Which is another way of saying 'less than 5% of the population of the world still uses Fahrenheit'.
It's also another way of saying:
'More than 75% of native English speakers use Fahrenheit'.
'Almost 66% of fluent English speakers use Fahrenheit'.
'About 50% of all Internet users (any language) use Fahrenheit'. I see that as well as not teaching standard units in American schools, they also don't teach basic arithmetic.
The US has 304 million people, the UK 60, South Africa 47, Canada 33, Australia 21. None of these countries are entirely native English speaking, of course, but many other countries have substantial English-speaking minorities. Only 215 million Americans have English as their first language. Over all, fewer than 70% of the world's native English speakers, and fewer than 30% of the world's fluent English speakers, live in the US.
And that's why an American paper should be using the metric system? Because the 95% of the world that's not in America is too stupid to realize that it's an American publication writing to an American audience using the units of measure in use in America? Errrrr... hate to tell you this, but the journal in question is Nature. Published by Macmillan Publishers Ltd, a British company owned by a German group, for an international audience.
The third largest nation in the world (by population) still uses Fahrenheit. I wouldn't consider that quite in the same league.
Which is another way of saying 'less than 5% of the population of the world still uses Fahrenheit'. Looked at that way I'd assert it's in exactly the same league, or, indeed, the same 5.560 kilometres.
We've been using it for 100% of mine. The 80386 was still shiny and new when I was born.
See, this is one the reasons I come to Slashdot. Other discussion boards make me feel so old because I remember using my old 486DX2/66.
Hah! The first machines I used professionally didn't even have a microprocessor... Have used 6502, 8080, Z80, H800, M68000, ARM, PowerPC, MIPS. Oh, and the odd x86.
The most famous examples would be Jeanneke Pis in Brussels and Mieke Stroel in Zelzate. Of the top of my head: there's also one in Ellezelle and Dubrovnik.
Not only could the average user not find an advantage in Vista over XP (remember, users rarely care what's under the hood, they just want to use the system), now even geeks won't see a difference between the old and the new system?
Ok, let's be constructive. We heard now what will not be different between Vista and "Windows 7". So what will? Because, well, if it's the same... I'm no marketing guru, but I guess even the marketing guys in Redmond might have a hard time selling the same product again.
... is the wrong answer.
The marketing spin is, 'yes, we know Windows Vista was a dog. But this all new all singing all dancing VistaRebadgedWithNewDesktopTheme will solve all your IT problems!'
And the sad fact is people will buy it.
People will buy it because they don't understand what an operating system is or how it works. They think that if the desktop looks different that means that fundamental things are different. All Microsoft need to do is change the name and repaint a few icons, and the suckers will come rolling in again.
And the even sadder fact is that because that's all Microsoft needs to do, that's all Microsoft will do.
I didn't define it, but I did read the definition. In any case, your assertion is just not so, because the more money a person makes, the more they are taxed (proportionally) in pretty much every country, including the US and all of Europe I've seen numbers on. As such the wealth is taken more from the wealthy and spent on programs that help everyone or just the poor. For example, socialized medicine helps everyone in a society to the same degree without significant favoritism, but a wealthy person pays more in taxes to support that program, thus subsidizing it for the poor. Another example would be welfare, where again the wealthy pay more of the tax burden, but are ineligible for any of the benefits.
Sadly, this just ain't so. I agree that that's how it's supposed to work, but it isn't. In Britain, the share of the disposable income of the poor which goes into taxation is much higher than of the rich. This is partly because income tax in the United Kingdom just isn't very progressive, and partly because the rich benefit disproportionally from tax breaks on housing and on pensions. And partly, of course, the rich can afford to pay accountants to minimise their tax liabilities.
Here in rural Scotland, the richest people are the farmers who not only pay virtually no tax but who also receive a state subsidy which averages twice the average wage each; so we really are taxing the poor to pay the rich. It's not what the system is designed to do, of course; but it is the way it's worked out.
