For a Free software project to be completely inactive means that it isn't worth anyone's time to maintain it or hire someone to do so for them.
For a commercial project to be inactive means it isn't worth maintaining for the IP owner.
Big difference there.
If I depended on your example project, I'd have a copy of the source and could restart it independently of the original maintainer, who obviously doesn't want to be bothered anymore.
You have to draw the line somewhere, because if you don't you end up fudging further across the line every time.
I find it amusing when people assume that being moral means being a holier than thou prick about other people's morality as well, and then proceed to be holier than thou about their lack of morality.
At least some of us have "PMU's". I kinda like that in fact.
It keeps people from walking off with my stuff.
I find it amusing and disturbing that someone would have such a badly misfunctioning PMU that they need to put down someone else for having a more functional one.
For example: the message passing API which was (still is?) a major local privilege escalation vulnerability.
For example: Shipping major software packages that required significant administrative skill to run as an unprivileged user on NT-series OS's (MS Office).
For example: Shipping as their major OS product for years an OS that didn't even have the concept of an unprivileged user (Windows-over-DOS).
They are getting better, but so is everyone else, and they have a lot of catching up to do.
As far as the Danes are concerned, he is threatening a shutdown. If Denmark was such a bad place to do business, why'd he buy a business there to begin with?
Um, he bought a company created by Danes, and is threatening to shut it down. One could speculate that the value to Microsoft of this particular company was leverage on the Danish government.
Of course, that would imply a degree of scheming and underhanded forethought that would be impolitic to imply in this august forum.
You sound like an end user who refuses to accept that if he isn't paying someone to administer his machine, he is responsible for it. Either you pay someone to keep your internet connected machines healthy, you do it yourself (with the reponsibilities of an administrator), or you are a hazard to the community.
The real world has no tolerance for laziness. Do, or be done to.
"The poor will alway be with us"
But that doesn't mean we have to let them die in the streets.
The REASON we do not have the elderly poor dying in the streets of NY, Chicago, and Houston is Social Security. So saying that this isn't the '30's and we don't need it any more is disengenuous at best.
As far as "Why does the modern government hate the working poor?", it is because the Republicans have been in effective power for the past 30+ years and they hate anyone who isn't White, Protestant, and Rich. Things improve for everyone when the Democrats get any measure of power.
Show me a containment method that's guaranteed to survive something as bad as Challenger or Columbia and I'll show you a lie. Got anything that's guaranteed to take all the force of an uncontrolled re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere, do you? No? I didn't think so.
What do you need?
A nice solid titanium shell combined with good structural integrity design in the reactor itself would provide containment and recoverability for a solid-state reactor. "Guarantees" are for suckers anyway.
A gas state Nuclear Rocket couldn't be used within the atmosphere (or even LEO I'd say) due to the containment problems in the event of catastrophic failure, but I doubt that we have the materials tech to build them for at least 50 years anyway.
I think that there is something of a profit motive inherent to the GPL, just not what you might expect. The payoff comes from third party improvements, where the entire community profits by having better software anytime anyone contributes new ideas and good code to the project.
It isn't cash, but it is value. The rights to this value that the GPL grants are particularly powerful, which is why the GPL is the gold standard of Free software licenses.
Re:people are not mathematical equations
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Mathematics and Sex
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· Score: 1
Fine. I'm done.
You are obviously insane by my standard, and may now have the last word if you so desire.
Re:people are not mathematical equations
on
Mathematics and Sex
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· Score: 1
As I mentioned before, your ignorance of mathematics appears to exceed the level of ignorance you accord me on your field.
Pythagoras's Theorem has indeed been proven, there is an entire branch of mathematics devoted to proofs so old that the proof you chose to belittle as "axiomatic" is standard for college level students as an exercise.
As I mentioned in my previous post, many things have been considered "self evident" in the past that have since rolled beneath the gunwales of time. One of those is that there is any field of study that describes the real world and cannot be tested.
