and to keep the middle class from rising too much). Except when the rich royally screw up - then it's there to give the rich truckloads of middle class and lower class money.
We count/do maths in base 10. We have 10 digits. Our measurement system should reflect that. The rest of the world, and the scientific community get it.
10 is a tough number for working with - factors are 2 and 5, which aren't terribly useful for real world work (well, 2 is). We have twelve knuckle segments on our fingers, and it has factors of 2, 3 & 4 (also 6, but less useful). The Egyptians and the Babylonians got it, but then the Arabs forgot about eleven and twelve (not oneteen, twoteen, eh?) and folks pushing for a metric system went with a base-10 metric system, and people used to working in common fractional amounts for mental math balked.
Dozenal metric is the system that will make the world happy some day.
I can't wait until the feds get enough hair on their balls to take him down. Anyone with that much money is bound to have broken some law, somewhere, sometime.
The entire problem with Bloomberg isn't just that he's really bad at solving problems, it's because there's too much government power and he just happens to be the one wielding it at the moment.
Wishing for revenge from more government power is just the kind of thinking that perpetuates the system that makes Bloomberg a problem.
Don't take this the wrong way, but you're not the first person to consider that problem.
The researchers commissioned by the DoJ used anonymizing techniques when surveying people. Another group of researchers asked people if they were on the receiving side of DGU's rather than the giving side (to eliminate the risk of answering), and this doubled the response rate. That study had other problems though and its results (2.4M DGU's per year) is considered too high by the serious academics in the field.
It's true, though, another 'study' was done with interviews by federal officers - they got a 15-30x lower response rate than academics with anonymous guarantees. Still, about 80,000 people admitted to DGU's in the prior year when talking to sworn federal officers. I assume they were the ones unaware of the brandishing laws.
There are enough studies now with a variety of methodologies (each with their own flaws) for statisticians to consider the likely true range to be around 800,000.
76F34BB0EF7 849 Thu May 23 12:57:02 icinga@example.com (host mx.cingularme.com[209.183.32.63] said: 452 Insufficient system storage (in reply to MAIL FROM command))
6035551212@txt.att.net
The crap we all put up with from our leaders at times is a much better alternative to having all-out anarchy, and deep down even you understand this.
The people who feel really strongly about this tend to be the ones who haven't looked into it very deeply. Remember, the cost of having government is a human sacrifice rate of about 5% of the population. There's no strong ethnological case that societies without governments do worse than this. Then there are the economic costs.
There is considerable scholarship available on various proposals for running a society that are not based on a-priori threats of violence (that is, mechanisms for governance, not government). There are hundreds of hours of serious lectures on YouTube alone if you're open to such new ideas and shelves full of academic books on the subject.
I question anybody who thinks that society's evolutionary pinnacle is _right now_.
Is it fear that keeps people from applying the basic methodology of statistics to gun ownership? Guns were the great equalizer of power that changed society from being run by warlords ('Kings' in British parlance) to being one that supports democracy.
The USDOJ has a comprehensive study on defensive gun use available, the US CDC has a searchable database of causes of death, John Lott will make his merged database available gratis (not 'free', there are no redistribution rights), and Rummell at U. Hawaii has comprehensive democide statistics (Hitler, Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot, Hussein, et. al.). Several places (CIA World Fact Book, Wikipedia, UN) have violent crime statistics available for all countries. If only the UK could be as safe as Switzerland where every home is required to keep at least one military-grade weapon.
But, don't take my word for it, this is science; do the analysis yourself - it's all available and accessible.
regular battery servicing - probably cheaper just to run copper.
Sounds like a good application for iron-nickel batteries. Inefficient to charge, but they last forever. The nano-versions are more efficient but not on the market yet, though the customer is paying for the charging power so it probably doesn't matter.
instead of investing in the network, they flog the life out of the old crap they have to avoid investing in the network
Because the smart thing to do would be to rip up thousands of miles of fiber that can carry 800Gbps and replace it all with thousands of miles of fiber that can carry 800Gbps.:can't tell if kidding or IBEW:
I bought a couple to experiment with. Yeah, they're fine little boards you can ssh into. I thought the hardware accelerated video was going to be the killer feature, so I got a few of the XBMC images, played some videos, and, then googled to find all the people who are also complaining about blocking artifacts, lockups, and generally buggy video decoding on the things. Got the latest firmware updates, etc.
So, useless for that purpose, but it doesn't say so on the tin. Maybe I'll grab Pidora and set them up as vnc clients screwed into the back of a display. I think they can manage that OK, but from what I can see they're still prototypes.
I thought they'd be my kids' C=64's, but buggy doesn't encourage good learning.
Slashdot Mirror
No, he's pointing out that the free market is a myth, and never has operated (and never will operate) the way its proponents claim.
