3) All Java classes are the equivalent of C++ virtual classes. There's a whole lot of dynamic type-checking, virtual function table lookups, and so forth when dealing with any Java objects, right?
Which is what is striking to me about these benchmarks--there's all kinds of sorts and matrices and pure number crunching stuff, but I didn't see anything in which garbage collection or object management delays would start to become apparent. If what the other poster says about avoiding bounds checking is correct, that means that these benchmarks managed to avoid the major potential liabilities of Java performance.
That's not to undermine the significance of these benchmarks--it's still very interesting that Java can approach and perhaps surpass C++ performance in any case with JIT.
People in California have been given life sentences for shoplifting (Three strikes...). Even without insane laws, you can spend more than a decade in jail for theft if the theft is big enough--and we may be approaching the billions for a few spammers. Just because they manage to spread out their thievery over a huge number of people shouldn't mitigate their crimes any more than it should for a white collar criminal.
Point is irrelevant as we are discussing a proposed market solution that has already been thought up.
But not implemented. The private sector and government are in the same state of illpreparedness--and notice that Bill Joy expressed hope of finding a job with the Kerry administration should that come to pass.
Ask any economist, a market solution if available is generally far more effective than government regulation.
Look, I guess I shouldn't bother arguing that we shouldn't have blind faith if you're just going to say "but, but....but I've got blind faith!!" Ask any sociologist about large organisations--economists don't like to admit it, but their field is built on top of these fields like biology is built on top of chemistry.
Indeed, one could imagine our government as a corporation existing in a state of nature--a corporation that owns the entire united states and all people within it. There's no rule in capitalism that one guy isn't allowed to own every single thing--so let the government be that one guy. Now the government is viewed as a private firm, no more efficient than they were before.
All I'm saying is large, hierarchical bureaucracy is large, hirearchical bureaucracy, whether it calls itself government or insurance company.
How is the failure of a government regulating body proof that government regulations are more effective than the market?
Not the failure of--the existence of. Not even you want to get rid of it. Why not?
Where is this straw man coming from? I never said I wanted to remove all regulations from the stock market.
Well, I guess the question is why not--since you seem to be arguing that market forces are better in all instances than government regulation.
precedent has already been set
It has?
As for the likelihood of a disaster happening, well thats what insurance companies do. Assess risk.
Doesn't mean they're good at it.
As I pointed out to him, limited liability is not the same as no liability.
Did you? I must have missed it. How can a company and it's investors and executives be held responsible for more than the their company is worth? Why would a small biotech start up get enough insurance to cover the End of the World?
Except that you generally have a choice of policies. Plus they are controlled by market forces instead of government forces.
If the government were requiring insurance, presumably they would be fairly specific about what the insurance in question must provide. Or they might even just specify which insurance companies are permitted to offer the insurance. Either way, it's just government by one more layer of indirection.
I'm not saying the XBox is a bad deal--but looking at the financial results, you have to wonder if it was in Microsoft's interest to offer that particular deal to consumers.
Remember that the particulars of DirectX 8 vs 9 have been designed to assist their gaming strategy--DirectX 8 was explicitly written to benefit the XBox. If MS pursued a PC-only strategy, DirectX 8 could have been delayed and modified to have more features that PS2 and GC wouldn't hope to compete with.
This is interesting. So this, along with Windows XP Media Center (which I'm surprised no one made fun of me for completely forgetting about) are slight movements in the direction I'm talking about, but Microsoft doesn't seem to have put their full weight behind them. Microsoft has proven they have the power to push around video game developers when they want to, even pre-XBox--remember the old days of John Carmack defending OpenGL against DirectX?
I think they could have "consoleified" the PC if they wanted to. First step would be to lean on ATI and nVidia to make sure graphics cards weren't so damn confusing (like the GeForce 4 MX not having DX 8.0 features while the GeForce 3 and normal GeForce 4 did.) Perhaps get computer retailers to sell a Windows XP Gaming PC, equivalent to Tablet PC except with standardized gaming configuration
Combine this with rising anti-American sentiment in Eurasia, and the wait until 2006 or later until longhorn's release, and we might just start to see interesting things happening with Linux on the desktop really soon.
On the other hand, between Avalon, new security models, and possibly even its relational database file system (not sure about that), Longhorn might end up being a really big deal.
Microsoft is taking business away from the PC industry that's given them hundreds of billions of dollars to a console market on which they have yet to make a single dime. It is too soon to praise the virtues of their business sense yet.
One wonders what the gaming market today would look like if Microsoft has spent the billions they invested in Xbox into making PC gaming vastly better than game cube or PS2 could offer. Suppose they had launched a "Windows XP Live" service, and invessted in/bribed game developers into using it. Or if they had worked to make installing PC games as easy as playing an Xbox games--by encouraging the PC market to make a transition to DVD-ROM faster, or perhaps creating some sort of DirectX Virtual Machine. Suppose they invested money in DirectX 9 games, which would be far and away vastly better than anything today's consoles can offer, but doesn't really do much today because who the hell cares about pc games when Microsoft is willing to bleed money on the XBox?
And if they had done all that,and then perhaps integrated Tivo-like features into the OS, and even made it simple to view movies downloaded from the internet on your television (as if MS would fail to brush the MPAA aside like a gnat if they so felt it expedient to do so), and even co-opted the Apple route of writing consumer-level tools for editing music and video -- then that would have been it. Microsoft would have owned our living rooms,and no one could be happier.
