When a democracy can't defend itself from people/cultures/countries that resect human freedom less, then the democracy dies.
This sounds like a message of the great ayatollah (or the pre-1991 Kremlin):
"When the Umma can't defend itself from subversive and contagious ideas of heathens outside the Umma that do not repect even the most basic rules of Islam, then the Umma dies.
Unfortunately, there must be limits to the freedom of expression in the Umma in a world where there are still heathens and heretics. It also means that the Umma must be prepared for war, even though the community of the faithful is committed to peace."
Unless the enemies of freedom possess the liberties which they are keen to abuse, we are no better than those to whom we are opposed. Or as Voltaire has been paraphrased,
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
Do host these websites, and do visit them, so that you will know how to distinguish the rhetoric of totalitarianism from that of democracy. You cannot learn what regime X is like from those who oppose it.
Why don't we all try to donate 1.5% of our assets instead of whining about the poster's flamebait.
Why don't we to donate everything we own in surplus of $500,000? There is no point in anyone owning more than that.
Anyway, my net worth is negative due to student loans and the recent purchase of a house. Still I donate money to people who own nothing and therefore have more assets than I do. Isn't that odd?
What about comparing incomes? There is a wealth of psychological research proving that the utility of your first $50,000 of income is much higher than the utility of your second $50,000 of income.
I am pretty sure Bill Gates doesn't have to deny himself anything because he gave away 1.5% of his assets this year.
Cover article "The Good Company" of the current issue of the Economist argues that companies should stop pretending that they are "socially responsible" and instead should focus on behaving honestly and obeying the law - provided they face competition in their market - and do good works without even trying.
"Good works" with lots of publicity are too often just a smokescreen for an evil company.
Firefox and Linux are helping Microsoft in a way as long as they are marginal. It is going to be incredibly hard to sell a new PC OS. One competitor owns the market, and therefore the money, and the other one gives away its product for free.
What if I start using some very idiomatic language paradigms in perl, which all make good sense there, but result in, at best a tangled barely intelligible mess of Java
Auditor 1: "Your code is a total mess in Visual Basic. Rewrite it."
Auditor 2: "Your code is a total mess in Java. Rewrite it."
Auditor 3: "Your code is a total mess in Prolog. Rewrite it."
You're advocating the government seizure of private property without compensation here.
In the Netherlands we have a problem with the privatization of former government musea in the 90s. The "public" still owns the art works and should be able to see the works for "free" according to the law. Government just completely forgot about that when they decided musea should be able to make a profit in some way.
The government will commit the biggest art theft since WWII if they would transfer the complete rights of ownership to the musea. The publicly owned collection includes the major works of Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Vermeer etc, and the musea certainly can't afford to buy them. Many of the works are "priceless" in the sense that they haven't been on the market for centuries.
The publicly owned universities here have also been giving away the copyright to scientific works to publishers for naught for decades, and never patented anything. The government actually pays legal publishers to use copies of its own legislation. And the national railways and energy grid have been given away for naught to companies.
Theft from the public through privatization of publicly owned assets by short-sighted governments is the threat of today. They are giving away the national hoard and keeping the national debt.
Government seizure of private assets is negligible compared to that. It's just a rhetorical trick to create support for plundering the national treasury on behalf of the "free market".
Perhaps "mercantilism" would be the better term. A free market, by definition, doesn't involve organized violence. Or, in other terms, it's not a very free market for the people who get killed.
Communism, by definition, also doesn't involve violence. It's just that you have to kill so many dissidents on the fast track to communism.
Capitalism does not create free markets. Marx was not criticizing free markets, but real markets (or transactions involving labour for money to be specific).
Capitalist rethoric always presents us models of voluntary transactions between two people, but the real victims of those transactions are usually not even involved in the transaction. Even if they are, they are often not making a real choice. Necessitas non habet legem.
Or perhaps they starve thanks to modern day mercantilists and their eternal cry of imperialist nationalism: "They're taking our jobs!"
It's not just about protectionism on our side, but also that our lending conditions prohibit protectionism on their side.
In eastern Ethiopia, there is no longer an incentive to sell agricultural surpluses in western Ethiopia in return for goats because there is a world market where they can get more meat for their agricultural products. Illiterate marginal farmers are outcompeted by farmers a continent away, and they are not in a position to switch to flipping burgers at McDonalds.
In economic terms, there is no demand for food in the west while people starve. They don't have the instinct for collectivism that we take for granted, because they belong to different tribes.
It is possible to create a world economy in which every one can participate, but the road from here to there is not "the free market" but redistribution of wealth so that their children will be able to compete.
The areas in the former USSR where the statues of Lenin still stand (in private gardens), are those areas, in Central Asia and eastern Siberia, that benefitted enormously from redistribution through central planning. Redistribution is also why the people of Wyoming are so much better of than the people of Mongolia even though they live in similar hellholes.
