It is not progress to invent snazzier riot armor, "nonlethal" crowd subjugation weapons, a better electric chair. And for much the same reasons it's not progress to invent a more effective means of mob tyranny ("democracy"). Tyranny is not more acceptable because the blame has been spread thin over a whole population; it's worse, with laws being changed repeatedly on the whim of whatever pressure-group is currently top of the pile, leaving nothing safe and nobody's pocket un-picked.
That was why the founders of the USA invented the constitution, to rein in democracy and limit the grasp of the state. Unfortunately this can now be seen to have been an instance of "setting the fox to guard the henhouse". The restraints are beaten ever back, because the politicians sell themselves on their ability to pick pockets and give freebies, and the customers (the electorate) don't like being balked in their larceny.
All moves towards "direct democracy" or "easier democracy" make the problem worse not better.
It's not freedom to have a hand in your neghbors pocket, and his in yours! Freedom is when you both keep your own hands in your own damn pockets and work for a living rather than voting yourself one.
After all, didn't they already have one of these things in the movie "goldfinger"? Admittedly that only printed onto huge blocks of gold, or secret agents.
The irony is that this is no more a threat to jobs than the invention of the passenger aircraft was to those employed in the zeppelin industry.
If $CONGRESSMAN sat and thought a moment, he'd start asking questions like "how will the economy grow if I have a commercial and passenger spaceport in my district?"
Wireless spam? I'm thinking that's not necessarily such a bad thing. (1) wireless broadcasting objects are locatable in 3D using the proper detection tools (2) a wireless enabled laptop is deliberately radio-permeable and structured so as to pick up radio energy.
Solution: directional high powered radio emitters on the 802.11b wavelength. Target the suckas and zap the bejeezus out of 'em.
..they're ugly blocky tasteless shite. So naturally people want rid of them. But a well designed building built for both usefulness and beauty should last hundreds of years, its use changing but its structure and basic appearance remaining.
Why have "tastes changed"? They haven't, some semblance of taste has merely been reasserted, displacing the 60s "big brick with windows", "concrete barn" and "prefab cardboard box" styles that were always more ideological / cheapskate than an honest attempt at beauty.
"If you own your property and want to keep developers away, then don't sell it."
Can you say "eminent domain"? Or in the UK where I live the equivalent is called a "compulsory purchase". Big business often has big government eating out of it's hand. But sheer bloody intractability might dissuade what mere private property rights cannot.
One other feature of government subsidies is that they come with government strings. Which universally favor "political correctness" and, in the movie industry, result in the creation of a slew of ten hour films of the artist's own belly button, and suchlike trash. One could assume that the game results will be similar. Not to mention they will also likely be bland pap, since there would be public pressure on the government freebie givers to turn up their noses at anything "encouraging violence" or "prurient" or suchlike nanny-behaviorist blather.
The market reflects the free choices and preferences of the buying public. Attempt to bypass it, and all you get is something by definition unsaleable. Worse, you misallocate resources (in films: actors; in games: programmers) towards the production of unwanted crud, which stifles the market for good stuff and raises its price.
Use what you need is not the point. Most coding is code maintenance. Code maintenance on perl 6 will consist of: screaming, gagging, tearing it up, throwing it away, and rewriting.
I'm sorry, but it's not. It's the bastard descendant of perl, ada, c++, and ocaml, with a slew of line noise thrown in, and most of the grammar words from the English language. I know perl 5, and yet I can't read that stuff. My prior knowledge gets me about as far as a knowledge of C would - I can guess the basic outlines. Sheesh.
Idiots (especially overly clever idiots) could write hard to read programs in perl 5.
In perl 6, any program written by an idiot will have to be torn up and thrown away, because there is no damned way in hell I or anyone else short of a linguistic supergenius could parse sense out of that morass, to maintain it or check it.
During a talk here in Oxford University's computing lab, Eric Raymond proclaimed that "UNIX died because it was closed-source", and then refused to accept that Microsoft's multi-billion dollar success suggested that otherwise.
It's true, it's just incomplete.
Unix died because it was closed source and internally competitive. It fractured into a slew of islands of mutually incompatible enhancements, none of which, with the possible exception of Solaris, had sufficient momentum to stand alone.
By contrast, Microsoft, being closed source and a unity, is motivated to converge rather than diverge its OSes, so it doesn't fragment its' user base.
The lefty types, being the minority, are scared not in spite of choice, but because of it.
Never said otherwise. That is, after all, the default reaction of said types.
Yes, free choice in genetics would lead to one generation of barbie-kens. One, no more, because from that point on mere perfect-ten beauty would be just an item on a checklist. It would be originality that would be at a premium.
Standard market mechanism - what's rare or hard to get is valued above what's common or trivial.