Good set of posts, by the way; I've been enjoying them, and mostly agree with you.
So, have you bothered to check Amazons Bestsellers in Computers & PC Hardware list lately? (Amazon being by far the largest online reseller that sells Apple, Asus EEE PC as well as Vista laptops?). The list updates hourly, but currently the first Vista laptop is at spot number 4.
It's also worth looking at customer satisfaction, as indicated by the customer reviews. Each of the Apple machines has a review average of 4.5/5 starts; the EEEPC has a review average of 5/5; the first Vista PC has a review average of 3/5. Not only are the non-Vista laptops selling very well, but the people who buy them are happier with what they get for their money - both at the high end and at the low end.
And to respond to your criticism that "the ability to answer is dependent on culture"... Well, that's the entire point. If you don't know culture, that reflects a deficiency in your social intelligence.
Ok, so if the questions referenced the Bhagavad Gita, the Quran and the Prose Edda - all extremely important cultural artifacts - they would form part of a useful test of your intelligence, would they?
Certainly if you don't know any culture, that reflects on your intelligence. But the fact that you don't know a specific culture does not. There are people in the world who've never read the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Rigsveda, or The Art of War. Those people aren't necessarily stupid.
For example, if there is a bugler in your house, and you call the police, they will not generally enter the house, even if they believe your life is in danger. This is because intervention can make the situation worse, and endanger the lives of police-officers. In reality, they are almost completely powerless to help you.
If there were a bugler in my house I expect the council noise abatement officer would come in. But if there was a burglar, then my local police definitely would come in. Why? Because, hand guns being illegal in Scotland, virtually no-one has one and it's safe for the police to do that.
Who is better off, you, living in a country where most people who are killed with guns are killed with their own gun, and the police are (reasonably) too cautious to help you when your life is threatened, or me, living in a country where no-one has guns and the police aren't scared?
In the United States four people in every hundred thousand are killed with a gun in any single year. In 2004 in Scotland, exactly two people - count them, one, two - were killed with guns. In the whole country. In the whole year.
So you're happy with the situation in which the guy with the bigger gun can just take your property off you whenever he feels like?
Not the guy with the bigger gun, the guy who is most committed. You don't have to defeat everyone, simply put up a nasty enough fight to make stealing your property more work than it is worth.
So what about your grandmother? If the thug from down the block with the big guns and tough friends decides he wants her house, what's she supposed to do? It doesn't matter whether she's 'more committed' or not, she still ends up homeless or dead. Is that the way you want life to be?
And before you say 'oh, I'd help out my grandma', what about her widowed, disabled neighbour who has no family? Who is going to help her out in your brave new world?
At the end of the day, the victor is the owner. Others may feel that they are the "rightful" owner, but if they're not in possession of the property, they're not the effective owner and of little to no consequence.
So you're happy with the situation in which the guy with the bigger gun can just take your property off you whenever he feels like?
We keep making the same mistakes over and over again. There are things you can't legislate, like morality and common sense, for instance.
Whoah, there! Morality is not a given. Moral standards change over time. In the Bible Lot is held up as an example of a supremely moral man. What did he do that was so unusually moral? He turned his virgin daughters out to be raped by a mob. We don't think that's a moral thing to do any more, but in old testament times it was.
In Jesus' time it was considered moral to stone adulteresses (but not adulterers). We don't do that any more. In Classical Greek, it was considered moral for adult men to become 'mentors' of adolescent boys - and that included homosexual sex. We don't do that any more. In the eighteenth century in the US, it was considered moral to keep slaves. We don't do that any more. The classical Romans considered it moral to put unwanted babies out on the hillsides to die. We don't do that any more.
Morality isn't something handed down by God on tablets of stone, it's something which evolves as society changes. And it isn't something about which people necessarily agree, even now - look at the controversies on abortion, euthanasia, capital punishment. Look at the wide differences in age of consent across the world. Look at...
