Parital list of most basic and nessessary institutions:
Division of Labor
Stable Money
Price System
Lex, Rex ~ "rule of (uniform, abstract) law"
Natural Rights legal philosophy
nulla crimen, nulla poena sine lege ~ "no penalty without law"
basic principles of the Common Law:
stare decisis
right of property
right of contract
responsibility for tortious action
transferance of power by democratic process
limited government:
use of coercive power of government solely to prevent coercive acts by others
actions bound by the law
These are the traditional British/American institutions on which all of modern western civilization is based. Starting in Prussia in about 1850 a reaction against these institutions developed. Since then they have been attacked and seriously undermined by adherents to those reactionary views. Unfortunately, those views seem to dominate the public perception and are simultaniously presented as "traditional" and as "progressive".
It may be instructive to consider some of the relevent literature. Good starting points would be Mises's Socialism and Hayek's Constitution of Liberty. Mises's latter book Human Action and Hayek's follow up to Constitution, Law, Legislation, and Liberty are also relevent, but between Socialism and Constitution, the vast majority of the relevent works will have been cited.
In my experience, conservatives tend to under-estimate the robustness of society. As a result they fear any change because they worry it may destabilize everything.
Progressives, on the other hand, tend to over-estimate the robustness of society. They believe that things will keep working reguarless of how much the institutions of civilization change.
Both views are forms of extreem naivete. Society can handle all forms of change provided that the core institutions that form the foundation of civilization and allow the proper adjustments to take place remain healthy, but it does not follow that any random set of institutions will allow society and civilization to continue.
What worries me is not that society can't handle a few bumps but that the vast majority of people can't even list the core institutions critical to the function of western civilization, let alone explain why they are needed. The rampant ignorance reguarding the underpinnings of civilization presents a disturbing problem. Absent a drastic change in public demeanor, it seems we are likely to vote ourselves gradually into barbarity.
You can buy sensors that get down to millimeter. I have difficulty believing that more precision would be nessessary. As for testing, you are entirely right. Making the device easy to calibrate, getting the sensitivity just right, and getting the correct filter on the sensor signal are all very challenging parts of development. I in no way meant to imply that this was trivial, just that it could be done without running afoul of a patent.
Those particular gyros are patented. Gryo's and 3D motion sensors in general are readily available. One could build a functionally identical device without the patented part.
I was refering to the events that are generally reguarded to have caused the colapse of civilization. For example:
A Prolonged period of continuous inflation
Steadily increasing economic regulations
Growing government, with increasingly arbitrary powers
Decline of the rule of law
A rapid prolonged rate of increase in the standard of living followed by a decreasing rate of increase
A rapid and prolonged increase in the division of labor followed by a decrease and then a halt in it's progression
Political pull replacing business acumen as the key to success
Wide spread demands for what we would call social justice and wellfare today
Popularity of ideologies basically indistinguishable from collectivism and socialism
Increasing favor toward the ideas of absolute government that we call positivism today
General abandonment of the ideals on which the civilization is based
This list could go on. If it were really thorough you could show that most of the popular political views on both sides of the isle are either really old reactionary stances that were prevelent in Rome, or modernized reactionary stances developed in Bismark's Germany.
The whole irony of the division of labor is that it leads to myopic people who lack a broad base of knowledge. They tend to think that whatever they do is the most important and don't understand how all of society is connected. That is to say that it seems that as the division of labor becomes more intense, the number of people who have a sufficiently broad understanding to keep society going tends to decrease. This could be a problem....
At some point Rome did start declining. Any serious student of history is more than casually concerned that many of the same trends that occured as Rome reached it's zenith are occuring now throughout most of western civilization.
Despite what you say, there is no "historic law" that commands that things always get better any more then there is a historic law that will make the proletariat overthrow the bourgeoisie. Left alone, things are just as likely to get worse as they are to get better. Durring the dark ages the standard of living and the life expectancy of the typical person was substantially lower than durring the high point of classical civilization --- things got measurably worse. Things tend to get better only because most people hold values that cause them to take actions that actually do make things better.
