Just guessing, but from the outside they probably look like two blobs joining into a single blob.
A more interesting question would be, what if the universe is shaped kind of like a 3-d donut (with 3-d "surface", folded in 4-d), and you take so many black holes that you can string them together and make a "belt" out of them. Will it remain as a stable "black belt"?
I'll try one more time, resorting to a simple analogy, the slashdot way. This mess started after you said "The money system itself is based on trust." Here is why it is not.
If I am in a monogamous relationship with a real human female and we both have to wear titanium chastity belts, then our monogamous relationship is not based on trust. On the contrary, it will probably remain monogamous even though, apparently, we do not trust each other at all.
In US economy, players do not ever have to trust each other. In particular, they do not expect the other party to do things right without oversight. Titanium belts are light in comparison with legal mambo-jumbo which surrounds a transfer of an insignificant sum like $10'000'000. In this sense, the economy is not based on trust.
It is true, as I indicated above, that money system requires us all to believe in certain abstract principles. I also know that in order for money to work, we should have an expectation that the government will do its job competently, which implies upholding the law. If you call things like that "trust", that's fine, but they are different from trusting into someone's good will.
Which somehow brings us back to the question of whether or not it is wise to trust software vendors. Bam!
Why won't you compare these software products on merits? Why won't you post non-bullshit figures for MS Office sales and Emacs adoption, and then present a meaningful argument for how they compare? I know! Because you cannot be bothered with stupid things like facts.
I am not sure if "trust" means what you think it means. In retail especially, they "trust" you barely enough not to drive you up the wall. They scan your checks and many shops will ask for your photo ID when you pay with anything but cash.
Regardless, do you feel like explaining what you mean by "we trust the government to uphold its [$10 bill] value"? I just do not get it. It seems to be outright false. What I expect the government to do is to force anyone who does commerce to use money. "Legal tender" means that by law, if you are in debt, then you can pay with dollars. You don't have to pay with labor, words, daughters, personal freedom or anything else if you do not feel like it. If you owe at all, the government guarantees that you can repay your debt with nothing but dollars. The dollar value of your debt is not guaranteed by anyone, and difficult cases usually require a court settlement.
The validity of the check is not as relevant as the accurate record of your identity. You see, a store will trust you as long as they have your ID on file, i.e. they have you by the balls in case if your check bounces. This is not what I would call a trust-based transaction.
whenever I use or accept a $20 bill as payment, I am trusting that the US government is vouching for the value of that bill.
I don't even know what this means. All I know is that dollars are legal tender and people do accept them as payment for anything I ever care to obtain. I also suspect that nearly everyone treats money very selfishly. No one (besides the treasury) is trying to actually make the system work. On the contrary, everyone is trying to make as much money as possible without doing too much work. It is freaking amazing to me that the economy works at all.
Credit card companies trust you as much as a hold-em player trusts you when you make a large bet. They are basically gambling on credit. They are well aware of the fact that sometimes they will loose and will have no way to recover their bets, but they know that they are winning overall, and they do so by jacking up the rates and fucking over honest customers. And again, they have your phone number. They may not be able to take any money from you, but you can be sure that they will drag you through the mud if you cross them.
An example of a trust-based transaction is when you lend $120 to your friend or housemate, for a week or two, with no interest and no certified IOU.
No, this could not be more wrong. Money is based on faith. Money works because we believe, as a society, that a number can be used for exchanging goods and services. No one is trustworthy when a lot of money is involved, and the system is designed so that no one has to be. When you write a check, you have to show your ID, because (drum rolls) the store does not want to give you a big screen TV in exchange for a piece of paper. When you bring a bunch of Franklins to a bank, they put them under a fancy light, for the same reason. I don't know why it is such a shock to you that money is designed to be functional even for parties which distrust each other completely.
Do a thought experiment, imagine that everybody decided to distrust everybody else with money, as a matter of principle. So you keep your own balance sheets, you pay attention to what your competitors and allies are doing, and when you do outsource your finances to someone else, you also make sure that there is plenty of oversight and accountability. Oh, wait, this is not a thought experiment at all, this is how we actually operate.
No he isn't. He's looking after his own interests while trying to convince everyone else that their interests are the same as his.
I am sorry, I have to call bullshit. RMS contributed for some 20 years and never asked for anything in return, except for people to volunteer to help and for companies to stop waging a war on a software user. He contributed some of the most brilliant development software, an incredibly useful software license, as well as philosophical and ethical arguments (in writing and in video) for abandoning non-free commodity software. RMS never charged anyone for software, never forced or coerced anyone into using his or anyone else's software, never "locked" anyone into using an open standard file format (mostly because it would be logically impossible). It is OK to disagree with his arguments for one who is evil like Microsoft and other commercial software vendors, but it just not OK to say that he is exploiting the trust of the community for his own narrow interest. This is utter bullshit. Please provide an example or shut the hell up.