Actually you hit the nail on the had there IMO. Genetics potentially extends private choice to heredity. All the lefty types are terrified of it lest everyone churn out Barbie and Ken replicas. But as per usual they ignore the importance of the individual's choice. Even with totally unregulated private-individual genetic tinkering, the individual differences as to what constitutes "super" would become the source of diversity.
I don't care who establishes off world permanent habitation, I just wish they'd hurry up and do so. I mean this quite seriously - I don't even worry it will be tyrannous commie bastards, because one fundamental feature of colonies, provided they're far away enough to gain an identity of their own, they always secede.
Besides, I am an anarchist and I look forward to interplanetary spaceflight with glee - it is simply impossible to rule over open space, there's just plain too much of it.
"Also do you actually know why they had to impose Age restrictions on employment? Do a little reading on the Coal Mines and Mills back in the nineteenth century. It is not a good thing for children - and thats what they are - to be working. Hence the need for Social Services "snooping" as you so objectivly put it."
I see no reason to sit on the fence (which you mistakenly call "objective"). I oppose child labor bans. I consider them an ill-concieved solution to a problem that no longer exists.
I find the "dark satanic mills" argument without merit. Sweatshops and child labor are what happens when any country goes through an industrial revolution, when the populace is poor, the technology is rudimentary, labor is cheap, and price is the consideration that trumps all. Left to the free market, this fairly quickly creates a wealthy "middle class", which then drives the old sweatshops out of business with a preference for quality as well as cheapness, and lacking the economic need to send their children to work.
Before this point child labor laws (if they exist) are ignored and openly flaunted; after this point they are redundant.
If the child labor laws went away tomorrow in the USA or Europe, nobody would employ five-year-olds in huge cotton mills or down coal mines. You could simply never collect up that many children willing to forgo education, nor make money with the wages, safety, and working conditions they and their parents could demand. "Satanic mills" were a very transient phenomenon in the industrialized west, and will be in the developing world too - in those countries where wealth accumulation is possible and the market has not been smothered in red tape (ie: not in most of the semisocialist dictatorships of the poorer countries).
E-gold or Goldmoney are payment systems based on transfers of ownership of real physical gold, denominated by mass. Goldmoney scales down to 0.001g (which is worth just over one US cent at todays wartime-high gold prices) and all the way up to infinity. E-gold scales up likewise to infinity and down further (to about 4/100 of a cent at todays prices), and has an e-silver version if you want to go yet smaller.
There is not even an honest need for school
on
Why Nerds Are Unpopular
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
The article says "Teenagers now are useless, except as cheap labor in industries like fast food"
but:
- if there weren't a minimum wage law making low-employables merely unemployable
- if there weren't age related employment bans and/or social-services snooping
- if there weren't irreducible minimum red tape and tax burden making every employee cost, even if they are a volunteer
- if young people were not forced en masse into "education" whether they were willing to learn or not
...then would teenagers still be useless? All these things were not present so recently as the earlier half of the 20th century, and there was no "teenaged hormone madness" back then.
How many jobs REALLY NEED a college degree to actually DO the job? (Rather than merely as a "is more intelligent than a goldfish" checklist item, to winnow the resume pile.) How many of those could not be instead learned apprentice-style, working up from office coffee-maker and gofer?
Not vastly many. As demonstrated by the fact that many college dropouts go on to become successful earners, once they've conned their way into their first job.
Truly, school is not merely a prison, but the very need for it to be there in the first place is a socially (and governmentally) constructed fiction.
Oh, and as to the badness of letting teenagers run around at liberty: observe the ruin and havoc created by homeschoolers. (What, there isn't any? How surprising.)
- It would be a money sink that would never pay back its construction costs - a tax money sink, because no commercial firm could ever get investment funding (not this side of AD 3000 anyhow).
- It would be the worst sort of governmental monopoly, a choke point where everyone must bow and scrape to the groundbound owners, in order to get a lift.
- It would be The Definitive Terrorist Target - and the bad guys only have to get lucky once. It would be utterly indefensible from a simple kamikaze attack, being so long that no weapons installation could keep cover over its whole length without weighing it down.
- It would be a murphys-law magnet, untested technology carrying staggering tension loads in atmospheric, vacuum, radiation and electromagnetic conditions that would be experimental at best. And that's even before an orbiting piece of space junk slams into it.
- And it would be a catastrophe waiting to happen, when (not if) it snaps and rains megatons of carbon cable down upon the ground below.
Slashdot Mirror
It is not progress to invent snazzier riot armor, "nonlethal" crowd subjugation weapons, a better electric chair. And for much the same reasons it's not progress to invent a more effective means of mob tyranny ("democracy"). Tyranny is not more acceptable because the blame has been spread thin over a whole population; it's worse, with laws being changed repeatedly on the whim of whatever pressure-group is currently top of the pile, leaving nothing safe and nobody's pocket un-picked.
