I don't think this chap had much to fear from an American corporation.
Er, I think he did - we're talking about a number of American banks here, being at least indirectly grossly negligent.
Remember the ILOVEYOU virus? I don't recall national boundaries - and even a lack of computer crime laws in the country in question - being a barrier to tracking down and detaining the chief suspect there.
There's no guarantee that automatic checking would fix this bug. If the model didn't account for negative altitudes properly, it wouldn't catch the bug.
Still, it's probably easier to see the error in a clearly-written formula than in a few thousand lines of dispersed code.
There is another point of view. The unix guy is not being arrogant, he is being assertive. It is the Windoze users who are at fault for being so thoughtless - for assuming, quite without good reason, that everyone will be able to read their proprietary-format files.
I'm curious to see more details on C# to see if it's going to JIT compile to native bytecode or just re# the Java model of running interpreted code on an emulator for a Virtual Machine.
You're behind the times. Java has had JITs for years. And the latest "JIT", Hotspot, is quite something - it does dynamic optimisation.
There are also freely accessible servers that do this sort of cookie munging - I've been able to use some of them on various different platforms. See http://dmoz.org/Computers/Security/Internet/Privac y/Tools_and_Services/Free/
You might want to take a look at nanotechnology. Try "Engines of Creation" by Eric Drexler, a book which is also online at http://www.foresight.org . Essentially, the idea is that cheap universal nanoassemblers will be able to make anything that is physically possible - given sufficient raw materials - so that production will be decentralised. Oh, and pollution will disappear too - it's an artifact of macroscopic production, and existing pollution will be cheap to clean up with nanites.
Nice pipe dream - but it is actually based on some fairly solid engineering projections.
There's an even simpler objection to applying game theory to real-life economics. How much information should a rational agent collect? How should they decide between competing sources of information, all unfamiliar? How do we know whether information will be useful until we've collected it? There's one or two good papers on this on the web.
Governments and those in power cannot be trusted. That is why we must keep them in check, limited.
I take it you include powerful corporations in this. If not, why not? Why do libertarians always want to check the government, but not the corporations?
Economics is a capitalist ideology. You can't use economics to argue for capitalism, that's circular. Because economics assumes that money is the measure of all things, which it isn't.
you will unleash the imaginations of a thousand entrepreneurs on the problem,
Yeah, and they will all be scheming how to avoid paying the pollution costs. Somehow, putting the environment in the hands of a bunch of selfish capitalists (oh, sorry, entrepreneurs) doesn't seem all that attractive to me.
I'd much rather see a participative democracy, in which decisions were made based on how much and how badly people were affected, not on how much money they had. The trouble with money is that rich people have too much of it, and therefore decisions are unfairly biased in their favour (just take the criminal justice system). In fact, money is not a universal measure of worth at all, because $1000 to a billionaire is worth much less than $1000 to a subsistence farmer who has nothing.
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Mind you, I'd never use the GPL either, but that's not because I don't like Free Software, it's because I don't think the GPL is free enough, for me.
Or the fact that we have too few editors to keep up with submissions in some areas.
--
Robin Green
ODP editor "greenrd"
Er, I think he did - we're talking about a number of American banks here, being at least indirectly grossly negligent.
Remember the ILOVEYOU virus? I don't recall national boundaries - and even a lack of computer crime laws in the country in question - being a barrier to tracking down and detaining the chief suspect there.
There's no guarantee that automatic checking would fix this bug. If the model didn't account for negative altitudes properly, it wouldn't catch the bug.
Still, it's probably easier to see the error in a clearly-written formula than in a few thousand lines of dispersed code.
So - reductio ad absurdum - x86 assembly language (or machine code) is "buggy"? I don't think so.
or just grab a nightly build.
You're behind the times. Java has had JITs for years. And the latest "JIT", Hotspot, is quite something - it does dynamic optimisation.
Nice pipe dream - but it is actually based on some fairly solid engineering projections.
There's an even simpler objection to applying game theory to real-life economics. How much information should a rational agent collect? How should they decide between competing sources of information, all unfamiliar? How do we know whether information will be useful until we've collected it? There's one or two good papers on this on the web.
Just because someone is irrational doesn't mean they aren't predictable. They could predictably go to Voodoo meetings every week.
How can a libertarian argue for littering laws, when littering is not a violent use of force?
I take it you include powerful corporations in this. If not, why not? Why do libertarians always want to check the government, but not the corporations?
Economics is a capitalist ideology. You can't use economics to argue for capitalism, that's circular. Because economics assumes that money is the measure of all things, which it isn't.
Yeah, and they will all be scheming how to avoid paying the pollution costs. Somehow, putting the environment in the hands of a bunch of selfish capitalists (oh, sorry, entrepreneurs) doesn't seem all that attractive to me.
I'd much rather see a participative democracy, in which decisions were made based on how much and how badly people were affected, not on how much money they had. The trouble with money is that rich people have too much of it, and therefore decisions are unfairly biased in their favour (just take the criminal justice system). In fact, money is not a universal measure of worth at all, because $1000 to a billionaire is worth much less than $1000 to a subsistence farmer who has nothing.
Exactly. The so-called "right" to hoard potentially infinite amounts of wealth is not self-evident, and needs to be justified.
What you say may all be true, but it still has Lots of Irritating Silly Parantheses.
In other words, it tends to be harder to read (and write) than say Java.