"The problem is that P2P is not cacheable or noone has figured out how to cache it."
No, the problem really is a legal one. AOL could fund Freenet development, install multi-terabytes of Freenet nodes on their servers, and encourage their users to use Freenet rather than traditional P2P mechanisms... that would eliminate much of the outside P2P traffic. But they can't, because of the legal implications of enabling the sharing of copyrighted material on their system.
"NVidia immidiately put out a rebuttal to these claims, and I'm not sure why they weren't reported along with this article."
Other than because it's obvious garbage, you mean? Did you even read what nvidia are doing in their drivers? You think it's a bug that they substitute a _COMPLETELY DIFFERENT_ shader in the pixel shader test which just happens to run twice as fast on their hardware?
"Films go at 24 FPS, but film also has perfect motion blur and the eye can harldy tell."
What's "perfect" motion blur?
The reality is that you _can_ see stuttering in movies if you look for it and the director doesn't know how to avoid it (which is, for example, one reason why you rarely see a fast pan in IMAX movies). I remember some of the pans in 'Sixth Sense' being particularly bad.
"This doesn't prove that they don't tune for 3DMark2003, though. Reading the report, it does seem suspicious, but I believe the tune would have to be specific to that particular benchmark."
In the past, to tune for a specific benchmark you generally had to detect the benchmark application running and hence your strings check might work (though any competent programmer can think of an infinite number of ways to defeat it).
3DMark03 used a timed demo playback so depending on your frame rate your driver could get different calls every time the benchmark ran. However, 3DMark03 uses frame-based playback and makes _exactly_ the same calls to the driver, down to the very last bit, every single time it runs: it is, therefore, trivial for someone to add code to say 'are we being asked to render with pixel shader xyz at camera position (0.512, 23.76542, -89.67325)? If so, we're running 3DMark03. For frame 1, we can ignore the first twelve rendering calls as they're offscreen. For frame 2 we can ignore the last eight rendering calls as they're offscreen. For frame 3 we can artifically clip anything outside this area as they're offscreen, etc, etc' That would give you a big, big boost in the benchmark, but the rendering would go wrong the instant the camera was turned away from the default position for that frame, and would give you a high value that bore no relation whatsoever to the performance that card would give in a real game.
And this is why frame-playback benchmarks are a bad idea: they're trivial for programmers to develop hacky optimizations for that artificially inflate their numbers. There's no definite proof that nvidia have deliberately done this, but the pictures in the web articles look very suspicious.
"This is just a semantics game. I guess there's no such thing as "identity theft" either?"
Uh, an identity is a unique item tied to a particular person: if you can "steal" that identity, then the original owner no longer has it nor has the ability to control what you do with it, yet faces the fallout from your actions.
Trying to compare dowloading an.mp3 of a song to identity theft or other real forms of theft does not make people take downloading "theft" more seriously, but instead trivialises real theft. Odds are before long you'll be more likely to go to jail for downloading a song than for committing a burglary.
"So...you don't think it's wrong to obtain valuable research without paying for it because the price isn't to your liking?"
So I'm committing a crime if someone leaves a research paper lying in the bathroom and I read it, even if I wouldn't have paid for that information? Wow, we'd better all be fitted with wireless cameras so the copyright police can ensure we don't deprive the authors of their money! Or have LCD goggles screwed into our heads so that a computer can detect when we're about to look at copyrighted material and black it out.
Re:Very different to Challenger
on
Shuttle Politics
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· Score: 1
"But please remember that NASA also had an 'active programme' to fix the SRB seals before Challenger exploded."
They didn't. The engineers hadn't even managed to convince the management that it was a problem, let alone that it could be fixed. Not to mention that there was an utterly trivial short-term fix if the management had believed it was a problem: just don't launch when the weather was too cold.
If the management had considered the O-ring problem as serious as they considered the foam loss problem, the Challenger explosion would never have happened, as the engineers would have imposed the launch temperature limitation as a short term solution as soon as they were asked for a fix. The managers at the time simply didn't care about what the engineers told them.
Re:Why Politicians Are Shortsighted Idiots
on
Shuttle Politics
·
· Score: 1
"I propose an aeroshell that fits under the orbiter body where it mounts to the ET. It would be integral to the ET, and cover the RCC and underbody of the orbiter, including part of the nose."
Every pound that weighs will be something like 0.8 pounds less payload, since the shell will have to be carried most of the way to orbit. Given that the shuttle payload to the ISS orbit is small as it is, reducing it further is really not an option: for heavy missions NASA would probably have to compensate by running the engines at an even higher multiple of their design thrust, which is likely to be far more dangerous than flying the current shuttle design.
