Oil companies produce oil because there's a demand. Shut down some of them and others will make up for the shortage. Remove some of the demand and oil companies produce less.
Part of the solution is to have individuals doing things that result in less CO2 emission. We're all on the hook. Act wisely.
I consider ISIS to be a religious war (and little else). ISIS's justification for existing is that it''s the modern Caliphate, to which all Muslims owe loyalty. It doesn't matter that most of the victims are Muslims, because they're not the right type of Muslims.
The crusades were Western expansion into the Middle East with more religious propaganda than most wars.
And how would that apply? Are you trying to say that no government and complete privatization would be good for economic growth? The areas where government has broken down do not seem to be economic powerhouses. If not, then there's a level of public service that is better than either anarchy or 1984, and that's what we're arguing about, and you're just using a slogan to avoid having to think about specifics.
It's like idiots who use the Laffer curve to argue that tax rates are too high. The idea behind the curve shows that tax rates can be too high, but in itself says nothing about whether a particular tax rate is counterproductive.
You still don't seem to understand that "private ownership" isn't the same as "individual ownership".
Obviously a corporation can own things, and that's private ownership, but no one individual owns the things. How does the corporation get these things? I suspect we're both against eminent domain for private enrichment. This means that the corporation had to acquire all necessary ownership and/or rights from other people. In the case of a development, this could be a company that develops the land, but lots of people live in areas where there is no one developer. In any other case, or in any case where the developer didn't foresee when signing contracts, it's necessary to negotiate with individual property owners, some of whom would be very uncooperative.
There is a big difference between "Guy does something he's ashamed of," and "Guy does something that can be portrayed as such by multi-billion dollar Media outlet with international reach.
There is? If you put something on the Internet that you don't want linked to you, at least in the US, you're taking a risk. From what I know, the guy does not want to be identified as the author of the stuff he pulled, and therefore is ashamed of it.
Further, not recognizing that CNN spending money and resources to track this guy down is in and of itself an act of intimidation is insane.
So is publicizing a video mocking CNN and not expecting them to react. If you haven't noticed, that's what news organizations do. CNN was going to investigate no matter what. If the guy was fine with being identified as the author, it wouldn't be intimidation.
The guy posted stuff that became newsworthy. It could happen to any of us. He didn't want to be associated with it. CNN was going to finger him. So far, I see nothing wrong. Then the guy proposed a deal, and CNN accepted and published. Nothing in this is illegal. CNN is not trying to extort any goods, services, or money. CNN made a deal that the guy wanted, and published that fact.
Blackmail, in my eyes, involves attempting to get something valuable out of the victim. So far, nobody's shown me what CNN gets out of this arrangement.
If CNN contacted you about your last comment and asked why you promote bullying, would you start to worry about any other post you have ever made and how it could be spun to make you look a particular way. Especially if they contact you outside of your/. name, you will know that they have spent money and resources to track you down.
My number one rule for putting anything on the Internet in any of its forms is that it must be something I'd be willing to be identified as the author of. Whether I apply that rule well is subject to debate, but it means that, if a news organization wanted to identify me as the author of something, fine. If they want to distort what I said (and so far no news organization has), I'll worry about that when it happens.
On the assumption that I am an idiot, which of the following are something CNN did wrong?
Unknown guy posting video and other embarrassing stuff.
President publicizing video
CNN investigating the video
CNN finding author
Author offers deal for anonymity
CNN accepts deal
CNN publishes approximate agreement
If you have some GPLed software, you may copy it as you please. You may make changes as you please. You can redistribute as you please. What you can't do is change the license, which makes it incompatible with certain business models.
Can they do so without providing the source to modifications they've made?
If they're bundling, sure. Otherwise, no.
The GPL is restrictive. You may like the ways it's restrictive, but not everyone does
Correct. However, it's a free license in that it allows anyone to distribute the software, with or without modification, under the terms of the license. You may not like the restrictions, but many people do. I don't think it's the best license for everything. For example, I'm just as happy that Microsoft was able to appropriate BSD-licensed networking code for Windows, which would not have happened if not for the less restrictive licensing.
And just what are we talking about? v1? v2? v3? Some modification of any of the above?
