That's an improper analogy. People of Europe and of the America's were both of the same species, and therefore were both vulnerable to the same diseases, whether they've seen them before or not. However, the Europeans have been exposed to those diseases for a long time, and therefore had a certain level of resistance to it.
There are likely no common species between Earth and Mars, so even if the probe is contaminated by any terrestrial bacteria/diseases, they will not be designed to infect or otherwise compromise Martian species. Not to say it would be impossible to kill of Martian life with terrestrial organisms, but just that your analogy is fallacious.
Have you ever seen 700MB encoded in DivX 5 or XviD? It looks very nice. 1400MB is as far as I can tell DVD quality.
Re:How to take care of the situation you describe
on
Copyright as Cudgel
·
· Score: 1
Is there only ONE governement on Earth that doesn't suck.
I *totally* agree. There probably hasn't been a single government that didn't suck after a small amount of time, ever. Maybe I'm just overly optimistic. It's just that I have a vision of how the world can be much better, and that vision requires a very effective government, even if it hasn't existed before. Before the United States there hasn't been a republic of that size that ever lasted so long (tho the republic is long gone now). So I also think there are new precedents to be set, and optimism is a good thing.
Re:How to take care of the situation you describe
on
Copyright as Cudgel
·
· Score: 1
Listen, I can't get involved and discuss every contingency, and every exception, ever. I've many times in the past expressed admiration for the work DARPA does, even aside from the internet. The quote that you're quoting me might have a been severe overgeneralization, but I was just trying to concede that I don't like the US government very much as a whole, but that's no reason to be against "government" in general.
Mathematically, yes, but to me it's a matter of consistency..25,.18,.13,.10, these are more easilycomparable than to each other than ".25,.18,.13,.1". Let's put it this way: Imagine I'm comparing distances. "A is 2*10^3 meters away, B is 4.5*10^3 meters away, C is 5.6*10^3 meters away, and D is 0.8*10^4 meters away". 'D' doesn't really fit in, and just throws you off. I know the analogy is quite right, mathematically, but as far as human perception of numbers it works.
I might understand the mathematics behind adding feet and inches, quarts and pints and cups and gallons, which have mixed number bases, but just because I *understand* it, that doesn't mean it's easy. It's better to keep things simpler in general, and not waste cycles on stuff like this.
Re:How to take care of the situation you describe
on
Copyright as Cudgel
·
· Score: 1
They *do* quite often try to do a good job.
I'm sure they do, in fact, I actively believe that. And I don't necessarily blame the politicians for this horrible system. I blame the horrible system. There's no way to get into office without money, and when corporations give you money, you are beholden to them. I think the system is fundamentally flawed, and that nearly anyone would try to do a good job if corruption weren't a factor. This is why I believe that, paradoxically, judges are often more fair than senators. People might disagree with this and point out that judges don't have to answer to voters, so they can do what they want without fearing being thrown out. But in this upside down world, judges end up being more trustworthy, because unlike congressmen, they don't have to advertise, and they therefore don't have to take contributions from anyone. This allows them to do what their conscience tells them.
Thank you for that last sentence. It seems a lot of people have no idea what I'm talking about when I try to explain this, and end up calling me a communist, which I am not.
Just a random thought I had recently: I believe that eventually through technology (lots of nanotech), everything will have low marginal costs, but high fixed costs (see The Diamond Age, by Neal Stephenson). Picture nanobots automatically constructing everything from computers, to food, and automatically extracting valuable elements from it's compounds, valuable metals from it's ores. Imagine all this happening with very little human interaction, that is, almost completely autonomously. I think when this happens, "communism," or whatever you want to call it, will truly be a viable economic model.
I don't need a TV now. Let me put it this way. The government is making it *illegal* to manufacture and sell televisions that receive and display analog signals.
And there is plenty of government regulation is there for good reason, but as I said, I believe the government is doing this to increase the value of what they think is THEIR property. Yes, we are not forced to buy a TV, but the fact is, more money will be spent on TVs as a result of the price increase. Money from taxpayers is going to raise the price of spectrum, which is being stolen from them, and they're not going to see any of it.
Taxes are taxes, and if that's what this is, then call it that. They do that in England. But the fact is, they're not calling it that, and therefore no one will really be held accountable for where the spectrum profits will go.
The trouble is that even though the government isn't allowed to infringe on your speech, if they offered internet access, they can say "we're not infringing upon your speech, we're just denying you service. internet service is not a universal right". This would certainly be held up in court. I think the best thing is dark fiber, because then we'd all have insanely cheap broadband.
