Sounds like a reasonable argument to me. Welfare is the ultimate "imposing your sense of morality on me". For all the left's bitching about separation of church and state, here's the penultimate tenet of the Judeo-Christian ethos being enforced at gunpoint.
Don't get me wrong; I donate 10% of my income and a weekend a month to help the less fortunate. But it's MY CHOICE. I can give joyfully, and what's more, if I discover that my giving is not helping those who receive (or perhaps even hurting them), I can change the way I give.
To drag this back on topic, don't we all really know that money is not the problem with NASA? Let's face it; NASA has no real mandate from the people. Explore space? Oh, and also do...aviation type stuff. Isn't that a little vague? If I were the NASA bigwig, I would:
A. Dump the shuttle program B. Reduce our involvment in ISS C. Reduce the budget for exploration
So what does NASA do? NASA has one mission: reduce cost to orbit. Run 24 month programs with specific goals (develop a fuel pump that weighs x and costs x to produce). Focus on making the X-Prize achievable. Above all, partner with private industry. NASA's attitude towards private industry is basically the same as the Post Office's towards FedEx...
Definitely some truth about the inflated egos of programmers. I must disagree on a larger part here, however.
Being a programmer is about equal parts artist, engineer and scientist. And by artist, I don't mean artiste, I simple mean that solutions to problems bear some relation to the psychocultural background of the solver. Whether it's hard or not is not the point; I think you would agree it depends on the type of development being done.
You seem to be implying that if you're in other fields, there is no "zone". That's simply not true; a child care worker may experience a period of terrific well-being or behavioral insight into a child and have a period of high productivity in that sense...and God knows that teachers have good days and bad days.
All of what you've said here doesn't change the fact that the programming zone exists. You may grumble that we should just be happy with whatever environment we have. Fine...but that bears a cost, the reality of the lost productivity of a better coding environment. And man, if all we're talking about here is changing the lighting and dishing out free cokes and coffee, is that really so much to ask?
Light-deflecting material could make the suit blend in with surroundings
Light deflecting? Pining for the fjords? What kind of talk is that? Perhaps:
Light reflecting: okay, you look like a mirror.
Light refracting: Predator, but way hard (this is sci-fi).
If there is anything to this, it would seem more likely it's some kind of display camoflage, like a computer display displaying the image of the cube wall behind it...
You substitute one fallacy (ad authoritem) with another (begging the question)...
Anyhow, the big difference between a nuclear rocket and a chemical rocket "blowing up" (to use a technical term) is that while a chemical rocket is loading to the gills with volatile fuel, a nuke rocket will just sputter out. While there's pressure in the engine, there's not a office building full of volatile fuel in the equation. This makes nuke rockets somewhat safer than conventional rockets.
The worst case scenario, of course, is a catastophic mid-launch failure that scatters nuclear material over a wide area. I've read conflicting reports, though one source for which I have tremendous respect, physicist Michio Kaku has argued vehemently against nuke rockets for this reason.
It seems to me, however, that this is not an insurmountable problem. Believe it or not, it is possible for items to survive ground zero of a nucelar explosion relatively unscathed. Now steel spheres are a long way from a working nuclear core, but perhaps we let ourselves be emotionally carried away by the visual violence of an explosion: "nothing could survive that." Well, yes some things could survive that. Perhaps we just need to build engine cores that could...
Well, yes, there does have to be someone to blame. Occasionally, a serial killer does come out of a decent, stable home (I suppose; I've never heard of it, but I do accept that some kids are just born evil). But I don't know about you man, but most really nasty screwed up people I've known have come from parents that were investing their time and effort somewhere else (new husband, career, drugs).
Everyone repeat after me: parents matter. More than absolutely anything else in a kids life. It is NOT kneejerk to say, when you see a bad kid, "probably lousy parents".
I remember a study a few years back (mod me down for not having the details) that attempted to determine the most likely predictors of going to prison by examining the family histories, education, and sociological background of inmates. The on factor that crossed incomes, race, education and even sex was that they were born outside of marriage. Without two people investing full time in them, perhaps it was more difficult for them to function in the world.
I say perhaps for two reasons; first and foremost,/.'ers like their statistics straight and this study doesn't even purport to prove causality. Secondly, as in all things, at some point in their lives, no matter how screwed up their childhood was, each and every one of those inmates made a choice not to take responsibility for themselves and ended up in prison.