I've never seen GPLv1. Presumably I could find a copy if I liked, but I've never seen software with that as a license. There are, AFAIK, three versions of both v2 and v3: the standard license, the Library/Lesser license, and the Affero license (which applies to server-side software on the Web or similar environment). The answers, to the best of my knowledge, are the same with the Affero and standard licenses for both versions. For the LGPLs, if you use an LGPLed library, you are free to distribute as a DLL with source, with none of the software that calls it necessarily being GPLed in any form.
Costs that have to be paid no matter what do not affect the optimum price. They determine how profitable (or not) the business is. If they don't cause businesses to drop out (thereby changing the supply curve) there is no effect on optimum price. Aside from that, the price that optimizes P also optimizes P - N.
Costs that are a fixed percentage of profit do not affect the optimum price. The price that optimizes P also optimizes 0.6P. These costs can't make a business unprofitable.
Costs that scale with number of units sold do affect optimum price.
Aside from the roads, the police forces, the fire department, the water, the sewers, education, court system, and defense, what have the Socialists ever done for us?
You don't seem to get how prices are set. Prices are set to get the optimum income. If a business could get more profit by raising taxes, it would already have done so. They aren't charities.
Taxes on corporate income don't affect the sales prices, since the price to optimize profit also optimizes.60*profit (or whatever). Similarly, taxes that represent fixed costs don't affect the optimal price.
Owners (including stockholders) absorb all of those taxes.
Raising the minimum wage can be a bad idea, or it can be a good idea. Typically, a minimum-wage worker is minimum-wage because there's a fairly small cost to replacing him or her, and typically the minimum-wage worker provides enough value to justify a raise.
Suppose I'm an employer, and I hire someone for a minimum-wage job. I pay that worker minimum because I can get someone who'll do the job for minimum wage. If I make $30/hour because the employee is there, I'm not going to pay better than minimum wage, because I don't have to . If, suddenly, the minimum wage goes to $15, I still make money on the employee, so the employee winds up making more money. Further, the employee is likely to spend more money in the community that I was, stimulating the economy and providing more jobs.
Real-world results tend to be favorable for the sort of minimum wage we're talking about.
Having lived with varying income, it's easier to get out of paycheck-to-paycheck on a higher income than a lower one. It feels to me like standard of living tends to be fixed to some extent, so by not increasing my living expenses as fast as my income I was in a better place. Given less income now, I'd try clinging to my present standard and not do so well.
A person's income (if they work for someone else) is based ENTIRELY on how much the employer views their effort is worth.
Actually, no. That's a cap. The income is based primarily on the cost to replace that person or what that person does. Do you think a company is going to pay an employee more than they need to to retain his or her services or a replacement thereof?
The GPL provides you with very restricted patent protections. Someone else with a patent can come along and screw you over.
What the GPL does is give you an automatic license for the patents actually used that are actually held by upstream providers. There's no reason you can't negotiate your own patent licenses, just as there's no reason you can't write your own code.
Most of the non-copyleft licenses I've looked at have no mention of patents, so you're in trouble with that.
Again, if you don't want the benefits of the GPL, don't use GPLed code. You're whining that GPLed code has certain protections that shield you from some inconveniences you whine about.
That's a valid attitude. Lambasting the GPL for being something you don't want is less so. The GPL protects freedom, just not in a way that's useful to you and the way you operate.
On what grounds should the government do anything? CNN has a perfect legal right to out the guy CNN has a perfect legal right to give the guy a pass on outing this time.
I think it very likely that the guy didn't want to be exposed on national news and started doing things to avoid it, including negotiating a deal. I still don't see where that means CNN did anything wrong. Guy does something he's ashamed of, CNN starts investigating, guy removes what he can and asks for anonymity. CNN goes along this time. It's like getting a warning form a police officer, rather than an arrest or ticket.
So what does it mean? There's lots of people who are generally cooperative, but in any large group of people there will be one or more Scrooge McDucks. If you've got a situation that will require everybody's buy-in, you have to account for them.
What do you consider a religious war? Sunni vs. Shiite is one branch of a religion against another. ISIS is religiously motivated and uses religion to claim legitimacy and to recruit. What, in your opinion, would be a religious war?
Gasoline, according to Wikipedia, contains 34.2 megajoules per liter. My car has a tank of greater than 50 liters, let's call it 50. That means my gas tank contains something like 1700 megajoules, so putting the equivalent energy in using a megawatt of electricity would take half an hour. Electrical power on that scale is quite dangerous, while we've arrived at reasonably safe equipment and procedures to pump gas. (Assume that we need only a quarter of the energy if it's electric, and that still requires power on the megawatt level to make it as convenient as gas.)