Well said. Coffee almost came out my nose when I read the OP was a self-described 'anarcho-capitalist'... Without any sort of strong central authority chaos reigns and leads to the centralization of power in a tyrannical, unaccountable entity...
I agree with most of what you say. Anarchism and property are mutually incompatible. Anarchism and capitalism are immiscible. But I don't agree that all societies need strong central authority, provided there aren't great disparities of wealth and power. Hunter-gatherer and peasant societies manage to get on well for long periods without it. Whether you can make that scale to an urban technological society is a separate question, of course.
And for an authority-free society to flourish there probably need to be degrees of social sanction - ostracism, for example - that we as individualistic Westerners would find it hard to tolerate.
If you claim that property can "only be enforced by force", how is this different from the enforcement of non-property? In other words, why does your argument appear to suggest that without the concept of property, there is no need to use force for conflict resolution?
By the way, there are ways to enforce property (or anything for the matter) without force, and they are often much more effective. For example social and economic pressure.
Property is disentropic: it tends to accumulate wealth unevenly. Having property is a good way of getting more property - that's the whole basis of capitalism. Property leads to unequal societies, where some people have a lot more than others. Peaceful conflict resolution depends on all the parties involved feeling that the system and the rules are essentially fair. It works in reasonably equal societies, it doesn't work in very unequal societies. And that's why you can't have both property and peaceful conflict resolution; which in turn is why you can't have both property and anarchism.
So how is your right to enforce your property rights with a gun, any different from ShieldW0lf's claim to take by force the (metaphorical or not) land occupied by others before his birth? Both are based with what you can do by sheer force.
No, I'm on my land. I'm making something of it. I'm there. ShieldW0lf argues that he has the right to go break into someone's house, murder a man, his wife, and his children in their sleep, take his food, and house, as his, for some against him that the man arguably had little to do with. I'm a property owner, ShieldW0lf is a murderer, like most communists are.
To be honest I'm not certain there's a difference. No matter where you are in the world you're on land which was once someone else's, and they were murdered or enslaved to get them off it. In the US that's more recently true than it is in Europe, but it's also true in Europe.
If you believe in property rights, now is the time to give the whole of the territorial United States back to the First Nations, because, with the exception of a very few small enclaves, they were there first and they didn't give it up voluntarily (and before you think I'm getting at Americans, the same is true virtually everywhere else on Earth, too).
If what you're saying is 'I believe in property rights, but only those rights which were established after my ancestors killed your ancestors', then I don' think you've got a very solid foundation for your rights.
This whole issue gets very complicated. Look at Israel/Palestine. The Israelis claim it's theirs, because their (cultural) ancestors were there first, even though they were driven out. The Palestinian Arabs claim it's theirs, because they've always lived there. Who's right? It turns out that the Palestinian Arabs are genetically closer to the ancient Jews than most modern Israelis are. So what counts, your genetic heredity, your cultural heritage, or your actual possession of the land? And if it's actual possession, when's the date from which we say property rights apply? Is it before 1948 or after?
I'm not picking on the Israelis particularly here, either. It's just that they are currently in the process which mostly finished in Britain by the eighteenth century and in the United States in the nineteenth, of driving indigenous people off their land by force. We've all done it. Everywhere in the world it's been done. No-one's innocent. But before you start talking about property rights, when's the date the rights start from?
Property - any kind of property - isn't a natural right. It can be enforced only by force. which either means you have a government to enforce property rights, or else that the guy with the bigger gun takes your property off you.
An anarchist society cannot survive much inequity. If people can accumulate property, what happens is that the most ruthless just grab everything, leaving everyone else with nothing. And because the ruthless started out by grabbing all the weapons, there isn't much anyone else can do about it. The word for that is 'feudalism' or 'tyrrany', not 'anarchism'.