Dude, compared to your idealistic hippie post (not that it's bad in itself), RMS sounds like the oracle of common sense.
The only problem is, society cannot operate without trust.
Certain aspects of it do operate without trust. Any time you see 1000000.00 written on a check, you can (and should) forget about trusting anyone.
Think of it this way: Without trust, we would all be too busy farming, hunting, building our own homes, fabbing our own materials, and providing our own healthcare.[sic]
You are thinking of what we would do if we did not have a money-based economy. This has nothing to do with trust.
RMS is correct in distrusting commercial software manufacturers and providers. Time and time again these people (with MS and Apple in the lead) have tried to fuck us over by supplying us with software that is bloated, insecure by design, intentionally buggy (DRM), cannot be configured, spies on us, comes with file format lock, etc., etc. A few exceptions aside, none of their code ever gets open, not even the oldest stuff. In order to get a functional product, the community has to rewrite everything from scratch, and they won't even open their code after we have a superior FLOSS product. Why??? Because commercial software manufacturers hate us and distrust us. They want us to bend over, take it from behind and scream like we are enjoying it while writing them a large non-refundable check.
Fuck that. RMS may be nuts, but he is looking after your interest, unlike MS, Apple, Google.
P.S. I really don't mean to sound dickish, I am just sick tired of stupid commercial commodity software. It's hurting pretty much everyone, and it's awful.
Sorry if this is too random, but you seem to be extremely well informed about this case.
I live in Boston and I am interested in visiting oral arguments in Sony v. Tenenbaum. Is there, like, a program for this show? Where can I get tickets?
And without proprietary software, we wouldn't need the GPL.
Hmm I dunno. GPL actively protects the 4 freedoms and it prevents big cats from applying EEE strategy. I think the copyright would be fine the way it is, sans restrictions to non-commercial distribution.
[...] opinions of artists themselves. You know, the people whose works you pirate and justify as a favor in the fight against the record industry. The people you speak for but never asked an opinion from. The people you're ripping off.
No, you dolt. You are not talking about artists, but only about a very small group of professional artists. Not even that: only professional artists who are old enough or dumb enough to use outdated business and distribution models. And you are right, I don't give a shit about what they think.
I don't know what the deal is now, but when I traveled between Moscow and Krasnodar (600 miles, may be?) in 1997, I took a train with what they call "sleeping cars". Everybody gets a bed. Some cars will have a bunch of beds everywhere, kind of like in cubicles without the fourth wall, more expensive ones will have suites for 4, and the most expensive ones will have suites for 2. I remember taking the middle option and paying very little. It really must have been little, because a student's stipend does not go very far in Moscow.
After living in Russia for 19 years, I find that the passenger train system in US is just plain awful. Take CA. Even in SF Bay, which has some of the best public transit in CA, you sometimes have to change train systems twice just to go from San Jose to Berkeley (CalTrain -> Muni -> BART). That's 46 miles, for god's sake. More recently, it became possible to go CalTrain -> Bart, still PITA. Going outside of the Bay Area or trying to be on time just within the city of San Jose? Get a car.
Boston is a lot better. There is subway and light rail, both very decent. Still, no cheap long distance travel by train. Want to go to New York? A Chinese bus (very decent) is $15. Amtrak is... $62-110? What the fuck? You can get from Brussel to Paris for as low as $32, and there you are crossing state borders.
[...] to provide real names and national ID numbers, in order to curb anonymous comments.
Can someone please explain just how does this prevent me from registering with a fake name/number combination? OK, suppose websites check the name against the number. How does this prevent me from using my next door neighbor's credentials? Or that other guy's I know? Or, if I work in the government and have access to the said database (if it exists), then why shouldn't I use a random name every time? Are they expecting records not ever to leak? I find the whole situation baffling.
You are right, though, about the value of a social network. But this is not a problem of appraising internet, it is a much older issue which has to do with foundations of economics. It falls into a wide category which one writer calls "shadow work". An extreme example is the work of a parent at home, raising a child. The economic worth to the society is tremendous, but no one gets paid for it. Likewise, a person may produce tremendous value by simply connecting the right people with each other, but there is no easy way to put a price sticker on it, simply because there is no money exchange.
It may be to the best. I personally like the fact that we have other economies besides the one based on money.
Slashdot Mirror
Not without a nagger-box, at least.
Haha, you are right. It would be silly to presume that this rather simple book is somehow harmful. Now, if it had sharp teeth and bad temper...
The funniest thing I read in a while. Would you really show it to your child? It's just so weird. I would show a documentary or an internet video.
you gotta read between the lines.
Impossible. Comic Book Guy's voice does not implement /sarcasm.