Now do you start to see why these easy and obvious fixes _haven't_ been made? It is Rocket Science, after all...
"And now it looks like they've done it with Columbia."
Nope. There was already an active program underway to resolve the foam-loss problems... but any change to such an important system requires a lot of testing before it can be implemented. Just imagine if they'd changed the formulation of the foam and _caused_ a shuttle loss as a result.
NASA is a typical government bureaucracy and should be closed down, but comparing Columbia's bad luck (it appears that the foam must have hit in just the wrong place to cause the damage it did, and a few feet in any direction would probably have been survivable) to the Challenger management ignoring the engineers who were telling them that launching in that temperature was dangerous is wrong.
In Brin's naive and silly utopia, the people would be watching the government even more than the government watched the people (after all, there are many more of us than there are of them). No-one here is talking about installing webcams in and around government buildings so that we can watch what they're doing, only installing webcams in public places so that the government can watch what we're doing.
No, a few seconds are framed differently, in a transfer approved by the director, than the way a bunch of fans on the Internet believe they should be framed. Oddly, these are often the same people who'd complain if the movie studio released a different version to the one the director intended, yet they're now trying to force the movie studio to release a different version to the one the director intended.
This 'insulting' framing is actually so barely visible to anyone but the fanatics that I can't even be arsed to send my DVDs back to be 'fixed'. It's really a non-issue.
"Sure, the auto group doesn't have the 500% a year growth that it had in the early 1900's, but it is far from a dead industry."
Yes, but... one important difference between cars and software is that cars are big hunks of steel and plastic that are expensive to ship around, whereas software can be transferred from one country to another for a few cents. The software industry as a whole may have a future, but increasingly software jobs are going to be exported out of expensive Western nations like America to countries where programmers can be hired for a fraction of the cost.
"Even if it _looks_ exactly the same, you should expect a performance boost, since much of the drawing work is now being done in the GPU, rather than your CPU"
You mean unlike today, when most of the drawing work is being done in the GPU, rather than your CPU?
You don't really think that Windows treats the desktop as a dumb framebuffer and renders everything with the CPU, do you?
A 3D desktop will likely be slower, will certainly be vastly more power-hungry (since the desktop will be repeatedly rendered at least at the frame-rate of your monitor, so the CPU and GPU will never be able to idle), and seems like a pretty lame idea to me. Of all the things I can think of that would improve Windows, a 3D desktop is roughly number 18,756 on the list.
"And, really, can't plenty of us just roll our eyes and go back to compiling our systems from source?"
What do you do with OS-dependent code that's no longer supported and was written for an OS a couple of versions behind the one you're running on? Untar, make... oops, three bazillion build errors. Or even, say, what would have been perfectly portable Xview code in these days of Gnome and the like.
Sure, you have the source, you may be able to understand it, and you could put in days, weeks or longer to fix it to build on the new OS. But on a number of occasions in the past I've avoided doing so by running an old a.out binary on Linux while migrating to new software which did the same job and was still supported. There are very good reasons for wanting to be able to run older code without recompilation.
Years back I tried an x86 Sinclair Spectrum emulator on SoftPC on a Tadpole Sparcbook: it was only running something like a 40-50MHz Sparc chip from what I remember, but the Spectrum games still managed to run pretty much at full speed. The main benefit of the Sparcbook for emulation, AFAIR, was that it had a real VGA chip so SoftPC didn't have to emulate that as well as the CPU and other components.
"Biodiesel is a great fuel since it produces no net carbon dioxide (all of the carbon in it was pulled from the air by the plants) and it lacks the sulfur found in normal diesel."
And, uh, what about all the energy used to produce the fuel from those plants? I don't know the current state of the art, but last time I checked a couple of years ago it took more energy to make the fuel than you got when you burnt it... that energy has to come from somewhere.
"There is a slight increase in the particulates (smoke) produced"
Mmm, yummy, only a "slight" increase in the evil carcinogenic particulates that the British government claim kill 10,000 people a year in this country.
The problem with that argument is there's still no clear way that the impact could have done enough damage for the shuttle to burn up. Either it was a very, very unlucky hit in just the wrong place, or there's some other problem which, in combination with the impact, lead to plasma coming in through the wing. For all we know, the wing could have been damaged prior to launch (either due to errors in handling on the ground or pure old age) and the normal stresses of orbital maneuvering could have led to the same damage on this or a later flight.