This doesn't mean that I think you can't have a stable anarchist society, or that I don't believe a stable anarchist society would be a good thing; but you can't say 'there aren't any laws except the law of property'. That doesn't work. You need a whole government infrastructure just to enforce that, and once you've got a government infrastructure it will aggregate more power to itself - that's the nature of government.
Now you're the one that isn't thinking. Assuming the OP doesn't use an insanely short bit length, it would take EVERY SINGLE COMPUTER ON THE PLANET working together at least a decade to brute force it.
The math is simple, the amount of computing power to brute force PGP just doesn't exist on this planet yet. Maybe in a decade or two but then all we'd have to do is increase the bit length that PGP uses.
That's what the Germans thought when they used Enigma.
They may very well have the resources to break a message or two. But is this message important enough to spend a decade of processing power on? No reason to be paranoid, usually people aren't important enough for their messages to be interesting. And SSNs? Like NSA couldn't get them from anyplace else.
You aren't thinking.
Multiply the number of employees in the company by US$50, and that's what this data stream is worth to an identity fraudster. If the identity fraudster also controls a botnet, a decade of processing power not only costs nothing but also can be supplied in a week of wall-clock time.
No, usually encrypted messages aren't worth cracking, because individually they're mostly not worth a lot of money. But this datastream is worth a very large amount of money. If the attacker knows what it is, it's definitely worth cracking.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd like to see them write Grand Theft Auto 4 with VB ;-)
Yes, GTA4 is a British production.
You misspelled Scottish.
'More than 75% of native English speakers use Fahrenheit'.
'Almost 66% of fluent English speakers use Fahrenheit'.
'About 50% of all Internet users (any language) use Fahrenheit'. I see that as well as not teaching standard units in American schools, they also don't teach basic arithmetic.
Of course, the US isn't the only country in the world still to use Fahrenheit. There's also Belize.
Which is another way of saying 'less than 5% of the population of the world still uses Fahrenheit'. Looked at that way I'd assert it's in exactly the same league, or, indeed, the same 5.560 kilometres.
But seriously, when did Fahrenheit stop working?
About the same time that furlongs per fortnight ceased to be a useful measure of speed.
No Alpha. I'd forgotten the SPARC. I've got a scrap Alpha in the car just now, and I'm going to have a try at resurrecting it.
We've been using it for 100% of mine. The 80386 was still shiny and new when I was born.
See, this is one the reasons I come to Slashdot. Other discussion boards make me feel so old because I remember using my old 486DX2/66.
Hah! The first machines I used professionally didn't even have a microprocessor... Have used 6502, 8080, Z80, H800, M68000, ARM, PowerPC, MIPS. Oh, and the odd x86.
Meet MakeHuman
The most famous examples would be Jeanneke Pis in Brussels and Mieke Stroel in Zelzate. Of the top of my head: there's also one in Ellezelle and Dubrovnik.
Here's the famous one in Brussels
...now, what exactly?Not only could the average user not find an advantage in Vista over XP (remember, users rarely care what's under the hood, they just want to use the system), now even geeks won't see a difference between the old and the new system?
Ok, let's be constructive. We heard now what will not be different between Vista and "Windows 7". So what will? Because, well, if it's the same... I'm no marketing guru, but I guess even the marketing guys in Redmond might have a hard time selling the same product again.
... is the wrong answer.
The marketing spin is, 'yes, we know Windows Vista was a dog. But this all new all singing all dancing VistaRebadgedWithNewDesktopTheme will solve all your IT problems!'
And the sad fact is people will buy it.
People will buy it because they don't understand what an operating system is or how it works. They think that if the desktop looks different that means that fundamental things are different. All Microsoft need to do is change the name and repaint a few icons, and the suckers will come rolling in again.
And the even sadder fact is that because that's all Microsoft needs to do, that's all Microsoft will do.