Imperialism, involving organized violence against native populations, is responsible for a lot of mass murders. And a lot of that imperialism was for the benefit of commercial concerns. That doesn't make capitalism responsible, as any system where people go around killing/enslaving native populations and plundering their land and possessions is, oh, perhaps, plundering, and not a free market.
I don't care very much for which reason I am killed. My point is that capitalism creates commercial thugs and communism government thugs.
The absolute numbers are not that relevant. As a citizen of a small country I could for instance observe that large countries kill more people than small countries. Mass murders seem more or less randomly distributed over types of state, but there are differences between geographic areas. Some states kill mostly non-citizens and some citizens.
We are not unable to feed the world population.
Agreed.
It's a distribution problem caused by the fact that the people we are unable to feed live under quasi-feudal regimes that plunder the people's food and sell it outside the country to fund their armies. That's not capitalism, that's plunder by government thugs.
A part of the African population can no longer live because they cannot produce anything that the part of the population that can produce valuable things want to have, because there is a world market. Without redistribution a capitalist Africa cannot survive now. Capitalism is not going to remove the thugs. Capitalism often placed them there.
In any case, murder by government was the leading cause of preventable death in the 20th century, and communist governments led in the mass murder. That's simple historical fact, and nothing capitalism ever did matches it.
See Ranking Atrocities for a ranking of atrocities by percentage of affected population killed. The first three places are for a constitutional monarchy, communist regime, and a consortium of companies. That the largest absolute numbers (USSR, China) are communist atrocities is simply because the affected populations were very large.
Another thing: ideologies don't kill anyone. People do. The nature of capitalism makes it very hard to attribute deaths to them, but surely it is for instance pretty obvious that capitalism is the reason why we still seem unable to feed the world population because there is no "demand" for food in Africa. It is easier to count the victims of an ideology that by its very nature demands centralization of power in one hand.
It kind of reminds me of my favorite argument about the "Newton was Wrong" folks: No, he wasn't wrong. His equations were accurate to a certain point. If he had the ability to hurl apples to the ground at velocities comparable to light (and be able to measure the consequences), he would have certainly had the wherewithall to at least state "my basic theory breaks down at absurd velocities for some reason".
The theory that the earth is flat is also pretty accurate, and only breaks down at absurd distances for some reason. We all use this theory, and even land measurers use measurement systems that are based on the theory that the earth is flat.
We do not know or care who invented the flat earth theory, but we all believe that the people who defended the theory against the more accurate theory proposed by Copernicus, Keppler, and Galileo are religious lunatics.
The scientist that invents the new theory is treated kindly by history, while the people that represent the one being replaced are evil.
Given what we know of Newton't vanity, it is fortunate for him that his theory was replaced with a more accurate one after his death. I am not sure he would have handled that gracefully.
Newton's theory of gravity and the flat earth theory are still most appealing from a computational point of view.
No. A patent was originally a grant from the king to some particular benefit. (I'm not sure just how widely that was interpreted.) The most commonly encountered fossil from that time is the term "a patent of nobility", but I believe that it was also applied to such things as the official royal jam maker. (I remember my feeling of the bizarre when I first encountered a jar of jam with the label on it "Official Jammaker to the Royal Household".)
It's a good thing that the 'letter patent' and things like that survived to remind us of what the patent really was: just a feudal privilege.
The patent allowed the king to give something valuable, usually a monopoly, away even though his treasury is empty. Most of his subjects don't notice that they are being screwed indirectly anyway.
A more refined use of the patent is as a protectionist instrument: patent the monopoly on producing, selling, or trading some good within your territory to a local to prevent foreigners from cornering the market.
This is the kind of (supposedly 'modern') patent granted by English king Henry VI in 1449 for stained glass making after some English manufacturer succeeded in copying Italian stained glass. By granting the patent a fledgling industry is protected against any foreign competition.
Eventually the patent disappeared with the absolute monarch, except for the purpose of 'promoting science' because this seemed like a harmless thing.
The patent is a protectionist instrument that should have disappeared long ago. In the 17th century, to be exact, when the English stopped using them against each other (in 1623) and switched to the even blunter protectionist instrument of the Navigation Act of 1651 against the Dutch that sparked of the Anglo-Dutch Wars.
'Protecting garage inventors' bullshit is dishonest: that's not what the system was ever intended for, and garage inventors do not have a right to a monopoly on something just because they invented it. 'Garage inventors' cannot afford patents.
Not quite. The only way to permanently stop software patents is to rewrite the directive and make it very clearly, in no uncertain terms, state that software is _not patentable_.
We have won when the "freedom from software patents" is in the European Convention on Human Rights.
Indeed, we're a good example of that. We in the Netherlands have laws against saying "God sucks",
This statement has never been prohibited in the Netherlands, even in the days before the blasphemy articles you are referring to (147-147a, Title 5 WvS) officially fell into desuetude.
and a prohibition on discrimination is actually set down in our constitution!. In fact, it's in Article 1.
Article 1 of the Netherlands constitution states that the governments treats all inhabitants of the kingdom equally. You do not understand what it says. Criminal discrimation provisions are found in Title 5 WvS.
In contrast, the constitution does not grant freedom of speech even in limited terms, contrary to what many people think is in art. 7. That article only states that prior permission is not required to publish something, whoopidoo. But once it's published, you can be persecuted for anything that crosses the law (like the ones against discrimination or blasphemy). It's sad, really.
Article 7 is much clearer about what 'freedom of expression' means than the first amendment in the US Constitution. The US Constitution is so underspecified on many points that it is almost useless as a protective device for citizens against government abuse of power.
Article 7 says that the government can not prevent you from expressing your opinion, and that any litigation must be based directly on formal law. This is a translation for anyone who is interested:
Article 7 [Expression]
(1) No one shall require prior permission to publish thoughts or opinions through the press, without prejudice to the responsibility of every person under the law. (2) Rules concerning radio and television shall be laid down by Act of Parliament. There shall be no prior supervision of the content of a radio or television broadcast. (3) No one shall be required to submit thoughts or opinions for prior approval in order to disseminate them by means other than those mentioned in the preceding paragraphs, without prejudice to the responsibility of every person under the law. The holding of performances open to persons younger than sixteen years of age may be regulated by Act of Parliament in order to protect good morals. (4) The preceding paragraphs do not apply to commercial advertising.
You can (rightly) point out a lot of bad things about the USA, but at least they got the free speech thing right.
Is that why the Netherlands customarily scores very high on press freedom rankings (shared 1st place) and the US scores low (31st place)?
France is in 26th place, by the way.
I am not really impressed by a country that tolerates nazis because of "freedom of expression", but still succeeds in ending up in the 31st place in an international ranking.
So, you think that using multiple iterations of an inherently power-hungry technology will somehow solve the power problem? While, certainly, we could back off clock speeds with multi-processing and reduce heat considerably, but, people always want the cutting edge so the demand to "crank it up" would still be a profitable venture, thus pressuring the price of the lower-end stuff.
I would be perfectly happy with, let's say, ten passively cooled 1Gh pc's, each running one application + a small operating system, provided that I can use one set of peripherals and can cut and paste easily between applications through a global clipboard. The hardware is no problem: we need a new operating system.
Another thing I have been waiting for for years is the integrated home pc/boiler/central heating system, powered by (watercooled) CPU's. I never understood why generating heat is a problem. The real problem is that we are wasting it by trying to force hot air out with fans through the same holes in the box that we use to let cool air in resulting in noise which is useless waste.
Oh, a side note. If I have Windows and I want to use Mozilla, why do I have to use IE first to download mozilla?? I already have IE installed, why do I need to download yet another browser and install it?
Never download Mozilla with IE or any other insecure product! Only download Mozilla with Mozilla!
If you download it with IE you may not be downloading the REAL Mozilla. That's what I tell people who report Mozilla crashing and stuff like that. The real Mozilla is flawless. How do you know you are using the real Mozilla?
Also never let someone else install Mozilla from a storage device. They may have tampered with it.
Remember: It's an open source product, so anyone can recompile it with his own malware embedded!
1. Is there a patch or do I have to download the whole browser and reinstall?
See Tools>Options>Software Updates
Re:How Israeli Companies Are Succeeding...
on
Business Under Fire
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· Score: 1
The U.S. spends about 5% of GDP on military (including pizza delivery in places like the Indian Ocean), while Canada and Europe spend far less (<2%?).
Old figures, but the general idea is clear:
Russia $79,000,000,000 China $27,400,000,000 N. Korea $5,300,000,000 Iraq $2,600,000,000 Iran $2,300,000,000 Libya $2,300,000,000 Syria $2,200,000,000 Cuba $270,000,000
Total Potential Enemies $121 Total US + NATO $523
If GDP is what is important, then Europe still has nothing to fear from the rest of the world. So the US can stop defending us. Thank you.
You don't have to look back to the eighties to find cluelessness.
Last year a Dutch prosecutor involved in some high profile organized crime cases threw out his home computer with the garbage because it was "broken".
A taxi driver took it, reinstalled windows, and decided to bring it to a journalist. The computer still contained a number of memo's from current cases and the user name and password for his email account.
The prosecutor was not fired, but reassigned to another job where he could do less harm.
They don't have to pay for air, light (not sunlight at least), or gravity...
They don't own it. It is immaterial whether the patron paid for something, inherited it, made it, or received it as a gift. The patron pays for artificial light, but he doesn't own it.
and theft of electricity -- a criminal offence -- from the instant they flicked the switch
A taking of some good is only theft if it is clearly contrary to custom or law. That is why many businesses have 'private' signs on doors. I think in this case you would have to tell customers first it is not allowed, or add a 'private' sign to the outlets.
No different really than a door that's not for public use, with nothing behind it -- not even a floor.
This kind of arrangement is also prohibited in a workplace. There is wellknown international case law about it (about an engine room in a ship with steel ladders etc. but no nearby floor).
{BTW, I'd charge my customers for using the extinguisher, too, if it ever came down to that. They don't recharge themselves after every use, you know.}
Since you don't care for my equipment, I don't care for your restaurant. I would not feel a need to extinguish the fire, I think. You started it, after all.
Just make sure they give you the change from 1 cent!
Here most businesses do not accept eurocents and round amounts up or down because it is too much trouble giving small change. It saves on labour time, weight, and space in the tills.
If an employee walks over to tell you that you can't use the power outlet, they just spent more money on labour costs than you can steal from them by charging your equipment.
So, would you have us locked into an energy-inefficient system permanently when better options exist simply due to this? This is a "one time cost" of energy that saves energy in the future; it's an energy "investment".
It is an unrealistic goal, and elevated rails spoil the landscape. It is not going to happen. It's simply too expensive, and I don't support policies based on the idea of spending your way out of a problem that is not about traffic, but about the use of space.
If you want to decrease energy consumption, people have to live close to eachother and to their workplace in small houses (which consume less energy) within walking distance of public transport. Coercive spatial policy, like the unpopular Ministry for Spatial Planning does here in the Netherlands, is free and it works.
I own a car, but I use it just once or twice a week. Parking is 3 to 4 euros an hour and I can get to my workplace, and most other places I have to go, faster by public transport. The public transport system works because it is cheaper and faster in my case. It is actually slow and expensive, but better than driving. If people live too far apart, public transport is never going to cost-effective no matter what technology you use.
Lets follow this line of reasoning. Should we keep building new roads, for which the materials don't take as much refining as steel for tracks but have much higher transportation energy consumption due to their higher mass? It would seem reasonable that we should stop building new roads, and just build personal rail. But then there's the problem of backwards compatability.
Rails are generally not cheaper than road. If a rail is damaged, traffic is jammed until the damage is repaired. Roads rarely become completely unusable. Only the speed limit is lowered. In Amsterdam we have a great rail transport system that will get you almost anywhere, and much faster than the car on average, but it is (even) more sensitive to traffic jams than the roads.
In addition, the construction of a personal rail system would be a disaster for car traffic, and the economy, for at least a decade. The supports of the elevated rail have to carry all weight, and you will need more than steel to construct them. I am thinking of large reinforced concrete slabs and concrete injection or a sand layer below that where it is needed.
If you want a high speed elevated rail, entering and leaving the rail with your personal vehicle is going to be a space consuming problem.
There is also still a parking problem, unless you want empty vehicles to keep consuming energy outside rush hours. Also if you want to move cargo by personal rail, you are going to need parking spaces at any place where cargo might be delivered, to avoid holding up traffic. A vehicle on a rail will use more space for parallel parking than a car with a competent driver.
In addition elevated rail spoil the landscape, and noone will tolerate one of them going over their house or near the windows of their house.
I do support the idea of public transport by elevated rail in those cases where it is the only viable solution, but I do not think a "personal" system is going to solve anything.
Humans are overrated as user interfaces. Try putting a random human between you and your computer. You talk to the human, and the human tries to do what you instruct it to do. It doesn't work.
The communication protocols for interacting with humans are seriously underspecified, and they are all different.
Humans are also incredibly irritating as opponents in multiplayer computer games. Their behavior is not at all realistic.
I have done the math, and it would take more land to grow soy than U.S. ownes to provide enough biodiesel for the current yearly consumption.
A few remarks:
1) In the short term mixing locally produced biodiesel with diesel and gas for existing cars is already a good thing for the environment and the economy. 2) Why do you expect that a solution to existing energy problems makes the US independent of foreign imports? The US imports most of the natural resources it consumes, because it can afford to. If it doesn't want to be dependent on imports, it should consume less. 3) Vegetable oil can be produced on most types of soil by any farmer. Vegetable oil will make us less dependent on specific regimes and the vegetable oil economy is inherently more democratic because there will be more producers.
The "shit-based economy" is even more democratic, if it means you can sell your shit in the future.
Of course, there's the one really big hitch: staggering capital costs. Still, the GDP boost alone should pay for it.
I can think of another one: staggering energy costs and emissions required for the construction of this revolutionary system.
One of the reasons nobody considers taking old inefficient and polluting cars off the road is that the energy costs of replacing them outweigh the costs of keeping them on the road until they fall apart.
We can use admixtures of vegetable oil to existing fuels today in our car, without modifications.
Slashdot Mirror
When a democracy can't defend itself from people/cultures/countries that resect human freedom less, then the democracy dies.
This sounds like a message of the great ayatollah (or the pre-1991 Kremlin):
"When the Umma can't defend itself from subversive and contagious ideas of heathens outside the Umma that do not repect even the most basic rules of Islam, then the Umma dies.
Unfortunately, there must be limits to the freedom of expression in the Umma in a world where there are still heathens and heretics. It also means that the Umma must be prepared for war, even though the community of the faithful is committed to peace."
Unless the enemies of freedom possess the liberties which they are keen to abuse, we are no better than those to whom we are opposed. Or as Voltaire has been paraphrased,
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
Do host these websites, and do visit them, so that you will know how to distinguish the rhetoric of totalitarianism from that of democracy. You cannot learn what regime X is like from those who oppose it.
If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck...
Why don't we all try to donate 1.5% of our assets instead of whining about the poster's flamebait.
Why don't we to donate everything we own in surplus of $500,000? There is no point in anyone owning more than that.
Anyway, my net worth is negative due to student loans and the recent purchase of a house. Still I donate money to people who own nothing and therefore have more assets than I do. Isn't that odd?
What about comparing incomes? There is a wealth of psychological research proving that the utility of your first $50,000 of income is much higher than the utility of your second $50,000 of income.
I am pretty sure Bill Gates doesn't have to deny himself anything because he gave away 1.5% of his assets this year.
Cover article "The Good Company" of the current issue of the Economist argues that companies should stop pretending that they are "socially responsible" and instead should focus on behaving honestly and obeying the law - provided they face competition in their market - and do good works without even trying.
"Good works" with lots of publicity are too often just a smokescreen for an evil company.
Firefox and Linux are helping Microsoft in a way as long as they are marginal. It is going to be incredibly hard to sell a new PC OS. One competitor owns the market, and therefore the money, and the other one gives away its product for free.
Nothing new here.
I learned this in "high school", on the very first day:
Non scholae sed vitae discimus. (Seneca, Epistulae morales ad Lucilium, Epistula CVI)
The very first latin sentence we had to translate.
Another one by Seneca:
Diligentia maximum etiam mediocris ingeni subsidium.
And "Vitanda est improba siren desidia" (Horace) is to the point too.
What if I start using some very idiomatic language paradigms in perl, which all make good sense there, but result in, at best a tangled barely intelligible mess of Java
Auditor 1: "Your code is a total mess in Visual Basic. Rewrite it."
Auditor 2: "Your code is a total mess in Java. Rewrite it."
Auditor 3: "Your code is a total mess in Prolog. Rewrite it."
Good luck.
You're advocating the government seizure of private property without compensation here.
In the Netherlands we have a problem with the privatization of former government musea in the 90s. The "public" still owns the art works and should be able to see the works for "free" according to the law. Government just completely forgot about that when they decided musea should be able to make a profit in some way.
The government will commit the biggest art theft since WWII if they would transfer the complete rights of ownership to the musea. The publicly owned collection includes the major works of Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Vermeer etc, and the musea certainly can't afford to buy them. Many of the works are "priceless" in the sense that they haven't been on the market for centuries.
The publicly owned universities here have also been giving away the copyright to scientific works to publishers for naught for decades, and never patented anything. The government actually pays legal publishers to use copies of its own legislation. And the national railways and energy grid have been given away for naught to companies.
Theft from the public through privatization of publicly owned assets by short-sighted governments is the threat of today. They are giving away the national hoard and keeping the national debt.
Government seizure of private assets is negligible compared to that. It's just a rhetorical trick to create support for plundering the national treasury on behalf of the "free market".
Perhaps "mercantilism" would be the better term. A free market, by definition, doesn't involve organized violence. Or, in other terms, it's not a very free market for the people who get killed.
Communism, by definition, also doesn't involve violence. It's just that you have to kill so many dissidents on the fast track to communism.
Capitalism does not create free markets. Marx was not criticizing free markets, but real markets (or transactions involving labour for money to be specific).
Capitalist rethoric always presents us models of voluntary transactions between two people, but the real victims of those transactions are usually not even involved in the transaction. Even if they are, they are often not making a real choice. Necessitas non habet legem.
Or perhaps they starve thanks to modern day mercantilists and their eternal cry of imperialist nationalism: "They're taking our jobs!"
It's not just about protectionism on our side, but also that our lending conditions prohibit protectionism on their side.
In eastern Ethiopia, there is no longer an incentive to sell agricultural surpluses in western Ethiopia in return for goats because there is a world market where they can get more meat for their agricultural products. Illiterate marginal farmers are outcompeted by farmers a continent away, and they are not in a position to switch to flipping burgers at McDonalds.
In economic terms, there is no demand for food in the west while people starve. They don't have the instinct for collectivism that we take for granted, because they belong to different tribes.
It is possible to create a world economy in which every one can participate, but the road from here to there is not "the free market" but redistribution of wealth so that their children will be able to compete.
The areas in the former USSR where the statues of Lenin still stand (in private gardens), are those areas, in Central Asia and eastern Siberia, that benefitted enormously from redistribution through central planning. Redistribution is also why the people of Wyoming are so much better of than the people of Mongolia even though they live in similar hellholes.
Imperialism, involving organized violence against native populations, is responsible for a lot of mass murders. And a lot of that imperialism was for the benefit of commercial concerns. That doesn't make capitalism responsible, as any system where people go around killing/enslaving native populations and plundering their land and possessions is, oh, perhaps, plundering, and not a free market.
I don't care very much for which reason I am killed. My point is that capitalism creates commercial thugs and communism government thugs.
The absolute numbers are not that relevant. As a citizen of a small country I could for instance observe that large countries kill more people than small countries. Mass murders seem more or less randomly distributed over types of state, but there are differences between geographic areas. Some states kill mostly non-citizens and some citizens.
We are not unable to feed the world population.
Agreed.
It's a distribution problem caused by the fact that the people we are unable to feed live under quasi-feudal regimes that plunder the people's food and sell it outside the country to fund their armies. That's not capitalism, that's plunder by government thugs.
A part of the African population can no longer live because they cannot produce anything that the part of the population that can produce valuable things want to have, because there is a world market. Without redistribution a capitalist Africa cannot survive now. Capitalism is not going to remove the thugs. Capitalism often placed them there.
In any case, murder by government was the leading cause of preventable death in the 20th century, and communist governments led in the mass murder. That's simple historical fact, and nothing capitalism ever did matches it.
See Ranking Atrocities for a ranking of atrocities by percentage of affected population killed. The first three places are for a constitutional monarchy, communist regime, and a consortium of companies. That the largest absolute numbers (USSR, China) are communist atrocities is simply because the affected populations were very large.
Another thing: ideologies don't kill anyone. People do. The nature of capitalism makes it very hard to attribute deaths to them, but surely it is for instance pretty obvious that capitalism is the reason why we still seem unable to feed the world population because there is no "demand" for food in Africa. It is easier to count the victims of an ideology that by its very nature demands centralization of power in one hand.
It kind of reminds me of my favorite argument about the "Newton was Wrong" folks: No, he wasn't wrong. His equations were accurate to a certain point. If he had the ability to hurl apples to the ground at velocities comparable to light (and be able to measure the consequences), he would have certainly had the wherewithall to at least state "my basic theory breaks down at absurd velocities for some reason".
The theory that the earth is flat is also pretty accurate, and only breaks down at absurd distances for some reason. We all use this theory, and even land measurers use measurement systems that are based on the theory that the earth is flat.
We do not know or care who invented the flat earth theory, but we all believe that the people who defended the theory against the more accurate theory proposed by Copernicus, Keppler, and Galileo are religious lunatics.
The scientist that invents the new theory is treated kindly by history, while the people that represent the one being replaced are evil.
Given what we know of Newton't vanity, it is fortunate for him that his theory was replaced with a more accurate one after his death. I am not sure he would have handled that gracefully.
Newton's theory of gravity and the flat earth theory are still most appealing from a computational point of view.
No. A patent was originally a grant from the king to some particular benefit. (I'm not sure just how widely that was interpreted.) The most commonly encountered fossil from that time is the term "a patent of nobility", but I believe that it was also applied to such things as the official royal jam maker. (I remember my feeling of the bizarre when I first encountered a jar of jam with the label on it "Official Jammaker to the Royal Household".)
It's a good thing that the 'letter patent' and things like that survived to remind us of what the patent really was: just a feudal privilege.
The patent allowed the king to give something valuable, usually a monopoly, away even though his treasury is empty. Most of his subjects don't notice that they are being screwed indirectly anyway.
A more refined use of the patent is as a protectionist instrument: patent the monopoly on producing, selling, or trading some good within your territory to a local to prevent foreigners from cornering the market.
This is the kind of (supposedly 'modern') patent granted by English king Henry VI in 1449 for stained glass making after some English manufacturer succeeded in copying Italian stained glass. By granting the patent a fledgling industry is protected against any foreign competition.
Eventually the patent disappeared with the absolute monarch, except for the purpose of 'promoting science' because this seemed like a harmless thing.
The patent is a protectionist instrument that should have disappeared long ago. In the 17th century, to be exact, when the English stopped using them against each other (in 1623) and switched to the even blunter protectionist instrument of the Navigation Act of 1651 against the Dutch that sparked of the Anglo-Dutch Wars.
'Protecting garage inventors' bullshit is dishonest: that's not what the system was ever intended for, and garage inventors do not have a right to a monopoly on something just because they invented it. 'Garage inventors' cannot afford patents.
Not quite. The only way to permanently stop software patents is to rewrite the directive and make it very clearly, in no uncertain terms, state that software is _not patentable_.
We have won when the "freedom from software patents" is in the European Convention on Human Rights.
Indeed, we're a good example of that. We in the Netherlands have laws against saying "God sucks",
This statement has never been prohibited in the Netherlands, even in the days before the blasphemy articles you are referring to (147-147a, Title 5 WvS) officially fell into desuetude.
and a prohibition on discrimination is actually set down in our constitution!. In fact, it's in Article 1.
Article 1 of the Netherlands constitution states that the governments treats all inhabitants of the kingdom equally. You do not understand what it says. Criminal discrimation provisions are found in Title 5 WvS.
In contrast, the constitution does not grant freedom of speech even in limited terms, contrary to what many people think is in art. 7. That article only states that prior permission is not required to publish something, whoopidoo. But once it's published, you can be persecuted for anything that crosses the law (like the ones against discrimination or blasphemy). It's sad, really.
Article 7 is much clearer about what 'freedom of expression' means than the first amendment in the US Constitution. The US Constitution is so underspecified on many points that it is almost useless as a protective device for citizens against government abuse of power.
Article 7 says that the government can not prevent you from expressing your opinion, and that any litigation must be based directly on formal law. This is a translation for anyone who is interested:
Article 7 [Expression]
(1) No one shall require prior permission to publish thoughts or opinions through the press, without prejudice to the responsibility of every person under the law.
(2) Rules concerning radio and television shall be laid down by Act of Parliament. There shall be no prior supervision of the content of a radio or television broadcast.
(3) No one shall be required to submit thoughts or opinions for prior approval in order to disseminate them by means other than those mentioned in the preceding paragraphs, without prejudice to the responsibility of every person under the law. The holding of performances open to persons younger than sixteen years of age may be regulated by Act of Parliament in order to protect good morals.
(4) The preceding paragraphs do not apply to commercial advertising.
You can (rightly) point out a lot of bad things about the USA, but at least they got the free speech thing right.
Is that why the Netherlands customarily scores very high on press freedom rankings (shared 1st place) and the US scores low (31st place)?
France is in 26th place, by the way.
I am not really impressed by a country that tolerates nazis because of "freedom of expression", but still succeeds in ending up in the 31st place in an international ranking.
So, you think that using multiple iterations of an inherently power-hungry technology will somehow solve the power problem? While, certainly, we could back off clock speeds with multi-processing and reduce heat considerably, but, people always want the cutting edge so the demand to "crank it up" would still be a profitable venture, thus pressuring the price of the lower-end stuff.
I would be perfectly happy with, let's say, ten passively cooled 1Gh pc's, each running one application + a small operating system, provided that I can use one set of peripherals and can cut and paste easily between applications through a global clipboard. The hardware is no problem: we need a new operating system.
Another thing I have been waiting for for years is the integrated home pc/boiler/central heating system, powered by (watercooled) CPU's. I never understood why generating heat is a problem. The real problem is that we are wasting it by trying to force hot air out with fans through the same holes in the box that we use to let cool air in resulting in noise which is useless waste.
Oh, a side note. If I have Windows and I want to use Mozilla, why do I have to use IE first to download mozilla?? I already have IE installed, why do I need to download yet another browser and install it?
Never download Mozilla with IE or any other insecure product! Only download Mozilla with Mozilla!
If you download it with IE you may not be downloading the REAL Mozilla. That's what I tell people who report Mozilla crashing and stuff like that. The real Mozilla is flawless. How do you know you are using the real Mozilla?
Also never let someone else install Mozilla from a storage device. They may have tampered with it.
Remember: It's an open source product, so anyone can recompile it with his own malware embedded!
1. Is there a patch or do I have to download the whole browser and reinstall?
See Tools>Options>Software Updates
The U.S. spends about 5% of GDP on military (including pizza delivery in places like the Indian Ocean), while Canada and Europe spend far less (<2%?).
Old figures, but the general idea is clear:
Russia $79,000,000,000
China $27,400,000,000
N. Korea $5,300,000,000
Iraq $2,600,000,000
Iran $2,300,000,000
Libya $2,300,000,000
Syria $2,200,000,000
Cuba $270,000,000
Total Potential Enemies $121
Total US + NATO $523
If GDP is what is important, then Europe still has nothing to fear from the rest of the world. So the US can stop defending us. Thank you.
You don't have to look back to the eighties to find cluelessness.
Last year a Dutch prosecutor involved in some high profile organized crime cases threw out his home computer with the garbage because it was "broken".
A taxi driver took it, reinstalled windows, and decided to bring it to a journalist. The computer still contained a number of memo's from current cases and the user name and password for his email account.
The prosecutor was not fired, but reassigned to another job where he could do less harm.
They don't have to pay for air, light (not sunlight at least), or gravity...
They don't own it. It is immaterial whether the patron paid for something, inherited it, made it, or received it as a gift. The patron pays for artificial light, but he doesn't own it.
and theft of electricity -- a criminal offence -- from the instant they flicked the switch
A taking of some good is only theft if it is clearly contrary to custom or law. That is why many businesses have 'private' signs on doors. I think in this case you would have to tell customers first it is not allowed, or add a 'private' sign to the outlets.
No different really than a door that's not for public use, with nothing behind it -- not even a floor.
This kind of arrangement is also prohibited in a workplace. There is wellknown international case law about it (about an engine room in a ship with steel ladders etc. but no nearby floor).
{BTW, I'd charge my customers for using the extinguisher, too, if it ever came down to that. They don't recharge themselves after every use, you know.}
Since you don't care for my equipment, I don't care for your restaurant. I would not feel a need to extinguish the fire, I think. You started it, after all.
Just make sure they give you the change from 1 cent!
Here most businesses do not accept eurocents and round amounts up or down because it is too much trouble giving small change. It saves on labour time, weight, and space in the tills.
If an employee walks over to tell you that you can't use the power outlet, they just spent more money on labour costs than you can steal from them by charging your equipment.
So, would you have us locked into an energy-inefficient system permanently when better options exist simply due to this? This is a "one time cost" of energy that saves energy in the future; it's an energy "investment".
It is an unrealistic goal, and elevated rails spoil the landscape. It is not going to happen. It's simply too expensive, and I don't support policies based on the idea of spending your way out of a problem that is not about traffic, but about the use of space.
If you want to decrease energy consumption, people have to live close to eachother and to their workplace in small houses (which consume less energy) within walking distance of public transport. Coercive spatial policy, like the unpopular Ministry for Spatial Planning does here in the Netherlands, is free and it works.
I own a car, but I use it just once or twice a week. Parking is 3 to 4 euros an hour and I can get to my workplace, and most other places I have to go, faster by public transport. The public transport system works because it is cheaper and faster in my case. It is actually slow and expensive, but better than driving. If people live too far apart, public transport is never going to cost-effective no matter what technology you use.
Lets follow this line of reasoning. Should we keep building new roads, for which the materials don't take as much refining as steel for tracks but have much higher transportation energy consumption due to their higher mass? It would seem reasonable that we should stop building new roads, and just build personal rail. But then there's the problem of backwards compatability.
Rails are generally not cheaper than road. If a rail is damaged, traffic is jammed until the damage is repaired. Roads rarely become completely unusable. Only the speed limit is lowered. In Amsterdam we have a great rail transport system that will get you almost anywhere, and much faster than the car on average, but it is (even) more sensitive to traffic jams than the roads.
In addition, the construction of a personal rail system would be a disaster for car traffic, and the economy, for at least a decade. The supports of the elevated rail have to carry all weight, and you will need more than steel to construct them. I am thinking of large reinforced concrete slabs and concrete injection or a sand layer below that where it is needed.
If you want a high speed elevated rail, entering and leaving the rail with your personal vehicle is going to be a space consuming problem.
There is also still a parking problem, unless you want empty vehicles to keep consuming energy outside rush hours. Also if you want to move cargo by personal rail, you are going to need parking spaces at any place where cargo might be delivered, to avoid holding up traffic. A vehicle on a rail will use more space for parallel parking than a car with a competent driver.
In addition elevated rail spoil the landscape, and noone will tolerate one of them going over their house or near the windows of their house.
I do support the idea of public transport by elevated rail in those cases where it is the only viable solution, but I do not think a "personal" system is going to solve anything.
Humans are overrated as user interfaces. Try putting a random human between you and your computer. You talk to the human, and the human tries to do what you instruct it to do. It doesn't work.
The communication protocols for interacting with humans are seriously underspecified, and they are all different.
Humans are also incredibly irritating as opponents in multiplayer computer games. Their behavior is not at all realistic.
I have done the math, and it would take more land to grow soy than U.S. ownes to provide enough biodiesel for the current yearly consumption.
A few remarks:
1) In the short term mixing locally produced biodiesel with diesel and gas for existing cars is already a good thing for the environment and the economy.
2) Why do you expect that a solution to existing energy problems makes the US independent of foreign imports? The US imports most of the natural resources it consumes, because it can afford to. If it doesn't want to be dependent on imports, it should consume less.
3) Vegetable oil can be produced on most types of soil by any farmer. Vegetable oil will make us less dependent on specific regimes and the vegetable oil economy is inherently more democratic because there will be more producers.
The "shit-based economy" is even more democratic, if it means you can sell your shit in the future.
Of course, there's the one really big hitch: staggering capital costs. Still, the GDP boost alone should pay for it.
I can think of another one: staggering energy costs and emissions required for the construction of this revolutionary system.
One of the reasons nobody considers taking old inefficient and polluting cars off the road is that the energy costs of replacing them outweigh the costs of keeping them on the road until they fall apart.
We can use admixtures of vegetable oil to existing fuels today in our car, without modifications.