"In 'murka, yain't gotta have no license to receive any kinda signal!"
On the other hand, my British radio scanner would be illegal in America because it can receive signals that are illegal for Americans to listen to... the American version of the same scanner is deliberately crippled to block those frequency bands. AFAIR some vice-president was upset that mere voters could listen in on their phone calls from Air Force One and got the law passed.
Both nations have stupid laws, and the bad news is that Americans generally take their stupid laws far more seriously than British people do. Sadly, British people still take their stupid laws far more seriously that most mainland Europeans do...
"Apparently, the study was partially funded by the American Petroleum Institute so I would be especially wary of bias."
Do a search on "medieval climate optimum": the only news here is that these people are demonstrating that the IPCC claim that the MCO didn't exist is utter garbage. But then the majority of scientists knew that long ago.
"However, maybe it will help us look at global warming from a new perspective."
Perhaps you should look at it from the perspective of the well-established data. Anyone who expects us to believe their pronouncements about "global warming" should have been well aware of the MCO.
Oberg is a well-respected expert on spaceflight, and worked for NASA in the MCC for several years; I'm sure he was just talking down to a technically challenged reporter.
"Nobody has done it except for the first crew. If I remember correctly, the first Shuttle pilot (dunno his name, some ex-Navy pilot) attempted to manually guide the Shuttle during its landing approach, and did so for a few minutes only to give up and let the auto-pilot take over, mid-way through."
Not true. Almost every landing has been flown manually in the last stages when the shuttle reaches the landing site and slows to subsonic speeds. Every shuttle pilot flies hundreds of landings in an executive jet fitted with shuttle controls and HUD and modified to fly like a shuttle (aka like a brick) before they fly a shuttle for real. I can't find an official page, but here's one person's writeup of a flight in the STA: http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/people/journals/aero/rin go/shuttle.html
AFAIR there has been one flight where the crew flew manually all the way down from orbit (one of the first half-dozen or so, I think Crippen was flying), and one flight which did a 'hands-off' landing. Otherwise every other flight has been flown by computer until it went subsonic, then taken over by the crew.
As for the accidental autopilot disengagement, no, it's extremely unlikely that it had anything to do with the burn-up.
"If we consider a country that has no copyright or patent system, then there is less incentive to innovate."
Yeah, if there were no patents and copyright we'd still be running our software on 8008 chips, since Intel would have no incentive to produce better ones. I mean, it's not like each chip generation is obsolete before their competitors would have a chance to copy it, or that anyone actually pays good money to the first company to release a better chip.
Seriously, the idea that without copyright and patents there'd be no innovation is just silly; there are many, many reasons why companies produce new products, and copyrights and patents are way down on the list. Indeed, if there are half a dozen companies in an industry it's almost certain that they'll all be using so many patented processes that they'll have to cross-license their patents to everyone else anyway in order to get access to the other patents that they need; like other forms of regulation, patents then become just a government-sponsored means of keeping new competition out of the industry at the consumer's expense.
Re:CDAC setup to build supercomputers
on
TiVo++ from India
·
· Score: 1
"I think every country needs a *balance* of free trade and protection of weaker industries"
Sure, if you want to be poor. In the short term, allowing weak industries to fail may be harmful to the people who work in them, but in the long term, "protecting" them makes everyone poor.
No-one benefits from having to pay artificially high prices for the goods they buy due to protectionist policies, and the money spent on those weak industries could much better be spent developing real, profitable new products that people really want to buy instead. This is such basic economics that it's hard to see how anyone could actually believe that "protecting" weak industries is a good thing unless they're selfishly trying to keep their own job at other people's expense.
[quote]since our economy is based on growth alone, and we have nowhere to grow anymore, we've only got one way to go: down.[/quote]
Which sounds rather like something someone in the 70s would have said about, say, the Japanese taking over the auto market and much of other US manufacturing industry. Oops, then we discovered personal computers and there came another thirty years of growth based on new technology.
America only has "nowhere to grow anymore" if people decide to sit on their backsides and whine rather than go out and develop new technologies that people want to buy. Unfortunately in the current political climate it's almost certain those technologies would be unable to grow due to excessive regulation and lawsuits, which is why they're being developed elsewhere... if America goes down economically it will be because of rampaging government and lawyers, not because of the failure of capitalism.
Slashdot Mirror
"The problem is that P2P is not cacheable or noone has figured out how to cache it."
