I'm being a weenie and posting this to an early reply because I think it's one of the few thoughtful replies.:P
One of the major potential benefits of contributing to open-source projects is that, when searching for a future programming job, one can point to one's open-source contributions and say "Here's some of my code, and people are using it." This works especially if one has contributed to a project with prestige - something that a Microsoft-sanctioned project would certainly have in the closed-source corporate world.
However, it can be difficult to pick out the code that one has contributed from a large project and say, "yeah, download this tgz and look at kluge.cpp lines 377-421, that's my code!" So I would propose, as a carrot to your future open-source contributors, that you design a system that keeps a database of who contributed code, how old it is, and maybe some other statistics about it. You could post a summary page for each contributor with browseable links to the code and statistics.
I've often thought of moving to someplace cheap, like central europe, to start working for an American company there, or even start my own. My costs would be much lower (cost of living in, say, Hungary is 5-10% what it is where I live now, Boston), but I would be an american-born programmer so that could give me an edge over foreign programmers, at least in the language-barrier department. Plus it would be a blast to live somewhere abroad for a while. But first I have to eliminate my US-super-sized fixed costs... that's the challenge. There are many countries in central and eastern europe that don't really enforce their work visa laws, because they are glad to have foreigners there spending foreign cash. This has several advantages, because it helps the local economy and tends to equalize the differences between these countries and the more developed West. Ultimately this could make those countries less appealing for outsourcing - once their economy starts to equalize a little bit, cost of living (and standard of living due to cheaper imports) will go up. But also it could help a recovery in the US tech sector, because what it needs is cheap labor to jump-start it right now.
Isn't there something wrong with the idea that every CD in their entire catalog is set at the same price? How can they get away with that? I'm sure that the utility and cost of production of those CDs varies greatly. If the CD market were functioning properly, I doubt they would have the flexibility to dictate prices by fiat.
Then why the fsck is there an income tax? Shouldn't we be taxing poverty instead?
Actually I think the point is we should only tax things for which there is a negative externality[?] or negative impact on society in general. We probably shouldn't tax income (except maybe a little flat tax to pay for agencies that help keep people employed) but tax stuff like gasoline (creates pollution) vehicle registration (to maintain/plow roads) houses (pay for fire, police services) and so on. I think the things taxed should be directly related to what the govt's going to do with the money. Helps everything form a better balance. Stuff that's expensive to society is expensive to the individual, etc.
You've obviously never worked with any police departments before.
You are correct, I have not worked directly with any police departments, except in the same sense that most people have encountered some form of police enforcement.
These people are some of the most underpaid, underappreciated lot in our society (with the exceptions of teachers). They work long, hard, mentally-disturbing stints...in a community that probably doesn't even give a rats backside port about them.
I agree, in fact I realized after I posted that I should've elaborated on that a little. I'm sure that 99% of the law enforcement personnel out there are hard working, honest, and yes, underappreciated. But my point is that we could have an even better system. You raise points about people putting their lives in danger for something as stupid as a bad tail-light. And yes, of course murder is orders of magnitude worse than petty theft. The system as it is works pretty well. I think it could be improved by some restructing. IMHO it's more important to pursue identity thiefs than it is to fine a broken taillight.
I disagree that identity theft is a minor offense. People (banks or individuals) can be out tens of thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours due to ID theft, and that adds up to grand theft. It's like stealing a car. No, not worse than murder, but certainly much worse than petty theft. When a department is severely underfunded, they should be spending their scant resources in as productive a way as possible. And just because the money is stolen from a bank or an insurance company doesn't make it okay.
Cops don't have time to do anything, even if you find the perp yourself.
I would just like to point out that this is not necessarily a problem of "not having time" as much as it's a problem of incentives. Cops are not incentivized to reduce the quantity of crime. Legislators are somewhat incentivized to reduce crime, or at least appear to be trying, but almost none of that actually trickles down to the department itself. Certainly there are plenty of honest individuals in the police force - but an institution as a whole, unfortunately, tends to follow its incentives regardless of how moral and honest its constituent members are. What we need is to reward police departments for actually reducing the reported crime. This of course would require a separate third party or ombudsman to report the crime to so that departments couldn't just ignore the crime reports. But IMHO this would force police departments to be more creative and proactive about reducing actual crime. Right now their biggest incentive is to get their traffic ticket quotas in each month.