If you doubt the ability to run experiments in economics you haven't been paying attention to the IMF or world markets for the past 30 years. They may be unethical, but they have been experiments. In the process, a lot of pretty theories have been disproven and millions have been driven into poverty. I imagine as many other theories have been justified, but as it isn't my primary field I don't subscribe to their journals. It would appear that you don't either.
And your favorite example of this exchange, inflations relation to rising prices, is utter bunk. Not only can you determine if everything else is equal but thanks to modern accounting and computers, the margin of error of those calculations has shrunk considerably since the 1930's. Not to mention certain examples of "captured economies" where there is a smaller economy that has clearly defined transactions with the world and minute knowledge of the inner workings of said economy is available.
Re:people are not mathematical equations
on
Mathematics and Sex
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· Score: 1
We do not need to "test" economic theory. We deduce it from a logical chain of reasoning, starting from self-evident axiomatic truths and self-evidently true empirical postulates: (1) Man acts, and to deny such would be self-contradictory; (2) Variety of resources, human and natural; (3) Leisure is a consumer good; (3) optional: when analyzing economies of indirect exchange, we assume indirect exchanges are occuring; we aren't "testing" the theory here, but choosing the theory that applies to the reality we want to explain; (4) least important, a simplification for elaborating catallactics: firms aim at maximizing profits; praxeologists always remember that where this postulate does not apply, the theories deduced from it, while correct, do not apply. Furthermore, contrary to your mantra, we cannot test correct economic statements. We cannot "test" the statement that ceteris paribus, inflation causes price increases.
If you do not check your theories against reality, how do you know that they are correct?
People KNEW that the earth was the center of the universe. They knew that all celestial bodies moved in perfect circles, and with this knowledge they mapped the heavens and created elaborate (and apparently accurate) measures of the movement of the sky.
Then someone looked at Jupiter a bit too closely and it all fell apart.
This is why the physical scientists are so insistent on checking their results against reality. If you can't or don't check against reality your writings are just as valid as any other well thought out work of fiction. You can have perfect internal consistency, you can even use it to map against the outside world and maybe get good results. Frankly, anybody who invests conservatively and has half a brain can do well in the stock market. It doesn't take a superior economic theory, it just takes a willingness to look at direct consequences of your actions and not assume any risk you cannot afford.
Besides, economic theory has as much to do with playing the stock market as meteorology has to do with skiing. Knowing when the snow will fall and how much really doesn't help you get down the hill. Knowing the business cycle perfectly tells you nothing about whether the particular business you are looking at investing in is well managed or another Enron.
You confuse and attempt to distract with unrelated minutia, because economies are predictable and can be observed and even experimented with, as the IMF seems bent on doing.
You assume either that the statements you make are true, or that those of us who aren't professional economists are too dim to see through their falsehood.
I do not beleive you are correct, and nothing you have said in this discussion has been anything more or less than "appeal to authority" and incitement to appeals to authority, I have read enough of your references to know what is contained therin, and if the master was not able to convince me of the validity of their claims, what hope the student?
Re:people are not mathematical equations
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Mathematics and Sex
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· Score: 1
Yet you assert that your system is better in some way. When you get to the quantum level the basis is not simple, nor are the systems that come out of it. You allege simplicity of physical systems which is simply not the case, and I assert that simplifying assumptions are as relevant (and necessary) to economics as they are to physics.
Whether what you do can be called a science at all really boils down to one thing:
Do you make predictions?
If yes, can they be verified?
If the answer to either of these questions is no, you are not practicing science of any form.
Re:people are not mathematical equations
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Mathematics and Sex
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· Score: 1
Sparse monocultural populations will tend to anarcho-capitalism because states are a bother, but it has not proven to be a stable system for the general case. Many small towns in the US tend to run local affairs in such a manner as well, but it is unstable above a certain size town. This is because you don't need a state for the scum to rise. To suppose otherwise is romantic idealism.
As far as Socialism vs. Capitalism, iff you assume no use of force, and perfect knowledge, then pure capitalism works. As soon as you see a need for intervention in the case of coersion (selective denial of resources) and fraud, then some fetters upon capitalism are necessary and it tends toward socialism. Pure socialism is even worse, though, so don't read too much into that.