No, the problem really is a legal one. AOL could fund Freenet development, install multi-terabytes of Freenet nodes on their servers, and encourage their users to use Freenet rather than traditional P2P mechanisms... that would eliminate much of the outside P2P traffic. But they can't, because of the legal implications of enabling the sharing of copyrighted material on their system.
"NVidia immidiately put out a rebuttal to these claims, and I'm not sure why they weren't reported along with this article."
Other than because it's obvious garbage, you mean? Did you even read what nvidia are doing in their drivers? You think it's a bug that they substitute a _COMPLETELY DIFFERENT_ shader in the pixel shader test which just happens to run twice as fast on their hardware?
"3DMark03 used a timed demo playback"
Of course that should read '3DMark01'.
"Films go at 24 FPS, but film also has perfect motion blur and the eye can harldy tell."
What's "perfect" motion blur?
The reality is that you _can_ see stuttering in movies if you look for it and the director doesn't know how to avoid it (which is, for example, one reason why you rarely see a fast pan in IMAX movies). I remember some of the pans in 'Sixth Sense' being particularly bad.
"This doesn't prove that they don't tune for 3DMark2003, though. Reading the report, it does seem suspicious, but I believe the tune would have to be specific to that particular benchmark."
In the past, to tune for a specific benchmark you generally had to detect the benchmark application running and hence your strings check might work (though any competent programmer can think of an infinite number of ways to defeat it).
3DMark03 used a timed demo playback so depending on your frame rate your driver could get different calls every time the benchmark ran. However, 3DMark03 uses frame-based playback and makes _exactly_ the same calls to the driver, down to the very last bit, every single time it runs: it is, therefore, trivial for someone to add code to say 'are we being asked to render with pixel shader xyz at camera position (0.512, 23.76542, -89.67325)? If so, we're running 3DMark03. For frame 1, we can ignore the first twelve rendering calls as they're offscreen. For frame 2 we can ignore the last eight rendering calls as they're offscreen. For frame 3 we can artifically clip anything outside this area as they're offscreen, etc, etc' That would give you a big, big boost in the benchmark, but the rendering would go wrong the instant the camera was turned away from the default position for that frame, and would give you a high value that bore no relation whatsoever to the performance that card would give in a real game.
And this is why frame-playback benchmarks are a bad idea: they're trivial for programmers to develop hacky optimizations for that artificially inflate their numbers. There's no definite proof that nvidia have deliberately done this, but the pictures in the web articles look very suspicious.
"This is just a semantics game. I guess there's no such thing as "identity theft" either?"
.mp3 of a song to identity theft or other real forms of theft does not make people take downloading "theft" more seriously, but instead trivialises real theft. Odds are before long you'll be more likely to go to jail for downloading a song than for committing a burglary.
Uh, an identity is a unique item tied to a particular person: if you can "steal" that identity, then the original owner no longer has it nor has the ability to control what you do with it, yet faces the fallout from your actions.
Trying to compare dowloading an
"So...you don't think it's wrong to obtain valuable research without paying for it because the price isn't to your liking?"
So I'm committing a crime if someone leaves a research paper lying in the bathroom and I read it, even if I wouldn't have paid for that information? Wow, we'd better all be fitted with wireless cameras so the copyright police can ensure we don't deprive the authors of their money! Or have LCD goggles screwed into our heads so that a computer can detect when we're about to look at copyrighted material and black it out.
"But please remember that NASA also had an 'active programme' to fix the SRB seals before Challenger exploded."
They didn't. The engineers hadn't even managed to convince the management that it was a problem, let alone that it could be fixed. Not to mention that there was an utterly trivial short-term fix if the management had believed it was a problem: just don't launch when the weather was too cold.
If the management had considered the O-ring problem as serious as they considered the foam loss problem, the Challenger explosion would never have happened, as the engineers would have imposed the launch temperature limitation as a short term solution as soon as they were asked for a fix. The managers at the time simply didn't care about what the engineers told them.
"I propose an aeroshell that fits under the orbiter body where it mounts to the ET. It would be integral to the ET, and cover the RCC and underbody of the orbiter, including part of the nose."
Every pound that weighs will be something like 0.8 pounds less payload, since the shell will have to be carried most of the way to orbit. Given that the shuttle payload to the ISS orbit is small as it is, reducing it further is really not an option: for heavy missions NASA would probably have to compensate by running the engines at an even higher multiple of their design thrust, which is likely to be far more dangerous than flying the current shuttle design.
