Life is the most basic of all rights. If the state has the power to take that, then there is no power the state doesn't have. It is the ultimate encroachment of government power.
(And I say this as someone who is not a small-government libertarian.)
The death penalty is not cheaper. It is not a deterrent. There are also way too many cases of people on death row who end up being cleared. How many innocent people have we wound up executing? We'll never know.
Even if you think the death penalty has practical value, though, the state should not be empowered to execute its citizens, period.
A photo is a new copyright in the same way that a recording of a new performance of a public domain musical piece is a new copyright.
The original work is no longer copyrighted, so you can go take pictures of that. However, people can't just endlessly copy your photos--they'd have to go take photos themselves, or get photos from someone who has made them public domain.
Likewise, say an orchestra plays a Beethoven symphony, and the symphony records it in order to sell it. People can't then take that and give it away. The original work is public domain. The new recording of its performance is not.
It is that creation of a new derivative work which produces a new copyright, but you can always duplicate/perform the original without legal problems.
If there are no jobs for humans because robots are doing all of them, then the idea of making stuff to sell to people will go away. We'll need a new kind of economic system.
"Uses less memory" is a nonsensical argument when it comes to Windows 7, because the whole point of the new memory model is to not waste your RAM. Unused RAM is wasted RAM. Win7 deliberately caches frequently-used programs in memory so they start up faster. Naturally, this means your baseline memory usage is going to look higher.
I won't argue that XP may run faster on that same hardware, but the limits I've come up against on 32-bit XP are just awful, and I will be glad to get rid of them permanently.
I also turn off the graphical effects so Windows 7 looks more or less like Windows 2000. No sense wasting GPU cycles on desktop flair.
I used to have a very "cold, dead hands" attitude about XP. Then I got a new desktop with Windows 7. You know what? It's better. A lot better. The pluses you described were all part of that.
I'm stuck with an XP machine at work. I hate it. I have 4GB of RAM installed and only 3.5GB available. I max it out all the time because I'm running quite a few development and document editing tools. Result: constant paging and poor system responsiveness. I can run a similar workload on a Windows 7 machine with about the same amount of RAM, and it never chugs. It always responds quickly. It just makes much better use of the memory. I've also never hit a situation where it appeared to run out of memory, to the point of things screwing up or Windows telling me it's run out. XP? Random things just start to fail once you're using up all your system resources. You may or may not be told anything is wrong. Things will just refuse to respond, the clipboard fails, new programs won't open (or won't open completely), random crashes, etc. etc.
The improved memory model and scheduling were enough to make me like Windows 7.
I will hold out on Windows 8 for as long as possible, though. Maybe Windows 9 will give us back the "classic" interface after Microsoft realizes how dumb it is to force this Metro nonsense on desktop users.
Indeed. I like both languages, and I think C# is better in some ways, but it's not like MS invented C# out of whole cloth. The whole concept of the.Net CLR was nicked from Java, and C# shares a great many language features and paradigms with Java.
Given the choice between the two, I'm not sure which I would pick. It would depend on what features I need, I suppose, and what platforms I need to support.
If you feel "slighted" by not being able to take part in the first round of sales of a corporate product, I'd suggest you reevaluate your priorities in life.
This has been suggested before. Penalizing volume will just cause investment firms to create dozens or hundreds of shell companies to do the trades for them. It's just a pointless exercise that creates a lot of overhead while not addressing the problem.
They're siphoning money out of the market while contributing nothing, and their fuckups cause severe disruptions for which they end up having few consequences.
Nonsense. No one is against technology here. What is being decried is the unregulated use of technology to enable profit-taking by an elite class of investors who contribute nothing through their market manipulation, and instead have caused multiple "flash crashes" through their incompetence.
Just because we have the technology to do something, doesn't mean we should just do it, or allow it because it is possible. That our laws haven't caught up to this sort of thing doesn't mean it's perfectly fine.
"Liquidity" as the argument for allowing HFT doesn't really prove anything, either.
Okay, so it grants near-perfect liquidity. Great. So what? Is that more important than market stability and sane trading practices?
That is the real problem: that traders on Wall Street think the system should be set up exactly how they want it so they can make as much money as possible, but taxpayers will be there to bail them out when the shit hits the fan. Well, fuck that. The economy is too important to just let it run wild in this way. No one is guaranteed a completely free and open market. We have rules for a reason. Ending the HFT shell game won't drive anyone out of the market who was making a genuine contribution in the first place.
There are plenty of ways to approach it, but the reality is, there are too many people making too much money to go along with any of this willingly. It would have to be mandated by law.
