Also, GP is fundamentally misunderstanding (or willfully ignoring to pursue a religious agenda) the word "theory": The Theory of Evolution has roughly the same scientific standing as the Theory of Gravity. For an idea to be elevated to the title of "Theory", there has to be really overwhelming evidence that the theory accurately describes the observable universe, demonstrated by different scientists in different labs in a lot of different ways.
'Why is the government mandating that you support a for-profit company?"
As well as the entire "defense" industry. And not entirely but still significantly the telecommunications, railroad, oil / natural gas, agriculture, airline, shipping, automobile, pharmaceutical, medical device, and finance industries. And I'm sure I'm leaving out a bunch.
I mean, why do you think big companies pay big bucks for lobbyists and campaign contributions?
Yes, of course: Because when the average temperature in December rises from -18 C to -16 C means that it's impossible for water to even consider freezing.
Of course, this isn't the kind of thing where everything actually changes all at once - what really happens is that slowly but surely most of the key functionality for computers is web-based, so as long as the protocols are well-understood and implemented by a bunch of different clients that leaves users free to choose operating system platforms on other factors (like freedom, price, or coolness) rather than the applications deciding for the buyer. And eventually, the threats that Microsoft makes when an OEM doesn't put Windows on everything will not have enough teeth to be effective.
People - the Unix-likes advanced far beyond command-line utilities ages ago.
There's an implication that doesn't make sense to me with the phrase "advanced far beyond": the idea that the GUI, because it is newer than the CLI, is necessarily superior.
I know which one I want when the task is "Go through my entire code tree and replace all quoted instances of the previous database password with the new one" (yes, that implies bad code/configuration separation, but the problem crops up). There are probably GUI tools somewhere that can do the job if you know where to look, but some basic CLI skills makes this a a much easier task.
As for the "That's for sysadmins" argument, I'll just point out that it has always benefited me as a mostly-developer to have a decent sysadmin skillset as well. That helps when working with sysadmins on deployment strategies, when responding to crises, and being able to manage my own systems when needed. Sure, professional sysadmins are better at it than I am, but that I can do it at all makes a difference.
1) Large initial outlay on the energy saving bulbs;
Well, if it helps at all, you don't have to replace all your existing bulbs at once. You can buy 4 or 12 of the new ones for a much smaller price, and replace your incandescent bulbs as they burn out.
Another factor here: Changing light bulbs is an annoyance. Switching to a bulb that doesn't burn out for years will save you hassle over the not-very-long run, as well as money.
You can usefully fit less information or interaction points in a 2" x 3" screen than you can in a 8" x 12" screen. You can kinda sorta work around that problem by designing interactions carefully to be easily done on touchscreens or keyboards, but you can't change that basic fact. That means more scrolling, pinching, etc to do what used to be a relatively fast point-click task.
It's not a Republican plan. ABSOLUTELY ZERO Republicans voted for this monstrosity in the House, and ABSOLUTELY ZERO voted for it in the Senate.
That's not a very solid argument: There are measures that the Republicans would have approved 20 years ago that they would never accept today.
The argument that it's a Republican plan is easy: The Heritage Foundation, very much part of the intellectual apparatus of the Republican Party, came up with this exact plan back in 1993 (yes, to oppose the Clinton plan, but the point is that this was their proposal in the first place). Bob Dole ran on it as the Republican presidential nominee in 1996. Newt Gingrich talked about it in 1998. Mitt Romney made it real in Massachusetts in 2006. No Democrat was talking about it as a serious proposal until the Obama administration.
Today's Republican Party opposes Medicaid, SCHIP, Medicare, and the not unrelated food aid programs, never mind adding on the ACA. They're philosophically opposed to the idea that government should be providing food, health care, housing, or transportation to people who can't afford to buy it. That's there plain as day to anyone who listens to Paul Ryan, Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, Michelle Bachmann, John McCain, Mitch McConnell and just about everyone else who is a major player among GOP elected leaders.