The thing is, you would NEVER see this from the US, not in todays climate. The best we can hope for is neutrality. We don't even have that. The US government divides up the spectrum as if it were still 1930. If they applied the right research we could all have ultra wide band, ultra broadband wireless internet access. No one would own any fiber, so you'd only have to pay for your own wireless router, and that's all you'd have to worry about. But the US government has so much money to be made from selling spectrum, why would they offer it to the public?
Take a look at this story that's up today. It says the US government is forcing TVs to have digital receivers. Why do you think they're doing that? I'll tell you why. If everyone has a digital receiver, then everyone can receive signals from the hdtv spectrum. So if everyone has it, this part of the spectrum is much more valuable than if only 25% of people have access to it. This is to increase the value of the spectrum and make the government more money.
So citizens are being forced to spend an extra 200 dollars on televisions, in order to increase the value of the spectrum that the government is stealing from us and selling it.
In this environment, don't you think maybe government sponsored net access is a little bit beyond the realm of possibility.
Or how about when Larry King interviews the star of AOL-Time Warner's latest movie? Does the fact that they don't interview stars of movies from competing studios mean it's "advertising". I'm not defending it, but how do you determing what advertising is anyway. This is the problem with monopolies.
Actually, now that you put it that way, I think it would be really great. In fact I've been advocating that for a while. I think like roads, it would be more efficient if the government paid for the initial laying of cable, so that there is no restricting the amount of bandwidth used just to make a profit. Not only that, I think it would be a great statement about freedom of speech. Also there'd be lot more people serving websites, because they wouldn't have to worry about paying for bandwidth (most people are willing to devote time and energy for stuff they care about, but less willing to actually *pay* to do a service for other people).
And if the government didn't provide internet service, it would be really great if they at least laid down dark fiber, which would drastically cut the cost of getting ultra high speed broadband (see seoul korea).
But this is just government in general. I would *not* want the US government in control of the internet, because they would certainly abuse their power. It seems the country that invented freedom (fine maybe they didn't invent it) doesn't understand it anymore.
see this thread, and you'll notice that we share a lot of the same views.
But I still believe it's wrong for the government to prevent OTHER people/businesses from offering e-mail if they wanted to.
Re:How to take care of the situation you describe
on
Copyright as Cudgel
·
· Score: 1
As I said in the other point, I agree, the US sucks, I really hate everything about the US federal government. But some people (including me in the past) interpret their hate for the US government as a hate for government in general. I think proper, effective government IS possible (even if it's never happened before), and I think with it we can all accomplish great things.
Re:How to take care of the situation you describe
on
Copyright as Cudgel
·
· Score: 1
That's precisely my point. The US government sucks giant donkey balls. That doesn't mean you should be against the idea of government.
So if they came out with e-mail in 1970, it would be illegal today to write software based on TCP/IP to send text messages? Or would TCP/IP be illegal altogether.
I've seen this already, and personally, I think it's a lot of crap. What is he suggesting? That any other systems of E-mail aside from ones controlled by the USPS would be *illegal*? Frankly, I think if the USPS had their own E-mail service, things wouldn't be so different, because there's no way any court would ever hold up an order to prevent other people from running other E-mail services. Sensationalism sucks.
I don't know too much about the feasibility in applying this stuff. All I know is what would be REALLY useful. And a machine the size and maneuverability of a dragon fly would be REALLY useful. Can you even imagine?...
I look at it this way. The dragonfly does it fine. It's definitely possible. It's only a matter of time.
Yes, but what would make it about 100 times more useful would be if it could hover. THAT would be great. Imagine one of these things zipping around like a dragonfly. Hover, zip somewhere, stop, hover, zip some more, hover. You know what I'm talking about. That would be hot.
Re:How to take care of the situation you describe
on
Copyright as Cudgel
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Oh, I see. So in order to make sure that they don't bribe politicians in order to get their way, we do it their way FOR FREE?? It's a nice libertarian principle, and I used to feel that way, but it just doesn't work. The point of the government is to protect the rights of it's citizens. Why should businesses be the only ones exempt from laws?
Once upon a time there was a man named Adam Smith. His thesis was that "men working to fulfill their own selfish desires will lead to benefitting society". I guess that's roughly true, but it seems he never heard of game theory.
Ok, picture this game: There are four people, each with a 100 dollars, and they're playing a game. The game is sponsored by someone. Here are the rules. Each person can put however much money they want towards the pot. Each round the pot is doubled by the sponsor and split amongst them. So if they all put in 20, they end up with 80, doubled equals 160, and split by 4 is 40. So they each end up with double they put in. Now imagine that 3 people put in 20 but the fourth person puts nothing. So the total in the pot is 60, which when doubled is 120, and divided by 4 is 30. So each of them make 10 dollars profit, except for the person who put in nothing, who made 30 dollars profit.