Not while a government is around with their thumbs on the scales. You can find plenty of free markets, say at a local Farmers' Market, flea market, or a so-called 'black market' (though governments create artificially high prices there). Areas without much government, eBay, Craigslist, etc. The biggest corporate warlords in most geographic areas have taken control over the majority of commerce, though. There are exceptions - in Egypt, for instance, the black market is larger than the regulated market.
We don't have a free market, we have what we've always had -- industry writes the rules and the rest of us can eat shit.
Agreed, except that 'always' fails to recognize the increasing degree to which this has been true over the 20th and 21st Centuries.
These wonderful free market forces you talk are mostly about big players trying to get an advantage and screw us all over.
No, that's the opposite of a free market - that's a government controlled market.
The people claiming how wonder the free market is are either full of shit or self deluded. But people still cling to it like it's the best thing ever.
Well, it certainly could be. We haven't built the necessary systems (exchange, reputation, etc.) yet to do it right (n.b. business opportunities, cypherpunk entrepreneurs). Bitcoin may be the solution to the exchange problem, which is probably why governments are now trying to smash it.
He's pointing out that we're only a few steps away from an oligarchy in which corporations run the show.
Agreed, though unfortunately, most people don't understand that without the coercive force of government backing these government-creations known as 'corporations', they'd just be a bunch of spoiled brats that would quickly go out of business, in favor of companies with better business models.
Something as non-essential and ephemeral as the entertainment "industry" doesn't deserve a minute of face time with our government. There are important matters to be dealt with, going after filesharers doesn't even register on the importance-scale.
The only importance scale, in reality, is who has the most money for lobbyists and bribes.
Is anyone really entertaining the delusions of these detached, clueless, dinosaurs?
Is anybody still believing that fairy tale taught in grade school that Government is "of the People, by the People, and for the people?" If it were a peered reviewed paper, it would be thrown out for the overwhelming contradictory evidence available.
This is shameful, and I really hope the lawmakers tell them a big "no friggin' way".
The lawmakers will tell them, "wow, this will be tough to get through. And I'm very busy with my reelection campaign and fundraising right, now - it's very hard to do fundraising in this economy. If only I didn't need to spend so much time fundraising I might be able to work on this."
We shouldn't defend anybody polluting private water wells - that's an affront to property rights - but it's also silly to think that any of those wells contain 'pure water'. Every ground well has some minerals in it, and it's often those 'impurities' that give the local food products their unique character.
We also shouldn't be paying attention to any 500-year-old rules that have something to say about chemistry...
I ungenerously assumed he might have been the guy who wrote the docs, but that was a bad assumption:
I watched the debate between Schmidt and Thiel, and he came off as a reasonable, fairly sharp fellow, perhaps with some of the sharper parts rounded over by experience. With that kind of experience and his successful stint at Google, I'm unlikely to dismiss his insights out of hand. To do so would be to assume that my experience and insights are superior to his, and I have no basis to make such an assumption, and a fair degree of data to show that I probably ought to carefully scrutinize what he has to say before dismissing it. Teenage basement-dwellers, take note and mind the hubris.
What's most unfortunate is that his post will be found by employment attorneys for years to come.
FWIW, the greatest programmers I've known are also accomplished musicians. Nerds work poorly in teams.
Whereby "restrictive" means "d to respect the rights of end users" and where "lawsuits" means "usually settle once the license is complied with."
Let's be clear - GPL, BSD, and Apache are based on copyright which is an artificial monopoly granted by a government. If all else fails, men with guns will come and kill those who violate your license (the same end-game of every government threat). That outcome is unlikely, but a built-in possibility with copyright-enforceed licenses.
Devs who aren't OK with that should use something like WTFPL and understand that the possibility exists that some people will disrespect their wishes without the "intellectual property" construct in play (though oddly enough that happens with licenses too). It's funny - sometimes you'll see a post here where the author is both against imaginary property and pro-GPL. Their hearts are in the right place, but they really don't understand what they're saying. It gives opponents something to latch onto as well.
Of course, people releasing Free Software should just expect to have their license violated while proprietary software vendors shouldn't, right?
From the above perspective, the two-wrongs-don't-make-a-right fallacy comes into play here.
Which is fine, really. A smarter company will out-compete them, benefiting both the market generally and GPL'ed software specifically. Those smarter companies have competent attorneys who can understand licenses, for one.
Wait, maybe one of your competitors got that meme placed into your company.
So it'll take the AI's to outpace the regulators that keep us from using the technology we have available to us today?
The Terminator view of Skynet is very 80's - today's version would have a nano- tech or bio-tech plague that would just wipe everybody out. Terminators and HK's are a very inefficient perspective.
Normally government is just designed to take money from the middle class and give it to the poor, to protect the rich from the poor (and to keep the middle class from rising too much). Except when the rich royally screw up - then it's there to give the rich truckloads of middle class and lower class money.