That was why the founders of the USA invented the constitution, to rein in democracy and limit the grasp of the state. Unfortunately this can now be seen to have been an instance of "setting the fox to guard the henhouse". The restraints are beaten ever back, because the politicians sell themselves on their ability to pick pockets and give freebies, and the customers (the electorate) don't like being balked in their larceny.
All moves towards "direct democracy" or "easier democracy" make the problem worse not better.
It's not freedom to have a hand in your neghbors pocket, and his in yours! Freedom is when you both keep your own hands in your own damn pockets and work for a living rather than voting yourself one.
After all, didn't they already have one of these things in the movie "goldfinger"? Admittedly that only printed onto huge blocks of gold, or secret agents.
The irony is that this is no more a threat to jobs than the invention of the passenger aircraft was to those employed in the zeppelin industry.
If $CONGRESSMAN sat and thought a moment, he'd start asking questions like "how will the economy grow if I have a commercial and passenger spaceport in my district?"
Pork isn't a gain, it's misapplied money.
Wireless spam? I'm thinking that's not necessarily such a bad thing. (1) wireless broadcasting objects are locatable in 3D using the proper detection tools (2) a wireless enabled laptop is deliberately radio-permeable and structured so as to pick up radio energy.
Solution: directional high powered radio emitters on the 802.11b wavelength. Target the suckas and zap the bejeezus out of 'em.
Mmmm, fried spam.
..they're ugly blocky tasteless shite. So naturally people want rid of them. But a well designed building built for both usefulness and beauty should last hundreds of years, its use changing but its structure and basic appearance remaining.
Why have "tastes changed"? They haven't, some semblance of taste has merely been reasserted, displacing the 60s "big brick with windows", "concrete barn" and "prefab cardboard box" styles that were always more ideological / cheapskate than an honest attempt at beauty.
"If you own your property and want to keep developers away, then don't sell it."
Can you say "eminent domain"? Or in the UK where I live the equivalent is called a "compulsory purchase". Big business often has big government eating out of it's hand. But sheer bloody intractability might dissuade what mere private property rights cannot.
...it's rocket fuel. Literally. Cheap H2 (and perhaps also cheap O2 from electric hydrogen generation) means cheaper space travel.
One other feature of government subsidies is that they come with government strings. Which universally favor "political correctness" and, in the movie industry, result in the creation of a slew of ten hour films of the artist's own belly button, and suchlike trash. One could assume that the game results will be similar. Not to mention they will also likely be bland pap, since there would be public pressure on the government freebie givers to turn up their noses at anything "encouraging violence" or "prurient" or suchlike nanny-behaviorist blather.
The market reflects the free choices and preferences of the buying public. Attempt to bypass it, and all you get is something by definition unsaleable. Worse, you misallocate resources (in films: actors; in games: programmers) towards the production of unwanted crud, which stifles the market for good stuff and raises its price.
here's a better:
/dev/urandom`}
while (1) {fork ? `cat
Use what you need is not the point. Most coding is code maintenance. Code maintenance on perl 6 will consist of: screaming, gagging, tearing it up, throwing it away, and rewriting.
I'm sorry, but it's not. It's the bastard descendant of perl, ada, c++, and ocaml, with a slew of line noise thrown in, and most of the grammar words from the English language. I know perl 5, and yet I can't read that stuff. My prior knowledge gets me about as far as a knowledge of C would - I can guess the basic outlines. Sheesh.
Idiots (especially overly clever idiots) could write hard to read programs in perl 5.
In perl 6, any program written by an idiot will have to be torn up and thrown away, because there is no damned way in hell I or anyone else short of a linguistic supergenius could parse sense out of that morass, to maintain it or check it.
During a talk here in Oxford University's computing lab, Eric Raymond proclaimed that "UNIX died because it was closed-source", and then refused to accept that Microsoft's multi-billion dollar success suggested that otherwise.
It's true, it's just incomplete.
Unix died because it was closed source and internally competitive. It fractured into a slew of islands of mutually incompatible enhancements, none of which, with the possible exception of Solaris, had sufficient momentum to stand alone.
By contrast, Microsoft, being closed source and a unity, is motivated to converge rather than diverge its OSes, so it doesn't fragment its' user base.
The lefty types, being the minority, are scared not in spite of choice, but because of it.
Never said otherwise. That is, after all, the default reaction of said types.
Yes, free choice in genetics would lead to one generation of barbie-kens. One, no more, because from that point on mere perfect-ten beauty would be just an item on a checklist. It would be originality that would be at a premium.
Standard market mechanism - what's rare or hard to get is valued above what's common or trivial.
Actually you hit the nail on the had there IMO. Genetics potentially extends private choice to heredity. All the lefty types are terrified of it lest everyone churn out Barbie and Ken replicas. But as per usual they ignore the importance of the individual's choice. Even with totally unregulated private-individual genetic tinkering, the individual differences as to what constitutes "super" would become the source of diversity.
...said the half crippled mouse to the two ton gorilla, "or I'll stab you in the toe!"
I don't care who establishes off world permanent habitation, I just wish they'd hurry up and do so. I mean this quite seriously - I don't even worry it will be tyrannous commie bastards, because one fundamental feature of colonies, provided they're far away enough to gain an identity of their own, they always secede.
Besides, I am an anarchist and I look forward to interplanetary spaceflight with glee - it is simply impossible to rule over open space, there's just plain too much of it.
I want off this rock!
...then why didn't they just fork it? I thought the BSD licence allowed that.
Doesn't Dilbert already have a copyright on that one?
"Also do you actually know why they had to impose Age restrictions on employment? Do a little reading on the Coal Mines and Mills back in the nineteenth century. It is not a good thing for children - and thats what they are - to be working. Hence the need for Social Services "snooping" as you so objectivly put it."
I see no reason to sit on the fence (which you mistakenly call "objective"). I oppose child labor bans. I consider them an ill-concieved solution to a problem that no longer exists.
I find the "dark satanic mills" argument without merit. Sweatshops and child labor are what happens when any country goes through an industrial revolution, when the populace is poor, the technology is rudimentary, labor is cheap, and price is the consideration that trumps all. Left to the free market, this fairly quickly creates a wealthy "middle class", which then drives the old sweatshops out of business with a preference for quality as well as cheapness, and lacking the economic need to send their children to work.
Before this point child labor laws (if they exist) are ignored and openly flaunted; after this point they are redundant.
If the child labor laws went away tomorrow in the USA or Europe, nobody would employ five-year-olds in huge cotton mills or down coal mines. You could simply never collect up that many children willing to forgo education, nor make money with the wages, safety, and working conditions they and their parents could demand. "Satanic mills" were a very transient phenomenon in the industrialized west, and will be in the developing world too - in those countries where wealth accumulation is possible and the market has not been smothered in red tape (ie: not in most of the semisocialist dictatorships of the poorer countries).
E-gold or Goldmoney are payment systems based on transfers of ownership of real physical gold, denominated by mass. Goldmoney scales down to 0.001g (which is worth just over one US cent at todays wartime-high gold prices) and all the way up to infinity. E-gold scales up likewise to infinity and down further (to about 4/100 of a cent at todays prices), and has an e-silver version if you want to go yet smaller.
The article says "Teenagers now are useless, except as cheap labor in industries like fast food"
but:
- if there weren't a minimum wage law making low-employables merely unemployable
- if there weren't age related employment bans and/or social-services snooping
- if there weren't irreducible minimum red tape and tax burden making every employee cost, even if they are a volunteer
- if young people were not forced en masse into "education" whether they were willing to learn or not
...then would teenagers still be useless? All these things were not present so recently as the earlier half of the 20th century, and there was no "teenaged hormone madness" back then.
How many jobs REALLY NEED a college degree to actually DO the job? (Rather than merely as a "is more intelligent than a goldfish" checklist item, to winnow the resume pile.) How many of those could not be instead learned apprentice-style, working up from office coffee-maker and gofer?
Not vastly many. As demonstrated by the fact that many college dropouts go on to become successful earners, once they've conned their way into their first job.
Truly, school is not merely a prison, but the very need for it to be there in the first place is a socially (and governmentally) constructed fiction.
Oh, and as to the badness of letting teenagers run around at liberty: observe the ruin and havoc created by homeschoolers. (What, there isn't any? How surprising.)
...you could try swiping it in the slot?
It may be feasible, but it's also insane.
- It would be a money sink that would never pay back its construction costs - a tax money sink, because no commercial firm could ever get investment funding (not this side of AD 3000 anyhow).
- It would be the worst sort of governmental monopoly, a choke point where everyone must bow and scrape to the groundbound owners, in order to get a lift.
- It would be The Definitive Terrorist Target - and the bad guys only have to get lucky once. It would be utterly indefensible from a simple kamikaze attack, being so long that no weapons installation could keep cover over its whole length without weighing it down.
- It would be a murphys-law magnet, untested technology carrying staggering tension loads in atmospheric, vacuum, radiation and electromagnetic conditions that would be experimental at best. And that's even before an orbiting piece of space junk slams into it.
- And it would be a catastrophe waiting to happen, when (not if) it snaps and rains megatons of carbon cable down upon the ground below.
Bleh.
It's called "nicotine chewing gum / patches". Except for the actually smoking it part, of course.
The downside is that for code that isn't SMP/HT-aware, performance can actually degrade.
How many modern programs use no kernel threads / multiple processes at all? Not many I'm guessing.