This is why I favor a 0.1-0.5% fee. If we really want, we could also assess the fee as an inverse function of how long you've held it: the longer you've held the stock, the lower the fee, and it gets exponentially smaller with time until it is insignificant.
But if you want to trade something you bought 5 seconds ago? Enjoy your 90% fee.
Nothing so extreme is necessary. You can kill the HFT nonsense with a few straightforward tweaks:
1. Put a random delay on every order, up to 60 seconds. This makes millisecond-level speculation worthless. 2. Assign a small fee (0.1%, 0.5%, something on that level) to every transaction. 3. Require sellers to make good on their offered prices. Don't offer a price you aren't willing to actually take.
Some combination of those would eliminate HFT as a useful vector of profit-taking.
But by that definition, "Web 2.0" was happening back in the... mid 1990s. I mean, you had WWWBoard back then, which was primitive compared to modern forum systems but still relied entirely on user-generated content (posts.)
I consider "Web 2.0" to be the iteration of Web interactivity that brought us JSON/AJAX-based page updates and SOAP/REST interfaces. Those weren't really possible back in the '90s, since they hadn't been specified yet and browser supported no similar functionality. Those didn't take off until the mid-2000s, which sounds about right.
Slashdotters seem to have really weird ideas about what really goes on at 4chan. It's not a haven for child porn and general illegality./b/ used to be a lot more "Wild West" but it isn't anymore, it's pretty much a memetic recycling bin now.
The rest of the (non-pornographic) forums are pretty tame and relatively good at staying on-topic.
Honestly, I tend to see better discussion on 4chan than I do around these parts.
Indeed. That is precisely why most vaccines are centered around the so-called "childhood diseases"--because children are a large investment of time, money, and other resources, and for them to be robbed of the chance for a healthy, productive, and long life is a detriment to society as a whole.
(Note that I am not suggesting we ignore the health needs of the elderly, just that there is a clear, rational incentive to protect children from preventable but dangerous diseases.)
Slashdot Mirror
Life is the most basic of all rights. If the state has the power to take that, then there is no power the state doesn't have. It is the ultimate encroachment of government power.
(And I say this as someone who is not a small-government libertarian.)
The death penalty is not cheaper. It is not a deterrent. There are also way too many cases of people on death row who end up being cleared. How many innocent people have we wound up executing? We'll never know.
Even if you think the death penalty has practical value, though, the state should not be empowered to execute its citizens, period.
A photo is a new copyright in the same way that a recording of a new performance of a public domain musical piece is a new copyright.
The original work is no longer copyrighted, so you can go take pictures of that. However, people can't just endlessly copy your photos--they'd have to go take photos themselves, or get photos from someone who has made them public domain.
Likewise, say an orchestra plays a Beethoven symphony, and the symphony records it in order to sell it. People can't then take that and give it away. The original work is public domain. The new recording of its performance is not.
It is that creation of a new derivative work which produces a new copyright, but you can always duplicate/perform the original without legal problems.
If by "don't play" you mean "don't get any patents," that will get you sued out of business.
If, instead, you mean "don't get into the business of making consumer electronics," then yeah, you're pretty much right.
Finding people who are doing something wrong isn't "abuse."
Using it to identify and persecute political dissidents? That would be abuse.
If there are no jobs for humans because robots are doing all of them, then the idea of making stuff to sell to people will go away. We'll need a new kind of economic system.
"Uses less memory" is a nonsensical argument when it comes to Windows 7, because the whole point of the new memory model is to not waste your RAM. Unused RAM is wasted RAM. Win7 deliberately caches frequently-used programs in memory so they start up faster. Naturally, this means your baseline memory usage is going to look higher.
I won't argue that XP may run faster on that same hardware, but the limits I've come up against on 32-bit XP are just awful, and I will be glad to get rid of them permanently.
I also turn off the graphical effects so Windows 7 looks more or less like Windows 2000. No sense wasting GPU cycles on desktop flair.
True. The hippies I know grow their own food. They don't buy organic (or buy much of anything, really.)
I used to have a very "cold, dead hands" attitude about XP. Then I got a new desktop with Windows 7. You know what? It's better. A lot better. The pluses you described were all part of that.
I'm stuck with an XP machine at work. I hate it. I have 4GB of RAM installed and only 3.5GB available. I max it out all the time because I'm running quite a few development and document editing tools. Result: constant paging and poor system responsiveness. I can run a similar workload on a Windows 7 machine with about the same amount of RAM, and it never chugs. It always responds quickly. It just makes much better use of the memory. I've also never hit a situation where it appeared to run out of memory, to the point of things screwing up or Windows telling me it's run out. XP? Random things just start to fail once you're using up all your system resources. You may or may not be told anything is wrong. Things will just refuse to respond, the clipboard fails, new programs won't open (or won't open completely), random crashes, etc. etc.