A thin-walled bubble with a membrane is simply connected.
Just guessing, but from the outside they probably look like two blobs joining into a single blob.
A more interesting question would be, what if the universe is shaped kind of like a 3-d donut (with 3-d "surface", folded in 4-d), and you take so many black holes that you can string them together and make a "belt" out of them. Will it remain as a stable "black belt"?
Dibs on nomenclature!
You seem to understand virtualization just fine.
Hmm. Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
I'll try one more time, resorting to a simple analogy, the slashdot way. This mess started after you said "The money system itself is based on trust." Here is why it is not.
If I am in a monogamous relationship with a real human female and we both have to wear titanium chastity belts, then our monogamous relationship is not based on trust. On the contrary, it will probably remain monogamous even though, apparently, we do not trust each other at all.
In US economy, players do not ever have to trust each other. In particular, they do not expect the other party to do things right without oversight. Titanium belts are light in comparison with legal mambo-jumbo which surrounds a transfer of an insignificant sum like $10'000'000. In this sense, the economy is not based on trust.
It is true, as I indicated above, that money system requires us all to believe in certain abstract principles. I also know that in order for money to work, we should have an expectation that the government will do its job competently, which implies upholding the law. If you call things like that "trust", that's fine, but they are different from trusting into someone's good will.
Which somehow brings us back to the question of whether or not it is wise to trust software vendors. Bam!
Why won't you compare these software products on merits? Why won't you post non-bullshit figures for MS Office sales and Emacs adoption, and then present a meaningful argument for how they compare? I know! Because you cannot be bothered with stupid things like facts.
Keep trolling, bud.
I am not sure if "trust" means what you think it means. In retail especially, they "trust" you barely enough not to drive you up the wall. They scan your checks and many shops will ask for your photo ID when you pay with anything but cash.
Regardless, do you feel like explaining what you mean by "we trust the government to uphold its [$10 bill] value"? I just do not get it. It seems to be outright false. What I expect the government to do is to force anyone who does commerce to use money. "Legal tender" means that by law, if you are in debt, then you can pay with dollars. You don't have to pay with labor, words, daughters, personal freedom or anything else if you do not feel like it. If you owe at all, the government guarantees that you can repay your debt with nothing but dollars. The dollar value of your debt is not guaranteed by anyone, and difficult cases usually require a court settlement.
None of your examples are trust-based.
The validity of the check is not as relevant as the accurate record of your identity. You see, a store will trust you as long as they have your ID on file, i.e. they have you by the balls in case if your check bounces. This is not what I would call a trust-based transaction.
whenever I use or accept a $20 bill as payment, I am trusting that the US government is vouching for the value of that bill.
I don't even know what this means. All I know is that dollars are legal tender and people do accept them as payment for anything I ever care to obtain. I also suspect that nearly everyone treats money very selfishly. No one (besides the treasury) is trying to actually make the system work. On the contrary, everyone is trying to make as much money as possible without doing too much work. It is freaking amazing to me that the economy works at all.
Credit card companies trust you as much as a hold-em player trusts you when you make a large bet. They are basically gambling on credit. They are well aware of the fact that sometimes they will loose and will have no way to recover their bets, but they know that they are winning overall, and they do so by jacking up the rates and fucking over honest customers. And again, they have your phone number. They may not be able to take any money from you, but you can be sure that they will drag you through the mud if you cross them.
An example of a trust-based transaction is when you lend $120 to your friend or housemate, for a week or two, with no interest and no certified IOU.
The money system itself is based on trust.
No, this could not be more wrong. Money is based on faith. Money works because we believe, as a society, that a number can be used for exchanging goods and services. No one is trustworthy when a lot of money is involved, and the system is designed so that no one has to be. When you write a check, you have to show your ID, because (drum rolls) the store does not want to give you a big screen TV in exchange for a piece of paper. When you bring a bunch of Franklins to a bank, they put them under a fancy light, for the same reason. I don't know why it is such a shock to you that money is designed to be functional even for parties which distrust each other completely.
Do a thought experiment, imagine that everybody decided to distrust everybody else with money, as a matter of principle. So you keep your own balance sheets, you pay attention to what your competitors and allies are doing, and when you do outsource your finances to someone else, you also make sure that there is plenty of oversight and accountability. Oh, wait, this is not a thought experiment at all, this is how we actually operate.
No he isn't. He's looking after his own interests while trying to convince everyone else that their interests are the same as his.
I am sorry, I have to call bullshit. RMS contributed for some 20 years and never asked for anything in return, except for people to volunteer to help and for companies to stop waging a war on a software user. He contributed some of the most brilliant development software, an incredibly useful software license, as well as philosophical and ethical arguments (in writing and in video) for abandoning non-free commodity software. RMS never charged anyone for software, never forced or coerced anyone into using his or anyone else's software, never "locked" anyone into using an open standard file format (mostly because it would be logically impossible). It is OK to disagree with his arguments for one who is evil like Microsoft and other commercial software vendors, but it just not OK to say that he is exploiting the trust of the community for his own narrow interest. This is utter bullshit. Please provide an example or shut the hell up.