If you want some proof that the modern Republican Party is different from the Republican Party of 20 years ago, look at a couple of recent incidents:
- Bob Dole, former Republican senate leader, former Republican presidential pick, was wheeled into the Senate in 2012 to try to approve a treaty that would make the measures in the Americans with Disabilities Act (which Dole fought for and George H.W. Bush signed in 1990) apply to countries around the world. This treaty had been negotiated over 4 presidential administrations: George H W Bush, Bill Clinton, George W Bush, and Barack Obama all pursued it. It was shot down not because of the contents of the treaty (which involved basically no changes at all to what the US was doing about the treatment of the disabled), but because (A) some people were on TV worried that it would allow the UN to takeover of America and (B) it might seem like Obama had done something good in the world and we can't have that.
- John Boehner and Paul Ryan recently negotiated a budget deal that gave the Republican Party some of what they were asking for in terms of budget cuts in return for keeping the government functioning. The next day, a lot of Republicans were calling for their ouster, because apparently keeping the government functioning is not a goal of the current Republican Party.
The correct term is "amoral": Robots have no moral sense whatsoever. "immoral" would imply they had moral sense but were actively engaging in the behavior that is against that morality.
There is no expectation of privacy when driving a vehicle on public roads.
There is also a big difference between tracking a specific vehicle (e.g. the police have reasonable suspicion that the person is engaged in criminal activity) and tracking everybody. Generally speaking, the principle in play here is: If the cops don't have a reason to suspect you of a crime, they should be leaving you completely alone. And if they catch you doing one crime (e.g. speeding), that does not give them a legitimate reason to immediately suspect you of another (e.g. human trafficking).
I can understand the instincts of police departments that would lead to tracking everybody: If you track every vehicle, then you can use that information to piece together criminal conspiracies after the fact. For example, if a drug dealer is caught, and his car stops at the same address every Tuesday at 3 PM, there's a decent chance that you've found the dealer's supplier or higher-up in the drug gang.
There are two problems with this idea: 1. You get a lot of bad leads this way. That address that the dealer stops at every Tuesday at 3 PM could be the supplier, but it could also be his family member, girlfriend or mistress, pastor, family friend, or someone else who's completely innocent. 2. You annoy a lot of law-abiding citizens. The police tend to forget that the majority of citizens they interact with are basically law-abiding, even among people they've profiled as "criminal". If you annoy them, the lifeblood of a truly just and successful criminal justice system, information from (un-coerced) witnesses, will dry up.
I've often wondered what would happen if police training and culture were such that when a cop was talking to a poor black guy, he was assumed to be either a law-abiding citizen or a witness to criminal activity rather than engaged in criminal activity. In other words, the opposite of this.
Bill Gates, I think somewhere in his brain he wants to be altruistic for some philosophical reason, but his charity really just pumps M$ products and tries to make teachers be paid by performance.
His charity also does a ton of good stuff in areas like public health and sanitation. He's not a saint, he may be doing it primarily as a PR move, but that's definitely doing more good for the world than having it just sitting in some trust fund for his 3 kids or something. And yes, he could have also given it to a bunch of organizations rather than creating a foundation of his own, but my impression from those who have done work in the area where his foundation operates is that they have a fairly good reputation as far as non-profits go.
I don't like Bill Gates' business tactics. I do like what he's chosen to do with a lot of his time and money.
Fiat currencies are worth something because you have faith in the issuer.
Specifically, there are two mechanisms that a government (say, the US) can use that Bitcoin or any other non-fiat currency can't that make fiat currency more useful than Bitcoins: 1. Attempting to settle a debt with fiat currency is always a legal offer of payment. That means that you can, for example, go into a restaurant, order food, and proffer enough $20 bills to pay for your meal, and the restaurant cannot refuse your $20 bills and then claim that you skipped out on the check. This enforces the social value of holding fiat currency within the jurisdiction of the government in question, because that is the government saying that your currency can always be exchanged for something useful.
