The entire goal of the system (stop death) is unobtainable, and the governments will bankrupt themselves trying.
I think you mean the governments will bankrupt us trying. It's not like the politicians are paying for these services out of their own resources; they've simply arrogated to themselves the privilege of deciding how to spend our money.
(And don't say roads; money for roads comes from gasoline tax, not income tax.)
(Or SS or Medicare; that too is separate from income tax.)
Or fire, police, or schools, as these are funded by local property taxes. About the only item within the proper purview of government(*) which isn't locally funded is national defense. Between the general level of paranoia at home and policies favoring intervention elsewhere, defense spending is orders of magnitude greater than it could be without losing any significant degree of real effectiveness.
(*) Assuming you (unlike myself) believe there is such as thing as a legitimate role for government.
No one understands how the economy really works. Economists call that the Efficient Market Hypothesis.
The EMH doesn't really say that we don't know how the market works; it says that market prices already take into account the best possible estimates of future values based on all present publicly-available information. In other words, there are only two ways to beat the market: use of non-public information, and luck.
As the double-pendulum experiment proves in physics, it is possible to know exactly how something works without being able to predict how it may change in the future. As new information is revealed we can feed that into the model and see exactly how the new prices come about -- but every other investor can do the same, so knowledge of the market's workings doesn't give any particular investor an advantage.
In my layman's opinion, the main problem with the EMH is that it assumes nearly instantaneous price changes in response to new information. Prices do change quickly, but there is a time lag, both in the dissemination of new information and in adjusting resource allocations to match. Those in a position to respond quickly to new information should reap the most benefit (or most effectively avoid losses).
I'm also not convinced that investors' reactions truly follow a normal distribution, at least in the short term.
OK, forget buying and selling. In a P2P protocol like BitTorrent you have two peers, each of which is both a client and a server. Connections can be initiated locally or remotely, and any connection can be used to transfer data in either direction. It is thus correct to say that each peer in a BT "swarm" is both an uploader (sending data to a foreign server) and a downloader (receiving data from a foreign server) in the traditional client/server framework, in addition to acting as a server itself.
I still maintain that it makes more sense, in a P2P context, to label the peer sending the data as the "uploader" and the peer receiving the data as the "downloader" regardless of which side initiated the connection. The whole point of P2P is that there is no meaningful distinction drawn between clients and servers; what really matters is which direction the data is moving.
Isn't that a contradiction in terms? If the award is punitive, then it obviously does not correspond to any damage experienced by the injured party.
The point of civil trials being compensation for harm rather than arbitrary punishment, I really don't see how such punitive "damages" have any place in a civil context.
You're buying from a machine, but the machine is not the seller.... The people who stock the machine aren't selling to the machine.
These positions are contradictory; pick one.
A machine is not an independent operator; it can't own property, and thus can't buy or sell anything. You're not buying from the machine; you're buying from the owner of the product, with the machine merely mediating the transaction. The role of a vending machine is identical to that of a cashier at a store; you don't buy things from the cashier, you buy them from the seller (the store).
In the same way, the uploader is the person who set up the server, not the server itself. You can only buy from a seller -- the owner of the property being bought -- and you can only download from an uploader. In either case there is a single transaction -- a transfer of ownership, or of data -- and every transaction has two human participants -- a buyer and a seller, or an uploader and a downloader. Neither can exist without the other.
If you want data from the internet, somebody is going to need your IP address.
Yes, but the computer that has your IP address doesn't need to know the data, and visa-versa. That's the whole point behind onion routing; you route through one or more neutral intermediaries, and use end-to-end encryption. Neither endpoint needs to know the other's IP address, and the intermediaries don't have any idea what data is being exchanged. With two or more intermediate nodes you don't even have to disclose who you're talking to.
How is an author's desire to get paid for his sweat, labor, and time "obsolete"?
The GP never said that it was. The exact phrase was "obsolete business model", which refers not to a general desire to get paid, but rather the specific way in which that payment is sought.
Certainly more progressive than the 10,000-year-old practice of "shackling a man" and forcing him to work for free (slavery).