The improved memory model and scheduling were enough to make me like Windows 7.
I will hold out on Windows 8 for as long as possible, though. Maybe Windows 9 will give us back the "classic" interface after Microsoft realizes how dumb it is to force this Metro nonsense on desktop users.
They're welcome to keep what they have, but Microsoft is not obligated to keep supporting them.
Indeed. I like both languages, and I think C# is better in some ways, but it's not like MS invented C# out of whole cloth. The whole concept of the .Net CLR was nicked from Java, and C# shares a great many language features and paradigms with Java.
Given the choice between the two, I'm not sure which I would pick. It would depend on what features I need, I suppose, and what platforms I need to support.
If you feel "slighted" by not being able to take part in the first round of sales of a corporate product, I'd suggest you reevaluate your priorities in life.
What kind of idiot buys a stock they end up selling a few seconds later? Think before you buy, genius.
Well, way to assign motives to me without knowing anything about me in the first place. I appreciate it.
But by the end of your post, you outed yourself as a libertard, so I also know I can easily dismiss everything you say as irrelevant hogwash.
Thank you and have a nice day. :)
This has been suggested before. Penalizing volume will just cause investment firms to create dozens or hundreds of shell companies to do the trades for them. It's just a pointless exercise that creates a lot of overhead while not addressing the problem.
They're siphoning money out of the market while contributing nothing, and their fuckups cause severe disruptions for which they end up having few consequences.
Nonsense. No one is against technology here. What is being decried is the unregulated use of technology to enable profit-taking by an elite class of investors who contribute nothing through their market manipulation, and instead have caused multiple "flash crashes" through their incompetence.
Just because we have the technology to do something, doesn't mean we should just do it, or allow it because it is possible. That our laws haven't caught up to this sort of thing doesn't mean it's perfectly fine.
Exactly. This is a game the small investor will never be able to play, because of how the exchange is set up. It's a fundamentally unfair advantage.
"Liquidity" as the argument for allowing HFT doesn't really prove anything, either.
Okay, so it grants near-perfect liquidity. Great. So what? Is that more important than market stability and sane trading practices?
That is the real problem: that traders on Wall Street think the system should be set up exactly how they want it so they can make as much money as possible, but taxpayers will be there to bail them out when the shit hits the fan. Well, fuck that. The economy is too important to just let it run wild in this way. No one is guaranteed a completely free and open market. We have rules for a reason. Ending the HFT shell game won't drive anyone out of the market who was making a genuine contribution in the first place.
Those are the same ideas I've had.
There are plenty of ways to approach it, but the reality is, there are too many people making too much money to go along with any of this willingly. It would have to be mandated by law.
This is why I favor a 0.1-0.5% fee. If we really want, we could also assess the fee as an inverse function of how long you've held it: the longer you've held the stock, the lower the fee, and it gets exponentially smaller with time until it is insignificant.
But if you want to trade something you bought 5 seconds ago? Enjoy your 90% fee.
Nothing so extreme is necessary. You can kill the HFT nonsense with a few straightforward tweaks:
1. Put a random delay on every order, up to 60 seconds. This makes millisecond-level speculation worthless.
2. Assign a small fee (0.1%, 0.5%, something on that level) to every transaction.
3. Require sellers to make good on their offered prices. Don't offer a price you aren't willing to actually take.
Some combination of those would eliminate HFT as a useful vector of profit-taking.
But by that definition, "Web 2.0" was happening back in the... mid 1990s. I mean, you had WWWBoard back then, which was primitive compared to modern forum systems but still relied entirely on user-generated content (posts.)
I consider "Web 2.0" to be the iteration of Web interactivity that brought us JSON/AJAX-based page updates and SOAP/REST interfaces. Those weren't really possible back in the '90s, since they hadn't been specified yet and browser supported no similar functionality. Those didn't take off until the mid-2000s, which sounds about right.
Slashdotters seem to have really weird ideas about what really goes on at 4chan. It's not a haven for child porn and general illegality. /b/ used to be a lot more "Wild West" but it isn't anymore, it's pretty much a memetic recycling bin now.
The rest of the (non-pornographic) forums are pretty tame and relatively good at staying on-topic.
Honestly, I tend to see better discussion on 4chan than I do around these parts.
Indeed. That is precisely why most vaccines are centered around the so-called "childhood diseases"--because children are a large investment of time, money, and other resources, and for them to be robbed of the chance for a healthy, productive, and long life is a detriment to society as a whole.
(Note that I am not suggesting we ignore the health needs of the elderly, just that there is a clear, rational incentive to protect children from preventable but dangerous diseases.)