So what happens when they tried this in real life? Well in the first round they all put in about half their money. But each round they put in succesively less and less until by the last round, they've all learned their lesson, and put in nothing.
So imagine further, a new rule. Anyone can pay 3 dollars to take away 10 dollars from someone else. So now if the fourth one puts in nothing, the three others pay 3 dollars each and take away all 30 dollars that he won, ending up with a profit of zero, but they each won 7 dollars profit. So this new rule totally changed the nature of the game, and actually, paradoxically, made it easier to trust each other.
You know what happened in this game? It started out the same...they each bet half of what they had. But each round after that, the slowly bet more and more, till the last round when they all bet the whole pot, and really made a ton of money.
So what's the lesson here? Changing the rules a little bit can help everybody. That's the governments job. Just because the government is forcing a business to do something doesn't mean they don't want to do it. It might just mean that they want to do it, but they want to make sure the others have to do it too.
Like software patents. Getting rid of them would definitely help the software industry, but they still hoarde them and prosecute them because they get the same treatment from the others.
I know, you're a libertarian, so you likely agree with me about software patents, but government is not bad. The US government is bad, they never do anything right, it's shameful. But that shouldn't turn you off to the idea of government. I think you'd agree that certain 'public' things are best taken care of by non-commercial entities. Schools. Libraries. Roads. Public transport.
Let's look at public transport. Even though the city usually does not recoup money from bus and train fares, it doesn't matter. The city doesn't recoup money for laying and maintaining roads either. Almost anything with very low scarcity, but a high fixed cost should be publicly funded, because it's the most efficient system. If you charge excessively, less people use it, and since there's no scarcity (no marginal cost) the less people who use it, the higher the cost PER use, and hence the lower efficiency.
"Government" is not inherently bad, you really should consider that possibility.
The purchase is aimed at boosting slowing revenues in the computer giant's large services business, which now accounts for more revenue than its well-known computers and mainframes
If they're trying to boost revenue, wouldn't it be cheaper to just hire them as consultants?
Slashdot Mirror
That's an improper analogy. People of Europe and of the America's were both of the same species, and therefore were both vulnerable to the same diseases, whether they've seen them before or not. However, the Europeans have been exposed to those diseases for a long time, and therefore had a certain level of resistance to it.
There are likely no common species between Earth and Mars, so even if the probe is contaminated by any terrestrial bacteria/diseases, they will not be designed to infect or otherwise compromise Martian species. Not to say it would be impossible to kill of Martian life with terrestrial organisms, but just that your analogy is fallacious.
Have you ever seen 700MB encoded in DivX 5 or XviD? It looks very nice. 1400MB is as far as I can tell DVD quality.
Is there only ONE governement on Earth that doesn't suck.
I *totally* agree. There probably hasn't been a single government that didn't suck after a small amount of time, ever. Maybe I'm just overly optimistic. It's just that I have a vision of how the world can be much better, and that vision requires a very effective government, even if it hasn't existed before. Before the United States there hasn't been a republic of that size that ever lasted so long (tho the republic is long gone now). So I also think there are new precedents to be set, and optimism is a good thing.
Listen, I can't get involved and discuss every contingency, and every exception, ever. I've many times in the past expressed admiration for the work DARPA does, even aside from the internet. The quote that you're quoting me might have a been severe overgeneralization, but I was just trying to concede that I don't like the US government very much as a whole, but that's no reason to be against "government" in general.
Very interesting, I didn't know that. Although, it does seem contrary to the idea of "laissez faire" as I understand it.
That should be "I know the analogy isn't quite right."
Mathematically, yes, but to me it's a matter of consistency. .25, .18, .13, .10, these are more easilycomparable than to each other than ".25, .18, .13, .1". Let's put it this way: Imagine I'm comparing distances. "A is 2*10^3 meters away, B is 4.5*10^3 meters away, C is 5.6*10^3 meters away, and D is 0.8*10^4 meters away". 'D' doesn't really fit in, and just throws you off. I know the analogy is quite right, mathematically, but as far as human perception of numbers it works.
I might understand the mathematics behind adding feet and inches, quarts and pints and cups and gallons, which have mixed number bases, but just because I *understand* it, that doesn't mean it's easy. It's better to keep things simpler in general, and not waste cycles on stuff like this.