Are people in third world countries more likely to endager their lives because their life expectancy is only half that of the first world?
Absolutely! Ever heard "life is short" as an exhortation to "just do it" and not worry? Many people who don't expect to live a long time are far more likely to partake in risky activities such as drug abuse, unprotected sex, and various sundry other dangerous things. Of course this is a vicious cycle because all of these things actually decrease life expectancy as well. And certainly some of those things are a product of the improverishment under which they live. But there is a specific increase in cost per risk that comes with a given longer life expectancy. A rational person who could expect to live 200 productive years is not going drive like a maniac.
However this comes to another interesting point - not everyone is rational, especially in their youth. This may turn out to be a limiting factor in our life expectancy. As our medicine improves, it may not effectively increase our life expectancy, especially if we can still have children at late teens or twenties. Studies have shown that selective pressure falls off rapidly after the first few offspring. Extrapolating from that, one might suppose that the improved medical technology will simply enable new and more extreme risk-taking instead of longer lifespans. We can also expect that there certainly there will be a variety of reactions, including those who attempt to maximize their lifspan at all costs, including those who take a very long and leisurely time at finding their mate. And yes, I do realize that selective pressure takes many generations to have any effect, but we are talking about the somewhat distant and very distant future here.
As a final point, I think we have misjudged the challenges that face us in the field of longevity enhancement. Whilst the technology is indeed improving at an exponential rate, I suspect the cost per additional year of life expectancy also goes up at a similar exponential rate, if only due to the laws of thermodynamics and difficulties of maintaining order in such a complex system that is full of hacks and workarounds and crazy multifunctional interrelated action pathways - an system that, for humans, has essentially never had any feedback beyond the 50-year mark. A graph of average current medical costs in relation to age as they currently stand could be very educational, and I think it would bear out my point. As a result, my prediction is that we will see only a linear increase in life expectancy.
-Ansel.
p.s. I might be so bold as to suggest a study (perhaps it is already being done) where we start breeding mice for longevity. Keep them from breeding until the very end of their productive life cycle, and keep pushing that envelope until their lifespan becomes years longer. Then study the resulting "immortal" mice and see what they've done to adapt...
It is clear now that while SCO is putting up a pretty good show of being indignant and violated. Their FUD campaign is being brilliantly executed, but their legal strategy is suicidal. It looks like a strategy which is optimized to cause the most damage to Linux's reputation at the ultimate cost to SCO - their existence. Why would a company do this? Perhaps we need to examine the incentives that prevail currently for the management of SCO. Could Darl & Co. come out of this unscathed or even quite rich? Is it possible to "pierce the corporate veil" here and find the upper management guilty of conspiracy? Especially, what is the nature of the business relationship between Microsoft and SCO? The brilliance of the FUD campaign and the utter hopelessness of SCO's legal case strongly indicates an "ulterior motive." Has anyone examined this seriously, or am I just missing something?
Assuming a 10 to 12 hour work day and no holidays (365 days a year) that means the ancient Egyptians placed a block every 20 to 30 seconds.
Today, even with modern equipment, we could not make that happen.
Isn't the directly observable number of blocks a much more compelling piece of evidence than anything else? If you ask me, the maximum theoretical rate and the number of blocks should trump any other estimate of how long it would take to build the pyramids. I haven't seen any of the "other" evidence, of course.
I'm inclined to think that for one reason or another we like to believe the Ancients were intellectual Gods who could overcome their lack of "technology" using their bare hands and pure unspoiled cleverness... in reality I suspect the very, very wide class gamut (which tends to emerge naturally in a power law distribution) allowed a few people to organize many, many people to the task... certainly there was lots of cleverness involved, but we like to exaggerate it.