Going up thread a couple, arguments of "complexity" fall upon deaf ears when you talk to people with physics training. Most of physics, all of the physics most people know, is a gross approximation to reality. But it is good enough to get the job done, and easily understood.
That is what we need from economics, something that is good enough to do the job. Perfection is neither necessary nor desirable in such a case. If you can get close enough with something calculable (and it does boil down to calculations in the end), then that is what you go with. I don't need to know
when a particular square inch of ground will be dampened by
rain to predict the weather a couple of days in advance, and I don't need to know what brand of cereal you buy to predict that you spend some of your income on food. Fine details get swamped by the law of large numbers, and you can get close enough to the right answer to hit it with a rock.
In fact, one of the beauties of capitalism over socialism is that it allows the fine details to be ignored at the large scale.
As far as the uses of history. It isn't perfect, but it is all we have. The only way to know what happens is to watch it happening.
Predict
Observe
Adjust
Skip either of the last 2 steps and it is just intellectual masturbation (a common phenomenon on/. and approaching OT for the article).
And the fact that he was moderated up as "Interesting" is/. all over.
Re:people are not mathematical equations
on
Mathematics and Sex
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· Score: 1
Truth, I have been asserting a few things without presenting evidence. However, I have educated myself on a great many things, and from my studies of history (both past and present) the Marxists are full of it too. Any theory that contains "and then people will get along OK" as an implicit assumption is likely to have other errors, as history shows that people tend to be contentious opportunists.
Note that not everything that I encountered in examining Austrian School economics was bad. It was just couched in such dense jargon that a complete analysis of it would be the work of a graduate degree of itself.
So I concluded my analysis based on the assetions of those who have made such study, by reading numerous papers posted through the mises.org site as well as following leads into the core papers that were available in translated form.
What I discovered is that many of these assertions contradicted events and patterns that I have personally witnessed, and the presented analysis was murky at best, straying quickly into deep jargon for concepts that are expressible in standard college level english. As well as presenting and defending assumptions that would lead to extreme class stratification and slavery as common practice all the while claiming that there was some magical characteristic of anarcho-capitalist society that would prevent people from exploiting each other in such a way.
This is the historical precedent which I see as ignored.
Now, it may be that the mises.org internet community just attracts people who present such dubious social theories as fact, but from following the papers deeper, I concluded that such theories are indeed supported by the core works.
So, in the fine tradition of "know the teacher by their students", I have come to the conclusion that there is a deep structural flaw in the theory. And since it would take several years to internalize enough of the jargon to be accepted as "knowledgable" and attempt to find and fix the particular flaw, I have given the lot up as a bad job for someone else.
Re:people are not mathematical equations
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Mathematics and Sex
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· Score: 1
As great as you claim my ignorance of your particular branch os "social science" is, you betray an even greater ignorance of the science of mathematics, even while using some of its language.
As well, you betray an ignorance of history. Austrian theory may "explain" the business cycle, but it does not explain, in fact it brushes off cleanly, 3000 years of historical record to do so.
In the physical sciences a theory that explains one thing while contradicting observed facts is generally thrown out as in error.
I guess those soft social scientists are more forgiving.
Throwing progressively more obscure and obfuscated language at me is unconvincing. It is a blatant "appeal to authority" falsity and I will not play that game with you. I haven't the time to read 500 pages of nonsense to argue with you on your ground. I have already read ~100 pages of it and I was not convinced then. If you wish to convince me that you are correct use plain English instead of jargon, and explain to me why your precious perfect theory implicitly supports slavery as a good thing.
Re:people are not mathematical equations
on
Mathematics and Sex
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· Score: 1
If it is too complicated for mathematics, which can model the very movements of the stars in the heavens and allows us to directly manipulate the very atoms of creation, what is the power of PRAXEOLOGY that mere mathematics cannot aspire to?