Refueling electric cars is not something that will be made as conveniently as refueling gasoline cars in a few years.
Slashdot Mirror
Oil companies produce oil because there's a demand. Shut down some of them and others will make up for the shortage. Remove some of the demand and oil companies produce less.
Part of the solution is to have individuals doing things that result in less CO2 emission. We're all on the hook. Act wisely.
That's a rather restrictive view.
I consider ISIS to be a religious war (and little else). ISIS's justification for existing is that it''s the modern Caliphate, to which all Muslims owe loyalty. It doesn't matter that most of the victims are Muslims, because they're not the right type of Muslims.
The crusades were Western expansion into the Middle East with more religious propaganda than most wars.
And how would that apply? Are you trying to say that no government and complete privatization would be good for economic growth? The areas where government has broken down do not seem to be economic powerhouses. If not, then there's a level of public service that is better than either anarchy or 1984, and that's what we're arguing about, and you're just using a slogan to avoid having to think about specifics.
It's like idiots who use the Laffer curve to argue that tax rates are too high. The idea behind the curve shows that tax rates can be too high, but in itself says nothing about whether a particular tax rate is counterproductive.
Obviously a corporation can own things, and that's private ownership, but no one individual owns the things. How does the corporation get these things? I suspect we're both against eminent domain for private enrichment. This means that the corporation had to acquire all necessary ownership and/or rights from other people. In the case of a development, this could be a company that develops the land, but lots of people live in areas where there is no one developer. In any other case, or in any case where the developer didn't foresee when signing contracts, it's necessary to negotiate with individual property owners, some of whom would be very uncooperative.
There is? If you put something on the Internet that you don't want linked to you, at least in the US, you're taking a risk. From what I know, the guy does not want to be identified as the author of the stuff he pulled, and therefore is ashamed of it.
So is publicizing a video mocking CNN and not expecting them to react. If you haven't noticed, that's what news organizations do. CNN was going to investigate no matter what. If the guy was fine with being identified as the author, it wouldn't be intimidation.
The guy posted stuff that became newsworthy. It could happen to any of us. He didn't want to be associated with it. CNN was going to finger him. So far, I see nothing wrong. Then the guy proposed a deal, and CNN accepted and published. Nothing in this is illegal. CNN is not trying to extort any goods, services, or money. CNN made a deal that the guy wanted, and published that fact.
Blackmail, in my eyes, involves attempting to get something valuable out of the victim. So far, nobody's shown me what CNN gets out of this arrangement.
My number one rule for putting anything on the Internet in any of its forms is that it must be something I'd be willing to be identified as the author of. Whether I apply that rule well is subject to debate, but it means that, if a news organization wanted to identify me as the author of something, fine. If they want to distort what I said (and so far no news organization has), I'll worry about that when it happens.
On the assumption that I am an idiot, which of the following are something CNN did wrong?
Unknown guy posting video and other embarrassing stuff.
President publicizing video
CNN investigating the video
CNN finding author Author offers deal for anonymity
CNN accepts deal
CNN publishes approximate agreement
If you have some GPLed software, you may copy it as you please. You may make changes as you please. You can redistribute as you please. What you can't do is change the license, which makes it incompatible with certain business models.
Sure. No problem.
If they're bundling, sure. Otherwise, no.
Correct. However, it's a free license in that it allows anyone to distribute the software, with or without modification, under the terms of the license. You may not like the restrictions, but many people do. I don't think it's the best license for everything. For example, I'm just as happy that Microsoft was able to appropriate BSD-licensed networking code for Windows, which would not have happened if not for the less restrictive licensing.
I've never seen GPLv1. Presumably I could find a copy if I liked, but I've never seen software with that as a license. There are, AFAIK, three versions of both v2 and v3: the standard license, the Library/Lesser license, and the Affero license (which applies to server-side software on the Web or similar environment). The answers, to the best of my knowledge, are the same with the Affero and standard licenses for both versions. For the LGPLs, if you use an LGPLed library, you are free to distribute as a DLL with source, with none of the software that calls it necessarily being GPLed in any form.
There are different types of costs.
Costs that have to be paid no matter what do not affect the optimum price. They determine how profitable (or not) the business is. If they don't cause businesses to drop out (thereby changing the supply curve) there is no effect on optimum price. Aside from that, the price that optimizes P also optimizes P - N.
