Free markets *want* to destroy themselves with monopolies. All businesses gravitate towards monopolies. It is simply a law of survival. So you *must* put in place some sort of restrictions so that "harmful" monopolies cannot form. And when I say harmful, I mean doing more harm to the consumer than the same amount of product and services provided by separate companies. I think if you have a "benificent" monopoly, where consumers are only benefitted, then it is a matter of philosophy whether that is allowed. But I think the nature of monopolies is that they generally do *not* benefit the consumer. Now enter in government-run/regulated monopolies. You immediately (or so it goes) make a harmful monopoly "benificent", by policy, by law. Of course this is only as true as how much you trust the government. Given a fully trusted government, theoretically, socialized monopolies may be just fine. Things are complicated if you allow companies to influence or dictate politics. Then it becomes a chicken and egg problem: you cannot fully trust government because it is being influenced by corporate power, yet you need government to legislate against corporate influence of politics.
And that, I believe, is the current state of the US political system. Which should explain my sig.
This thread was brought to you by the phrase "Cultural Relativism".
Yes it is ridiculous that Yahoo is being asked to actively ban any viewing of anything offensive to the French from any entity that might be originating in France. That's because it's technically infeasable.
But the poster is correct. Americans have to get off our goddamn high horse. We are only the *de facto* "bastion of democracy and free thought". Nobody voted for us to be. We are because we are big enough to have the gall to claim we are. There was nothing especially noble about our history or the set of values this country was founded on. It is entirely hypocritical, not to mention just downright rude and ignoratn to insist that our values are the best for everybody. Some societies might not see absolute freedom of speech in their interest. Some societies might not see a property based economy in their interest.
And since this thread is already stillborn with the mention of Nazism, I'll note that is even more ironic to criticize the French for this decision when it is upon the United States' highly effective native american extermination policy that the Nazi holocaust was based in the first place. I believe Himmler hung a picture of the native american in his office for inspiration. That don't teach that in the text books.
Reminds me of the old guy in The Shawshank Redemption. They let him out after many decades of "rehabilitation". He had been so isolated from society, so totally aloof, that he could not bear living in the foreign real world. So he hung himself.
Sometimes it just seems easier to jam our problems in a small dark hole and ignore them instead of actually trying hard to fix them.
I'm pretty sure *some* compiler supports 3DNow, because there are applications that use those instructions. Some MP3 players and FPS games to name some.
The only place I can see XML being used, as far as a universal configuration file format, is only as a large central repository, with well-defined semantics...perhaps RDF or something.
Otherwise, for the majority of small programs, XML is cracking a nut with a jackhammer. Before we even talk of XML, we should talk of some standard flat file. Take the java.lang.Properties format for instance. Straightforward key=value pairs. No magic, no whitespace wierdness. Very simple. Applicable for probably 95% of general applications. Only when you start needing to introduce *structure* do you really want XML. Which leads me to think the most applicable place for XML as far as configuration files, would be a central XML settings registry which *all* applications read through some standard API (but were not allowed to directly manipulate). XML is not a panacea. I think the vast majority of programs could do just find with a *standardized* flat file format. The problem now is just that there are so *many* different flat file formats being used.
I think only two states out of fifty, use any sort of representational electoral college. The rest are all winner-takes-all, which seems to me, to defeat the purpose of limiting the power of the majority.
I thought the auther made a clear distinction between equal representation and equal power, (e.g., under a dictatorship everybody had equal representation and zero power).
Mob rule isn't due to equal representation, but by equal power. That is why I mentioned that the way to avoid mob rule is to use the EC, *but* have the EC be representative. So, for instance, a large state would get slightly less vote in proportion to its size - yet these votes should equally represent the population of that state! The mob rule of the state would be curtailed because its power has been limited, but not the representation of the population within it. Currently, even if the former is true, the latter isn't, so the mob rules anyway. And a whole bunch of these tiny mobs take scads of states and electoral votes.