2. You are required by law to pay taxes using the fiat currency. That means that one way or another you have to get your hands on enough of them to keep the IRS happy. And yes, tax laws typically treat income not in the fiat currency as income: You can't legally evade income taxes by taking your entire salary and managing all your purchases in bottles of Guinness, not even in Ireland. If the government finds out that you are in fact attempting to do that, they will treat your Guinness as income, demand that you pay the tax based on the value of Guinness in the fiat currency to them, which forces you to sell some of your Guinness for fiat currency.
In short, if the government is functioning well enough that there's still a police force, court system, and tax collections, your fiat currency is guaranteed to be worth something. Bitcoins, by contrast, are not guaranteed to be anything.
There is a good reason that modern economists pretty consistently oppose deflation.
How would you react if your cash was going to be worth more a year from now? You'd probably avoid spending unnecessary cash on anything. You'd also be more reluctant to invest, because you know that if you get, say, less than a 2% return you'd do better holding cash. So what you're going to do with your cash is hoard it, as much as possible.
So far so good - you've encouraged saving, right? But there's a problem: Everyone else reached the same conclusions that you did and responded more or less the same way. In deflation-adjusted terms, that lowers corporate sales (because consumers are avoiding purchasing), it lowers sales to corporations (because their sales are down and they're also trying to hang onto cash), it dries up the job market (existing corporations won't hire under those conditions, and new businesses have a hard time starting because they can't get sales), banks demand much higher interest rates (because you have to now beat deflation), and slowly but surely the gears of the economy grind to a halt.
By contrast, with modest inflation, everyone is encouraged to do something with their money, so goods and services circulate more, so more work needs to get done, so more people are employed and doing more work when employed. And it's relatively easy to prevent inflation from adversely affecting you: Hold assets that aren't cash (securities, real estate, etc), and adjust the prices you demand for anything you sell (including your labor). And yes, those conditions are very different from hyperinflation, where nobody wants to have cash because it will be worthless by next week: You want cash to move, but not move so quickly that nobody can plan ahead, which gives you a target of 1-2% inflation, which is exactly what we have.
But the US people will pay again for the arrogance of the government.
I, like the vast majority of the US, am neither a shareholder nor employee of Boeing. Explain to me how this costs me a lot of money.
I agree that the way the NSA is spying on everyone is really really stupid, arrogant, and against the basic principles of civilized government. But I also don't think that Boeing has a right to contracts with anyone in particular, and that foreign governments can stop doing business with US-based businesses for any reason. And while this scuttled deal is certainly bad for Boeing, I don't see how what's bad for Boeing is necessarily bad for America.
But of course seeing someone's head being chopped off is far from as traumatising as seeing two people having fun without clothes on.
Or, horror of horrors, just seeing a human breast and nipple (notwithstanding the fact that most kids in the world see their first one within a few hours of being born).
I sometimes wonder if we would be better off with an actual dictator instead of the establishment that runs it now.
No, we wouldn't be, for four basic reasons: 1. If you get a bad dictator, life really really sucks until the dictator dies. Life sucks a lot less under democracies historically. 2. If you get a good dictator, being dictator for a while will not infrequently turn him into a bad dictator. Once you have absolute power, the temptation to abuse that power is simply too great. 3. Even good dictators can't keep track of *everything*, so any dictator has to rely on subordinates. If any of those subordinates is bad, but good at fooling the dictator (or has dirt on him sufficient to protect the subordinate from the dictator), the regime is almost as bad as if the dictator was bad. 4. Whenever a dictator is out of power, there is not infrequently no clear answer to who will be the next dictator. Frequently, when that's a question, it's been answered by a civil war.
To quote a famous Prime Minister: "It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried."
Slashdot Mirror
Also, GP is fundamentally misunderstanding (or willfully ignoring to pursue a religious agenda) the word "theory": The Theory of Evolution has roughly the same scientific standing as the Theory of Gravity. For an idea to be elevated to the title of "Theory", there has to be really overwhelming evidence that the theory accurately describes the observable universe, demonstrated by different scientists in different labs in a lot of different ways.
'Why is the government mandating that you support a for-profit company?"