I didn't define it, but I did read the definition. In any case, your assertion is just not so, because the more money a person makes, the more they are taxed (proportionally) in pretty much every country, including the US and all of Europe I've seen numbers on. As such the wealth is taken more from the wealthy and spent on programs that help everyone or just the poor. For example, socialized medicine helps everyone in a society to the same degree without significant favoritism, but a wealthy person pays more in taxes to support that program, thus subsidizing it for the poor. Another example would be welfare, where again the wealthy pay more of the tax burden, but are ineligible for any of the benefits.
Sadly, this just ain't so. I agree that that's how it's supposed to work, but it isn't. In Britain, the share of the disposable income of the poor which goes into taxation is much higher than of the rich. This is partly because income tax in the United Kingdom just isn't very progressive, and partly because the rich benefit disproportionally from tax breaks on housing and on pensions. And partly, of course, the rich can afford to pay accountants to minimise their tax liabilities.
Here in rural Scotland, the richest people are the farmers who not only pay virtually no tax but who also receive a state subsidy which averages twice the average wage each; so we really are taxing the poor to pay the rich. It's not what the system is designed to do, of course; but it is the way it's worked out.
Good set of posts, by the way; I've been enjoying them, and mostly agree with you.
It's also worth looking at customer satisfaction, as indicated by the customer reviews. Each of the Apple machines has a review average of 4.5/5 starts; the EEEPC has a review average of 5/5; the first Vista PC has a review average of 3/5. Not only are the non-Vista laptops selling very well, but the people who buy them are happier with what they get for their money - both at the high end and at the low end.
Ok, so if the questions referenced the Bhagavad Gita, the Quran and the Prose Edda - all extremely important cultural artifacts - they would form part of a useful test of your intelligence, would they?
Certainly if you don't know any culture, that reflects on your intelligence. But the fact that you don't know a specific culture does not. There are people in the world who've never read the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Rigsveda, or The Art of War. Those people aren't necessarily stupid.
If there were a bugler in my house I expect the council noise abatement officer would come in. But if there was a burglar, then my local police definitely would come in. Why? Because, hand guns being illegal in Scotland, virtually no-one has one and it's safe for the police to do that.
Who is better off, you, living in a country where most people who are killed with guns are killed with their own gun, and the police are (reasonably) too cautious to help you when your life is threatened, or me, living in a country where no-one has guns and the police aren't scared?
In the United States four people in every hundred thousand are killed with a gun in any single year. In 2004 in Scotland, exactly two people - count them, one, two - were killed with guns. In the whole country. In the whole year.
Where would you rather live?
So you're happy with the situation in which the guy with the bigger gun can just take your property off you whenever he feels like?
Not the guy with the bigger gun, the guy who is most committed. You don't have to defeat everyone, simply put up a nasty enough fight to make stealing your property more work than it is worth.So what about your grandmother? If the thug from down the block with the big guns and tough friends decides he wants her house, what's she supposed to do? It doesn't matter whether she's 'more committed' or not, she still ends up homeless or dead. Is that the way you want life to be?
And before you say 'oh, I'd help out my grandma', what about her widowed, disabled neighbour who has no family? Who is going to help her out in your brave new world?
So you're happy with the situation in which the guy with the bigger gun can just take your property off you whenever he feels like?
Whoah, there! Morality is not a given. Moral standards change over time. In the Bible Lot is held up as an example of a supremely moral man. What did he do that was so unusually moral? He turned his virgin daughters out to be raped by a mob. We don't think that's a moral thing to do any more, but in old testament times it was.
In Jesus' time it was considered moral to stone adulteresses (but not adulterers). We don't do that any more. In Classical Greek, it was considered moral for adult men to become 'mentors' of adolescent boys - and that included homosexual sex. We don't do that any more. In the eighteenth century in the US, it was considered moral to keep slaves. We don't do that any more. The classical Romans considered it moral to put unwanted babies out on the hillsides to die. We don't do that any more.
Morality isn't something handed down by God on tablets of stone, it's something which evolves as society changes. And it isn't something about which people necessarily agree, even now - look at the controversies on abortion, euthanasia, capital punishment. Look at the wide differences in age of consent across the world. Look at...
And common sense? Common sense is worse.
I agree with most of what you say. Anarchism and property are mutually incompatible. Anarchism and capitalism are immiscible. But I don't agree that all societies need strong central authority, provided there aren't great disparities of wealth and power. Hunter-gatherer and peasant societies manage to get on well for long periods without it. Whether you can make that scale to an urban technological society is a separate question, of course.
And for an authority-free society to flourish there probably need to be degrees of social sanction - ostracism, for example - that we as individualistic Westerners would find it hard to tolerate.
Property is disentropic: it tends to accumulate wealth unevenly. Having property is a good way of getting more property - that's the whole basis of capitalism. Property leads to unequal societies, where some people have a lot more than others. Peaceful conflict resolution depends on all the parties involved feeling that the system and the rules are essentially fair. It works in reasonably equal societies, it doesn't work in very unequal societies. And that's why you can't have both property and peaceful conflict resolution; which in turn is why you can't have both property and anarchism.
To be honest I'm not certain there's a difference. No matter where you are in the world you're on land which was once someone else's, and they were murdered or enslaved to get them off it. In the US that's more recently true than it is in Europe, but it's also true in Europe.
If you believe in property rights, now is the time to give the whole of the territorial United States back to the First Nations, because, with the exception of a very few small enclaves, they were there first and they didn't give it up voluntarily (and before you think I'm getting at Americans, the same is true virtually everywhere else on Earth, too).
If what you're saying is 'I believe in property rights, but only those rights which were established after my ancestors killed your ancestors', then I don' think you've got a very solid foundation for your rights.
This whole issue gets very complicated. Look at Israel/Palestine. The Israelis claim it's theirs, because their (cultural) ancestors were there first, even though they were driven out. The Palestinian Arabs claim it's theirs, because they've always lived there. Who's right? It turns out that the Palestinian Arabs are genetically closer to the ancient Jews than most modern Israelis are. So what counts, your genetic heredity, your cultural heritage, or your actual possession of the land? And if it's actual possession, when's the date from which we say property rights apply? Is it before 1948 or after?
I'm not picking on the Israelis particularly here, either. It's just that they are currently in the process which mostly finished in Britain by the eighteenth century and in the United States in the nineteenth, of driving indigenous people off their land by force. We've all done it. Everywhere in the world it's been done. No-one's innocent. But before you start talking about property rights, when's the date the rights start from?
But isn't fasting Un-American!?
Property - any kind of property - isn't a natural right. It can be enforced only by force. which either means you have a government to enforce property rights, or else that the guy with the bigger gun takes your property off you.
An anarchist society cannot survive much inequity. If people can accumulate property, what happens is that the most ruthless just grab everything, leaving everyone else with nothing. And because the ruthless started out by grabbing all the weapons, there isn't much anyone else can do about it. The word for that is 'feudalism' or 'tyrrany', not 'anarchism'.
This doesn't mean that I think you can't have a stable anarchist society, or that I don't believe a stable anarchist society would be a good thing; but you can't say 'there aren't any laws except the law of property'. That doesn't work. You need a whole government infrastructure just to enforce that, and once you've got a government infrastructure it will aggregate more power to itself - that's the nature of government.
That's what the Germans thought when they used Enigma.
You aren't thinking.
Multiply the number of employees in the company by US$50, and that's what this data stream is worth to an identity fraudster. If the identity fraudster also controls a botnet, a decade of processing power not only costs nothing but also can be supplied in a week of wall-clock time.
No, usually encrypted messages aren't worth cracking, because individually they're mostly not worth a lot of money. But this datastream is worth a very large amount of money. If the attacker knows what it is, it's definitely worth cracking.