Voluntarily spending labor on something no one is willing to pay you for, regardless of the reason, is not slavery. Nothing compels authors to write; if they do so anyway, at their own expense and in the absence of any contractual guarantee of payment, then they do so of their own free will.
When you steal a book,....
Likewise, this discussion is not about theft. These authors are not being deprived of anything.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid your neighbors' wallets and give you their money.
Perhaps you should pay attention to your own words of wisdom. This is exactly what copyright is: an act of government which forces others to play by your rules, artificially subsidizing authorship, artistry, and invention by transferring money from their wallets to yours.
Voluntary cartels are inherently unstable; the reward for defecting is simply too high to resist. No cartel or artificial monopoly has ever survived for any significant length of time without involuntary (i.e., government) support.
Division of resources across multiple owners is a naturally-occurring phenomenon in any unencumbered market. It does not require any deliberate, coercive act of centralized power.
I doubt that what's going on in the Congo is anything like a powerful outsider assassinating any and all individuals attempting to form governments, or government-like organizations, and only such individuals.
The whole idea is severely non-proportional, however, which is why I am opposed to it; to be just the response would have to be in line with the aggressive acts of those aspiring to create a government, and consistent with the will of those directly harmed by said acts. An assassination might be appropriate if the official in question actually (personally) committed murder, but such isn't always the case.
Well, if they persisted in taking out anyone who appeared to be forming a government I suspect people would eventually stop trying. I'm not supportive of random assassinations as a means of inhibiting aggression (it just shifts the problem elsewhere), but I have no doubt such a strategy would become locally effective over time.
At least the Xilinx synthesis tools are free to download and use, although they're not F/OSS. I don't know about Altera.
Xilinx Webpack ISE, available for Windows and Linux. Free registration required.
There's a libusb wrapper available which allows JTAG programming through the standard Linux USB and parallel port interfaces without their proprietary kernel module (which, last I checked, doesn't compile against recent kernels).
So, if I take your Credit card and charge it up, I did not steal anything because the physical money never exsisted?
Exactly. You haven't stolen anything from me (other than the card itself), but you have committed fraud by claiming authorization to charge to that account. Using someone else's credit card is just another way of taking out a loan in someone else's name; ID fraud, not theft. There is a difference.
The BZ2-compressed archive of the 2.6.27.1 kernel source is 49,181 KB. I consider that a decent measure of complexity; compression takes out much of the redundancy. Uncompressed it's about 350-400 MB, not a full GB.
Regardless, an increase in code size is not necessarily bloat, particularly when a lot of that size is from optional components. My core kernel (vmlinuz) is just 2MB, with about 30MB in modules, most of which aren't loaded. That's not a bad trade-off for an extremely broad range of hardware support, including nearly every variety of supported hotplug device (e.g. USB). My more limited kernel for the Eee PC -- still including most USB hardware support -- is just 7.5MB total (as a Debian package).
I expect that this would compare favorably with most other modern operating systems, given similar compatibility.
Well, let's look at how a traditional absentee ballot works:
To begin with, you have a list of eligible voters and some way of identifying each of them. This is easy enough to duplicate with public keys, passwords, whatever.
The ballot itself consists of an inner part, containing the actual selections, and an outer part, containing the voter's ID. The inner part is sealed, and remains that way until the ID portion has been stripped away.
The same thing can be done with encryption. Create the digital equivalent of an anonymous ballot, indicating your preferred candidates. Encrypt that ballot (with a "salt" value to ensure uniqueness) with the public key designated for the purpose. Sign the encrypted ballot with your own public key and submit it.
When the voting authorities receive your ballot they simply validate the signature and store it for later use, still in its encrypted and IDed form. If you change your mind, or the original ballot was submitted under duress, etc., you can submit a new ballot later or show up in person on the day of the vote, and the old ballot will be discarded unopened.
When it's time to count the votes -- after deleting the obsolete ballots of anyone who showed up in person -- the ID information is discarded (permanently) and the raw ballots are decrypted and counted. The tricky part is ensuring the complete destruction, or at least disassociation, of the ID data, but that's just a matter of developing the proper policies. The same concern applies regarding current absentee ballots.