As well as the entire "defense" industry. And not entirely but still significantly the telecommunications, railroad, oil / natural gas, agriculture, airline, shipping, automobile, pharmaceutical, medical device, and finance industries. And I'm sure I'm leaving out a bunch.
I mean, why do you think big companies pay big bucks for lobbyists and campaign contributions?
I was changing her phrasing around to match GGP's cannibalism theme. Apparently, you missed that.
"You're worried that we're going to run out of food. But that's not going to happen. ... We'll freeze to death first."
Yeah, doctors keep saying that, but when I asked one to help me solve that problem and boost my brain she slapped me!
Yes, of course: Because when the average temperature in December rises from -18 C to -16 C means that it's impossible for water to even consider freezing.
2014 will be the Year of the Linux Desktop!
Of course, this isn't the kind of thing where everything actually changes all at once - what really happens is that slowly but surely most of the key functionality for computers is web-based, so as long as the protocols are well-understood and implemented by a bunch of different clients that leaves users free to choose operating system platforms on other factors (like freedom, price, or coolness) rather than the applications deciding for the buyer. And eventually, the threats that Microsoft makes when an OEM doesn't put Windows on everything will not have enough teeth to be effective.
In the States, Boxing Day traditions are very different: What we do is go up to some random stranger and punch them in the face!
GUIs tend to suck at automation because all GUIs tend to assume that end users are blithering morons.
Which, to be fair, is frequently a safe assumption.
One of ESR's Unix koans makes the point wonderfully, I think.
People - the Unix-likes advanced far beyond command-line utilities ages ago.
There's an implication that doesn't make sense to me with the phrase "advanced far beyond": the idea that the GUI, because it is newer than the CLI, is necessarily superior.
I know which one I want when the task is "Go through my entire code tree and replace all quoted instances of the previous database password with the new one" (yes, that implies bad code/configuration separation, but the problem crops up). There are probably GUI tools somewhere that can do the job if you know where to look, but some basic CLI skills makes this a a much easier task.
As for the "That's for sysadmins" argument, I'll just point out that it has always benefited me as a mostly-developer to have a decent sysadmin skillset as well. That helps when working with sysadmins on deployment strategies, when responding to crises, and being able to manage my own systems when needed. Sure, professional sysadmins are better at it than I am, but that I can do it at all makes a difference.
1) Large initial outlay on the energy saving bulbs;
Well, if it helps at all, you don't have to replace all your existing bulbs at once. You can buy 4 or 12 of the new ones for a much smaller price, and replace your incandescent bulbs as they burn out.
Another factor here: Changing light bulbs is an annoyance. Switching to a bulb that doesn't burn out for years will save you hassle over the not-very-long run, as well as money.
You can usefully fit less information or interaction points in a 2" x 3" screen than you can in a 8" x 12" screen. You can kinda sorta work around that problem by designing interactions carefully to be easily done on touchscreens or keyboards, but you can't change that basic fact. That means more scrolling, pinching, etc to do what used to be a relatively fast point-click task.
It's not a Republican plan. ABSOLUTELY ZERO Republicans voted for this monstrosity in the House, and ABSOLUTELY ZERO voted for it in the Senate.
That's not a very solid argument: There are measures that the Republicans would have approved 20 years ago that they would never accept today.
The argument that it's a Republican plan is easy: The Heritage Foundation, very much part of the intellectual apparatus of the Republican Party, came up with this exact plan back in 1993 (yes, to oppose the Clinton plan, but the point is that this was their proposal in the first place). Bob Dole ran on it as the Republican presidential nominee in 1996. Newt Gingrich talked about it in 1998. Mitt Romney made it real in Massachusetts in 2006. No Democrat was talking about it as a serious proposal until the Obama administration.
Today's Republican Party opposes Medicaid, SCHIP, Medicare, and the not unrelated food aid programs, never mind adding on the ACA. They're philosophically opposed to the idea that government should be providing food, health care, housing, or transportation to people who can't afford to buy it. That's there plain as day to anyone who listens to Paul Ryan, Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, Michelle Bachmann, John McCain, Mitch McConnell and just about everyone else who is a major player among GOP elected leaders.