I have read Herr Mises primary essay, in its entirety. I was curious, having already observed the weakness of modern economic theory. It was entertaining for a bit, but it is not science. "Common sense" as an economic theory only works if you are willing to acknowledge that what may be "common sense" to you is damnfoolishness to someone with different experiences.
Frankly, my experience of the world has shown me that there are holes in his theory that you can drive an aircraft carrier through without dampening them by its wake. The existence and utility of aircraft carriers being only one of those holes.
"The Pretence of Knowledge" indeed. You pretend to knowledge and attempt to dissuade others from seeking true knowledge, because if they find it then you have been wrong.
Economics is the study of money, not people. Money follows rules, and people follow money. They will not change their behaviours significantly because of some new economic theory on the block. They are too busy answering to the Golden Rule: He who has the gold, makes the rules. That is common sense, and it is the truth that Herr Mises and his followers since have chosen to ignore to their discredit.
Re:people are not mathematical equations
on
Mathematics and Sex
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· Score: 1
To paraphrase your post:
"You cannot describe people with math because people have
freewill and math cannot describe freewill, but we can use our special method to describe people that cannot be translated or verified by observation".
If you use your freewill to jump off a building, I can use physics and math to describe what will happen to you in fine, though not infinitesimally fine, detail.
If you, by the same token, use your freewill to engage in economic transactions, I can use many of the same mathematical techniques to describe the path your money takes through the economy.
"It is too complex" is a cop out of the first order, especially when a modern desktop computer has enough capability to directly model an economy consisting of tens of thousands of individuals at the single transaction level, accurate to the mill.
"You can't conduct experiments" is another copout. Astronomy gets by just fine without being able to blow stars up in the lab. Geology got by just fine without being able to make rocks in the lab. Observation is the key, and there is enough history, past and present, to observe and test one's pet theories against.
All you need is discipline and rigor.
Besides, money is math in a very real and legally binding sense. If you don't believe that, I pity your poor accountant (or perhaps I envy them).
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, /. ;)
For a commercial project to be inactive means it isn't worth maintaining for the IP owner.
Big difference there.
If I depended on your example project, I'd have a copy of the source and could restart it independently of the original maintainer, who obviously doesn't want to be bothered anymore.
Hey, that's the combination to my luggage!
I find it amusing when people assume that being moral means being a holier than thou prick about other people's morality as well, and then proceed to be holier than thou about their lack of morality.
Guilty consience perhaps?
It keeps people from walking off with my stuff.
I find it amusing and disturbing that someone would have such a badly misfunctioning PMU that they need to put down someone else for having a more functional one.
No signs have been found, and the Universe looks flatter than Kansas as far as we have been able to see.
Frankly, with COLA's you probably come out ahead before then.
Naahh, couldn't be that simple...
For example: Shipping major software packages that required significant administrative skill to run as an unprivileged user on NT-series OS's (MS Office).
For example: Shipping as their major OS product for years an OS that didn't even have the concept of an unprivileged user (Windows-over-DOS).
They are getting better, but so is everyone else, and they have a lot of catching up to do.
As far as the Danes are concerned, he is threatening a shutdown. If Denmark was such a bad place to do business, why'd he buy a business there to begin with?
Of course, that would imply a degree of scheming and underhanded forethought that would be impolitic to imply in this august forum.
The real world has no tolerance for laziness. Do, or be done to.
But that doesn't mean we have to let them die in the streets.
The REASON we do not have the elderly poor dying in the streets of NY, Chicago, and Houston is Social Security. So saying that this isn't the '30's and we don't need it any more is disengenuous at best.
As far as "Why does the modern government hate the working poor?", it is because the Republicans have been in effective power for the past 30+ years and they hate anyone who isn't White, Protestant, and Rich. Things improve for everyone when the Democrats get any measure of power.
A nice solid titanium shell combined with good structural integrity design in the reactor itself would provide containment and recoverability for a solid-state reactor. "Guarantees" are for suckers anyway.
A gas state Nuclear Rocket couldn't be used within the atmosphere (or even LEO I'd say) due to the containment problems in the event of catastrophic failure, but I doubt that we have the materials tech to build them for at least 50 years anyway.
It isn't cash, but it is value. The rights to this value that the GPL grants are particularly powerful, which is why the GPL is the gold standard of Free software licenses.
Fine. I'm done.
You are obviously insane by my standard, and may now have the last word if you so desire.
Pythagoras's Theorem has indeed been proven, there is an entire branch of mathematics devoted to proofs so old that the proof you chose to belittle as "axiomatic" is standard for college level students as an exercise.
As I mentioned in my previous post, many things have been considered "self evident" in the past that have since rolled beneath the gunwales of time. One of those is that there is any field of study that describes the real world and cannot be tested.
If you doubt the ability to run experiments in economics you haven't been paying attention to the IMF or world markets for the past 30 years. They may be unethical, but they have been experiments. In the process, a lot of pretty theories have been disproven and millions have been driven into poverty. I imagine as many other theories have been justified, but as it isn't my primary field I don't subscribe to their journals. It would appear that you don't either.
And your favorite example of this exchange, inflations relation to rising prices, is utter bunk. Not only can you determine if everything else is equal but thanks to modern accounting and computers, the margin of error of those calculations has shrunk considerably since the 1930's. Not to mention certain examples of "captured economies" where there is a smaller economy that has clearly defined transactions with the world and minute knowledge of the inner workings of said economy is available.
People KNEW that the earth was the center of the universe. They knew that all celestial bodies moved in perfect circles, and with this knowledge they mapped the heavens and created elaborate (and apparently accurate) measures of the movement of the sky.
Then someone looked at Jupiter a bit too closely and it all fell apart.
This is why the physical scientists are so insistent on checking their results against reality. If you can't or don't check against reality your writings are just as valid as any other well thought out work of fiction. You can have perfect internal consistency, you can even use it to map against the outside world and maybe get good results. Frankly, anybody who invests conservatively and has half a brain can do well in the stock market. It doesn't take a superior economic theory, it just takes a willingness to look at direct consequences of your actions and not assume any risk you cannot afford.
Besides, economic theory has as much to do with playing the stock market as meteorology has to do with skiing. Knowing when the snow will fall and how much really doesn't help you get down the hill. Knowing the business cycle perfectly tells you nothing about whether the particular business you are looking at investing in is well managed or another Enron.
You confuse and attempt to distract with unrelated minutia, because economies are predictable and can be observed and even experimented with, as the IMF seems bent on doing.
You assume either that the statements you make are true, or that those of us who aren't professional economists are too dim to see through their falsehood.
I do not beleive you are correct, and nothing you have said in this discussion has been anything more or less than "appeal to authority" and incitement to appeals to authority, I have read enough of your references to know what is contained therin, and if the master was not able to convince me of the validity of their claims, what hope the student?
Whether what you do can be called a science at all really boils down to one thing:
Do you make predictions?
If yes, can they be verified?
If the answer to either of these questions is no, you are not practicing science of any form.
As far as Socialism vs. Capitalism, iff you assume no use of force, and perfect knowledge, then pure capitalism works. As soon as you see a need for intervention in the case of coersion (selective denial of resources) and fraud, then some fetters upon capitalism are necessary and it tends toward socialism. Pure socialism is even worse, though, so don't read too much into that.
Going up thread a couple, arguments of "complexity" fall upon deaf ears when you talk to people with physics training. Most of physics, all of the physics most people know, is a gross approximation to reality. But it is good enough to get the job done, and easily understood.
That is what we need from economics, something that is good enough to do the job. Perfection is neither necessary nor desirable in such a case. If you can get close enough with something calculable (and it does boil down to calculations in the end), then that is what you go with. I don't need to know when a particular square inch of ground will be dampened by rain to predict the weather a couple of days in advance, and I don't need to know what brand of cereal you buy to predict that you spend some of your income on food. Fine details get swamped by the law of large numbers, and you can get close enough to the right answer to hit it with a rock.
In fact, one of the beauties of capitalism over socialism is that it allows the fine details to be ignored at the large scale.
As far as the uses of history. It isn't perfect, but it is all we have. The only way to know what happens is to watch it happening.
Predict
Observe
Adjust
Skip either of the last 2 steps and it is just intellectual masturbation (a common phenomenon on /. and approaching OT for the article).
And the fact that he was moderated up as "Interesting" is /. all over.
Note that not everything that I encountered in examining Austrian School economics was bad. It was just couched in such dense jargon that a complete analysis of it would be the work of a graduate degree of itself.
So I concluded my analysis based on the assetions of those who have made such study, by reading numerous papers posted through the mises.org site as well as following leads into the core papers that were available in translated form.
What I discovered is that many of these assertions contradicted events and patterns that I have personally witnessed, and the presented analysis was murky at best, straying quickly into deep jargon for concepts that are expressible in standard college level english. As well as presenting and defending assumptions that would lead to extreme class stratification and slavery as common practice all the while claiming that there was some magical characteristic of anarcho-capitalist society that would prevent people from exploiting each other in such a way.
This is the historical precedent which I see as ignored.
Now, it may be that the mises.org internet community just attracts people who present such dubious social theories as fact, but from following the papers deeper, I concluded that such theories are indeed supported by the core works.
So, in the fine tradition of "know the teacher by their students", I have come to the conclusion that there is a deep structural flaw in the theory. And since it would take several years to internalize enough of the jargon to be accepted as "knowledgable" and attempt to find and fix the particular flaw, I have given the lot up as a bad job for someone else.
As well, you betray an ignorance of history. Austrian theory may "explain" the business cycle, but it does not explain, in fact it brushes off cleanly, 3000 years of historical record to do so.
In the physical sciences a theory that explains one thing while contradicting observed facts is generally thrown out as in error.
I guess those soft social scientists are more forgiving.
Throwing progressively more obscure and obfuscated language at me is unconvincing. It is a blatant "appeal to authority" falsity and I will not play that game with you. I haven't the time to read 500 pages of nonsense to argue with you on your ground. I have already read ~100 pages of it and I was not convinced then. If you wish to convince me that you are correct use plain English instead of jargon, and explain to me why your precious perfect theory implicitly supports slavery as a good thing.
I have read Herr Mises primary essay, in its entirety. I was curious, having already observed the weakness of modern economic theory. It was entertaining for a bit, but it is not science. "Common sense" as an economic theory only works if you are willing to acknowledge that what may be "common sense" to you is damnfoolishness to someone with different experiences.
Frankly, my experience of the world has shown me that there are holes in his theory that you can drive an aircraft carrier through without dampening them by its wake. The existence and utility of aircraft carriers being only one of those holes.
"The Pretence of Knowledge" indeed. You pretend to knowledge and attempt to dissuade others from seeking true knowledge, because if they find it then you have been wrong.
Economics is the study of money, not people. Money follows rules, and people follow money. They will not change their behaviours significantly because of some new economic theory on the block. They are too busy answering to the Golden Rule: He who has the gold, makes the rules. That is common sense, and it is the truth that Herr Mises and his followers since have chosen to ignore to their discredit.
If you use your freewill to jump off a building, I can use physics and math to describe what will happen to you in fine, though not infinitesimally fine, detail.
If you, by the same token, use your freewill to engage in economic transactions, I can use many of the same mathematical techniques to describe the path your money takes through the economy.
"It is too complex" is a cop out of the first order, especially when a modern desktop computer has enough capability to directly model an economy consisting of tens of thousands of individuals at the single transaction level, accurate to the mill.
"You can't conduct experiments" is another copout. Astronomy gets by just fine without being able to blow stars up in the lab. Geology got by just fine without being able to make rocks in the lab. Observation is the key, and there is enough history, past and present, to observe and test one's pet theories against.
All you need is discipline and rigor.
Besides, money is math in a very real and legally binding sense. If you don't believe that, I pity your poor accountant (or perhaps I envy them).