If you want to help take care of those in need, fine -- I support that 100%. Just do it with your own resources. I'm arguing against tax-funded welfare, not charity in general.
In addition to its superior ethical standing, private charity doesn't have the same deleterious effects on society as welfare. The voluntary nature of the donations avoids the sense of entitlement cultivated by welfare, and at the same time ensures that greater attention will be paid to the recipient's individual situation -- past, present, and future. A private organization cannot afford to acquire a reputation for repeatedly bailing out irresponsible and/or unappreciative individuals.
(I'm certain I wrote a reply to this effect before; I wonder what happened to it?)
If the only issue were hardware failures that would be correct. RAID and backups are designed to protect against different failure modes, however. RAID isn't going to help you when all the drives are sent the same incorrect signal, whether that takes the form of OS- or application-level data corruption or user error.
As the GP said, RAID gives you quick, up-to-date -- but temporary -- recovery in the event of a single disk failure (or two failures for RAID 6), and/or improved speed during normal use. You still need the backups to protect against data corruption and user error. With backups you can recover most of your data after any failure in the live system; with just RAID limited hardware failures are the only thing you can recover from.
Nice try, but the SI standard is defined by the BIPM, not NIST. The SI base and derived units do not include bits or bytes.
Redefining the prefixes for base-2 units (e.g. byte) as base-10 does no one any good, as all the historical literature on the subject is already using the existing prefixes as base-2. The new terms (KiB/MiB/TiB) are clear enough, but the old ones -- which used to be unambiguous in context -- now have two possible meanings. Given the ridiculous names suggested for the new prefixes, that isn't going to change any time soon.
Anyway, it makes no sense to pile a base-10 prefix on top of a base-2 multiple of the base unit (one bit). It's like measuring distance in kilofeet, or area in millihectares. If you want base-10 units just use bits, and leave our perfectly useful binary prefixes well enough alone.
SI prefixed only have standardized meanings when used with SI base units. The byte is not an SI base unit. Actually, there is no official SI base unit for information, but if there were one it would most likely be the bit, which is already associated with base-10 SI prefixes. Mixed units (e.g. MB/s) vary depending on how the value is calculated, but are generally SI.
kilobits, megabits, terabits: SI prefixes
kilobytes, megabytes, terabytes: binary prefixes
The HDD manufacturers want to use real SI units they should say "12Tb" rather than redefining "1.5TB".
You should be irritated -- I certainly would be! However, the people you should be irritated at are the ones taxing you to pay for welfare, not the gamblers. Place the blame where it's due.
Who will show up after you've already been injured, fail to locate those who did it, and fine you for breaking the state's anti-gambling laws in the first place.
The root problem is that the government claims for itself the power to determine who can and cannot operate aircraft. Similar to taxes and other regulations, you aren't really agreeing to the terms voluntarily when some third party forces every airline to require consent for searches.
To look at this from a different perspective, let's say a law is enacted which requires every merchant to extract an agreement to invasive home inspections before trade can commence. You have the option of not engaging in trade, so the searches are voluntary, right? (Of course not.) Forcing two willing individuals not to trade except on your terms is just as involuntary as forcing someone to buy or sell against their will.
No, but you can consent to a search, in which case no warrant is required. Part of the agreement when purchasing a ticket is consenting to such searches.
The distinction between life and non-life is quite big, so...
This is a false premise. While there is a noticeable gap between things that are definitely alive and things that definitely aren't, there are intermediate forms which we have a harder time classifying (e.g. viruses). Rather than a single "big and spontaneous" event, consider that non-living structures can gradually transition through various levels of semi-life before eventually giving way to something we would clearly recognize as a living organism.
Not everything defended "religiously" is a religion. Definitions of religion. The first two definitions given (from wordnet.princeton.edu) sum it up nicely (emphasis mine):
S: (n) religion, faith, religious belief (a strong belief in a supernatural power or powers that control human destiny) "he lost his faith but not his morality"
S: (n) religion, faith, organized religion (an institution to express belief in a divine power) "he was raised in the Baptist religion"; "a member of his own faith contradicted him"
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The entire goal of the system (stop death) is unobtainable, and the governments will bankrupt themselves trying.