So, I disagree with you on the details, but agree with you on the overall principle.
Uh...guys. Check your MacroEco 101 textbooks. This is called the free rider problem, or the tragedy of the commons, for the love of Pete! These concepts were covered the year America signed the declaration of independence...
Just to inject a little shoot the moon sci-fi here, it seems like this moves the concept of memory "blanking" up a few years. With a good understanding of this stuff, it seems like you could develop a treatment (or perhaps even a drug) that could wipe out someone's memory of the past 24 hours (insert X-Files / Orwellian string swell here).
??? What's this??? Insightful economic analysis on Slashdot? You won't last long here...
Re:Deja Vu all over again
on
$1200 Cheap!
·
· Score: 2
This kind of talk really spooks me. You've ***granted*** Microsoft the right to do business? If Microsoft and I want to trade money and products, what business is it of yours? Mind your own damn business.
Only a Slashdotter would have so much chutzpah (and unintentional irony) to say that Adam Smith was naive about how the market works. Anyhow, let's examine the question you pose: "What happens to someone who subverts the public interest for their own?"
How is the public good being subverted here? If someone doesn't thing the bundle is a good deal, they won't buy it. If enough people don't buy it, then the retailers will be forced to un-bundle it, or lower the price. What's the problem? Public good is preserved.
I must not be getting my point across, because each time, somebody misses it. I'm not arguing that no one will work for altruism, just that if we limit the motive to altruism, we won't get the benefits to society that would come from those who would or can work only for profit.
Ahhh...but the point you miss is that, absent some ability to capture benefit from their idea, only those with some other means to support themselves, or those willing to suffer abject poverty (which pretty much describes the people in your list) will be able to pursue the activity.
We'll find people in four categories at the extremes: people who are terribly poor, and make crap, people who are terribly poor, and make great art; people who are terribly rich, and make crap, and people who are terribly rich, and make great art. The choice to limit IP says that our society will only allow the first two, cutting our possible greatness in half. Consider that there are probably a bunch of great poets out there doing accounting because they cannot fulfill their obligations with poetry.
From an economic standpoint, look at the abolition of IP rights as a price control, fixed at zero. Ceteris paribus, price ceilings causes shortages, period. You want fewer developed ideas in the world? Abolish IP rights.
This is the basic idea behind expiration of patents and the entry of artistic works into public domain: give the author time to internalize the benefits of his efforts, and then release the idea into the commons.
Particularly with the technological nature of the ideas we're talking about (aside from MP3), most of this stuff only has a shelf-life of so long...
The overriding concern to which citizens should adhere when deciding on how a society is structured is the question, "What incentives do we wish to create?" The Slashdot crowd seems to be overwhelmingly anti-intellectual property rights; I'm not sure whether it has adequately examined the consequences.
Consider the ideal pursued by many in the debate right now: total and absolute freedom of any idea. The inescapable consequence is that the ability of any one individual to capture benefits from that idea is gone. Thus the driving incentive to develop ideas is gone; I personally love studying astronomy, but I'm a programmer to pay the bills because I cannot feed my family on looking through a telescope.
So the paradox is that a society that jealously guards the rights of intellectual authors benefits the most from those ideas.
Here's a quote from another post:
The current IP regime is preventing inexpensive anti-AIDS drugs from being developed in Africa.
Consider the reality of the situation: a drug company spent millions of dollars to develop that drug for the purpose of making money. Maybe we wish they did things for different reasons, but unless we're willing to send their kids to school, it's really none of our business. If we abolish their intellectual property right to a particular AIDS drug, we gain the one drug for free use in Africa...but we can be sure there will never be another AIDS drug produced by that company.
The painful reality is that the profit motive is the most powerful transformative agent in the world. Abolish intellectual property, and you risk abolishing the benefit we derive from them.
I disagree that nanotechnology abolishes scarcity. It does nothing at all to abolish the scarcity of land, and only abolishes only some services. It ameliorates it certainly, but many elements of the modern economy will remain scarce. Assuming non-nuclear manipulation and assembly of objects, we can create 90% of our world with a bucket of sand, carbon and rust. What we can't create, however, is 100 acres of land on which to build the house whose raw materials we just created. Or, for that matter, the labor still required to assemble the house.