Unfortunately the vast majority of people hold views that can be demonstrated directly counter to the continuance of western civilization, a truth the original proponents of those views would not deny. We can reasonably expect things to start getting worse within our life time, unless the masses come to their senses.
Most of the stuff in the controller is off the shelf parts and there's plenty of prior art. It'd be really hard to have a general patent that would prevent MS and Sony from using a similar idea.
High standards of living do not have intrinsic justification.
Directly, no. Indirectly yes. In order to attain the wealth needed to support a high standard of living you have to provide a product to the consumers that improves their lives in their own estimation by more than the other alternatives. That is to say, when someone becomes wealthy in a competative market (as opposed to a back room government deal) it is because they earned it and deserved it in the minds of the consumers who purchased from them. So it could be said that a high standard of living is an intrinsic justification so long as it is maintained competatively.
If you plan on retireing at 65 and living to be 75 most financial consultants recommend planning on having $3-5 million saved up for the AVERAGE american family. I'd love to see how you can streach 10 years worth of savings at a typical standard of living into a life time...
You see the same thing all the time with lottery winners - they win multi-tens-of-millions but are bankrupt and often homeless only a few years later. The mind boggles at the kind of bahaviour that can produce this result.
It's not really that surprising. People who don't know how to manage money have to trust someone to do it for them. It's kinda hard to find someone you can trust if you don't even know what they are supposed to do. This is probably why MOST investment funds and professional managers underperform.
The other problem is that as the amount of money you have goes up so do your basic living expenses. Combine that with the government punishing people when they save and rewarding them when they consume and you get a very predictable result.
I'd like to point out that if he's been getting 3.5 million a year he probably has a high cost of living. As a result the bills he needs to pay are higher, as would be the amount he needs to save for retirement, than for someone making $50-60 thousand a year. Forcing him to sell his assets at a loss could bankrupt him or at least severely reduce his standard of living. You probably wouldn't want to end up in a situation where you had to sell off most of the stuff you own because you got backstabbed.
The real question is whether the contract in question is valid or not, and if it is, is it applicable to this particular series of events. It's likely that AC will contend that he was fired without cause and that the contract was only meant to require him to sell if he did not perform. Id will probably counter by trying to show that he did not perform his job acceptably.
Right now there is no way to tell who is right. The guy could be compleately incompetent. He could have been fired for abusing employees. He could have been fired because he back-stabbed the other owners durring negotiations. It could be that the other owners are greedy bastards. There are plenty of reasonable explainations for both sides. That's why a court is going to have to work it out. If it was clear-cut, it would be settled out of court.
Good point. Esp. since they are having another company do that art and game design for Quake4. It may be that they decided to take Gabe's advice and just focus on engine design....
He's under contract to sell back his shares if he is ever fired. He claims the other owners refused the offer so that they would have time to fire him, forcing him to sell his shares at a lower price to them and netting the remaining owners more money when they sell.
It's equally possible that this is a fued over whether they should sell. After all, activision did low-ball the buy out price of the company. AC may have upset the other owners by being eager to accept the activision offer.
back in the day many companies used roff or TeX with custom format macros so that all of the official documents would keep to the company format exactly. It should be relatively trivial to expand that idea into LyX or pure LaTeX.
Havn't every read the congressional records have you?
95% of what congress spends time doing is passing "public law". That is giving directions and setting policies for the government and it's programs.
Very little of what Congress does involves improving the private and crimial law dealt with by lawyers. There are several reasons for this:
America is a common law contry, so most of the things congress would need to do are already done
The rules for what counts as valid private or criminal law are a lot stricter and can't be used to pay off the special interest groups that got you elected
Most congressman don't have a clue about the day to day workings of the legal system so they can't possibly have a clue about how to improve it.