Right. I'm not a huge fan of Agile, but I guarantee this project was ruined by poor management, not people using agile correctly.
We count/do maths in base 10. We have 10 digits. Our measurement system should reflect that. The rest of the world, and the scientific community get it.
10 is a tough number for working with - factors are 2 and 5, which aren't terribly useful for real world work (well, 2 is). We have twelve knuckle segments on our fingers, and it has factors of 2, 3 & 4 (also 6, but less useful). The Egyptians and the Babylonians got it, but then the Arabs forgot about eleven and twelve (not oneteen, twoteen, eh?) and folks pushing for a metric system went with a base-10 metric system, and people used to working in common fractional amounts for mental math balked.
Dozenal metric is the system that will make the world happy some day.
just wait til he runs for _president_
Maybe I should just start selling the armbands to his supporters now, to get an early start in the market.
I can't wait until the feds get enough hair on their balls to take him down. Anyone with that much money is bound to have broken some law, somewhere, sometime.
The entire problem with Bloomberg isn't just that he's really bad at solving problems, it's because there's too much government power and he just happens to be the one wielding it at the moment.
Wishing for revenge from more government power is just the kind of thinking that perpetuates the system that makes Bloomberg a problem.
Benevolence implies a zero-sum game. Non-zero sum games are almost always more beneficial and sustainable.
Right on, Google.
Don't take this the wrong way, but you're not the first person to consider that problem.
The researchers commissioned by the DoJ used anonymizing techniques when surveying people. Another group of researchers asked people if they were on the receiving side of DGU's rather than the giving side (to eliminate the risk of answering), and this doubled the response rate. That study had other problems though and its results (2.4M DGU's per year) is considered too high by the serious academics in the field.
It's true, though, another 'study' was done with interviews by federal officers - they got a 15-30x lower response rate than academics with anonymous guarantees. Still, about 80,000 people admitted to DGU's in the prior year when talking to sworn federal officers. I assume they were the ones unaware of the brandishing laws.
There are enough studies now with a variety of methodologies (each with their own flaws) for statisticians to consider the likely true range to be around 800,000.
The crap we all put up with from our leaders at times is a much better alternative to having all-out anarchy, and deep down even you understand this.
The people who feel really strongly about this tend to be the ones who haven't looked into it very deeply. Remember, the cost of having government is a human sacrifice rate of about 5% of the population. There's no strong ethnological case that societies without governments do worse than this. Then there are the economic costs.
There is considerable scholarship available on various proposals for running a society that are not based on a-priori threats of violence (that is, mechanisms for governance, not government). There are hundreds of hours of serious lectures on YouTube alone if you're open to such new ideas and shelves full of academic books on the subject.
I question anybody who thinks that society's evolutionary pinnacle is _right now_.
Is it fear that keeps people from applying the basic methodology of statistics to gun ownership? Guns were the great equalizer of power that changed society from being run by warlords ('Kings' in British parlance) to being one that supports democracy.
The USDOJ has a comprehensive study on defensive gun use available, the US CDC has a searchable database of causes of death, John Lott will make his merged database available gratis (not 'free', there are no redistribution rights), and Rummell at U. Hawaii has comprehensive democide statistics (Hitler, Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot, Hussein, et. al.). Several places (CIA World Fact Book, Wikipedia, UN) have violent crime statistics available for all countries. If only the UK could be as safe as Switzerland where every home is required to keep at least one military-grade weapon.
But, don't take my word for it, this is science; do the analysis yourself - it's all available and accessible.
regular battery servicing - probably cheaper just to run copper.
Sounds like a good application for iron-nickel batteries. Inefficient to charge, but they last forever. The nano-versions are more efficient but not on the market yet, though the customer is paying for the charging power so it probably doesn't matter.
instead of investing in the network, they flog the life out of the old crap they have to avoid investing in the network
Because the smart thing to do would be to rip up thousands of miles of fiber that can carry 800Gbps and replace it all with thousands of miles of fiber that can carry 800Gbps. :can't tell if kidding or IBEW:
Yes, everybody knows they're wings (that's somewhat inherent in X-Wing).
Nerds call them S-foils.
wings
I think you mean S-foils.
You can turn in your nerd card at the door.
I bought a couple to experiment with. Yeah, they're fine little boards you can ssh into. I thought the hardware accelerated video was going to be the killer feature, so I got a few of the XBMC images, played some videos, and, then googled to find all the people who are also complaining about blocking artifacts, lockups, and generally buggy video decoding on the things. Got the latest firmware updates, etc.
So, useless for that purpose, but it doesn't say so on the tin. Maybe I'll grab Pidora and set them up as vnc clients screwed into the back of a display. I think they can manage that OK, but from what I can see they're still prototypes.
I thought they'd be my kids' C=64's, but buggy doesn't encourage good learning.
Brace yourselves - here come the Apple prior-art posts.