To pursue a more relevant line of logic, I cannot nanoassemble the experience of hearing a concert pianist... I must have something that the pianist wants and is thus willing to give up that portion of his time and effort.
Arthur C. Clarke has argued that the form of currency in the distant future will be the kilowatt hour. In a world where energy is the ultimate limit on production, this makes perfect sense. So while capitalism undergoes an sea-change transformation under those conditions, it's basic ability to distribute goods and services and signal scarcity is unchanged.
Interestingly enough, it seems to me that the last thing that could be effectively assembled in this way is food. Food has an incredibly complex structure with an incredibly sensitive error-detection process (taste).
It may be that the test was meant to test some other capability of the system than acquisition. I've hardwired dynamic capabilities as static into programs plenty of times when a demo of another feature was called for. It may be that this was a test of some other component for which the acquisition capability was assumed.
If, on the other hand, this is an honest deception (love that), we need to hang those bastards out to dry...
I ran some basic design concepts on this idea a few years back (nothing as sophisticated as DCC). I came to the same conclusion as the other readers, re: Countermeasures: the spammer would integrate something random into the message that would foul identification. There is simply no way around this. So the question becomes: at what point does the countermeasure become so expensive and difficult that the spam itself reaches the point of diminishing returns? Or, put another way, what can we track that would make the message so difficult to cloak that it wouldn't be worth it to do?
The cloak would have to be human-labour intensive, so it has to relate to the meaning of the text itself. I came up with a few variations, but in my own little thought-world, the most dependable signature for a spam was a key composed of the grammatical types of each word in the email. Chaff, or non-identifyable text would be ignored. With this system, even the words could be randomly generated (Get {rich, wealthy, affluent} and the signature would remain the same. How unique would the key be? I never did serious research, but it seems like it would be.
The major problem I encountered is that once this was done, the spam generator could then rotate the order of the sentences, or drop non-essential sentences altogether. You could make the key non-order dependent, but that would drastically reduce the uniqueness of the key...anyhow, the similarity index identified in this thread is a blazingly simple idea that somehow escaped me. Maybe it's time to dust of the docs...
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds like a reasonable argument to me. Welfare is the ultimate "imposing your sense of morality on me". For all the left's bitching about separation of church and state, here's the penultimate tenet of the Judeo-Christian ethos being enforced at gunpoint.
Don't get me wrong; I donate 10% of my income and a weekend a month to help the less fortunate. But it's MY CHOICE. I can give joyfully, and what's more, if I discover that my giving is not helping those who receive (or perhaps even hurting them), I can change the way I give.
To drag this back on topic, don't we all really know that money is not the problem with NASA? Let's face it; NASA has no real mandate from the people. Explore space? Oh, and also do...aviation type stuff. Isn't that a little vague? If I were the NASA bigwig, I would:
A. Dump the shuttle program
B. Reduce our involvment in ISS
C. Reduce the budget for exploration
So what does NASA do? NASA has one mission: reduce cost to orbit. Run 24 month programs with specific goals (develop a fuel pump that weighs x and costs x to produce). Focus on making the X-Prize achievable. Above all, partner with private industry. NASA's attitude towards private industry is basically the same as the Post Office's towards FedEx...
Definitely some truth about the inflated egos of programmers. I must disagree on a larger part here, however.
Being a programmer is about equal parts artist, engineer and scientist. And by artist, I don't mean artiste, I simple mean that solutions to problems bear some relation to the psychocultural background of the solver. Whether it's hard or not is not the point; I think you would agree it depends on the type of development being done.
You seem to be implying that if you're in other fields, there is no "zone". That's simply not true; a child care worker may experience a period of terrific well-being or behavioral insight into a child and have a period of high productivity in that sense...and God knows that teachers have good days and bad days.
All of what you've said here doesn't change the fact that the programming zone exists. You may grumble that we should just be happy with whatever environment we have. Fine...but that bears a cost, the reality of the lost productivity of a better coding environment. And man, if all we're talking about here is changing the lighting and dishing out free cokes and coffee, is that really so much to ask?
We do, however, have good evidence for the existence of black holes...
Asking as a non-physicist, do we really have good evidence for black holes, or simply for small, super-massive objects with accretion disks?
It seems to me that the essential "black hole-ness" of the observed objects is not really evident without far better observing devices than we have...
I've waited 20 years for these...
Light-deflecting material could make the suit blend in with surroundings
Light deflecting? Pining for the fjords? What kind of talk is that? Perhaps:
If there is anything to this, it would seem more likely it's some kind of display camoflage, like a computer display displaying the image of the cube wall behind it...
Firstly, IANARS.
You substitute one fallacy (ad authoritem) with another (begging the question)...
Anyhow, the big difference between a nuclear rocket and a chemical rocket "blowing up" (to use a technical term) is that while a chemical rocket is loading to the gills with volatile fuel, a nuke rocket will just sputter out. While there's pressure in the engine, there's not a office building full of volatile fuel in the equation. This makes nuke rockets somewhat safer than conventional rockets.
The worst case scenario, of course, is a catastophic mid-launch failure that scatters nuclear material over a wide area. I've read conflicting reports, though one source for which I have tremendous respect, physicist Michio Kaku has argued vehemently against nuke rockets for this reason.
It seems to me, however, that this is not an insurmountable problem. Believe it or not, it is possible for items to survive ground zero of a nucelar explosion relatively unscathed. Now steel spheres are a long way from a working nuclear core, but perhaps we let ourselves be emotionally carried away by the visual violence of an explosion: "nothing could survive that." Well, yes some things could survive that. Perhaps we just need to build engine cores that could...
Well, yes, there does have to be someone to blame. Occasionally, a serial killer does come out of a decent, stable home (I suppose; I've never heard of it, but I do accept that some kids are just born evil). But I don't know about you man, but most really nasty screwed up people I've known have come from parents that were investing their time and effort somewhere else (new husband, career, drugs).
/.'ers like their statistics straight and this study doesn't even purport to prove causality. Secondly, as in all things, at some point in their lives, no matter how screwed up their childhood was, each and every one of those inmates made a choice not to take responsibility for themselves and ended up in prison.
Everyone repeat after me: parents matter. More than absolutely anything else in a kids life. It is NOT kneejerk to say, when you see a bad kid, "probably lousy parents".
I remember a study a few years back (mod me down for not having the details) that attempted to determine the most likely predictors of going to prison by examining the family histories, education, and sociological background of inmates. The on factor that crossed incomes, race, education and even sex was that they were born outside of marriage. Without two people investing full time in them, perhaps it was more difficult for them to function in the world.
I say perhaps for two reasons; first and foremost,
So, I disagree with you on the details, but agree with you on the overall principle.
Uh...guys. Check your MacroEco 101 textbooks. This is called the free rider problem, or the tragedy of the commons, for the love of Pete! These concepts were covered the year America signed the declaration of independence...
Just to inject a little shoot the moon sci-fi here, it seems like this moves the concept of memory "blanking" up a few years. With a good understanding of this stuff, it seems like you could develop a treatment (or perhaps even a drug) that could wipe out someone's memory of the past 24 hours (insert X-Files / Orwellian string swell here).
??? What's this??? Insightful economic analysis on Slashdot? You won't last long here...
This kind of talk really spooks me. You've ***granted*** Microsoft the right to do business? If Microsoft and I want to trade money and products, what business is it of yours? Mind your own damn business.
Only a Slashdotter would have so much chutzpah (and unintentional irony) to say that Adam Smith was naive about how the market works. Anyhow, let's examine the question you pose: "What happens to someone who subverts the public interest for their own?"
How is the public good being subverted here? If someone doesn't thing the bundle is a good deal, they won't buy it. If enough people don't buy it, then the retailers will be forced to un-bundle it, or lower the price. What's the problem? Public good is preserved.
I must not be getting my point across, because each time, somebody misses it. I'm not arguing that no one will work for altruism, just that if we limit the motive to altruism, we won't get the benefits to society that would come from those who would or can work only for profit.
Again, price ceiling, shortages, done.
Moderate me down for redundancy...
Ahhh...but the point you miss is that, absent some ability to capture benefit from their idea, only those with some other means to support themselves, or those willing to suffer abject poverty (which pretty much describes the people in your list) will be able to pursue the activity.
We'll find people in four categories at the extremes: people who are terribly poor, and make crap, people who are terribly poor, and make great art; people who are terribly rich, and make crap, and people who are terribly rich, and make great art. The choice to limit IP says that our society will only allow the first two, cutting our possible greatness in half. Consider that there are probably a bunch of great poets out there doing accounting because they cannot fulfill their obligations with poetry.