Public law is all the american public talks about durring an election, so you can't run on a solid record of improving the legal system
Most of the law development that is important gets done by states anyway. Congress ignoring it doesn't have that big of a negative impact. Whereas if they do change something it might upset someone.
My advice: only vote for someone with non-political experience of some kind. If they have a law background, they need to have worked as an attorney for several years. "Don't elect carreer politicians" would be a much better rule.
First what I said above is true, at the time Ulrich said specifically that strlcat and strlcpy wern't nessessary because programers could just check their code for the common mistakes the strl* functions are intended to solve.
1) It is true that they are not in the POSIX, ANSI, ISO, or Single UNIX standards, but neither is a ton of the other stuff in glibc. However, they are supported on almost every non-GNU libc -- making it a defacto standard. Many open source apps use them and there is a BSD-licensed reference implementation.
Not implementing something because sun can't copy and paste correctly on the first try is about as silly as arguements come. If anything the arguement that roll-your-own tends to get messed up is an arguement FOR inclusion not against.
2) asprintf, a gnuism which is also non-standard and less widely implemented, is less used then the strl* functions in actual code. The strl* functions are admittedly not as general as a fixed printf but they are much faster and are near drop in replacements for old code. asprintf is simply not a workable replacement for strlcpy or strlcat. Why should you do a full printf just to cpy or cat a string? Truncation is not the problem you've made it out to be. The strl* API will tell you when it has occured allowing you to make whatever adjustments you need to make. Expanding the heap space to suck up whatever gets thrown at a program is just asking for DoS in many cases. Furthermore truncation is not something strl* was designed to fix. These are drop in replacements for the broken, slow strn* functions. They couldn't fix truncation in the way you and Ulrich want and be compleate replacements.
3) You already said above that roll-your-own was likely to get messed up. It's also stupid to have a few dozen open source apps carting around the code instead of putting it in a library. The GNU C library is one of the only C libraries without this functionality, because of that many programers continue to make the same mistakes that the strl* functions were intended to fix. Not including good, frequently used, defacto standardized code is a really dumb idea, especially when the excuse is that people didn't use the overkill GNU solution.
These functions demonstrably prevent common coding mistakes, prevent buffer overflow attacks, and improve code security. There is every reason to include them in glibc. Not including them was pure ego and NIH syndrome.
These areguements are all repetition of the same bs that came up when strlcpy and strlcat patches were submitted.
1) It is true that they are not in the POSIX, ANSI, ISO, or Single UNIX standards, but neither is a ton of the other stuff in glibc. They are a defacto standard however. Many OS apps use them and there is a BSD-license reference implementation. Not implementing something because sun can't copy and paste correctly is about as silly as arguements come. If anything the arguement that roll-your-own tends to get messed up is an arguement FOR inclusion not against.
2) asprintf is (a gnuism which is also non-standard) less used then the strl* functions. The strl* functions are admittedly not as general as a *printf but they are much faster and are near drop in replacements for old code. asprintf is simply not a workable replacement for strlcpy or strlcat. Why should you do a full printf just to cpy or cat a string?
3) You already said above that roll-your-own was likely to get messed up. It's also stupid to have a few dozen open source apps carting around the code instead of putting it in a library. The GNU C library is one of the only C libraries without this functionality and programers continue to make the same mistakes that the strl* functions were intended to fix. Not include good, frequently used, defacto standardized code is a really dumb idea. Complaining that people could use an inferior GNU fix doesn't change the fact that the industry is standardizing de facto on strl*.
autoconf? Hell no! That stuff is some of the most bloated stuff the FSF makes. If you really want to fix the code look at how SSH handles portability. That's a much better way to do it.
And while he happens to be right in this case, I don't think very highly of him. He's clearly very bright, but the poster above who said that Ulrich had a bigger ego than Theo was spot on. Too often, he lets his ego and NIH syndrome get in the way.