And laugh all the way to the bank. The very fact that you submitted this shows that you're thinking about it, but remember this: idealism does not a car payment make.
I beg to differ. I think mixed licensing is the way software is going in the long term: Robust, well-debugged, open-source frameworks (e.g. Darwin) with closed-source, well-researched, well-marketed apps on top of them (e.g. Aqua). Open-source and closed source have different strengths, and if you can take advantage of both then your proprietary product will be that much better off. Every case will be different though. Without knowing what this particular application is, it's hard to say which license he should go with. Seems like he thinks OSS is best for the framework though, which is consistent with its strengths, IMHO.
*sigh* Okay, I deserve an RTFA for that. Ah well. Hence the "AFAICT" (without reading much of the article, since I'm at work, have no time, but love to rant)
I'm sticking to my point though - certainly the markets will need some nudging from a few brilliantly placed, enforceable incentives to counteract negative externalities such as air pollution, but ultimately free enterprise is much better at solving resouce allocation problems than government is. (Yikes! Did I just write that?)
AFAICT, this is a perfect example of market-driven recycling - the way it should and will happen ultimately. Forcing it too soon, as the activists would have us do in the US, is even more of a waste than the trash was in the first place. When we run out of supply, then the market will find ways to recycle. As long as we have lots of places to put our trash and lots of cheap ways to get new stuff, then we won't recycle. Moral of the story is that you just let the market figure it out. Doesn't mean you don't protect the trees from overharvesting and the land from overfilling... Just that there's no need for government mandated recycling or government subsidized landfills, or government giveaways to logging companies.</rant>
In my experience, unreliable information is quickly ignored. If, in even 1 out of 50 cases, the alert is either generated erroneously or missed entirely, then the user will momentarily panic that their child is not at school or the dog has escaped -- call the school, and discover that the child is there. After one or two instances of this, all other false negatives/positives will be dismissed as a "glitch" and the information will become useless. So this alert tagging isn't going to work unless the networks are very reliable. Just stirring the pot a little.
I was speaking to a lay-person friend of mine last weekend, and he mentioned to me that he had heard about the threat of lawsuits, and decided to quickly install Bearshare, download all the songs he wanted and then uninstall it. Apparently at least some people are spooked.
Dude!!! Tell me you didn't ALSO have to use the firmware in your 11Mb full-height MFM drive to perform a low-level format to get your first computer working when you were 10 years old...!
Being nice and white, it there any physical advantage for having light skin?
It seems physically(not trying to get in a social debate) that dark skin would only be advantageous(you don't burn as bad), less skin cancer?
Ideas either way.
I believe those with darker skin need more sunlight to produce enough Folic Acid and Vitamin D. Thus the adaptation to lighter skin when we moved North to the Cloudy Continent.
I do believe I qualify as a geek (have been hacking around with computers and programming and linux for half my life - am 25) and I have just finished a 3-year-long complete frame-up rebuild on my big hobby, an early-80s Jeep CJ. Several of my geek friends are also Jeep Nuts. ("Jeep Nuts" can be parsed as an adjective phrase as well as a plural noun). Anyway I think the computer hacking and the automotive hacking both tie in to a deeper desire to explore and understand the observed phenomena that occur to us through our "senses" - simulation or not...
It seems to me that the origin of the body in question should have some significant role. If a brown dwarf is in orbit around another star, you don't then call it a planet, do you? According to current theory, all of our current planets presumably formed formed from the accretion disk which was around our primordial sun. Shouldn't that be just as much a part of the meaningful requirement for planet than simply size and orbit? We need to decide how the moniker "Planet" is going to help us classify objects.
<RightBrain>A planet is something we can go send probes to without having them bounce off! We can land on a planet and walk around without needing magnets and ropes to keep us from going into orbit! Too small, and you fly off. Too big, and it burns you up! Of course planets always orbit stars, not other planets, so the Moon doesn't count.</RightBrain>
-Ansel.
p.s. I do realize that the Moon and Earth orbit each other and the sun, but the Earth is so much bigger...
