Bitcoin is the greatest real-world experiment in Austrian economics. For once we'll get to actually see if a "deflationary spiral" will actually occur when the rate of money creation slows, or if the Keyensians were just full of it.
Whether bitcoin actually succeeds or not, we'll at least get some really good data.
I don't know how you can possibly claim that taxes are not coercive. They are absolutely coercive. If you don't pay your taxes - the government will come for you. Even if you live on your own property, and never use any public services (which is most certainly possible), they will still make you pay. Taxes are not at all like paying for a dinner that you've already eaten, because they'll make you pay whether you've eaten or not.
I agree that people should pay for services that they use. But, taxes are a horribly inefficient way to do this.
Government is not civilization. Government is just a monopoly on force. I don't disagree that paying taxes pays for many things, including roads and national defense, but if you took government out of the equation, we'd still be living in a civilization. As long as humans act rationally, and cooperate with each other, we've got civilization.
Rep. Ronald Paul [R-TX]: Mr. Speaker, H.R. 180 is premised on the assumption that. divestment, sanctions, and other punitive measures are effective in influencing repressive regimes, when in fact nothing could be further from the truth. Proponents of such methods fail to remember that where goods cannot cross borders, troops will. Sanctions against Cuba, Iraq, and numerous other countries failed to topple their governments. Rather than weakening dictators, these sanctions strengthened their hold on power and led to more suffering on the part of the Cuban and Iraqi people. To the extent that divestment effected change in South Africa, it was brought about by private individuals working through the market to influence others.
No one denies that the humanitarian situation in Darfur is dire, but the United States Government has no business entangling itself in this situation, nor in forcing divestment on unwilling parties. Any further divestment action should be undertaken through voluntary means and not by government fiat.
H.R. 180 is an interventionist piece of legislation which will extend the power of the Federal Government over American businesses...
The key quote here is this: "...the United States Government has no business [...] in forcing divestment on unwilling parties". This stands true to the core of Ron Paul's principles: the government does not have the right to tell people how to run their business.
"...but teaching people to use some library or other is simply not an academic pursuit"
I disagree. I think students should be exposed to many libraries from many different languages, including a few GUI libraries. The more different types of libraries that someone learns, the more they realize the different ways there are to do something. Also, after learning the first library, learning the second library will be easier, and learning the third will be even easier. Since the field is constantly changing, you really need to learn how to learn.
You know, California didn't actually deregulate the power market. Just because California claimed they were deregulating doesn't mean they were.
Part of the "deregualtion" law was that new owners of the divested power plants were forced to sell their juice to a state-managed "power pool." The price of that power was set by a daily spot market run by the state. (source, and more info here)
It isn't deregulation when private owners are forced to sell thier goods to the state, at a price decided by the state.
Obama though did vote FOR the Patriot act. Also, coming out against the war in 2004 isn't exactly ahead of the curve. The war was already going badly at that point. (Obama Voting Record)
Compare this to Ron Paul, who has been against the war from day 1. He also voted against the Patriot act from Day 1. (
Ron Paul Voting record)
Obama is young and charismatic, and he may seem like a breath of fresh air. But, in the end he's just another poitician. He changes his positions based on whatever suits his needs at the time. For a real change, Ron Paul is your man.
Would you truly say that you are unhappy with the state of the desktop OS market? I really don't know enough to comment decisively, being a Linux user my views are probably slighly skewed, I feel like I have all the choice in the world. But, I think that most consumers aren't all that unhappy either. The price of Windows has not gone up over the years, and the OS itself has gotten better. Additionally, I would argue that MS's "monopoly" has been gradually slipping year by year. IE is no longer the only legitimate browser (most sites support FF these days, and the numbers are growing), Office now has some serious competitors (Google Apps, and openoffice to a lesser extent). And, although again, my view may be skewed, I think that Linux is only becoming more and more of a threat.
In a free market, monopolies do die on there own. Sadly, there have been very few monopolies in recent history that weren't a result of the government.
As for IP, I didn't actually decry it, I just said that it is one of the only ways for infinitely high barriers to entry to exist. I do think that it could be possible for most IP to be protected through trade secrets and contractual aggreements. However, I agree that in today's society, limited patents and copyrights play an important role, and I am not going to argue against them.
You can't seriously mean that the crap that Enron pulled should be legal, can you?
It already was illegal, there's no need for a new law to make it even more illegal.
companies will use it to screw over customers... like a Nintendo (back when there was no real competition, that is - now the field is too crowded to mess around too much with the customer)
And there, you touched on the point that shows so clearly how free markets work so well. Nintendo may have had a near monopoly 20 years ago, but guess what? New players came into the marketplace, and now Nintendo has to play nice with the consumer, or else we'll take our business elsewhere.