Basically, Microsoft has given up The World, so that they can be fighting neck and neck with lowly Nintendo scavenging for the scraps left over by Sony.
Do you really think Doom 3 and Half-life 2 are going to do better than The Sims 2, sequel to the best selling PC Game ever? There are two genres you didn't mention that the PC is strong in--MMOG and games with player created content. And consoles are catching up with MMOGs--if they're smart enough to sell the next version of consoles with included microphone and/or keyboard, then the pc will lose its only advantage in that sphere.
But player created content--I can't foresee the PC losing its edge there. If the Sims 2 is "designed to allow players to easily integrate content created by players outside the game", then how could this content be created or used on the XBox?
Then there are things even further out there like the frequently-hyped-on-Slashdot Second Life, an MMOG composed entirely of player created models and scripts.
Consoles will keep growing,simply because as hardware grows cheaper it no longer makes sense to have one cumbersome, all purpose device to do everything I want to do with computers. The apparent innovations on consoles number exactly two: convenience, and price. The games on consoles aren't truly more innovative--but consoles are the path of least resistence to players.
However, there are still some serious, non-FPS, non-RTS experiences that the PCs have to ofer that are simply not possible on the path of least resistence.
Actually I did address it. Just because the 'invisible hand' hasn't acted yet doesn't mean the market cannot provide a solution.
Right, but it does mean we should not except with blind faith that the market's solution will be better or faster in coming than any other institution's. The end of the world as we know it should light as much of a fire under your ass as the end of your paychecks. And if it doesn't, that's an issue for psychologists, not economists.
There are numerous problems with having the government do the work instead of the market. First, it is highly ineffective. This other guy's argument about Enron actually shows this (although he apparently does not realize it).
But I don't think he was arguing that the government is perfect--merely that the market is no more perfect and perhaps far more imperfect. If this were not the case, then why is the SEC to blame at all for Enron's corruption?
The main force in existence to keep Enron from doing the things they ended up doing was the SEC and government regulations, and we all know what happened then.
Do you propose some other force? There's a reason no one talks about letting the marketplace correct for criminal behavior in the stock market--because the market correction for an SEC-less stock market would be to take most of the money out of the entire stock market.
Second, government power is easily abused. For every legitimate regulation, there will be dozens of regulations that serve no purpose other than to block legitimate research. Thus, relying on government regulations should be the very last resort.
But your apparently non-governmental resort relies on government decision making--the courts. I understand perfectly well the difference between statutory and civil law--but what you're asking for is the insurance company to make a prediction of how courts will rule in cases of nanotechnological and biotechnological disaster--or even more unpredictable, the chance of such a disaster occuring in the first place, which is basically completely unknowable today in 2004. For many decades from now, until we have real tragic experience with this stuff, any decisions an insurance company makes on this issue is completely arbitrary.
Not too mention the limited-liability issue the other poster brought up. You can get around this by requiring insurance, but then you've turned a free-market solution into mere subcontracted legislature--the insurance company ends up writing de facto laws.
yeah, yeah, preview before submit, i should know better...last line should read:
I'm aware that neither is perfect or absolute--and I should I think that I wouldn't have to work very hard to convince such a free market lover as yourself of the ineptitude of our courts, should I?
I presented three different possibilities--and this post is acting is if I didn't present the second possibility--that the invisible hand has simply not acted yet. (yes, I know it's just an anthropomorphication--that's why I referred to the quip Keynes made the famous about it only working after we're all dead.)
So, I reiterate that the government has every bit as much incentive to prevent their own infectious death as the insurance company has to prevent hypothetical profit loss. The principle of self interest applies to the government too, see?
Are you aware of the differences between criminal court and civil court?
I'm aware that neither is perfect or absolute--and I should I think that I wouldn't have to work very hard to convince such a free market as yourself love of the ineptitude of our courts, should I?
There is a motive which is stronger than self-preservation: it is the desire to get the better of the other fellow.
Other people have stated this principle with different connotations than Russell chose to. There's Patrick Henry's extreme line "Give me Liberty or Give me Death." And if that's not far enough for you, Milton's Satan goes even further " "Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven".
You might wonder how anyone can entertain such fanatical positions. I think what you have to understand is that Choice, Power, Control, Freedom, Liberty--whatever synonym you choose to use--is the essence of Humanity. If you have lost the ability to act in pursuit of your wishes, then you as a human being are essentially dead. (Actually achieving your wishes is optional and possibly detrimental). The purpose of the 3 pounds of meat on top of bodies that drives us to do anything we are driven to do is to make decisions and act upon them. To be denied that ability is a fate worse than death.
When we consider Bill Joy, we must consider what Bill Joy is asking us to surrender in order to avoid Grey Goo. To save the world, Bill Joy is not asking us to give up mere Science, Technology, or Geekdom. He is asking us to give up Democracy. Whether through a Science Guild, a government bureaucracy, or some strange all powerful insurance company, Bill Joy wants to put decisions over technology in the hands of some elite few--with the public completely uninformed that a decision has even been made--because public knowledge of the banned technology is dangerous.
It is strange that he looked to insurance companies and the supposed "free market" to solve this problem. Anyone who equates capitalism with freedom should see this as a counter-example--money is a very old and straightforward means of Power. It is a Power Bill Joy is comfortable with--he is more comfortable with the dominance of Money than with the dangers of democracy or freedom, because he has Money.