For example glibc is the only major C library that doesn't support the new buffer proctected string functions originally written by OpenBSD (at least last time I checked). These fuctions are faster, safer, and easier to use then the POSIX ones and are supported not just on BSDs but almost every commercial UNIX. Source compatability alone would dictate including them.
Drepper however has repeatedly refused to include them because they work and they make it too easy to not code buffer overflows (no this is not a joke). According to Drepper programmers should be good/smart enough not to mess up something so simple as a string buffer so including a defacto standard that makes it easy to get it right is inappropriate. WTF?
You'd be surprised how much of a boost in city gas milage you can get just by shutting the engine off and making it easy to crank. That feature ALONE makes up about 60% of the increased fuel efficiency of the hybrid.
Ofcourse there is nothing that prevents these technologies from working together...
All entirely true but you and the post you reply to miss the point.
It costs energy to break up the H2O into Hydrogen and Oxygen. This comes from burning fuel, BUT the hydrogen and Oxygen you produce increase the efficiency of the combustion process. If extra efficiency is enough to offset the energy costs to get it, you get system that is overall more efficient.
At least in theory this device can work. In practice I'm not so sure that the reliability of the engine won't be negatively impacted. The negative impact might be fixable with appropriate retuning however.
Slashdot Mirror
These are the traditional British/American institutions on which all of modern western civilization is based. Starting in Prussia in about 1850 a reaction against these institutions developed. Since then they have been attacked and seriously undermined by adherents to those reactionary views. Unfortunately, those views seem to dominate the public perception and are simultaniously presented as "traditional" and as "progressive".
It may be instructive to consider some of the relevent literature. Good starting points would be Mises's Socialism and Hayek's Constitution of Liberty. Mises's latter book Human Action and Hayek's follow up to Constitution, Law, Legislation, and Liberty are also relevent, but between Socialism and Constitution, the vast majority of the relevent works will have been cited.
Refering to Leonard E. Read's I, Pencil?
Progressives, on the other hand, tend to over-estimate the robustness of society. They believe that things will keep working reguarless of how much the institutions of civilization change.
Both views are forms of extreem naivete. Society can handle all forms of change provided that the core institutions that form the foundation of civilization and allow the proper adjustments to take place remain healthy, but it does not follow that any random set of institutions will allow society and civilization to continue.
What worries me is not that society can't handle a few bumps but that the vast majority of people can't even list the core institutions critical to the function of western civilization, let alone explain why they are needed. The rampant ignorance reguarding the underpinnings of civilization presents a disturbing problem. Absent a drastic change in public demeanor, it seems we are likely to vote ourselves gradually into barbarity.
You can buy sensors that get down to millimeter. I have difficulty believing that more precision would be nessessary. As for testing, you are entirely right. Making the device easy to calibrate, getting the sensitivity just right, and getting the correct filter on the sensor signal are all very challenging parts of development. I in no way meant to imply that this was trivial, just that it could be done without running afoul of a patent.
Those particular gyros are patented. Gryo's and 3D motion sensors in general are readily available. One could build a functionally identical device without the patented part.
This list could go on. If it were really thorough you could show that most of the popular political views on both sides of the isle are either really old reactionary stances that were prevelent in Rome, or modernized reactionary stances developed in Bismark's Germany.
The whole irony of the division of labor is that it leads to myopic people who lack a broad base of knowledge. They tend to think that whatever they do is the most important and don't understand how all of society is connected. That is to say that it seems that as the division of labor becomes more intense, the number of people who have a sufficiently broad understanding to keep society going tends to decrease. This could be a problem....
I'd really like to see how you derive models for transisters without using quantum theory.
Despite what you say, there is no "historic law" that commands that things always get better any more then there is a historic law that will make the proletariat overthrow the bourgeoisie. Left alone, things are just as likely to get worse as they are to get better. Durring the dark ages the standard of living and the life expectancy of the typical person was substantially lower than durring the high point of classical civilization --- things got measurably worse. Things tend to get better only because most people hold values that cause them to take actions that actually do make things better.