If you want some proof that the modern Republican Party is different from the Republican Party of 20 years ago, look at a couple of recent incidents:
- Bob Dole, former Republican senate leader, former Republican presidential pick, was wheeled into the Senate in 2012 to try to approve a treaty that would make the measures in the Americans with Disabilities Act (which Dole fought for and George H.W. Bush signed in 1990) apply to countries around the world. This treaty had been negotiated over 4 presidential administrations: George H W Bush, Bill Clinton, George W Bush, and Barack Obama all pursued it. It was shot down not because of the contents of the treaty (which involved basically no changes at all to what the US was doing about the treatment of the disabled), but because (A) some people were on TV worried that it would allow the UN to takeover of America and (B) it might seem like Obama had done something good in the world and we can't have that.
- John Boehner and Paul Ryan recently negotiated a budget deal that gave the Republican Party some of what they were asking for in terms of budget cuts in return for keeping the government functioning. The next day, a lot of Republicans were calling for their ouster, because apparently keeping the government functioning is not a goal of the current Republican Party.
I also left out Emeril - Bam!
So, -biological- differences between -biological- races (yes, races...) do exist - like the size of the heart, the dick... the brain!?
In all three cases, it's not the size that counts, it's what you do with it.
I couldn't agree more: The story amounts to "Browser plugin does something that the author really wanted. Film at 11."
I mean, why would it be news if some guy had written a Firefox plugin to do the opposite?
The correct term is "amoral": Robots have no moral sense whatsoever. "immoral" would imply they had moral sense but were actively engaging in the behavior that is against that morality.
There is no expectation of privacy when driving a vehicle on public roads.
There is also a big difference between tracking a specific vehicle (e.g. the police have reasonable suspicion that the person is engaged in criminal activity) and tracking everybody. Generally speaking, the principle in play here is: If the cops don't have a reason to suspect you of a crime, they should be leaving you completely alone. And if they catch you doing one crime (e.g. speeding), that does not give them a legitimate reason to immediately suspect you of another (e.g. human trafficking).
I can understand the instincts of police departments that would lead to tracking everybody: If you track every vehicle, then you can use that information to piece together criminal conspiracies after the fact. For example, if a drug dealer is caught, and his car stops at the same address every Tuesday at 3 PM, there's a decent chance that you've found the dealer's supplier or higher-up in the drug gang.
There are two problems with this idea:
1. You get a lot of bad leads this way. That address that the dealer stops at every Tuesday at 3 PM could be the supplier, but it could also be his family member, girlfriend or mistress, pastor, family friend, or someone else who's completely innocent.
2. You annoy a lot of law-abiding citizens. The police tend to forget that the majority of citizens they interact with are basically law-abiding, even among people they've profiled as "criminal". If you annoy them, the lifeblood of a truly just and successful criminal justice system, information from (un-coerced) witnesses, will dry up.
I've often wondered what would happen if police training and culture were such that when a cop was talking to a poor black guy, he was assumed to be either a law-abiding citizen or a witness to criminal activity rather than engaged in criminal activity. In other words, the opposite of this.
Bill Gates, I think somewhere in his brain he wants to be altruistic for some philosophical reason, but his charity really just pumps M$ products and tries to make teachers be paid by performance.
His charity also does a ton of good stuff in areas like public health and sanitation. He's not a saint, he may be doing it primarily as a PR move, but that's definitely doing more good for the world than having it just sitting in some trust fund for his 3 kids or something. And yes, he could have also given it to a bunch of organizations rather than creating a foundation of his own, but my impression from those who have done work in the area where his foundation operates is that they have a fairly good reputation as far as non-profits go.
I don't like Bill Gates' business tactics. I do like what he's chosen to do with a lot of his time and money.
Fiat currencies are worth something because you have faith in the issuer.