So: Microsoft is subsidising the XBox to gain market share. Buy one, mod it, and run it as a cheap linux box. Kills more than a couple birds with one stone.
IMHO, Open Source generally has the cost advantage when you have more expertise assets than money, and Closed Source products have the advantage when the opposite is true. When you can just throw some money at the vendor to get support, closed source often makes more sense than hiring an OSS expert. Until the vendor dies; but then you can just hire a contractor to migrate...
The fact is, good musicians just aren't that rare.
If this is really true, then there is no reason to have superstars. However, I submit that, at least for some audiences, there is intrinsic value in mega-popular bands - if only to narrow the field a bit for making music choices. Anthropology aside, if there really is a good reason to have superstars then it will happen naturally, without the promotion of recording companies. In fact the selection process may be better because the superstars will be picked by market forces rather than based on the decision of a talent scout. The band Phish is an example. Almost nonexistent advertising promotion, but still wildly successful.
Whether or not the recording industry is obsolete is I think a decision for the market to make. IMHO the RIAA constitutes a monopolistic organization which prevents market forces from operating properly; it is by far the largest of its kind, and I believe effectively facilitates collusion between the large recording companies. I would have no problems with DRM and expensive licensing if there were multiple similarly sized organizations which had to compete with each other for audience. Real capitalism would take over, prices would reflect costs, and everyone would win.
It's time to stop treating the RIAA as if it is being irrational and hoping that it mends its ways. It knows it is endangered and is fighting (rather too effectively) for survival. It needs to be broken up or eliminated via anti-trust mechanisms, and the recording companies left to fend for themselves. IANAL, so I don't know if the current system is capable of doing this.
I think it was mentioned in "A Brief History of Time" by Stephen Hawking that black holes are actually less "dense" the larger they get. "Density" doesn't actually make a lot of sense here because there isn't really a material to have density, but if you take the mass and divide it by the volume denoted by the Schwarzchild Radius, you get decreasing density with increasing mass. Many have surmised, from this, that maybe the Universe is really a super-mega-humongo-unimaginably-massive black hole whose Schwarzchild radius is a few hundred billion light-years. We're not a singularity because, since we're *inside* the black hole, our time is dilated relative to the outside, and we haven't collapsed yet...
p.s. I may be wrong about which book mentioned it, but it was one of those uber-cool sci-fact books by a reputable physicist, like Feynman or something. Really. I'm serious.
Slashdot Mirror
One of the major potential benefits of contributing to open-source projects is that, when searching for a future programming job, one can point to one's open-source contributions and say "Here's some of my code, and people are using it." This works especially if one has contributed to a project with prestige - something that a Microsoft-sanctioned project would certainly have in the closed-source corporate world.
However, it can be difficult to pick out the code that one has contributed from a large project and say, "yeah, download this tgz and look at kluge.cpp lines 377-421, that's my code!" So I would propose, as a carrot to your future open-source contributors, that you design a system that keeps a database of who contributed code, how old it is, and maybe some other statistics about it. You could post a summary page for each contributor with browseable links to the code and statistics.
-Ansel.
Mass exodus to Hungary!
-Ansel.
-Ansel.
Then why the fsck is there an income tax? Shouldn't we be taxing poverty instead?
Actually I think the point is we should only tax things for which there is a negative externality[?] or negative impact on society in general. We probably shouldn't tax income (except maybe a little flat tax to pay for agencies that help keep people employed) but tax stuff like gasoline (creates pollution) vehicle registration (to maintain/plow roads) houses (pay for fire, police services) and so on. I think the things taxed should be directly related to what the govt's going to do with the money. Helps everything form a better balance. Stuff that's expensive to society is expensive to the individual, etc.
-Ansel.
You are correct, I have not worked directly with any police departments, except in the same sense that most people have encountered some form of police enforcement.
These people are some of the most underpaid, underappreciated lot in our society (with the exceptions of teachers). They work long, hard, mentally-disturbing stints...in a community that probably doesn't even give a rats backside port about them.