Now do you start to see why these easy and obvious fixes _haven't_ been made? It is Rocket Science, after all...
"And now it looks like they've done it with Columbia."
Nope. There was already an active program underway to resolve the foam-loss problems... but any change to such an important system requires a lot of testing before it can be implemented. Just imagine if they'd changed the formulation of the foam and _caused_ a shuttle loss as a result.
NASA is a typical government bureaucracy and should be closed down, but comparing Columbia's bad luck (it appears that the foam must have hit in just the wrong place to cause the damage it did, and a few feet in any direction would probably have been survivable) to the Challenger management ignoring the engineers who were telling them that launching in that temperature was dangerous is wrong.
In Brin's naive and silly utopia, the people would be watching the government even more than the government watched the people (after all, there are many more of us than there are of them). No-one here is talking about installing webcams in and around government buildings so that we can watch what they're doing, only installing webcams in public places so that the government can watch what we're doing.
No, a few seconds are framed differently, in a transfer approved by the director, than the way a bunch of fans on the Internet believe they should be framed. Oddly, these are often the same people who'd complain if the movie studio released a different version to the one the director intended, yet they're now trying to force the movie studio to release a different version to the one the director intended.
This 'insulting' framing is actually so barely visible to anyone but the fanatics that I can't even be arsed to send my DVDs back to be 'fixed'. It's really a non-issue.
"Sure, the auto group doesn't have the 500% a year growth that it had in the early 1900's, but it is far from a dead industry."
Yes, but... one important difference between cars and software is that cars are big hunks of steel and plastic that are expensive to ship around, whereas software can be transferred from one country to another for a few cents. The software industry as a whole may have a future, but increasingly software jobs are going to be exported out of expensive Western nations like America to countries where programmers can be hired for a fraction of the cost.
"Even if it _looks_ exactly the same, you should expect a performance boost, since much of the drawing work is now being done in the GPU, rather than your CPU"
You mean unlike today, when most of the drawing work is being done in the GPU, rather than your CPU?
You don't really think that Windows treats the desktop as a dumb framebuffer and renders everything with the CPU, do you?
A 3D desktop will likely be slower, will certainly be vastly more power-hungry (since the desktop will be repeatedly rendered at least at the frame-rate of your monitor, so the CPU and GPU will never be able to idle), and seems like a pretty lame idea to me. Of all the things I can think of that would improve Windows, a 3D desktop is roughly number 18,756 on the list.
"And, really, can't plenty of us just roll our eyes and go back to compiling our systems from source?"
What do you do with OS-dependent code that's no longer supported and was written for an OS a couple of versions behind the one you're running on? Untar, make... oops, three bazillion build errors. Or even, say, what would have been perfectly portable Xview code in these days of Gnome and the like.
Sure, you have the source, you may be able to understand it, and you could put in days, weeks or longer to fix it to build on the new OS. But on a number of occasions in the past I've avoided doing so by running an old a.out binary on Linux while migrating to new software which did the same job and was still supported. There are very good reasons for wanting to be able to run older code without recompilation.
Years back I tried an x86 Sinclair Spectrum emulator on SoftPC on a Tadpole Sparcbook: it was only running something like a 40-50MHz Sparc chip from what I remember, but the Spectrum games still managed to run pretty much at full speed. The main benefit of the Sparcbook for emulation, AFAIR, was that it had a real VGA chip so SoftPC didn't have to emulate that as well as the CPU and other components.
"Biodiesel is a great fuel since it produces no net carbon dioxide (all of the carbon in it was pulled from the air by the plants) and it lacks the sulfur found in normal diesel."
And, uh, what about all the energy used to produce the fuel from those plants? I don't know the current state of the art, but last time I checked a couple of years ago it took more energy to make the fuel than you got when you burnt it... that energy has to come from somewhere.
"There is a slight increase in the particulates (smoke) produced"
Mmm, yummy, only a "slight" increase in the evil carcinogenic particulates that the British government claim kill 10,000 people a year in this country.
"Currently in Australia there's a billion dollar discrepancy between spending on roads and fuel tax input every year."
Think yourself lucky: in Britain the discrepancy is nearly US$50,000,000,000 a year.
"I paid 101.9 cents per litre for petrol a month ago - that's 2.75USD a gallon."
In ripoff Britain we pay about US$6 a gallon, most of it tax. I'd love to only have to pay $2.75.