Dude, compared to your idealistic hippie post (not that it's bad in itself), RMS sounds like the oracle of common sense.
The only problem is, society cannot operate without trust.
Certain aspects of it do operate without trust. Any time you see 1000000.00 written on a check, you can (and should) forget about trusting anyone.
Think of it this way: Without trust, we would all be too busy farming, hunting, building our own homes, fabbing our own materials, and providing our own healthcare.[sic]
You are thinking of what we would do if we did not have a money-based economy. This has nothing to do with trust.
RMS is correct in distrusting commercial software manufacturers and providers. Time and time again these people (with MS and Apple in the lead) have tried to fuck us over by supplying us with software that is bloated, insecure by design, intentionally buggy (DRM), cannot be configured, spies on us, comes with file format lock, etc., etc. A few exceptions aside, none of their code ever gets open, not even the oldest stuff. In order to get a functional product, the community has to rewrite everything from scratch, and they won't even open their code after we have a superior FLOSS product. Why??? Because commercial software manufacturers hate us and distrust us. They want us to bend over, take it from behind and scream like we are enjoying it while writing them a large non-refundable check.
Fuck that. RMS may be nuts, but he is looking after your interest, unlike MS, Apple, Google.
P.S. I really don't mean to sound dickish, I am just sick tired of stupid commercial commodity software. It's hurting pretty much everyone, and it's awful.
Sorry if this is too random, but you seem to be extremely well informed about this case.
I live in Boston and I am interested in visiting oral arguments in Sony v. Tenenbaum. Is there, like, a program for this show? Where can I get tickets?
And without proprietary software, we wouldn't need the GPL.
Hmm I dunno. GPL actively protects the 4 freedoms and it prevents big cats from applying EEE strategy. I think the copyright would be fine the way it is, sans restrictions to non-commercial distribution.
[...] opinions of artists themselves. You know, the people whose works you pirate and justify as a favor in the fight against the record industry. The people you speak for but never asked an opinion from. The people you're ripping off.
No, you dolt. You are not talking about artists, but only about a very small group of professional artists. Not even that: only professional artists who are old enough or dumb enough to use outdated business and distribution models. And you are right, I don't give a shit about what they think.
I don't know what the deal is now, but when I traveled between Moscow and Krasnodar (600 miles, may be?) in 1997, I took a train with what they call "sleeping cars". Everybody gets a bed. Some cars will have a bunch of beds everywhere, kind of like in cubicles without the fourth wall, more expensive ones will have suites for 4, and the most expensive ones will have suites for 2. I remember taking the middle option and paying very little. It really must have been little, because a student's stipend does not go very far in Moscow.
After living in Russia for 19 years, I find that the passenger train system in US is just plain awful. Take CA. Even in SF Bay, which has some of the best public transit in CA, you sometimes have to change train systems twice just to go from San Jose to Berkeley (CalTrain -> Muni -> BART). That's 46 miles, for god's sake. More recently, it became possible to go CalTrain -> Bart, still PITA. Going outside of the Bay Area or trying to be on time just within the city of San Jose? Get a car.
Boston is a lot better. There is subway and light rail, both very decent. Still, no cheap long distance travel by train. Want to go to New York? A Chinese bus (very decent) is $15. Amtrak is... $62-110? What the fuck? You can get from Brussel to Paris for as low as $32, and there you are crossing state borders.
[...] to provide real names and national ID numbers, in order to curb anonymous comments.
Can someone please explain just how does this prevent me from registering with a fake name/number combination? OK, suppose websites check the name against the number. How does this prevent me from using my next door neighbor's credentials? Or that other guy's I know? Or, if I work in the government and have access to the said database (if it exists), then why shouldn't I use a random name every time? Are they expecting records not ever to leak? I find the whole situation baffling.
ROFL
This is a very large parking ticket, more than 2 percent of their net income in 2008.
> Microsoft will find a way to pay them with coupons toward the upgrade of installed XP copies to Vista.
Here you go.
One word: Statistics.
You are right, though, about the value of a social network. But this is not a problem of appraising internet, it is a much older issue which has to do with foundations of economics. It falls into a wide category which one writer calls "shadow work". An extreme example is the work of a parent at home, raising a child. The economic worth to the society is tremendous, but no one gets paid for it. Likewise, a person may produce tremendous value by simply connecting the right people with each other, but there is no easy way to put a price sticker on it, simply because there is no money exchange.
It may be to the best. I personally like the fact that we have other economies besides the one based on money.