Specifically, there are two mechanisms that a government (say, the US) can use that Bitcoin or any other non-fiat currency can't that make fiat currency more useful than Bitcoins:
1. Attempting to settle a debt with fiat currency is always a legal offer of payment. That means that you can, for example, go into a restaurant, order food, and proffer enough $20 bills to pay for your meal, and the restaurant cannot refuse your $20 bills and then claim that you skipped out on the check. This enforces the social value of holding fiat currency within the jurisdiction of the government in question, because that is the government saying that your currency can always be exchanged for something useful.
2. You are required by law to pay taxes using the fiat currency. That means that one way or another you have to get your hands on enough of them to keep the IRS happy. And yes, tax laws typically treat income not in the fiat currency as income: You can't legally evade income taxes by taking your entire salary and managing all your purchases in bottles of Guinness, not even in Ireland. If the government finds out that you are in fact attempting to do that, they will treat your Guinness as income, demand that you pay the tax based on the value of Guinness in the fiat currency to them, which forces you to sell some of your Guinness for fiat currency.
In short, if the government is functioning well enough that there's still a police force, court system, and tax collections, your fiat currency is guaranteed to be worth something. Bitcoins, by contrast, are not guaranteed to be anything.
How dare the price of things go down over time!
There is a good reason that modern economists pretty consistently oppose deflation.
How would you react if your cash was going to be worth more a year from now? You'd probably avoid spending unnecessary cash on anything. You'd also be more reluctant to invest, because you know that if you get, say, less than a 2% return you'd do better holding cash. So what you're going to do with your cash is hoard it, as much as possible.
So far so good - you've encouraged saving, right? But there's a problem: Everyone else reached the same conclusions that you did and responded more or less the same way. In deflation-adjusted terms, that lowers corporate sales (because consumers are avoiding purchasing), it lowers sales to corporations (because their sales are down and they're also trying to hang onto cash), it dries up the job market (existing corporations won't hire under those conditions, and new businesses have a hard time starting because they can't get sales), banks demand much higher interest rates (because you have to now beat deflation), and slowly but surely the gears of the economy grind to a halt.
By contrast, with modest inflation, everyone is encouraged to do something with their money, so goods and services circulate more, so more work needs to get done, so more people are employed and doing more work when employed. And it's relatively easy to prevent inflation from adversely affecting you: Hold assets that aren't cash (securities, real estate, etc), and adjust the prices you demand for anything you sell (including your labor). And yes, those conditions are very different from hyperinflation, where nobody wants to have cash because it will be worthless by next week: You want cash to move, but not move so quickly that nobody can plan ahead, which gives you a target of 1-2% inflation, which is exactly what we have.
But the US people will pay again for the arrogance of the government.
I, like the vast majority of the US, am neither a shareholder nor employee of Boeing. Explain to me how this costs me a lot of money.
I agree that the way the NSA is spying on everyone is really really stupid, arrogant, and against the basic principles of civilized government. But I also don't think that Boeing has a right to contracts with anyone in particular, and that foreign governments can stop doing business with US-based businesses for any reason. And while this scuttled deal is certainly bad for Boeing, I don't see how what's bad for Boeing is necessarily bad for America.
But of course seeing someone's head being chopped off is far from as traumatising as seeing two people having fun without clothes on.
Or, horror of horrors, just seeing a human breast and nipple (notwithstanding the fact that most kids in the world see their first one within a few hours of being born).
I sometimes wonder if we would be better off with an actual dictator instead of the establishment that runs it now.
No, we wouldn't be, for four basic reasons:
1. If you get a bad dictator, life really really sucks until the dictator dies. Life sucks a lot less under democracies historically.
2. If you get a good dictator, being dictator for a while will not infrequently turn him into a bad dictator. Once you have absolute power, the temptation to abuse that power is simply too great.
3. Even good dictators can't keep track of *everything*, so any dictator has to rely on subordinates. If any of those subordinates is bad, but good at fooling the dictator (or has dirt on him sufficient to protect the subordinate from the dictator), the regime is almost as bad as if the dictator was bad.
4. Whenever a dictator is out of power, there is not infrequently no clear answer to who will be the next dictator. Frequently, when that's a question, it's been answered by a civil war.
To quote a famous Prime Minister: "It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried."