You can argue that the end result of ANY system is merit based. Centrally planned monarchy? The king, or whoever controls him, must have gained and retained that ability by some merit.
Capitalism, as a means of deciding what gets produced, isn't really a merit based system. Individuals will choose to invest in things for a wide variety of reasons. Some will succeed and others will fail. Warren Buffett might have gotten rich through intelligent investing, or he might have been in the right place at the right time. What will his heirs do?
"Its kind of like comparing taxi drivers to civilian drivers."
I don't think that's quite the simile you wanted. Most of the taxi drivers I've seen both get into and cause more accidents than even the unusually incompetent private citizens around here. Maybe cops versus private drivers. Or bus drivers.
I suppose if you postulate one person in an SUV then you've got something. Most of the world doesn't drive things the size of SUVs with only one person in them.
It is possible we could make an efficient aircraft, given incentive though.
I both fly and boat for free (after the cost of the vehicle). Hang gliding and sailing.
But yes, the "flying cars" people are always dreaming of (literal flying cars, not Cessnas) are going to be so horribly inefficient we'd be far better off without them.
"capital flows to those companies and endeavors 'needing it' most"
From each according to his ability, to each according to his need... no, wait, that's not right.
Capitalism is essentially a "wisdom of the crowd" approach to allocating resources. It seems to work pretty well, when properly regulated, but it definitely doesn't pay any attention to abstract concepts like "merit." Contrary to what the OP said, the stock market is the epitome of capitalism - a place where individuals with capital can allocate it however they see fit.
Twenty years ago it was also much harder to match up buyers and sellers, and actual trades took a lot longer. It's hard to say how much of the decrease in spread is due to high frequency traders and how much is due to improved technology providing a more efficient, easier to access market.
Not that there seems to be anything particularly bad about encouraging people to buy long term investments.
You might get away with that defence, if the program didn't install itself. Since the program is designed to convey itself, you'd have a hard time arguing that you didn't intend anyone to get it.
Social media makes it relatively easy for organizations to find and retain customers and increase sales, amongst many other benefits. At the same time, it can expose an organization to significant and highly-expensive legal risks and issues, and find themselves at the receiving end of a subpoena.
Nope, looks like I was right. It's about organizations using social media to "find and retain customers and increase sales..." i.e. advertising.
It's extremely difficult to prove correctness in anything but very short programs. It's done for some critical embedded code, but is totally impractical for anything you're likely to run on a PC. Not to mention that the average programmer doesn't know how.
Now, preventing a program from hanging is pretty easy in most modern languages. Just put the whole program in an exception block. But that's probably not exactly what you want, is it?
The GPL v3 contains the word "customer" in only one place, and it precedes "support" and is talking about the period of time you offer customer support for a hardware device.
The requirement is that if you "convey" the code in binary form you must also "convey" the source. Sending it to someone over a network or on, for example, flash drives purposely left in parking lots, would seem to be "conveying" it.
The GPL v2 uses the word "distribute" in the same context, which seems to be functionally identical to "convey" in this context.
No idea. The poor writing in the first paragraph very effectively convinced me I didn't want to read through the rest. It appears to be a book about advertising though.
The license is all of a quarter page long. There's no nefariousness hidden there, despite what you'd like to imagine. Notably, the incompatibility between the GPL and the MSPL does not come from the MSPL.
Microsoft has done some nasty things but we're talking about an open source license, not a multinational corporation.
NASA is pretty good friends with the US military. You might be in a wee bit of trouble if they noticed your 400 kilowatt transmitter trying to talk to Mars.
The first paragraph is an irrelevant anecdote to disguise the boring review of a boring book as an interesting story. Never mind that it appears to have the opposite meaning to the tenuous link the submitter tries to draw.
I agree with you, but a great many people, including a LOT here on Slashdot, believe that "citizen journalism" i.e. blogs, ARE journalism and that traditional journalism should wither and die.
Slashdot Mirror
Clearly you're someone who doesn't know the first thing about graduate education.
If you want to do something cutting edge you generally require support and resources. No, writing the next Facebook is not cutting edge.
SUVs make up far less than half the personal vehicles on the road, even in the US. Most people do not drive SUVs.
You can argue that the end result of ANY system is merit based. Centrally planned monarchy? The king, or whoever controls him, must have gained and retained that ability by some merit.
Capitalism, as a means of deciding what gets produced, isn't really a merit based system. Individuals will choose to invest in things for a wide variety of reasons. Some will succeed and others will fail. Warren Buffett might have gotten rich through intelligent investing, or he might have been in the right place at the right time. What will his heirs do?