The problem with that argument is there's still no clear way that the impact could have done enough damage for the shuttle to burn up. Either it was a very, very unlucky hit in just the wrong place, or there's some other problem which, in combination with the impact, lead to plasma coming in through the wing. For all we know, the wing could have been damaged prior to launch (either due to errors in handling on the ground or pure old age) and the normal stresses of orbital maneuvering could have led to the same damage on this or a later flight.
"In 'murka, yain't gotta have no license to receive any kinda signal!"
On the other hand, my British radio scanner would be illegal in America because it can receive signals that are illegal for Americans to listen to... the American version of the same scanner is deliberately crippled to block those frequency bands. AFAIR some vice-president was upset that mere voters could listen in on their phone calls from Air Force One and got the law passed.
Both nations have stupid laws, and the bad news is that Americans generally take their stupid laws far more seriously than British people do. Sadly, British people still take their stupid laws far more seriously that most mainland Europeans do...
"Apparently, the study was partially funded by the American Petroleum Institute so I would be especially wary of bias."
Do a search on "medieval climate optimum": the only news here is that these people are demonstrating that the IPCC claim that the MCO didn't exist is utter garbage. But then the majority of scientists knew that long ago.
"However, maybe it will help us look at global warming from a new perspective."
Perhaps you should look at it from the perspective of the well-established data. Anyone who expects us to believe their pronouncements about "global warming" should have been well aware of the MCO.
Oberg is a well-respected expert on spaceflight, and worked for NASA in the MCC for several years; I'm sure he was just talking down to a technically challenged reporter.
"Nobody has done it except for the first crew. If I remember correctly, the first Shuttle pilot (dunno his name, some ex-Navy pilot) attempted to manually guide the Shuttle during its landing approach, and did so for a few minutes only to give up and let the auto-pilot take over, mid-way through."
n go/shuttle.html
Not true. Almost every landing has been flown manually in the last stages when the shuttle reaches the landing site and slows to subsonic speeds. Every shuttle pilot flies hundreds of landings in an executive jet fitted with shuttle controls and HUD and modified to fly like a shuttle (aka like a brick) before they fly a shuttle for real. I can't find an official page, but here's one person's writeup of a flight in the STA: http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/people/journals/aero/ri
AFAIR there has been one flight where the crew flew manually all the way down from orbit (one of the first half-dozen or so, I think Crippen was flying), and one flight which did a 'hands-off' landing. Otherwise every other flight has been flown by computer until it went subsonic, then taken over by the crew.
As for the accidental autopilot disengagement, no, it's extremely unlikely that it had anything to do with the burn-up.
"If we consider a country that has no copyright or patent system, then there is less incentive to innovate."
Yeah, if there were no patents and copyright we'd still be running our software on 8008 chips, since Intel would have no incentive to produce better ones. I mean, it's not like each chip generation is obsolete before their competitors would have a chance to copy it, or that anyone actually pays good money to the first company to release a better chip.
Seriously, the idea that without copyright and patents there'd be no innovation is just silly; there are many, many reasons why companies produce new products, and copyrights and patents are way down on the list. Indeed, if there are half a dozen companies in an industry it's almost certain that they'll all be using so many patented processes that they'll have to cross-license their patents to everyone else anyway in order to get access to the other patents that they need; like other forms of regulation, patents then become just a government-sponsored means of keeping new competition out of the industry at the consumer's expense.
"I think every country needs a *balance* of free trade and protection of weaker industries"
Sure, if you want to be poor. In the short term, allowing weak industries to fail may be harmful to the people who work in them, but in the long term, "protecting" them makes everyone poor.
No-one benefits from having to pay artificially high prices for the goods they buy due to protectionist policies, and the money spent on those weak industries could much better be spent developing real, profitable new products that people really want to buy instead. This is such basic economics that it's hard to see how anyone could actually believe that "protecting" weak industries is a good thing unless they're selfishly trying to keep their own job at other people's expense.
[quote]since our economy is based on growth alone, and we have nowhere to grow anymore, we've only got one way to go: down.[/quote]
Which sounds rather like something someone in the 70s would have said about, say, the Japanese taking over the auto market and much of other US manufacturing industry. Oops, then we discovered personal computers and there came another thirty years of growth based on new technology.
America only has "nowhere to grow anymore" if people decide to sit on their backsides and whine rather than go out and develop new technologies that people want to buy. Unfortunately in the current political climate it's almost certain those technologies would be unable to grow due to excessive regulation and lawsuits, which is why they're being developed elsewhere... if America goes down economically it will be because of rampaging government and lawyers, not because of the failure of capitalism.