Costs that are a fixed percentage of profit do not affect the optimum price. The price that optimizes P also optimizes 0.6P. These costs can't make a business unprofitable.
Costs that scale with number of units sold do affect optimum price.
Aside from the roads, the police forces, the fire department, the water, the sewers, education, court system, and defense, what have the Socialists ever done for us?
You don't seem to get how prices are set. Prices are set to get the optimum income. If a business could get more profit by raising taxes, it would already have done so. They aren't charities.
Taxes on corporate income don't affect the sales prices, since the price to optimize profit also optimizes .60*profit (or whatever). Similarly, taxes that represent fixed costs don't affect the optimal price.
Owners (including stockholders) absorb all of those taxes.
Raising the minimum wage can be a bad idea, or it can be a good idea. Typically, a minimum-wage worker is minimum-wage because there's a fairly small cost to replacing him or her, and typically the minimum-wage worker provides enough value to justify a raise.
Suppose I'm an employer, and I hire someone for a minimum-wage job. I pay that worker minimum because I can get someone who'll do the job for minimum wage. If I make $30/hour because the employee is there, I'm not going to pay better than minimum wage, because I don't have to . If, suddenly, the minimum wage goes to $15, I still make money on the employee, so the employee winds up making more money. Further, the employee is likely to spend more money in the community that I was, stimulating the economy and providing more jobs.
Real-world results tend to be favorable for the sort of minimum wage we're talking about.
Having lived with varying income, it's easier to get out of paycheck-to-paycheck on a higher income than a lower one. It feels to me like standard of living tends to be fixed to some extent, so by not increasing my living expenses as fast as my income I was in a better place. Given less income now, I'd try clinging to my present standard and not do so well.
Actually, no. That's a cap. The income is based primarily on the cost to replace that person or what that person does. Do you think a company is going to pay an employee more than they need to to retain his or her services or a replacement thereof?
I may be older than you. I heard that over 40 years ago.
The GPL provides you with very restricted patent protections. Someone else with a patent can come along and screw you over.
What the GPL does is give you an automatic license for the patents actually used that are actually held by upstream providers. There's no reason you can't negotiate your own patent licenses, just as there's no reason you can't write your own code.
Most of the non-copyleft licenses I've looked at have no mention of patents, so you're in trouble with that.
Again, if you don't want the benefits of the GPL, don't use GPLed code. You're whining that GPLed code has certain protections that shield you from some inconveniences you whine about.
If I release code under the GPL, anyone can use it for whatever software they want to write.
That's a valid attitude. Lambasting the GPL for being something you don't want is less so. The GPL protects freedom, just not in a way that's useful to you and the way you operate.
On what grounds should the government do anything? CNN has a perfect legal right to out the guy CNN has a perfect legal right to give the guy a pass on outing this time.
I think it very likely that the guy didn't want to be exposed on national news and started doing things to avoid it, including negotiating a deal. I still don't see where that means CNN did anything wrong. Guy does something he's ashamed of, CNN starts investigating, guy removes what he can and asks for anonymity. CNN goes along this time. It's like getting a warning form a police officer, rather than an arrest or ticket.
So what does it mean? There's lots of people who are generally cooperative, but in any large group of people there will be one or more Scrooge McDucks. If you've got a situation that will require everybody's buy-in, you have to account for them.
Let me know when you come up with an efficient way of doing that that won't be out-competed by societies that regulate natural monopolies.
What do you consider a religious war? Sunni vs. Shiite is one branch of a religion against another. ISIS is religiously motivated and uses religion to claim legitimacy and to recruit. What, in your opinion, would be a religious war?
Considering that you used a German word, I bet you're going to enjoy watching France do this.
Gasoline, according to Wikipedia, contains 34.2 megajoules per liter. My car has a tank of greater than 50 liters, let's call it 50. That means my gas tank contains something like 1700 megajoules, so putting the equivalent energy in using a megawatt of electricity would take half an hour. Electrical power on that scale is quite dangerous, while we've arrived at reasonably safe equipment and procedures to pump gas. (Assume that we need only a quarter of the energy if it's electric, and that still requires power on the megawatt level to make it as convenient as gas.)
Refueling electric cars is not something that will be made as conveniently as refueling gasoline cars in a few years.