As a player in the market I play not just for profit, but for market share. My aim is to put all competitors out of business, and since I'm in a market with very high barriers to entry I can keep them out of business. Now that I have achieved a monopoly (and monopoly rents), the retailers have no choice but to do business with me and I will certainly dictate the exact conditions under which my products can be sold. If I'm unable to achive a monopoly, I will instead collude with the other surviving players to our mutual advantage, and again to the disadvantage of retailers and consumers.
The problem with your scenario is that it relys on a market that has a "high barrier to entry", or a market whose barrier to entry is so high that no other players can enter, no matter what. The reality is though, in a true free market this is never the case. No matter how high the barrier to entry, there is always room for another player.
There are two things that can help overcome high barriers to entry. Large companied with lots of capital, and innovation of new technologies. Large companies help because, for example, if every widget company decided to start selling their widgets for double the price that they should, then some other rich company with lots of capital to invest in making widgets is going to come in and start selling widgets for less.
The most important equalizer to high barriers to entry though is innovation. No matter what, new technologies will always be invented, and no monopoly can ever rest on its laurels forever. The market may be unbalanced for a short while, but it will even itself out, quicker and fairer than slow moving anti-trust laws can.
The only way that there can be a market with an infinitely high barrier to entry is when the government is involved, through patents, copyrights, subsidies, and other protectionist laws.
I was going to respond and recomend that you didn't take Cerner, but it appears that you already took one of the offers. I don't know first hand that Cerner is bad, but a few of my classmates had internships there and were fairly unhappy with the work that they were doing. Not to mention the fact that it's in Kansas City. (If the offer you got from from Kansas City isn't Cerner, then nevermind, but I don't of know any other CS compaies around there.)
Firefox's default is to resize images. I agree though, it's an annoying "feature" and I wish that it weren't the default, especially since they use such a crappy resize algorigthm.
It will slow any competent hacker only a few minutes at most. There are ample free programs that allow you to crack the password for the official versions of AIM, and MSN. And, anyways, for AIM, you should definitely NOT be using a password that you use for anything else, since it is sent across the the network unencrypted (well, its slightly obfuscated, but by no means encrypted) and it is trivially easy for an attacker with a packet sniffer to sniff your password.
Based on the theory of evolution, any sufficiently advanced species will have to be able think in terms of killing and weapons. If a species were to be created that was not able to kill, then it will also not be able to protect itself, and would probably be killed off by another species that can kill.
It's possible that an extremely advanced civilization could have moved beyond the need to kill, and therefore does not any longer have the concept of killing and weapons. However, in order to become this advanced, they will have to have come from a background that included the concept of killing.
I think if we ever come in contact with aliens, the one thing that we will be able to assume is that they are a species that has survived and evolved for millions of years, and therefore is capable of killing.
Rendering slashdot correctly is by no means the correct way to judge a browser. That's like saying that since IE renders my bank's site correctly, all other browsers are bad. Slashdot is truly coded incredibly shittily. Go ahead and run it through the validator
As for mozilla re-implementing their own widgets. That was the ONLY way to make it truly cross-platform. It's not "just a browser". It's an entire cross-platform runtime environment, that can be used to quickly and efficiently develop advanced cross-platform web applications.
Maybe you're thinking of Winamp3? Because Winamp2/5 has plenty of keyboard shortcuts. Winamp5 even has unviversal shortcuts. Justin Frankel had nothing to do with Winamp3.
You are correct in saying that the iPod's are not overpriced, if you are looking at it from Apple's perspective. They sell like hotcakes, and Apple is making a ton of money off of them. But, they don't sell so well because they are smaller or faster or more user-friendly. They sell so well because Apple has created an image. iPod's have almost become a status symbol. That's why when I see someone that has bought a new iPod, I think that they have wasted money, because for more than $100 less, they could have bought a Karma, which supports more formats, weighs the less, and has recieved many great reviews.
You're not alone in thinking like this. I remember when watching the 2003 WSOP, someone said that most of the pros don't like playing with amateurs for the same reasons that you said. I think that the best thing to remember when you're playing lower limit games with bad players, is that you are playing with bad players. You almost have to try to play worse to do well when you are playing with them, and you can never bluff them. The way to win, is just to make sure that when you do have a great hand, get as much money into the pot as possible, because the amateurs will be likely to call, and that's when you'll make your money.
One problem I've heard about is collusion. You go to a casino or a card club and play for money with people you don't know, and you don't realize that two of them are actually in it together. For instance, they'll have a secret signal so that one knows to drop out when the other is bluffing. Seems like it could be equally bad online.
The nice thing about playing online though, is that the house always knows what cards everyone has. And also, the house can keep track of who plays together. This makes it _much_ harder for players to successfully collude. I play online a lot at Party Poker. At first I was afraid of people colluding against me. A friend of mine also joined up at the same time as me, and we started playing on a lot af tables together. After a few hours of switching tables and always playing together, they wouldn't let us play at the same table anymore. We weren't colluding or anything, they just noted that two people had been playing together for a long time, and the odds of it being random in a pool of thousands of people is relatively low. At first I was kinda pissed that I couldn't sit with him anymore, but then I realized that this meant that if anyone were trying to collude, it would be very hard.
This is different than playing live, because the house can't do a statistical test of whether or not two people have been playing together too much. Also, if players are acting suspicious online, the house can always take a look at what cards the suspected colluders had, and see if one of them laid down a good hand, or something like that. Overall, I feel pretty confident that colluders aren't too much of a problem when I play online.
By the way, the 10 MB limit isn't just for the attachment size, it is the limit for the entire email itself. I have tried sending 9.8MB files, and the system won't let me. So, I think that UUEncoding a giant file and putting it in the message body wouldn't work either.
I'm a beta tester, the attachment size limit is actually only 10 megabytes. And they seem to limit the speed of uploads to about 30-40 KB/sec, which isn't that slow, but I bet they have some sort of system set up where the speed gets slower and slower for a certain account if that account starts either uploading or downloading too many MB of files.
There is a major difference between 'censorship' and 'government censorship'. From reading many of the comments, it seems that that is what many people seem to be forgetting. If google did indeed delete the site from their index, then it is indeed censorship. It is not as extreme as the governent sending in armed troops and shutting down the servers that the website is hosted on, but it is censorship.
This isn't that bad though, becuase if I do conclusivly find that google did actually delete the page from their index, then I will be more likely to use a different search engine, and so will other peoeple. So, it is not in google's best interest to delete the index.
Censorship is anytime that a major host of information denies access to that information. If Google did delete the index, then Google isn't actually denying access to the website, but they are denying access to the link to the site, which is censorship. It's just not as bad as government censorship.
How did you come up with all of this??? I applaud you , because I liked your script MUCH more than the movie that I saw. Too bad you didn't work with the Wachowski brothers, if they would have incorporated half of your ideas, the movie would have been ten times better.
Your movie was better because, it explained why neo had psychic powers while still in the real world, it gave a purpose and a reason as to why he was stuck in the train station at the beginning, it had more and cooler fight scenes, Morpheus had a legitimate part, and finally, the ending of your movie is actually a happy ending.
Overall, I think that you should do a re-make and use this script instead.
Slashdot Mirror
Bitcoin is the greatest real-world experiment in Austrian economics. For once we'll get to actually see if a "deflationary spiral" will actually occur when the rate of money creation slows, or if the Keyensians were just full of it. Whether bitcoin actually succeeds or not, we'll at least get some really good data.
I don't know how you can possibly claim that taxes are not coercive. They are absolutely coercive. If you don't pay your taxes - the government will come for you. Even if you live on your own property, and never use any public services (which is most certainly possible), they will still make you pay. Taxes are not at all like paying for a dinner that you've already eaten, because they'll make you pay whether you've eaten or not.
I agree that people should pay for services that they use. But, taxes are a horribly inefficient way to do this.
Government is not civilization. Government is just a monopoly on force. I don't disagree that paying taxes pays for many things, including roads and national defense, but if you took government out of the equation, we'd still be living in a civilization. As long as humans act rationally, and cooperate with each other, we've got civilization.
Yay! Anecdotal evidence!
"...but teaching people to use some library or other is simply not an academic pursuit"
I disagree. I think students should be exposed to many libraries from many different languages, including a few GUI libraries. The more different types of libraries that someone learns, the more they realize the different ways there are to do something. Also, after learning the first library, learning the second library will be easier, and learning the third will be even easier. Since the field is constantly changing, you really need to learn how to learn.
You know, California didn't actually deregulate the power market. Just because California claimed they were deregulating doesn't mean they were.
Part of the "deregualtion" law was that new owners of the divested power plants were forced to sell their juice to a state-managed "power pool." The price of that power was set by a daily spot market run by the state. (source, and more info here)
It isn't deregulation when private owners are forced to sell thier goods to the state, at a price decided by the state.
Obama though did vote FOR the Patriot act. Also, coming out against the war in 2004 isn't exactly ahead of the curve. The war was already going badly at that point. (Obama Voting Record)
Compare this to Ron Paul, who has been against the war from day 1. He also voted against the Patriot act from Day 1. ( Ron Paul Voting record)
Obama on the other hand has said "I don't oppose all wars." He would even has said that he would consider a missile strike on Iran.
Obama is young and charismatic, and he may seem like a breath of fresh air. But, in the end he's just another poitician. He changes his positions based on whatever suits his needs at the time. For a real change, Ron Paul is your man.
Would you truly say that you are unhappy with the state of the desktop OS market? I really don't know enough to comment decisively, being a Linux user my views are probably slighly skewed, I feel like I have all the choice in the world. But, I think that most consumers aren't all that unhappy either. The price of Windows has not gone up over the years, and the OS itself has gotten better. Additionally, I would argue that MS's "monopoly" has been gradually slipping year by year. IE is no longer the only legitimate browser (most sites support FF these days, and the numbers are growing), Office now has some serious competitors (Google Apps, and openoffice to a lesser extent). And, although again, my view may be skewed, I think that Linux is only becoming more and more of a threat.
In a free market, monopolies do die on there own. Sadly, there have been very few monopolies in recent history that weren't a result of the government.
As for IP, I didn't actually decry it, I just said that it is one of the only ways for infinitely high barriers to entry to exist. I do think that it could be possible for most IP to be protected through trade secrets and contractual aggreements. However, I agree that in today's society, limited patents and copyrights play an important role, and I am not going to argue against them.
You can't seriously mean that the crap that Enron pulled should be legal, can you?
... like a Nintendo (back when there was no real competition, that is - now the field is too crowded to mess around too much with the customer)
It already was illegal, there's no need for a new law to make it even more illegal.
companies will use it to screw over customers
And there, you touched on the point that shows so clearly how free markets work so well. Nintendo may have had a near monopoly 20 years ago, but guess what? New players came into the marketplace, and now Nintendo has to play nice with the consumer, or else we'll take our business elsewhere.
As a player in the market I play not just for profit, but for market share. My aim is to put all competitors out of business, and since I'm in a market with very high barriers to entry I can keep them out of business. Now that I have achieved a monopoly (and monopoly rents), the retailers have no choice but to do business with me and I will certainly dictate the exact conditions under which my products can be sold. If I'm unable to achive a monopoly, I will instead collude with the other surviving players to our mutual advantage, and again to the disadvantage of retailers and consumers.
The problem with your scenario is that it relys on a market that has a "high barrier to entry", or a market whose barrier to entry is so high that no other players can enter, no matter what. The reality is though, in a true free market this is never the case. No matter how high the barrier to entry, there is always room for another player.
There are two things that can help overcome high barriers to entry. Large companied with lots of capital, and innovation of new technologies. Large companies help because, for example, if every widget company decided to start selling their widgets for double the price that they should, then some other rich company with lots of capital to invest in making widgets is going to come in and start selling widgets for less.
The most important equalizer to high barriers to entry though is innovation. No matter what, new technologies will always be invented, and no monopoly can ever rest on its laurels forever. The market may be unbalanced for a short while, but it will even itself out, quicker and fairer than slow moving anti-trust laws can.
The only way that there can be a market with an infinitely high barrier to entry is when the government is involved, through patents, copyrights, subsidies, and other protectionist laws.
I was going to respond and recomend that you didn't take Cerner, but it appears that you already took one of the offers. I don't know first hand that Cerner is bad, but a few of my classmates had internships there and were fairly unhappy with the work that they were doing. Not to mention the fact that it's in Kansas City. (If the offer you got from from Kansas City isn't Cerner, then nevermind, but I don't of know any other CS compaies around there.)
Firefox's default is to resize images. I agree though, it's an annoying "feature" and I wish that it weren't the default, especially since they use such a crappy resize algorigthm.
It will slow any competent hacker only a few minutes at most. There are ample free programs that allow you to crack the password for the official versions of AIM, and MSN. And, anyways, for AIM, you should definitely NOT be using a password that you use for anything else, since it is sent across the the network unencrypted (well, its slightly obfuscated, but by no means encrypted) and it is trivially easy for an attacker with a packet sniffer to sniff your password.
It's possible that an extremely advanced civilization could have moved beyond the need to kill, and therefore does not any longer have the concept of killing and weapons. However, in order to become this advanced, they will have to have come from a background that included the concept of killing.
I think if we ever come in contact with aliens, the one thing that we will be able to assume is that they are a species that has survived and evolved for millions of years, and therefore is capable of killing.
Rendering slashdot correctly is by no means the correct way to judge a browser. That's like saying that since IE renders my bank's site correctly, all other browsers are bad. Slashdot is truly coded incredibly shittily. Go ahead and run it through the validator
As for mozilla re-implementing their own widgets. That was the ONLY way to make it truly cross-platform. It's not "just a browser". It's an entire cross-platform runtime environment, that can be used to quickly and efficiently develop advanced cross-platform web applications.
...and almost no keyboard shortcuts...
Maybe you're thinking of Winamp3? Because Winamp2/5 has plenty of keyboard shortcuts. Winamp5 even has unviversal shortcuts. Justin Frankel had nothing to do with Winamp3.
You are correct in saying that the iPod's are not overpriced, if you are looking at it from Apple's perspective. They sell like hotcakes, and Apple is making a ton of money off of them. But, they don't sell so well because they are smaller or faster or more user-friendly. They sell so well because Apple has created an image. iPod's have almost become a status symbol. That's why when I see someone that has bought a new iPod, I think that they have wasted money, because for more than $100 less, they could have bought a Karma, which supports more formats, weighs the less, and has recieved many great reviews.
You're not alone in thinking like this. I remember when watching the 2003 WSOP, someone said that most of the pros don't like playing with amateurs for the same reasons that you said. I think that the best thing to remember when you're playing lower limit games with bad players, is that you are playing with bad players. You almost have to try to play worse to do well when you are playing with them, and you can never bluff them. The way to win, is just to make sure that when you do have a great hand, get as much money into the pot as possible, because the amateurs will be likely to call, and that's when you'll make your money.
One problem I've heard about is collusion. You go to a casino or a card club and play for money with people you don't know, and you don't realize that two of them are actually in it together. For instance, they'll have a secret signal so that one knows to drop out when the other is bluffing. Seems like it could be equally bad online.
The nice thing about playing online though, is that the house always knows what cards everyone has. And also, the house can keep track of who plays together. This makes it _much_ harder for players to successfully collude. I play online a lot at Party Poker. At first I was afraid of people colluding against me. A friend of mine also joined up at the same time as me, and we started playing on a lot af tables together. After a few hours of switching tables and always playing together, they wouldn't let us play at the same table anymore. We weren't colluding or anything, they just noted that two people had been playing together for a long time, and the odds of it being random in a pool of thousands of people is relatively low. At first I was kinda pissed that I couldn't sit with him anymore, but then I realized that this meant that if anyone were trying to collude, it would be very hard.
This is different than playing live, because the house can't do a statistical test of whether or not two people have been playing together too much. Also, if players are acting suspicious online, the house can always take a look at what cards the suspected colluders had, and see if one of them laid down a good hand, or something like that. Overall, I feel pretty confident that colluders aren't too much of a problem when I play online.
By the way, the 10 MB limit isn't just for the attachment size, it is the limit for the entire email itself. I have tried sending 9.8MB files, and the system won't let me. So, I think that UUEncoding a giant file and putting it in the message body wouldn't work either.
I'm a beta tester, the attachment size limit is actually only 10 megabytes. And they seem to limit the speed of uploads to about 30-40 KB/sec, which isn't that slow, but I bet they have some sort of system set up where the speed gets slower and slower for a certain account if that account starts either uploading or downloading too many MB of files.
There is a major difference between 'censorship' and 'government censorship'. From reading many of the comments, it seems that that is what many people seem to be forgetting. If google did indeed delete the site from their index, then it is indeed censorship. It is not as extreme as the governent sending in armed troops and shutting down the servers that the website is hosted on, but it is censorship.
This isn't that bad though, becuase if I do conclusivly find that google did actually delete the page from their index, then I will be more likely to use a different search engine, and so will other peoeple. So, it is not in google's best interest to delete the index.
Censorship is anytime that a major host of information denies access to that information. If Google did delete the index, then Google isn't actually denying access to the website, but they are denying access to the link to the site, which is censorship. It's just not as bad as government censorship.
Ok, wait until you need it when you have a flat tire but no spare, then tell me that it causes stress.
Your movie was better because, it explained why neo had psychic powers while still in the real world, it gave a purpose and a reason as to why he was stuck in the train station at the beginning, it had more and cooler fight scenes, Morpheus had a legitimate part, and finally, the ending of your movie is actually a happy ending.
Overall, I think that you should do a re-make and use this script instead.