I agree, in fact I realized after I posted that I should've elaborated on that a little. I'm sure that 99% of the law enforcement personnel out there are hard working, honest, and yes, underappreciated. But my point is that we could have an even better system. You raise points about people putting their lives in danger for something as stupid as a bad tail-light. And yes, of course murder is orders of magnitude worse than petty theft. The system as it is works pretty well. I think it could be improved by some restructing. IMHO it's more important to pursue identity thiefs than it is to fine a broken taillight.
I disagree that identity theft is a minor offense. People (banks or individuals) can be out tens of thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours due to ID theft, and that adds up to grand theft. It's like stealing a car. No, not worse than murder, but certainly much worse than petty theft. When a department is severely underfunded, they should be spending their scant resources in as productive a way as possible. And just because the money is stolen from a bank or an insurance company doesn't make it okay.
-Ansel.
I would just like to point out that this is not necessarily a problem of "not having time" as much as it's a problem of incentives. Cops are not incentivized to reduce the quantity of crime. Legislators are somewhat incentivized to reduce crime, or at least appear to be trying, but almost none of that actually trickles down to the department itself. Certainly there are plenty of honest individuals in the police force - but an institution as a whole, unfortunately, tends to follow its incentives regardless of how moral and honest its constituent members are. What we need is to reward police departments for actually reducing the reported crime. This of course would require a separate third party or ombudsman to report the crime to so that departments couldn't just ignore the crime reports. But IMHO this would force police departments to be more creative and proactive about reducing actual crime. Right now their biggest incentive is to get their traffic ticket quotas in each month.
-Ansel.
Absolutely! Ever heard "life is short" as an exhortation to "just do it" and not worry? Many people who don't expect to live a long time are far more likely to partake in risky activities such as drug abuse, unprotected sex, and various sundry other dangerous things. Of course this is a vicious cycle because all of these things actually decrease life expectancy as well. And certainly some of those things are a product of the improverishment under which they live. But there is a specific increase in cost per risk that comes with a given longer life expectancy. A rational person who could expect to live 200 productive years is not going drive like a maniac.
However this comes to another interesting point - not everyone is rational, especially in their youth. This may turn out to be a limiting factor in our life expectancy. As our medicine improves, it may not effectively increase our life expectancy, especially if we can still have children at late teens or twenties. Studies have shown that selective pressure falls off rapidly after the first few offspring. Extrapolating from that, one might suppose that the improved medical technology will simply enable new and more extreme risk-taking instead of longer lifespans. We can also expect that there certainly there will be a variety of reactions, including those who attempt to maximize their lifspan at all costs, including those who take a very long and leisurely time at finding their mate. And yes, I do realize that selective pressure takes many generations to have any effect, but we are talking about the somewhat distant and very distant future here.
As a final point, I think we have misjudged the challenges that face us in the field of longevity enhancement. Whilst the technology is indeed improving at an exponential rate, I suspect the cost per additional year of life expectancy also goes up at a similar exponential rate, if only due to the laws of thermodynamics and difficulties of maintaining order in such a complex system that is full of hacks and workarounds and crazy multifunctional interrelated action pathways - an system that, for humans, has essentially never had any feedback beyond the 50-year mark. A graph of average current medical costs in relation to age as they currently stand could be very educational, and I think it would bear out my point. As a result, my prediction is that we will see only a linear increase in life expectancy.
-Ansel.
p.s. I might be so bold as to suggest a study (perhaps it is already being done) where we start breeding mice for longevity. Keep them from breeding until the very end of their productive life cycle, and keep pushing that envelope until their lifespan becomes years longer. Then study the resulting "immortal" mice and see what they've done to adapt...
-Ansel.
Today, even with modern equipment, we could not make that happen.
Isn't the directly observable number of blocks a much more compelling piece of evidence than anything else? If you ask me, the maximum theoretical rate and the number of blocks should trump any other estimate of how long it would take to build the pyramids. I haven't seen any of the "other" evidence, of course.