From an economic standpoint, look at the abolition of IP rights as a price control, fixed at zero. Ceteris paribus, price ceilings causes shortages, period. You want fewer developed ideas in the world? Abolish IP rights.
This is the basic idea behind expiration of patents and the entry of artistic works into public domain: give the author time to internalize the benefits of his efforts, and then release the idea into the commons.
Particularly with the technological nature of the ideas we're talking about (aside from MP3), most of this stuff only has a shelf-life of so long...
The overriding concern to which citizens should adhere when deciding on how a society is structured is the question, "What incentives do we wish to create?" The Slashdot crowd seems to be overwhelmingly anti-intellectual property rights; I'm not sure whether it has adequately examined the consequences.
Consider the ideal pursued by many in the debate right now: total and absolute freedom of any idea. The inescapable consequence is that the ability of any one individual to capture benefits from that idea is gone. Thus the driving incentive to develop ideas is gone; I personally love studying astronomy, but I'm a programmer to pay the bills because I cannot feed my family on looking through a telescope.
So the paradox is that a society that jealously guards the rights of intellectual authors benefits the most from those ideas.
Here's a quote from another post:
The current IP regime is preventing inexpensive anti-AIDS drugs from being developed in Africa.
Consider the reality of the situation: a drug company spent millions of dollars to develop that drug for the purpose of making money. Maybe we wish they did things for different reasons, but unless we're willing to send their kids to school, it's really none of our business. If we abolish their intellectual property right to a particular AIDS drug, we gain the one drug for free use in Africa...but we can be sure there will never be another AIDS drug produced by that company.
The painful reality is that the profit motive is the most powerful transformative agent in the world. Abolish intellectual property, and you risk abolishing the benefit we derive from them.
I disagree that nanotechnology abolishes scarcity. It does nothing at all to abolish the scarcity of land, and only abolishes only some services. It ameliorates it certainly, but many elements of the modern economy will remain scarce. Assuming non-nuclear manipulation and assembly of objects, we can create 90% of our world with a bucket of sand, carbon and rust. What we can't create, however, is 100 acres of land on which to build the house whose raw materials we just created. Or, for that matter, the labor still required to assemble the house.
To pursue a more relevant line of logic, I cannot nanoassemble the experience of hearing a concert pianist... I must have something that the pianist wants and is thus willing to give up that portion of his time and effort.
Arthur C. Clarke has argued that the form of currency in the distant future will be the kilowatt hour. In a world where energy is the ultimate limit on production, this makes perfect sense. So while capitalism undergoes an sea-change transformation under those conditions, it's basic ability to distribute goods and services and signal scarcity is unchanged.
Interestingly enough, it seems to me that the last thing that could be effectively assembled in this way is food. Food has an incredibly complex structure with an incredibly sensitive error-detection process (taste).
It may be that the test was meant to test some other capability of the system than acquisition. I've hardwired dynamic capabilities as static into programs plenty of times when a demo of another feature was called for. It may be that this was a test of some other component for which the acquisition capability was assumed.
If, on the other hand, this is an honest deception (love that), we need to hang those bastards out to dry...
Pop this technology into a handheld, paired with speech recognition technology, an go visit the south of France without speaking a word of French...
I ran some basic design concepts on this idea a few years back (nothing as sophisticated as DCC). I came to the same conclusion as the other readers, re: Countermeasures: the spammer would integrate something random into the message that would foul identification. There is simply no way around this. So the question becomes: at what point does the countermeasure become so expensive and difficult that the spam itself reaches the point of diminishing returns? Or, put another way, what can we track that would make the message so difficult to cloak that it wouldn't be worth it to do?
The cloak would have to be human-labour intensive, so it has to relate to the meaning of the text itself. I came up with a few variations, but in my own little thought-world, the most dependable signature for a spam was a key composed of the grammatical types of each word in the email. Chaff, or non-identifyable text would be ignored. With this system, even the words could be randomly generated (Get {rich, wealthy, affluent} and the signature would remain the same. How unique would the key be? I never did serious research, but it seems like it would be.
The major problem I encountered is that once this was done, the spam generator could then rotate the order of the sentences, or drop non-essential sentences altogether. You could make the key non-order dependent, but that would drastically reduce the uniqueness of the key...anyhow, the similarity index identified in this thread is a blazingly simple idea that somehow escaped me. Maybe it's time to dust of the docs...