So the approach should be twofold: limit the majority, "mob" rule, power of states like CA, FL, NY, and TX, by curving their number of electoral votes with respect to their population, yet maintain "fairness" within the state by having said electoral votes represent accurately the population of that state. So at the national level, such states have their impact dampened, yet, their impact is still fair. Right now, even if their impact is dampened any, the impact is not fair at all because the winner takes the whole damn state. I think that defeats the purpose.
The problem is the Linux community is far from homogenous. Some people think that "success" means Linux on every desktop, or a toppling of Microsoft. Some people think success is simply building a higher-quality OS. Some people think success is spreading Free software. Others think success is scratching their itch, or getting somebody else to think "Oh cool".
But every time one faction gets any media or corporate attention, others stand up and say "Hey, you just don't *get* it. It's not about *that* it's about *this*. Duh!". Please... Linux needs whatever people want it to need, to succeed. For RedHat that might be getting a standardized UI (users are weird and like that sort of stuff), for Linus perhaps it's adding new technologies for embedded and big iron use. For Mr. Debian Hacker maybe it's maintaining a philosophically pure Free distribution. There's no one right answer, there are many.
P.S. Moderators: I would like a large Insightful with a side of Informative, hold the Redundant
The problem is, with a winner-takes-all electoral college, the "mob rule" is just elevated to the state level. Now, any majority, no matter how small a majority, will take ALL the votes in a given state. So the mob *does* rule. The way to prevent mob rule is *equal* representation. So each elector is actually a reflection of the popular vote in that state. I don't see how winner-takes-all does anything but amplify the tyranny of the majority. Hell, whoever has the fraction of the percent of majority in Florida, come 5 PM will determine who wins the presidential election. That's a big damn mob rule.
I'm sorry, but that just sounds bigoted to me. Just because they're old, and have bad vision doesn't make them dumb, and doesn't make their vote count any less. You should hope that when you're old, and going to vote, and accidentally screw up because the ballot is confusing (at least to you), that some hip, cool, whippersnapper doesn't come along and say that it's your own damn fault and you don't deserve your vote to be counted (correctly). Damn, some people just have no respect.
And on second thought, the way that he claims the electoral process works, isn't actually the way it is working *currently*. Every state except one (I believe) the winner takes ALL electoral votes. The does the exact *opposite* of the original intent of limiting the power of the majority, by actually giving the majority, no matter how slight, *more* power, amplifying their majority.
For instance, instead of *mitigating* a large block of, say, southern voters voting in unison, it instead solidifies that majority by overturning any opposition views on a state to state basis. Instead, electoral votes should not be winner-takes-all. Then at least, you can mitigate somewhat a very large population in a given state, voting in the same direction, by truncating their possible electoral votes, instead of just adding to them.
Ok, I can buy his argument that as the size of the group increases towards towards some asymptote we'll call "majority", the power of the individual vote should go down in some proportion so that the minority isn't swamped by the majority. The way this is done, I suppose, is to just give slightly proportionally less electoral votes to really really large states. But that's still at a macroscopic, very high-grain (or is it low-grain) level.
Even if he is theoretically correct, and that we could formulate the optimum "minority"/"majority" point (is it at 75%? 85%? 51%?), I think that in the current state of politics this wouldn't matter anyway. The whole presumption is that each voter is 1) trustworthy/caring, 2) informed. The percentage of people who actually fulfill both of these requirements may themselves a minority! The fact is, people aren't voting for politicians based on the facts, based on their records. Many people vote based on fuzzy things like "likability", and "appearance". They vote because the million dollar hype machines have stuck the right memes in their heads. They vote because Britney Spears told em to. And if you think this is a one-sided tirade against the "average American", I happen to believe that it is also largely the political parties' faults for playing right along - they're all too glad to lower the criteria for the election process to things they can win: convincing people win tons of commercials paid by PACs and soft money, going around repeating the same tired old scripts.
Now consider *that* case and the electoral college. The actual *merits* of the candidates matter much less than the money they can spend (funded by those interests who want to buy policy) to convince voters. So given an equal amount of vested interests (hey, many of these big corporations give money to *both* campaigns just to make sure that no matter who wins they get their agenda pushed), and consequently a pretty equal amount of hyping and advertising, you can imagine voter results to be much more uniform than you'd otherwise expect (*cough* win popular vote by a fraction of one percent *cough*).
So the choice is either 1) clean up the damn system so the above scenario doesn't happen, and the electoral college works correctly, or 2) reform or abolish electoral college. The ironic thing is, 1 cannot be accomplished *because* of the electoral college stemming any progressive change. So it may be that we have to reform or abolish the electoral college, so that we can actually have a chance to clean up politics, so that the system works as it was intended to in the first place!
I think the difference is not between art and coding, but between student and faculty. Faculty probably have a lot more control over stuff they create than students, regardless of what field it's in.
Feel free to show me any access logs you have. I did not change the text after I previewed it. Slashdot is notoriously bad in its handling of Plain Old Text, which shouldn't even allow tags anyway.
Since you are so smart, here is a test for you. Enter this in a Plain Old Text post, and then preview it. The less-than character of the closing a tag will have been malformedly translated.
<A HREF="http://www.internic.net/cgi-bin/whois?whois_ nic=guinness.&type=domain">THESE</ a>
I have a suggestion. Instead of linking directly to the tiny web server running on leech neurons or in a pizza box, can't slashdot just be nice and link to a Google cached copy (if one is available) instead of directly? For those who *really* want to pull directly from the poor victim, it's easy enough to read the big glaring "This is a Google cached copy" disclaimer and click through.
Yeah...but the number of devices without large LCDs/hard drives/memory/etc. is increasing - portable devices. If, as the reports indicate, this market is rapidly expanding, I can imagine Crusoe chips will be quite applicable there.
I especially like the theory that dinosaurs were actually feathered and ran around flapping their wings to achieve higher speeds. Not that I entirely dismiss the idea. I just think it is funny to imagine all these immense and fearsome creatures flapping around like so many chickens.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, so where is Mr. T. vs. Software patents?
He needs to round up these jibber-jabberin' bozos, drive them in his very fast van to the coast and then throw them helluva far. He's tough.
Free markets *want* to destroy themselves with monopolies. All businesses gravitate towards monopolies. It is simply a law of survival. So you *must* put in place some sort of restrictions so that "harmful" monopolies cannot form. And when I say harmful, I mean doing more harm to the consumer than the same amount of product and services provided by separate companies. I think if you have a "benificent" monopoly, where consumers are only benefitted, then it is a matter of philosophy whether that is allowed. But I think the nature of monopolies is that they generally do *not* benefit the consumer. Now enter in government-run/regulated monopolies. You immediately (or so it goes) make a harmful monopoly "benificent", by policy, by law. Of course this is only as true as how much you trust the government. Given a fully trusted government, theoretically, socialized monopolies may be just fine. Things are complicated if you allow companies to influence or dictate politics. Then it becomes a chicken and egg problem: you cannot fully trust government because it is being influenced by corporate power, yet you need government to legislate against corporate influence of politics.
And that, I believe, is the current state of the US political system. Which should explain my sig.
This thread was brought to you by the phrase "Cultural Relativism".
Yes it is ridiculous that Yahoo is being asked to actively ban any viewing of anything offensive to the French from any entity that might be originating in France. That's because it's technically infeasable.
But the poster is correct. Americans have to get off our goddamn high horse. We are only the *de facto* "bastion of democracy and free thought". Nobody voted for us to be. We are because we are big enough to have the gall to claim we are. There was nothing especially noble about our history or the set of values this country was founded on. It is entirely hypocritical, not to mention just downright rude and ignoratn to insist that our values are the best for everybody. Some societies might not see absolute freedom of speech in their interest. Some societies might not see a property based economy in their interest.
And since this thread is already stillborn with the mention of Nazism, I'll note that is even more ironic to criticize the French for this decision when it is upon the United States' highly effective native american extermination policy that the Nazi holocaust was based in the first place. I believe Himmler hung a picture of the native american in his office for inspiration. That don't teach that in the text books.
Recursion? You must mean [re]iteration.
and even further off-topic...
Reminds me of the old guy in The Shawshank Redemption. They let him out after many decades of "rehabilitation". He had been so isolated from society, so totally aloof, that he could not bear living in the foreign real world. So he hung himself.
Sometimes it just seems easier to jam our problems in a small dark hole and ignore them instead of actually trying hard to fix them.
I'm pretty sure *some* compiler supports 3DNow, because there are applications that use those instructions. Some MP3 players and FPS games to name some.
nonononono....
The only place I can see XML being used, as far as a universal configuration file format, is only as a large central repository, with well-defined semantics...perhaps RDF or something.
Otherwise, for the majority of small programs, XML is cracking a nut with a jackhammer. Before we even talk of XML, we should talk of some standard flat file. Take the java.lang.Properties format for instance. Straightforward key=value pairs. No magic, no whitespace wierdness. Very simple. Applicable for probably 95% of general applications. Only when you start needing to introduce *structure* do you really want XML. Which leads me to think the most applicable place for XML as far as configuration files, would be a central XML settings registry which *all* applications read through some standard API (but were not allowed to directly manipulate). XML is not a panacea. I think the vast majority of programs could do just find with a *standardized* flat file format. The problem now is just that there are so *many* different flat file formats being used.
Asimov? Didn't Tesla predict drone aircraft way before that?
I think only two states out of fifty, use any sort of representational electoral college. The rest are all winner-takes-all, which seems to me, to defeat the purpose of limiting the power of the majority.
Absence of a reason not to do something, is not, alone, a reason TO do something.
I have no reason not to run around flapping my wings and clucking. I guess I should do that then.
I thought the auther made a clear distinction between equal representation and equal power, (e.g., under a dictatorship everybody had equal representation and zero power).
Mob rule isn't due to equal representation, but by equal power. That is why I mentioned that the way to avoid mob rule is to use the EC, *but* have the EC be representative. So, for instance, a large state would get slightly less vote in proportion to its size - yet these votes should equally represent the population of that state! The mob rule of the state would be curtailed because its power has been limited, but not the representation of the population within it. Currently, even if the former is true, the latter isn't, so the mob rules anyway. And a whole bunch of these tiny mobs take scads of states and electoral votes.
So the approach should be twofold: limit the majority, "mob" rule, power of states like CA, FL, NY, and TX, by curving their number of electoral votes with respect to their population, yet maintain "fairness" within the state by having said electoral votes represent accurately the population of that state. So at the national level, such states have their impact dampened, yet, their impact is still fair. Right now, even if their impact is dampened any, the impact is not fair at all because the winner takes the whole damn state. I think that defeats the purpose.
The problem is the Linux community is far from homogenous. Some people think that "success" means Linux on every desktop, or a toppling of Microsoft. Some people think success is simply building a higher-quality OS. Some people think success is spreading Free software. Others think success is scratching their itch, or getting somebody else to think "Oh cool".
But every time one faction gets any media or corporate attention, others stand up and say "Hey, you just don't *get* it. It's not about *that* it's about *this*. Duh!". Please... Linux needs whatever people want it to need, to succeed. For RedHat that might be getting a standardized UI (users are weird and like that sort of stuff), for Linus perhaps it's adding new technologies for embedded and big iron use. For Mr. Debian Hacker maybe it's maintaining a philosophically pure Free distribution. There's no one right answer, there are many.
P.S. Moderators: I would like a large Insightful with a side of Informative, hold the Redundant
The problem is, with a winner-takes-all electoral college, the "mob rule" is just elevated to the state level. Now, any majority, no matter how small a majority, will take ALL the votes in a given state. So the mob *does* rule. The way to prevent mob rule is *equal* representation. So each elector is actually a reflection of the popular vote in that state. I don't see how winner-takes-all does anything but amplify the tyranny of the majority. Hell, whoever has the fraction of the percent of majority in Florida, come 5 PM will determine who wins the presidential election. That's a big damn mob rule.
I'm sorry, but that just sounds bigoted to me. Just because they're old, and have bad vision doesn't make them dumb, and doesn't make their vote count any less. You should hope that when you're old, and going to vote, and accidentally screw up because the ballot is confusing (at least to you), that some hip, cool, whippersnapper doesn't come along and say that it's your own damn fault and you don't deserve your vote to be counted (correctly). Damn, some people just have no respect.
And on second thought, the way that he claims the electoral process works, isn't actually the way it is working *currently*. Every state except one (I believe) the winner takes ALL electoral votes. The does the exact *opposite* of the original intent of limiting the power of the majority, by actually giving the majority, no matter how slight, *more* power, amplifying their majority.
For instance, instead of *mitigating* a large block of, say, southern voters voting in unison, it instead solidifies that majority by overturning any opposition views on a state to state basis. Instead, electoral votes should not be winner-takes-all. Then at least, you can mitigate somewhat a very large population in a given state, voting in the same direction, by truncating their possible electoral votes, instead of just adding to them.
(ok, rant over)
Ok, I can buy his argument that as the size of the group increases towards towards some asymptote we'll call "majority", the power of the individual vote should go down in some proportion so that the minority isn't swamped by the majority. The way this is done, I suppose, is to just give slightly proportionally less electoral votes to really really large states. But that's still at a macroscopic, very high-grain (or is it low-grain) level.
Even if he is theoretically correct, and that we could formulate the optimum "minority"/"majority" point (is it at 75%? 85%? 51%?), I think that in the current state of politics this wouldn't matter anyway. The whole presumption is that each voter is 1) trustworthy/caring, 2) informed. The percentage of people who actually fulfill both of these requirements may themselves a minority! The fact is, people aren't voting for politicians based on the facts, based on their records. Many people vote based on fuzzy things like "likability", and "appearance". They vote because the million dollar hype machines have stuck the right memes in their heads. They vote because Britney Spears told em to. And if you think this is a one-sided tirade against the "average American", I happen to believe that it is also largely the political parties' faults for playing right along - they're all too glad to lower the criteria for the election process to things they can win: convincing people win tons of commercials paid by PACs and soft money, going around repeating the same tired old scripts.
Now consider *that* case and the electoral college. The actual *merits* of the candidates matter much less than the money they can spend (funded by those interests who want to buy policy) to convince voters. So given an equal amount of vested interests (hey, many of these big corporations give money to *both* campaigns just to make sure that no matter who wins they get their agenda pushed), and consequently a pretty equal amount of hyping and advertising, you can imagine voter results to be much more uniform than you'd otherwise expect (*cough* win popular vote by a fraction of one percent *cough*).
So the choice is either 1) clean up the damn system so the above scenario doesn't happen, and the electoral college works correctly, or 2) reform or abolish electoral college. The ironic thing is, 1 cannot be accomplished *because* of the electoral college stemming any progressive change. So it may be that we have to reform or abolish the electoral college, so that we can actually have a chance to clean up politics, so that the system works as it was intended to in the first place!
...and both of their wives on the sidelines in spandex, weilding chairs...
ew...maybe not...
I think the difference is not between art and coding, but between student and faculty. Faculty probably have a lot more control over stuff they create than students, regardless of what field it's in.
...please stand up. Please stand up. Please stand up.
Feel free to show me any access logs you have. I did not change the text after I previewed it. Slashdot is notoriously bad in its handling of Plain Old Text, which shouldn't even allow tags anyway.
_ nic=guinness.&type=domain">THESE</ a>
Since you are so smart, here is a test for you. Enter this in a Plain Old Text post, and then preview it. The less-than character of the closing a tag will have been malformedly translated.
<A HREF="http://www.internic.net/cgi-bin/whois?whois
I have a suggestion. Instead of linking directly to the tiny web server running on leech neurons or in a pizza box, can't slashdot just be nice and link to a Google cached copy (if one is available) instead of directly? For those who *really* want to pull directly from the poor victim, it's easy enough to read the big glaring "This is a Google cached copy" disclaimer and click through.
Yeah...but the number of devices without large LCDs/hard drives/memory/etc. is increasing - portable devices. If, as the reports indicate, this market is rapidly expanding, I can imagine Crusoe chips will be quite applicable there.
I especially like the theory that dinosaurs were actually feathered and ran around flapping their wings to achieve higher speeds. Not that I entirely dismiss the idea. I just think it is funny to imagine all these immense and fearsome creatures flapping around like so many chickens.