I'm inclined to think that for one reason or another we like to believe the Ancients were intellectual Gods who could overcome their lack of "technology" using their bare hands and pure unspoiled cleverness... in reality I suspect the very, very wide class gamut (which tends to emerge naturally in a power law distribution) allowed a few people to organize many, many people to the task... certainly there was lots of cleverness involved, but we like to exaggerate it.
-Ansel.
I beg to differ. I think mixed licensing is the way software is going in the long term: Robust, well-debugged, open-source frameworks (e.g. Darwin) with closed-source, well-researched, well-marketed apps on top of them (e.g. Aqua). Open-source and closed source have different strengths, and if you can take advantage of both then your proprietary product will be that much better off. Every case will be different though. Without knowing what this particular application is, it's hard to say which license he should go with. Seems like he thinks OSS is best for the framework though, which is consistent with its strengths, IMHO.
-Ansel.
I'm sticking to my point though - certainly the markets will need some nudging from a few brilliantly placed, enforceable incentives to counteract negative externalities such as air pollution, but ultimately free enterprise is much better at solving resouce allocation problems than government is. (Yikes! Did I just write that?)
-Ansel.
-Ansel.
-Ansel.
I was speaking to a lay-person friend of mine last weekend, and he mentioned to me that he had heard about the threat of lawsuits, and decided to quickly install Bearshare, download all the songs he wanted and then uninstall it. Apparently at least some people are spooked.
Dude!!! Tell me you didn't ALSO have to use the firmware in your 11Mb full-height MFM drive to perform a low-level format to get your first computer working when you were 10 years old...!
-Ansel.
This signature is no longer unique:
It seems physically(not trying to get in a social debate) that dark skin would only be advantageous(you don't burn as bad), less skin cancer?
Ideas either way.
I believe those with darker skin need more sunlight to produce enough Folic Acid and Vitamin D. Thus the adaptation to lighter skin when we moved North to the Cloudy Continent.
-Ansel.
-Ansel.
Jeep: Just Empty Every Pocket
So what is this system called then... the "Pinhead System"?
Get it? "Pinhead?"
*sigh*
-Ansel.
<RightBrain>A planet is something we can go send probes to without having them bounce off! We can land on a planet and walk around without needing magnets and ropes to keep us from going into orbit! Too small, and you fly off. Too big, and it burns you up! Of course planets always orbit stars, not other planets, so the Moon doesn't count.</RightBrain>
-Ansel.
p.s. I do realize that the Moon and Earth orbit each other and the sun, but the Earth is so much bigger...
Oh, did I just violate the DMCA? Oops... -Nafry.
-Ansel.
G=C800:5
If this is really true, then there is no reason to have superstars. However, I submit that, at least for some audiences, there is intrinsic value in mega-popular bands - if only to narrow the field a bit for making music choices. Anthropology aside, if there really is a good reason to have superstars then it will happen naturally, without the promotion of recording companies. In fact the selection process may be better because the superstars will be picked by market forces rather than based on the decision of a talent scout. The band Phish is an example. Almost nonexistent advertising promotion, but still wildly successful.
Whether or not the recording industry is obsolete is I think a decision for the market to make. IMHO the RIAA constitutes a monopolistic organization which prevents market forces from operating properly; it is by far the largest of its kind, and I believe effectively facilitates collusion between the large recording companies. I would have no problems with DRM and expensive licensing if there were multiple similarly sized organizations which had to compete with each other for audience. Real capitalism would take over, prices would reflect costs, and everyone would win.
It's time to stop treating the RIAA as if it is being irrational and hoping that it mends its ways. It knows it is endangered and is fighting (rather too effectively) for survival. It needs to be broken up or eliminated via anti-trust mechanisms, and the recording companies left to fend for themselves. IANAL, so I don't know if the current system is capable of doing this.
-Ansel.
p.s. I may be wrong about which book mentioned it, but it was one of those uber-cool sci-fact books by a reputable physicist, like Feynman or something. Really. I'm serious.
-Ansel.
Not surprising, what with all the screaming and whining...
-Ansel.