I think you mean the governments will bankrupt us trying. It's not like the politicians are paying for these services out of their own resources; they've simply arrogated to themselves the privilege of deciding how to spend our money.
(And don't say roads; money for roads comes from gasoline tax, not income tax.)
(Or SS or Medicare; that too is separate from income tax.)
Or fire, police, or schools, as these are funded by local property taxes. About the only item within the proper purview of government(*) which isn't locally funded is national defense. Between the general level of paranoia at home and policies favoring intervention elsewhere, defense spending is orders of magnitude greater than it could be without losing any significant degree of real effectiveness.
(*) Assuming you (unlike myself) believe there is such as thing as a legitimate role for government.
No one understands how the economy really works. Economists call that the Efficient Market Hypothesis.
The EMH doesn't really say that we don't know how the market works; it says that market prices already take into account the best possible estimates of future values based on all present publicly-available information. In other words, there are only two ways to beat the market: use of non-public information, and luck.
As the double-pendulum experiment proves in physics, it is possible to know exactly how something works without being able to predict how it may change in the future. As new information is revealed we can feed that into the model and see exactly how the new prices come about -- but every other investor can do the same, so knowledge of the market's workings doesn't give any particular investor an advantage.
In my layman's opinion, the main problem with the EMH is that it assumes nearly instantaneous price changes in response to new information. Prices do change quickly, but there is a time lag, both in the dissemination of new information and in adjusting resource allocations to match. Those in a position to respond quickly to new information should reap the most benefit (or most effectively avoid losses).
I'm also not convinced that investors' reactions truly follow a normal distribution, at least in the short term.
OK, forget buying and selling. In a P2P protocol like BitTorrent you have two peers, each of which is both a client and a server. Connections can be initiated locally or remotely, and any connection can be used to transfer data in either direction. It is thus correct to say that each peer in a BT "swarm" is both an uploader (sending data to a foreign server) and a downloader (receiving data from a foreign server) in the traditional client/server framework, in addition to acting as a server itself.
I still maintain that it makes more sense, in a P2P context, to label the peer sending the data as the "uploader" and the peer receiving the data as the "downloader" regardless of which side initiated the connection. The whole point of P2P is that there is no meaningful distinction drawn between clients and servers; what really matters is which direction the data is moving.
punitive damages
Isn't that a contradiction in terms? If the award is punitive, then it obviously does not correspond to any damage experienced by the injured party.
The point of civil trials being compensation for harm rather than arbitrary punishment, I really don't see how such punitive "damages" have any place in a civil context.
You're buying from a machine, but the machine is not the seller.... The people who stock the machine aren't selling to the machine.
These positions are contradictory; pick one.
A machine is not an independent operator; it can't own property, and thus can't buy or sell anything. You're not buying from the machine; you're buying from the owner of the product, with the machine merely mediating the transaction. The role of a vending machine is identical to that of a cashier at a store; you don't buy things from the cashier, you buy them from the seller (the store).
In the same way, the uploader is the person who set up the server, not the server itself. You can only buy from a seller -- the owner of the property being bought -- and you can only download from an uploader. In either case there is a single transaction -- a transfer of ownership, or of data -- and every transaction has two human participants -- a buyer and a seller, or an uploader and a downloader. Neither can exist without the other.
If you want data from the internet, somebody is going to need your IP address.
Yes, but the computer that has your IP address doesn't need to know the data, and visa-versa. That's the whole point behind onion routing; you route through one or more neutral intermediaries, and use end-to-end encryption. Neither endpoint needs to know the other's IP address, and the intermediaries don't have any idea what data is being exchanged. With two or more intermediate nodes you don't even have to disclose who you're talking to.
How is an author's desire to get paid for his sweat, labor, and time "obsolete"?
The GP never said that it was. The exact phrase was "obsolete business model", which refers not to a general desire to get paid, but rather the specific way in which that payment is sought.
Certainly more progressive than the 10,000-year-old practice of "shackling a man" and forcing him to work for free (slavery).
Voluntarily spending labor on something no one is willing to pay you for, regardless of the reason, is not slavery. Nothing compels authors to write; if they do so anyway, at their own expense and in the absence of any contractual guarantee of payment, then they do so of their own free will.
When you steal a book,....
Likewise, this discussion is not about theft. These authors are not being deprived of anything.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid your neighbors' wallets and give you their money.
Perhaps you should pay attention to your own words of wisdom. This is exactly what copyright is: an act of government which forces others to play by your rules, artificially subsidizing authorship, artistry, and invention by transferring money from their wallets to yours.
Voluntary cartels are inherently unstable; the reward for defecting is simply too high to resist. No cartel or artificial monopoly has ever survived for any significant length of time without involuntary (i.e., government) support.
Division of resources across multiple owners is a naturally-occurring phenomenon in any unencumbered market. It does not require any deliberate, coercive act of centralized power.
I doubt that what's going on in the Congo is anything like a powerful outsider assassinating any and all individuals attempting to form governments, or government-like organizations, and only such individuals.
The whole idea is severely non-proportional, however, which is why I am opposed to it; to be just the response would have to be in line with the aggressive acts of those aspiring to create a government, and consistent with the will of those directly harmed by said acts. An assassination might be appropriate if the official in question actually (personally) committed murder, but such isn't always the case.
Well, if they persisted in taking out anyone who appeared to be forming a government I suspect people would eventually stop trying. I'm not supportive of random assassinations as a means of inhibiting aggression (it just shifts the problem elsewhere), but I have no doubt such a strategy would become locally effective over time.
At least the Xilinx synthesis tools are free to download and use, although they're not F/OSS. I don't know about Altera.
Xilinx Webpack ISE, available for Windows and Linux. Free registration required.
There's a libusb wrapper available which allows JTAG programming through the standard Linux USB and parallel port interfaces without their proprietary kernel module (which, last I checked, doesn't compile against recent kernels).
So, if I take your Credit card and charge it up, I did not steal anything because the physical money never exsisted?
Exactly. You haven't stolen anything from me (other than the card itself), but you have committed fraud by claiming authorization to charge to that account. Using someone else's credit card is just another way of taking out a loan in someone else's name; ID fraud, not theft. There is a difference.
The BZ2-compressed archive of the 2.6.27.1 kernel source is 49,181 KB. I consider that a decent measure of complexity; compression takes out much of the redundancy. Uncompressed it's about 350-400 MB, not a full GB.
Regardless, an increase in code size is not necessarily bloat, particularly when a lot of that size is from optional components. My core kernel (vmlinuz) is just 2MB, with about 30MB in modules, most of which aren't loaded. That's not a bad trade-off for an extremely broad range of hardware support, including nearly every variety of supported hotplug device (e.g. USB). My more limited kernel for the Eee PC -- still including most USB hardware support -- is just 7.5MB total (as a Debian package).
I expect that this would compare favorably with most other modern operating systems, given similar compatibility.
Well, let's look at how a traditional absentee ballot works:
To begin with, you have a list of eligible voters and some way of identifying each of them. This is easy enough to duplicate with public keys, passwords, whatever.
The ballot itself consists of an inner part, containing the actual selections, and an outer part, containing the voter's ID. The inner part is sealed, and remains that way until the ID portion has been stripped away.
The same thing can be done with encryption. Create the digital equivalent of an anonymous ballot, indicating your preferred candidates. Encrypt that ballot (with a "salt" value to ensure uniqueness) with the public key designated for the purpose. Sign the encrypted ballot with your own public key and submit it.
When the voting authorities receive your ballot they simply validate the signature and store it for later use, still in its encrypted and IDed form. If you change your mind, or the original ballot was submitted under duress, etc., you can submit a new ballot later or show up in person on the day of the vote, and the old ballot will be discarded unopened.
When it's time to count the votes -- after deleting the obsolete ballots of anyone who showed up in person -- the ID information is discarded (permanently) and the raw ballots are decrypted and counted. The tricky part is ensuring the complete destruction, or at least disassociation, of the ID data, but that's just a matter of developing the proper policies. The same concern applies regarding current absentee ballots.
If you want to help take care of those in need, fine -- I support that 100%. Just do it with your own resources. I'm arguing against tax-funded welfare, not charity in general.
In addition to its superior ethical standing, private charity doesn't have the same deleterious effects on society as welfare. The voluntary nature of the donations avoids the sense of entitlement cultivated by welfare, and at the same time ensures that greater attention will be paid to the recipient's individual situation -- past, present, and future. A private organization cannot afford to acquire a reputation for repeatedly bailing out irresponsible and/or unappreciative individuals.
(I'm certain I wrote a reply to this effect before; I wonder what happened to it?)
If the only issue were hardware failures that would be correct. RAID and backups are designed to protect against different failure modes, however. RAID isn't going to help you when all the drives are sent the same incorrect signal, whether that takes the form of OS- or application-level data corruption or user error.
As the GP said, RAID gives you quick, up-to-date -- but temporary -- recovery in the event of a single disk failure (or two failures for RAID 6), and/or improved speed during normal use. You still need the backups to protect against data corruption and user error. With backups you can recover most of your data after any failure in the live system; with just RAID limited hardware failures are the only thing you can recover from.
Nice try, but the SI standard is defined by the BIPM, not NIST. The SI base and derived units do not include bits or bytes.
Redefining the prefixes for base-2 units (e.g. byte) as base-10 does no one any good, as all the historical literature on the subject is already using the existing prefixes as base-2. The new terms (KiB/MiB/TiB) are clear enough, but the old ones -- which used to be unambiguous in context -- now have two possible meanings. Given the ridiculous names suggested for the new prefixes, that isn't going to change any time soon.
Anyway, it makes no sense to pile a base-10 prefix on top of a base-2 multiple of the base unit (one bit). It's like measuring distance in kilofeet, or area in millihectares. If you want base-10 units just use bits, and leave our perfectly useful binary prefixes well enough alone.
SI prefixed only have standardized meanings when used with SI base units. The byte is not an SI base unit. Actually, there is no official SI base unit for information, but if there were one it would most likely be the bit, which is already associated with base-10 SI prefixes. Mixed units (e.g. MB/s) vary depending on how the value is calculated, but are generally SI.
kilobits, megabits, terabits: SI prefixes
kilobytes, megabytes, terabytes: binary prefixes
The HDD manufacturers want to use real SI units they should say "12Tb" rather than redefining "1.5TB".
You should be irritated -- I certainly would be! However, the people you should be irritated at are the ones taxing you to pay for welfare, not the gamblers. Place the blame where it's due.
Who will show up after you've already been injured, fail to locate those who did it, and fine you for breaking the state's anti-gambling laws in the first place.
The root problem is that the government claims for itself the power to determine who can and cannot operate aircraft. Similar to taxes and other regulations, you aren't really agreeing to the terms voluntarily when some third party forces every airline to require consent for searches.
To look at this from a different perspective, let's say a law is enacted which requires every merchant to extract an agreement to invasive home inspections before trade can commence. You have the option of not engaging in trade, so the searches are voluntary, right? (Of course not.) Forcing two willing individuals not to trade except on your terms is just as involuntary as forcing someone to buy or sell against their will.
No, but you can consent to a search, in which case no warrant is required. Part of the agreement when purchasing a ticket is consenting to such searches.
The distinction between life and non-life is quite big, so ...
This is a false premise. While there is a noticeable gap between things that are definitely alive and things that definitely aren't, there are intermediate forms which we have a harder time classifying (e.g. viruses). Rather than a single "big and spontaneous" event, consider that non-living structures can gradually transition through various levels of semi-life before eventually giving way to something we would clearly recognize as a living organism.
Not everything defended "religiously" is a religion. Definitions of religion. The first two definitions given (from wordnet.princeton.edu) sum it up nicely (emphasis mine):