I'm generally avoiding work when I'm flying, but if you did want to commute with it, there's your aerial equivalent of a moped.
Write your entire program as subprocesses spawned by a controller with a watchdog timer. If any subprocess takes too long to execute it gets killed.
Or, if you don't want to do that, put a watchdog timer that throws an exception in every loop you write.
American? I did say "most of the world."
Even in the US SUVs were never in the majority and their marketshare is falling.
Oh, like the Jetsons.
Meanwhile, if you want a practical flying car before we develop antigravity, it's going to look and behave a lot more like a present day aircraft.
"Its kind of like comparing taxi drivers to civilian drivers."
I don't think that's quite the simile you wanted. Most of the taxi drivers I've seen both get into and cause more accidents than even the unusually incompetent private citizens around here. Maybe cops versus private drivers. Or bus drivers.
I suppose if you postulate one person in an SUV then you've got something. Most of the world doesn't drive things the size of SUVs with only one person in them.
It is possible we could make an efficient aircraft, given incentive though.
I both fly and boat for free (after the cost of the vehicle). Hang gliding and sailing.
But yes, the "flying cars" people are always dreaming of (literal flying cars, not Cessnas) are going to be so horribly inefficient we'd be far better off without them.
"capital flows to those companies and endeavors 'needing it' most"
From each according to his ability, to each according to his need... no, wait, that's not right.
Capitalism is essentially a "wisdom of the crowd" approach to allocating resources. It seems to work pretty well, when properly regulated, but it definitely doesn't pay any attention to abstract concepts like "merit." Contrary to what the OP said, the stock market is the epitome of capitalism - a place where individuals with capital can allocate it however they see fit.
Twenty years ago it was also much harder to match up buyers and sellers, and actual trades took a lot longer. It's hard to say how much of the decrease in spread is due to high frequency traders and how much is due to improved technology providing a more efficient, easier to access market.
Not that there seems to be anything particularly bad about encouraging people to buy long term investments.
No, some trades were reversed. They suffered, but not the full extent.
You might get away with that defence, if the program didn't install itself. Since the program is designed to convey itself, you'd have a hard time arguing that you didn't intend anyone to get it.
I read the next paragraph:
Nope, looks like I was right. It's about organizations using social media to "find and retain customers and increase sales..." i.e. advertising.
It's extremely difficult to prove correctness in anything but very short programs. It's done for some critical embedded code, but is totally impractical for anything you're likely to run on a PC. Not to mention that the average programmer doesn't know how.
Now, preventing a program from hanging is pretty easy in most modern languages. Just put the whole program in an exception block. But that's probably not exactly what you want, is it?
The GPL v3 contains the word "customer" in only one place, and it precedes "support" and is talking about the period of time you offer customer support for a hardware device.
The requirement is that if you "convey" the code in binary form you must also "convey" the source. Sending it to someone over a network or on, for example, flash drives purposely left in parking lots, would seem to be "conveying" it.
The GPL v2 uses the word "distribute" in the same context, which seems to be functionally identical to "convey" in this context.
No idea. The poor writing in the first paragraph very effectively convinced me I didn't want to read through the rest. It appears to be a book about advertising though.
The license is all of a quarter page long. There's no nefariousness hidden there, despite what you'd like to imagine. Notably, the incompatibility between the GPL and the MSPL does not come from the MSPL.
Microsoft has done some nasty things but we're talking about an open source license, not a multinational corporation.
Why use public key? They launched the thing. They can use a strong symmetric key algorithm.
NASA is pretty good friends with the US military. You might be in a wee bit of trouble if they noticed your 400 kilowatt transmitter trying to talk to Mars.
Somebody saw m/s and figured miles starts with an m....
The first paragraph is an irrelevant anecdote to disguise the boring review of a boring book as an interesting story. Never mind that it appears to have the opposite meaning to the tenuous link the submitter tries to draw.
If you want to quibble about the source then go to the original sources:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOGoZFzHkhs
http://www.iam-magazine.com/blog/detail.aspx?g=cff2afd3-c24e-42e5-aa68-a4b4e7524177
Or more than one dictionary:
http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/patent+troll
http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/patent-troll.html
http://www.techopedia.com/definition/28564/patent-troll
http://onlineslangdictionary.com/meaning-definition-of/patent-troll
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=patent+troll
Anyway, the dictionary.com definition doesn't describe Apple either.
I agree with you, but a great many people, including a LOT here on Slashdot, believe that "citizen journalism" i.e. blogs, ARE journalism and that traditional journalism should wither and die.