In any event, if bio and nano technology are going to be the driving forces of our economy in the future, what Bill Joy is suggesting is prohibiting the vast majority of people from participating in the that economic change. There will be an elite few, who posess the power of death over us, who are impervious to any threat we the people can offer them , and have will have the ability to deny us life saving or enriching technology as their whims so dictate.
Bill Joy is asking us to adopt the teachings of Thomas Hobbes. I should hope that our prior experiences with absolute totalitarian power in history should be enough to dissuade us from that--we are weighing the possibility of destruction against the certainty of submission.
The principle of a market based solution (such as having insurance for technological disasters) is that they are enforced by the market. This ends up being much more effective than any form of regulation.
Any defense of market based solutions as opposed to government solutions has to contend with one fact--the insurance companies are not currently acting as Bill Joy suggests. How can we explain this? I can think of three possibilities:
Bill Joy's solution, I'm sure by no means the only solution he has suggested, doesn't make sense from an insurance companies point of view--if it did, the invisible hand would already have forced the insurance companies to act.
Bill Joy's solution is correct, but the invisible hand only works in the long-term-when-we're-all-dead sort of way. In the present, insurance companies are gigantic hierarchical bureacracies even more infamous than the government for ineptitude. The government has every bit as much incentive to avoid infectious death as an insurance company has to avoid profit loss.
Bill Joy's solution is ethically correct, but the insurance company is acting pragmatically wisely in not implementing it, because the government will likely not hold the biotech firm responsible for every single death and disease resulting from an accident, if they even manage to track it down to the firm in question. In other words, if you want the free market to work, you first have to change the REGULATIONS that define the market--as long as infectious disease is an externality, then you should expect no market corrections.
Again, the product of those "cyber-weapon factories" may only propagate via a medium which persons and organizations voluntarily connect themselves to, and that they can easily disconnect themselves from. Real, natural viruses can fly through the air and infect those with LAN's not connected to the internet and even those who don't have a computer. If you claim to be unable to see the difference I'd call you a liar because you're clearly smart enough to understand the significant distinction.
The difference is vanishing--as the number of devices increases, as our dependence on them decreases, as their interdependence increases, they're going to get harder and harder to disconnect from each oher. So while I see a difference today, neither of us might be able to see one tomorrow.
Not on my machine, they can't, and not on the machines of (properly run and regulated) organizations upon which lives depend, such as hospitals and transportation systems. Those are regulated. See the trend yet?
You can practice good hygeine with your body as well. This is certainly applicable to AIDS, horrible and tragic as the disease is. You have described no trend.
And both are regulated and require licenses and registration. Had this guy done what we all do before we (legally) drive on public roads or own a firearm, he'd not be in trouble.
He hasn't been accused or suspect of any sort of license violation, so I'm afraid you're defending a set of laws currently existing only in your mind.
We're not talking about banning (at least I wasn't), we're talking about regulation -- forcing people who muck with risky stuff to be adhere to some safety rules. That's not an infringement of rights, that's sane protection of public health. I support anyone's ability, even artists', to have a bio-tech lab, as long as they are as qualified and regulated as commercial labs.
Regulation can certainly be a defacto ban--one can imagine ridiculous regulations crafted for the specific purpose of making sure large corporations and governments are the only ones capable of engaging in this research. ISO900X compliance comes to mind. And any such regulaton at all would be extremely hypocritical, given the dangerous disease-spreading practices that lots of other individuals and companies engage in all the time--ranging from not washing your hands long enough to filling all your cattle with antibiotics.
You really can't conclude that requiring bio-tech labs to adhere to regulations is equal to living in submission to Monsanto. Nice try, though.
I could on two counts--more generally, if the regulations were specifically crafted such that large corporations like Monsanto had a monopoly on food, well, see how long you can go without eating. More specifically, this guy had equipment for the purpose of testing whether food was genetically engineered. Making such technology illegal would certainly be submission to Monsanto--giving them absolute control of the food we eat.
I guess the lower classes outside the border don't count?
They certainly do. The upper classes within our borders should be the ones to help them.
Jefferson himself was a plantation owner
Right, Monticello was the only business in America. Monticello was comparable in size as a function of population to General Motors. Umm...no.
Wealth doesn't go away.
Um....entropy, anyone?
Capitalism is the only system in which the workers can achieve the Marxist ideal of truly owning the means of production.
This is true, but only in the moderated capitalism that America and most of the Western world has practiced for the last few centuries. The recent experimentation with Pure, Libertarian capitalism, is just doomed as communism. Look up the Power Law.
What the workers need is an ownership stake and direct control of their businesses.
Right again, but since they don't currently have it, and the current owners aren't willing to give it up, then workers will need to use any means at their disposal to change the status quo--both government and non-governmental solutions.
Complaining about low wages and unemployment while shopping at Wal-Mart?
Sure do, when it's the only store in this town.
Whining about oil prices while driving a pickup on light errands?
So what, you just wanted me to drive to the next town to shop for groceries--how much gas is that going to fucking save?
Oops, sorry, you're an idiot. If the deck is stacked against workers, the only way to fix things is to reshuffle. After they all lost their shirts in Enron and similar scandals, they'd be crazy to invest in the pyramid scheme that is our stock market. Because guess who's the bottom of the pyramid?
You could write a computer virus in your house and shutdown a hospital or transportation system and kill people, too. Can you believe there are no regulations prohibiting the unqualified or politically radical from running these home cyber-weapon factories? People with no formal security training whatsoever can simply install a C compiler. Madness!
See, it turns out that you're allowed to have sex without a license, you just aren't allowed to spread AIDS. You're allowed to program a computer unlicensed, you just aren't allowed to program viruses. You're even allowed to possess deadly firearms and vastly more deadly automobiles (near infinitely more deadly than all terrorism combined)--but you aren't allowed to kill people with them.
It's not the tools that we are supposed to ban, it's the usage of these tools. Sorry, your right to paranoia about what I'm doing in my basement ends when it means we must all live in submission to Monsanto.
A trade decicit is measured in monetary units, such as dollars, as opposed to jobs
Same thing. Same thing. Jobs are paid for in money. There you go. It's true, America has added jobs as time goes on--I didn't say there was net decrease in the number of jobs since I was born, did I, my illiterate friend? Merely that we Americans have imported more goods, and therefore exported more jobs, than we have exported goods, and imported jobs. Basically, American demand has been the driving force of the world economy for the past few decades. I've never seen anyone deny this basic fact of international economics.
1992 to 2002, U.S. multinational companies added around five American jobs for every three foreign jobs they added. This means more job growth in the American market than the foreign one with respect to American jobs.
Right, so 3/8 of the jobs generated by American demand go to foreigners, and you've offered no information about what share of foreign jobs come to America. This is so retarded I will not read the rest of your post. So long.
Demonstrate that the gap between the rich and the poor is widening. Demonstrate this is to the detriment of the 'poor' if it is true.
Look up the statistics for both if you're so hardworking. It's true.
I won't deny kids basic health care, but I don't want to be forced at gunpoint to give it to them.
Right, kids can pay for their own health care. Monster.
I work in a de-regulated, competitive market. My plant sells electricity because we can make it & sell it cheaper than anyone else. If someone else comes along and is able to make juice cheaper, then we lose money or go out of business. Tell me how that's like the soviet union.
It's basically exactly like Russia. For decades there was a government granted monopoly. Now they are "privatized", which means they just gave the monopoly away to private interests, even though it would never existed without public arrangement. Just like your industry. "De-regulation" is just a government-created market--not capitalism at all. See California for examples of this.
So, yes, you are a government freeloader. Just like the plutocrats who now run Russia. You are completely isolated from true capitalism.
There are just as many inefficiencies in any monopoly as there are in the government or academia--so long as there is no incentive to do better, so long as you can guarantee someone's poverty if they don't do what they say, you have no incentive to do better.
Nothing I've proposed so far would prohibit people oppurtunities I had.
Given the ever increasing gap between rich and poor, given that our country is rapidly becoming the next Argentina, the status quo is preventing other people the opportunities you've had.
And that makes me a monster?
You want to deny kids basic health care? That makes you a monster.
Moreover, I personally couldn't stand to live off the largess of others if I had any capability at all to earn my own.
You already do. You work in power generation? That's a government sanctioned and regulated monopoly. You essentially work for the government. There is no philosophic difference between your job and that of someone working in a power plant in the Soviet Union. Why those who are most isolated from capitalism are it's biggest fans, from you to those crazy fellows at Enron, is to say the least noteworthy.
Only someone as isolated from the marketplace as yourself could believe things aren't terrible in this country right now. Especially in manufacturing. Sure, some manufacturing employers are pretending there's a shortage, just as some IT employers still pretend there's a shortage of people with IT training. Shops are still closing down all over the place.
People all over this country are working damn hard, but are going to suffer not because of their own inadequacy, but because of the macroeconomic fiscal and currency games of their government. For you to blame these people for getting screwed over, for you to rejoice in their suffering as you sit secure in a government fiat job, makes you a monster. And humorously hypocritical. You're a real laugh riot.
Life isn't fair, and it isn't easy. I have no answer for this other than to suck it up and look to some other endevour where you can earn money. If I lost my powerplant job, there's at least two or three ways I know I can make as much money. Of course, I'm willing to bust ass and be creative instead of whining about my misfortune.
Hey I bust ass with creativity too. I gotta eat today. But I know it's all for naught in the long run. I know people more deserving than me end up with less. I work for the short run. I fight for the long run.
Better than not getting it all for free until it's too late
Not if you can't afford it's skyrockecting premiums it's not. Better late than never.
Yes, the world would be hundreds of billions of dollars poorer if no one did what Bill Gates did.
And someone would have. Is that such a difficult concept to grasp? Why do you struggle with it so? The amount of wealth you collect is unrelated to difference in collective wealth between this world and the counter-factual world in which you were not born. It might be fantastically less, it might be fantastically more. (I don't know you, maybe your powerplant would have exploded killing everyone for 10 miles somehow if you hadn't been born.)
As for communists not being welcome in the United States- it might have been better put that your ideal is the antithesis of what made the United States what it is today, and should your ideal triumph, it would mean your precious mayflower ancestors and the framers of our nation put in all that effort for naught. So if you really believe what you say, then emmigrate to Europe where that kind of thought is welcome and commonplace. We certainly don't need any more of it fouling things up here.
What, any suggestion that giant mega-corporations shouldn't be allowed to own every single last thing is communism? Look, Senator McCarthy, this country was founded on the freedom and democracy of people, not corporations. If you want to play running dog cause it makes you feel good to push other people around, why don't you head on over to Singapore, where you're ideals are already perfectly implemented.
Incidentally, I don't give a shit about your ancestors. Your ideals, implement, are causing the economic ruin of Europe, and would do the same here.
I'm just saying, this is my fucking country too--you want to ruin the one ideal that has been most central to every immigrant to this place--Opportunity--you better be stockpiling guns, because we are definitely getting ready to stand up for what REALLY made our nation strong. Opportunity and Freedom, not feudal hierarchy. Have you noticed which social classes our soldiers are coming from? Better make sure they stay happy...
You are not to steal it from people who expertly manage the efforts of others to gain wealth for themselves while paying their employees.
You are not to steal it from people who expertly manage the efforts of serfs to gain wealth for themselves while protecting their serfs from other lords...
As for FDR- how's that war on poverty he started going along?
Well things aren't as bad as they were under Hoover, so that's a good start...
And for feudalism and nepotism- some people are indeed born into advantagous positions. Those who weren't, such as myself, had to work to put themselves in an advantegous position.
And some of them work even harder to shut the door behind them...
Having come from a very modest background, I have no sympathy for those who would use their less than perfect birth circumstances as an alibi for their failure. Success is hard, and you must prove your worth every day. Being a slacker and making excuses about how you're not 'priveleged' is a much more attractive option for many people, it seems you included.
And I've got no sympathy for those who wants to make sure no one has the same opportunities they had. For make no mistake--things are getting worse. Health care is more expensive,
Slashdot Mirror
You can? That's cool. If that's true, here's hoping that someone comes along to mod down my disinformation and mod you up.
3) All Java classes are the equivalent of C++ virtual classes. There's a whole lot of dynamic type-checking, virtual function table lookups, and so forth when dealing with any Java objects, right?
Which is what is striking to me about these benchmarks--there's all kinds of sorts and matrices and pure number crunching stuff, but I didn't see anything in which garbage collection or object management delays would start to become apparent. If what the other poster says about avoiding bounds checking is correct, that means that these benchmarks managed to avoid the major potential liabilities of Java performance.
That's not to undermine the significance of these benchmarks--it's still very interesting that Java can approach and perhaps surpass C++ performance in any case with JIT.
People in California have been given life sentences for shoplifting (Three strikes...). Even without insane laws, you can spend more than a decade in jail for theft if the theft is big enough--and we may be approaching the billions for a few spammers. Just because they manage to spread out their thievery over a huge number of people shouldn't mitigate their crimes any more than it should for a white collar criminal.
But not implemented. The private sector and government are in the same state of illpreparedness--and notice that Bill Joy expressed hope of finding a job with the Kerry administration should that come to pass.
Ask any economist, a market solution if available is generally far more effective than government regulation.
Look, I guess I shouldn't bother arguing that we shouldn't have blind faith if you're just going to say "but, but....but I've got blind faith!!" Ask any sociologist about large organisations--economists don't like to admit it, but their field is built on top of these fields like biology is built on top of chemistry.
Indeed, one could imagine our government as a corporation existing in a state of nature--a corporation that owns the entire united states and all people within it. There's no rule in capitalism that one guy isn't allowed to own every single thing--so let the government be that one guy. Now the government is viewed as a private firm, no more efficient than they were before.
All I'm saying is large, hierarchical bureaucracy is large, hirearchical bureaucracy, whether it calls itself government or insurance company.
How is the failure of a government regulating body proof that government regulations are more effective than the market?
Not the failure of--the existence of. Not even you want to get rid of it. Why not?
Where is this straw man coming from? I never said I wanted to remove all regulations from the stock market.
Well, I guess the question is why not--since you seem to be arguing that market forces are better in all instances than government regulation.
precedent has already been set
It has?
As for the likelihood of a disaster happening, well thats what insurance companies do. Assess risk.
Doesn't mean they're good at it.
As I pointed out to him, limited liability is not the same as no liability.
Did you? I must have missed it. How can a company and it's investors and executives be held responsible for more than the their company is worth? Why would a small biotech start up get enough insurance to cover the End of the World?
Except that you generally have a choice of policies. Plus they are controlled by market forces instead of government forces.
If the government were requiring insurance, presumably they would be fairly specific about what the insurance in question must provide. Or they might even just specify which insurance companies are permitted to offer the insurance. Either way, it's just government by one more layer of indirection.
Remember that the particulars of DirectX 8 vs 9 have been designed to assist their gaming strategy--DirectX 8 was explicitly written to benefit the XBox. If MS pursued a PC-only strategy, DirectX 8 could have been delayed and modified to have more features that PS2 and GC wouldn't hope to compete with.
I think they could have "consoleified" the PC if they wanted to. First step would be to lean on ATI and nVidia to make sure graphics cards weren't so damn confusing (like the GeForce 4 MX not having DX 8.0 features while the GeForce 3 and normal GeForce 4 did.) Perhaps get computer retailers to sell a Windows XP Gaming PC, equivalent to Tablet PC except with standardized gaming configuration
On the other hand, between Avalon, new security models, and possibly even its relational database file system (not sure about that), Longhorn might end up being a really big deal.
One wonders what the gaming market today would look like if Microsoft has spent the billions they invested in Xbox into making PC gaming vastly better than game cube or PS2 could offer. Suppose they had launched a "Windows XP Live" service, and invessted in/bribed game developers into using it. Or if they had worked to make installing PC games as easy as playing an Xbox games--by encouraging the PC market to make a transition to DVD-ROM faster, or perhaps creating some sort of DirectX Virtual Machine. Suppose they invested money in DirectX 9 games, which would be far and away vastly better than anything today's consoles can offer, but doesn't really do much today because who the hell cares about pc games when Microsoft is willing to bleed money on the XBox?
And if they had done all that,and then perhaps integrated Tivo-like features into the OS, and even made it simple to view movies downloaded from the internet on your television (as if MS would fail to brush the MPAA aside like a gnat if they so felt it expedient to do so), and even co-opted the Apple route of writing consumer-level tools for editing music and video -- then that would have been it. Microsoft would have owned our living rooms,and no one could be happier.
Basically, Microsoft has given up The World, so that they can be fighting neck and neck with lowly Nintendo scavenging for the scraps left over by Sony.
But player created content--I can't foresee the PC losing its edge there. If the Sims 2 is "designed to allow players to easily integrate content created by players outside the game", then how could this content be created or used on the XBox?
Then there are things even further out there like the frequently-hyped-on-Slashdot Second Life, an MMOG composed entirely of player created models and scripts.
Consoles will keep growing,simply because as hardware grows cheaper it no longer makes sense to have one cumbersome, all purpose device to do everything I want to do with computers. The apparent innovations on consoles number exactly two: convenience, and price. The games on consoles aren't truly more innovative--but consoles are the path of least resistence to players.
However, there are still some serious, non-FPS, non-RTS experiences that the PCs have to ofer that are simply not possible on the path of least resistence.
dog gone it! too late at night. just pretend i italicized the things you said
Right, but it does mean we should not except with blind faith that the market's solution will be better or faster in coming than any other institution's. The end of the world as we know it should light as much of a fire under your ass as the end of your paychecks. And if it doesn't, that's an issue for psychologists, not economists.
There are numerous problems with having the government do the work instead of the market. First, it is highly ineffective. This other guy's argument about Enron actually shows this (although he apparently does not realize it).
But I don't think he was arguing that the government is perfect--merely that the market is no more perfect and perhaps far more imperfect. If this were not the case, then why is the SEC to blame at all for Enron's corruption?
The main force in existence to keep Enron from doing the things they ended up doing was the SEC and government regulations, and we all know what happened then.
Do you propose some other force? There's a reason no one talks about letting the marketplace correct for criminal behavior in the stock market--because the market correction for an SEC-less stock market would be to take most of the money out of the entire stock market.
Second, government power is easily abused. For every legitimate regulation, there will be dozens of regulations that serve no purpose other than to block legitimate research. Thus, relying on government regulations should be the very last resort.
But your apparently non-governmental resort relies on government decision making--the courts. I understand perfectly well the difference between statutory and civil law--but what you're asking for is the insurance company to make a prediction of how courts will rule in cases of nanotechnological and biotechnological disaster--or even more unpredictable, the chance of such a disaster occuring in the first place, which is basically completely unknowable today in 2004. For many decades from now, until we have real tragic experience with this stuff, any decisions an insurance company makes on this issue is completely arbitrary.Not too mention the limited-liability issue the other poster brought up. You can get around this by requiring insurance, but then you've turned a free-market solution into mere subcontracted legislature--the insurance company ends up writing de facto laws.
I'm aware that neither is perfect or absolute--and I should I think that I wouldn't have to work very hard to convince such a free market lover as yourself of the ineptitude of our courts, should I?
So, I reiterate that the government has every bit as much incentive to prevent their own infectious death as the insurance company has to prevent hypothetical profit loss. The principle of self interest applies to the government too, see?
Are you aware of the differences between criminal court and civil court?
I'm aware that neither is perfect or absolute--and I should I think that I wouldn't have to work very hard to convince such a free market as yourself love of the ineptitude of our courts, should I?
Other people have stated this principle with different connotations than Russell chose to. There's Patrick Henry's extreme line "Give me Liberty or Give me Death." And if that's not far enough for you, Milton's Satan goes even further " "Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven".
You might wonder how anyone can entertain such fanatical positions. I think what you have to understand is that Choice, Power, Control, Freedom, Liberty--whatever synonym you choose to use--is the essence of Humanity. If you have lost the ability to act in pursuit of your wishes, then you as a human being are essentially dead. (Actually achieving your wishes is optional and possibly detrimental). The purpose of the 3 pounds of meat on top of bodies that drives us to do anything we are driven to do is to make decisions and act upon them. To be denied that ability is a fate worse than death.
When we consider Bill Joy, we must consider what Bill Joy is asking us to surrender in order to avoid Grey Goo. To save the world, Bill Joy is not asking us to give up mere Science, Technology, or Geekdom. He is asking us to give up Democracy. Whether through a Science Guild, a government bureaucracy, or some strange all powerful insurance company, Bill Joy wants to put decisions over technology in the hands of some elite few--with the public completely uninformed that a decision has even been made--because public knowledge of the banned technology is dangerous.
It is strange that he looked to insurance companies and the supposed "free market" to solve this problem. Anyone who equates capitalism with freedom should see this as a counter-example--money is a very old and straightforward means of Power. It is a Power Bill Joy is comfortable with--he is more comfortable with the dominance of Money than with the dangers of democracy or freedom, because he has Money.
In any event, if bio and nano technology are going to be the driving forces of our economy in the future, what Bill Joy is suggesting is prohibiting the vast majority of people from participating in the that economic change. There will be an elite few, who posess the power of death over us, who are impervious to any threat we the people can offer them , and have will have the ability to deny us life saving or enriching technology as their whims so dictate.
Bill Joy is asking us to adopt the teachings of Thomas Hobbes. I should hope that our prior experiences with absolute totalitarian power in history should be enough to dissuade us from that--we are weighing the possibility of destruction against the certainty of submission.
Any defense of market based solutions as opposed to government solutions has to contend with one fact--the insurance companies are not currently acting as Bill Joy suggests. How can we explain this? I can think of three possibilities:
Bill Joy's solution, I'm sure by no means the only solution he has suggested, doesn't make sense from an insurance companies point of view--if it did, the invisible hand would already have forced the insurance companies to act.
Bill Joy's solution is correct, but the invisible hand only works in the long-term-when-we're-all-dead sort of way. In the present, insurance companies are gigantic hierarchical bureacracies even more infamous than the government for ineptitude. The government has every bit as much incentive to avoid infectious death as an insurance company has to avoid profit loss.
Bill Joy's solution is ethically correct, but the insurance company is acting pragmatically wisely in not implementing it, because the government will likely not hold the biotech firm responsible for every single death and disease resulting from an accident, if they even manage to track it down to the firm in question. In other words, if you want the free market to work, you first have to change the REGULATIONS that define the market--as long as infectious disease is an externality, then you should expect no market corrections.
The difference is vanishing--as the number of devices increases, as our dependence on them decreases, as their interdependence increases, they're going to get harder and harder to disconnect from each oher. So while I see a difference today, neither of us might be able to see one tomorrow.
Not on my machine, they can't, and not on the machines of (properly run and regulated) organizations upon which lives depend, such as hospitals and transportation systems. Those are regulated. See the trend yet?
You can practice good hygeine with your body as well. This is certainly applicable to AIDS, horrible and tragic as the disease is. You have described no trend.
And both are regulated and require licenses and registration. Had this guy done what we all do before we (legally) drive on public roads or own a firearm, he'd not be in trouble.
He hasn't been accused or suspect of any sort of license violation, so I'm afraid you're defending a set of laws currently existing only in your mind.
We're not talking about banning (at least I wasn't), we're talking about regulation -- forcing people who muck with risky stuff to be adhere to some safety rules. That's not an infringement of rights, that's sane protection of public health. I support anyone's ability, even artists', to have a bio-tech lab, as long as they are as qualified and regulated as commercial labs.
Regulation can certainly be a defacto ban--one can imagine ridiculous regulations crafted for the specific purpose of making sure large corporations and governments are the only ones capable of engaging in this research. ISO900X compliance comes to mind. And any such regulaton at all would be extremely hypocritical, given the dangerous disease-spreading practices that lots of other individuals and companies engage in all the time--ranging from not washing your hands long enough to filling all your cattle with antibiotics.
You really can't conclude that requiring bio-tech labs to adhere to regulations is equal to living in submission to Monsanto. Nice try, though.
I could on two counts--more generally, if the regulations were specifically crafted such that large corporations like Monsanto had a monopoly on food, well, see how long you can go without eating. More specifically, this guy had equipment for the purpose of testing whether food was genetically engineered. Making such technology illegal would certainly be submission to Monsanto--giving them absolute control of the food we eat.
They certainly do. The upper classes within our borders should be the ones to help them.
Jefferson himself was a plantation owner
Right, Monticello was the only business in America. Monticello was comparable in size as a function of population to General Motors. Umm...no.
Wealth doesn't go away.
Um....entropy, anyone?
Capitalism is the only system in which the workers can achieve the Marxist ideal of truly owning the means of production.
This is true, but only in the moderated capitalism that America and most of the Western world has practiced for the last few centuries. The recent experimentation with Pure, Libertarian capitalism, is just doomed as communism. Look up the Power Law.
What the workers need is an ownership stake and direct control of their businesses.
Right again, but since they don't currently have it, and the current owners aren't willing to give it up, then workers will need to use any means at their disposal to change the status quo--both government and non-governmental solutions.
Complaining about low wages and unemployment while shopping at Wal-Mart?
Sure do, when it's the only store in this town.
Whining about oil prices while driving a pickup on light errands?
So what, you just wanted me to drive to the next town to shop for groceries--how much gas is that going to fucking save?
Oops, sorry, you're an idiot. If the deck is stacked against workers, the only way to fix things is to reshuffle. After they all lost their shirts in Enron and similar scandals, they'd be crazy to invest in the pyramid scheme that is our stock market. Because guess who's the bottom of the pyramid?
Really? I thought it was a pretty common metaphor. Well, thanks.
See, it turns out that you're allowed to have sex without a license, you just aren't allowed to spread AIDS. You're allowed to program a computer unlicensed, you just aren't allowed to program viruses. You're even allowed to possess deadly firearms and vastly more deadly automobiles (near infinitely more deadly than all terrorism combined)--but you aren't allowed to kill people with them.
It's not the tools that we are supposed to ban, it's the usage of these tools. Sorry, your right to paranoia about what I'm doing in my basement ends when it means we must all live in submission to Monsanto.
In any event, I'm pretty sure that this guy is the one who will inherit the Earth.
Same thing. Same thing. Jobs are paid for in money. There you go. It's true, America has added jobs as time goes on--I didn't say there was net decrease in the number of jobs since I was born, did I, my illiterate friend? Merely that we Americans have imported more goods, and therefore exported more jobs, than we have exported goods, and imported jobs. Basically, American demand has been the driving force of the world economy for the past few decades. I've never seen anyone deny this basic fact of international economics.
1992 to 2002, U.S. multinational companies added around five American jobs for every three foreign jobs they added. This means more job growth in the American market than the foreign one with respect to American jobs.
Right, so 3/8 of the jobs generated by American demand go to foreigners, and you've offered no information about what share of foreign jobs come to America. This is so retarded I will not read the rest of your post. So long.
I think of as me cruel and heartless, and a government freeloader, and a hypocrite. Bye bye.
Look up the statistics for both if you're so hardworking. It's true.
I won't deny kids basic health care, but I don't want to be forced at gunpoint to give it to them.
Right, kids can pay for their own health care. Monster.
I work in a de-regulated, competitive market. My plant sells electricity because we can make it & sell it cheaper than anyone else. If someone else comes along and is able to make juice cheaper, then we lose money or go out of business. Tell me how that's like the soviet union.
It's basically exactly like Russia. For decades there was a government granted monopoly. Now they are "privatized", which means they just gave the monopoly away to private interests, even though it would never existed without public arrangement. Just like your industry. "De-regulation" is just a government-created market--not capitalism at all. See California for examples of this.
So, yes, you are a government freeloader. Just like the plutocrats who now run Russia. You are completely isolated from true capitalism.
There are just as many inefficiencies in any monopoly as there are in the government or academia--so long as there is no incentive to do better, so long as you can guarantee someone's poverty if they don't do what they say, you have no incentive to do better.
Given the ever increasing gap between rich and poor, given that our country is rapidly becoming the next Argentina, the status quo is preventing other people the opportunities you've had.
And that makes me a monster?
You want to deny kids basic health care? That makes you a monster.
Moreover, I personally couldn't stand to live off the largess of others if I had any capability at all to earn my own.
You already do. You work in power generation? That's a government sanctioned and regulated monopoly. You essentially work for the government. There is no philosophic difference between your job and that of someone working in a power plant in the Soviet Union. Why those who are most isolated from capitalism are it's biggest fans, from you to those crazy fellows at Enron, is to say the least noteworthy.
Only someone as isolated from the marketplace as yourself could believe things aren't terrible in this country right now. Especially in manufacturing. Sure, some manufacturing employers are pretending there's a shortage, just as some IT employers still pretend there's a shortage of people with IT training. Shops are still closing down all over the place.
People all over this country are working damn hard, but are going to suffer not because of their own inadequacy, but because of the macroeconomic fiscal and currency games of their government. For you to blame these people for getting screwed over, for you to rejoice in their suffering as you sit secure in a government fiat job, makes you a monster. And humorously hypocritical. You're a real laugh riot.
As for communists not being welcome in the United States- it might have been better put that your ideal is the antithesis of what made the United States what it is today, and should your ideal triumph, it would mean your precious mayflower ancestors and the framers of our nation put in all that effort for naught. So if you really believe what you say, then emmigrate to Europe where that kind of thought is welcome and commonplace. We certainly don't need any more of it fouling things up here.
What, any suggestion that giant mega-corporations shouldn't be allowed to own every single last thing is communism? Look, Senator McCarthy, this country was founded on the freedom and democracy of people, not corporations. If you want to play running dog cause it makes you feel good to push other people around, why don't you head on over to Singapore, where you're ideals are already perfectly implemented.
Incidentally, I don't give a shit about your ancestors. Your ideals, implement, are causing the economic ruin of Europe, and would do the same here.
I'm just saying, this is my fucking country too--you want to ruin the one ideal that has been most central to every immigrant to this place--Opportunity--you better be stockpiling guns, because we are definitely getting ready to stand up for what REALLY made our nation strong. Opportunity and Freedom, not feudal hierarchy. Have you noticed which social classes our soldiers are coming from? Better make sure they stay happy...
You are not to steal it from people who expertly manage the efforts of others to gain wealth for themselves while paying their employees.
You are not to steal it from people who expertly manage the efforts of serfs to gain wealth for themselves while protecting their serfs from other lords...
As for FDR- how's that war on poverty he started going along?
Well things aren't as bad as they were under Hoover, so that's a good start...
And for feudalism and nepotism- some people are indeed born into advantagous positions. Those who weren't, such as myself, had to work to put themselves in an advantegous position.
And some of them work even harder to shut the door behind them...
Having come from a very modest background, I have no sympathy for those who would use their less than perfect birth circumstances as an alibi for their failure. Success is hard, and you must prove your worth every day. Being a slacker and making excuses about how you're not 'priveleged' is a much more attractive option for many people, it seems you included.
And I've got no sympathy for those who wants to make sure no one has the same opportunities they had. For make no mistake--things are getting worse. Health care is more expensive,