They *do* quite often try to do a good job.
I'm sure they do, in fact, I actively believe that. And I don't necessarily blame the politicians for this horrible system. I blame the horrible system. There's no way to get into office without money, and when corporations give you money, you are beholden to them. I think the system is fundamentally flawed, and that nearly anyone would try to do a good job if corruption weren't a factor. This is why I believe that, paradoxically, judges are often more fair than senators. People might disagree with this and point out that judges don't have to answer to voters, so they can do what they want without fearing being thrown out. But in this upside down world, judges end up being more trustworthy, because unlike congressmen, they don't have to advertise, and they therefore don't have to take contributions from anyone. This allows them to do what their conscience tells them.
Thank you for that last sentence. It seems a lot of people have no idea what I'm talking about when I try to explain this, and end up calling me a communist, which I am not.
Just a random thought I had recently: I believe that eventually through technology (lots of nanotech), everything will have low marginal costs, but high fixed costs (see The Diamond Age, by Neal Stephenson). Picture nanobots automatically constructing everything from computers, to food, and automatically extracting valuable elements from it's compounds, valuable metals from it's ores. Imagine all this happening with very little human interaction, that is, almost completely autonomously. I think when this happens, "communism," or whatever you want to call it, will truly be a viable economic model.
I don't need a TV now. Let me put it this way. The government is making it *illegal* to manufacture and sell televisions that receive and display analog signals.
And there is plenty of government regulation is there for good reason, but as I said, I believe the government is doing this to increase the value of what they think is THEIR property. Yes, we are not forced to buy a TV, but the fact is, more money will be spent on TVs as a result of the price increase. Money from taxpayers is going to raise the price of spectrum, which is being stolen from them, and they're not going to see any of it.
Taxes are taxes, and if that's what this is, then call it that. They do that in England. But the fact is, they're not calling it that, and therefore no one will really be held accountable for where the spectrum profits will go.
The trouble is that even though the government isn't allowed to infringe on your speech, if they offered internet access, they can say "we're not infringing upon your speech, we're just denying you service. internet service is not a universal right". This would certainly be held up in court. I think the best thing is dark fiber, because then we'd all have insanely cheap broadband.
The thing is, you would NEVER see this from the US, not in todays climate. The best we can hope for is neutrality. We don't even have that. The US government divides up the spectrum as if it were still 1930. If they applied the right research we could all have ultra wide band, ultra broadband wireless internet access. No one would own any fiber, so you'd only have to pay for your own wireless router, and that's all you'd have to worry about. But the US government has so much money to be made from selling spectrum, why would they offer it to the public?
Take a look at this story that's up today. It says the US government is forcing TVs to have digital receivers. Why do you think they're doing that? I'll tell you why. If everyone has a digital receiver, then everyone can receive signals from the hdtv spectrum. So if everyone has it, this part of the spectrum is much more valuable than if only 25% of people have access to it. This is to increase the value of the spectrum and make the government more money.
So citizens are being forced to spend an extra 200 dollars on televisions, in order to increase the value of the spectrum that the government is stealing from us and selling it.
In this environment, don't you think maybe government sponsored net access is a little bit beyond the realm of possibility.
Really? I did not know that...learn something new everyday.
Or how about when Larry King interviews the star of AOL-Time Warner's latest movie? Does the fact that they don't interview stars of movies from competing studios mean it's "advertising". I'm not defending it, but how do you determing what advertising is anyway. This is the problem with monopolies.
Actually, now that you put it that way, I think it would be really great. In fact I've been advocating that for a while. I think like roads, it would be more efficient if the government paid for the initial laying of cable, so that there is no restricting the amount of bandwidth used just to make a profit. Not only that, I think it would be a great statement about freedom of speech. Also there'd be lot more people serving websites, because they wouldn't have to worry about paying for bandwidth (most people are willing to devote time and energy for stuff they care about, but less willing to actually *pay* to do a service for other people).
And if the government didn't provide internet service, it would be really great if they at least laid down dark fiber, which would drastically cut the cost of getting ultra high speed broadband (see seoul korea).
But this is just government in general. I would *not* want the US government in control of the internet, because they would certainly abuse their power. It seems the country that invented freedom (fine maybe they didn't invent it) doesn't understand it anymore.
see this thread, and you'll notice that we share a lot of the same views.
But I still believe it's wrong for the government to prevent OTHER people/businesses from offering e-mail if they wanted to.
As I said in the other point, I agree, the US sucks, I really hate everything about the US federal government. But some people (including me in the past) interpret their hate for the US government as a hate for government in general. I think proper, effective government IS possible (even if it's never happened before), and I think with it we can all accomplish great things.
That's precisely my point. The US government sucks giant donkey balls. That doesn't mean you should be against the idea of government.
Why would it be a good thing?
So if they came out with e-mail in 1970, it would be illegal today to write software based on TCP/IP to send text messages? Or would TCP/IP be illegal altogether.
I didn't say I get spam, retard. But anyway, I do get spam at that address. That is my spambox.
What do you mean?
I fully understand that. Regardless, I don't think the courts would *ever* back the same thing for electronic mail.
Really? That's so weird, so why is my snail mail box filled with spam too?
I've seen this already, and personally, I think it's a lot of crap. What is he suggesting? That any other systems of E-mail aside from ones controlled by the USPS would be *illegal*? Frankly, I think if the USPS had their own E-mail service, things wouldn't be so different, because there's no way any court would ever hold up an order to prevent other people from running other E-mail services. Sensationalism sucks.
I don't know too much about the feasibility in applying this stuff. All I know is what would be REALLY useful. And a machine the size and maneuverability of a dragon fly would be REALLY useful. Can you even imagine?...
I look at it this way. The dragonfly does it fine. It's definitely possible. It's only a matter of time.
Yes, but what would make it about 100 times more useful would be if it could hover. THAT would be great. Imagine one of these things zipping around like a dragonfly. Hover, zip somewhere, stop, hover, zip some more, hover. You know what I'm talking about. That would be hot.
Oh, I see. So in order to make sure that they don't bribe politicians in order to get their way, we do it their way FOR FREE?? It's a nice libertarian principle, and I used to feel that way, but it just doesn't work. The point of the government is to protect the rights of it's citizens. Why should businesses be the only ones exempt from laws?
Once upon a time there was a man named Adam Smith. His thesis was that "men working to fulfill their own selfish desires will lead to benefitting society". I guess that's roughly true, but it seems he never heard of game theory.
Ok, picture this game: There are four people, each with a 100 dollars, and they're playing a game. The game is sponsored by someone. Here are the rules. Each person can put however much money they want towards the pot. Each round the pot is doubled by the sponsor and split amongst them. So if they all put in 20, they end up with 80, doubled equals 160, and split by 4 is 40. So they each end up with double they put in. Now imagine that 3 people put in 20 but the fourth person puts nothing. So the total in the pot is 60, which when doubled is 120, and divided by 4 is 30. So each of them make 10 dollars profit, except for the person who put in nothing, who made 30 dollars profit.
So what happens when they tried this in real life? Well in the first round they all put in about half their money. But each round they put in succesively less and less until by the last round, they've all learned their lesson, and put in nothing.
So imagine further, a new rule. Anyone can pay 3 dollars to take away 10 dollars from someone else. So now if the fourth one puts in nothing, the three others pay 3 dollars each and take away all 30 dollars that he won, ending up with a profit of zero, but they each won 7 dollars profit. So this new rule totally changed the nature of the game, and actually, paradoxically, made it easier to trust each other.
You know what happened in this game? It started out the same...they each bet half of what they had. But each round after that, the slowly bet more and more, till the last round when they all bet the whole pot, and really made a ton of money.
So what's the lesson here? Changing the rules a little bit can help everybody. That's the governments job. Just because the government is forcing a business to do something doesn't mean they don't want to do it. It might just mean that they want to do it, but they want to make sure the others have to do it too.
Like software patents. Getting rid of them would definitely help the software industry, but they still hoarde them and prosecute them because they get the same treatment from the others.
I know, you're a libertarian, so you likely agree with me about software patents, but government is not bad. The US government is bad, they never do anything right, it's shameful. But that shouldn't turn you off to the idea of government. I think you'd agree that certain 'public' things are best taken care of by non-commercial entities. Schools. Libraries. Roads. Public transport.
Let's look at public transport. Even though the city usually does not recoup money from bus and train fares, it doesn't matter. The city doesn't recoup money for laying and maintaining roads either. Almost anything with very low scarcity, but a high fixed cost should be publicly funded, because it's the most efficient system. If you charge excessively, less people use it, and since there's no scarcity (no marginal cost) the less people who use it, the higher the cost PER use, and hence the lower efficiency.
"Government" is not inherently bad, you really should consider that possibility.
The purchase is aimed at boosting slowing revenues in the computer giant's large services business, which now accounts for more revenue than its well-known computers and mainframes
If they're trying to boost revenue, wouldn't it be cheaper to just hire them as consultants?