Unfortunately the vast majority of people hold views that can be demonstrated directly counter to the continuance of western civilization, a truth the original proponents of those views would not deny. We can reasonably expect things to start getting worse within our life time, unless the masses come to their senses.
Most of the stuff in the controller is off the shelf parts and there's plenty of prior art. It'd be really hard to have a general patent that would prevent MS and Sony from using a similar idea.
Directly, no. Indirectly yes. In order to attain the wealth needed to support a high standard of living you have to provide a product to the consumers that improves their lives in their own estimation by more than the other alternatives. That is to say, when someone becomes wealthy in a competative market (as opposed to a back room government deal) it is because they earned it and deserved it in the minds of the consumers who purchased from them. So it could be said that a high standard of living is an intrinsic justification so long as it is maintained competatively.
You see the same thing all the time with lottery winners - they win multi-tens-of-millions but are bankrupt and often homeless only a few years later. The mind boggles at the kind of bahaviour that can produce this result.
It's not really that surprising. People who don't know how to manage money have to trust someone to do it for them. It's kinda hard to find someone you can trust if you don't even know what they are supposed to do. This is probably why MOST investment funds and professional managers underperform.
The other problem is that as the amount of money you have goes up so do your basic living expenses. Combine that with the government punishing people when they save and rewarding them when they consume and you get a very predictable result.
The real question is whether the contract in question is valid or not, and if it is, is it applicable to this particular series of events. It's likely that AC will contend that he was fired without cause and that the contract was only meant to require him to sell if he did not perform. Id will probably counter by trying to show that he did not perform his job acceptably.
Right now there is no way to tell who is right. The guy could be compleately incompetent. He could have been fired for abusing employees. He could have been fired because he back-stabbed the other owners durring negotiations. It could be that the other owners are greedy bastards. There are plenty of reasonable explainations for both sides. That's why a court is going to have to work it out. If it was clear-cut, it would be settled out of court.
Good point. Esp. since they are having another company do that art and game design for Quake4. It may be that they decided to take Gabe's advice and just focus on engine design....
It's equally possible that this is a fued over whether they should sell. After all, activision did low-ball the buy out price of the company. AC may have upset the other owners by being eager to accept the activision offer.
back in the day many companies used roff or TeX with custom format macros so that all of the official documents would keep to the company format exactly. It should be relatively trivial to expand that idea into LyX or pure LaTeX.
Lets see how long that sticks once there are people there defending the territory with weapons.
95% of what congress spends time doing is passing "public law". That is giving directions and setting policies for the government and it's programs.
Very little of what Congress does involves improving the private and crimial law dealt with by lawyers. There are several reasons for this:
My advice: only vote for someone with non-political experience of some kind. If they have a law background, they need to have worked as an attorney for several years. "Don't elect carreer politicians" would be a much better rule.
First what I said above is true, at the time Ulrich said specifically that strlcat and strlcpy wern't nessessary because programers could just check their code for the common mistakes the strl* functions are intended to solve.
1) It is true that they are not in the POSIX, ANSI, ISO, or Single UNIX standards, but neither is a ton of the other stuff in glibc. However, they are supported on almost every non-GNU libc -- making it a defacto standard. Many open source apps use them and there is a BSD-licensed reference implementation.
Not implementing something because sun can't copy and paste correctly on the first try is about as silly as arguements come. If anything the arguement that roll-your-own tends to get messed up is an arguement FOR inclusion not against.
2) asprintf, a gnuism which is also non-standard and less widely implemented, is less used then the strl* functions in actual code. The strl* functions are admittedly not as general as a fixed printf but they are much faster and are near drop in replacements for old code. asprintf is simply not a workable replacement for strlcpy or strlcat. Why should you do a full printf just to cpy or cat a string? Truncation is not the problem you've made it out to be. The strl* API will tell you when it has occured allowing you to make whatever adjustments you need to make. Expanding the heap space to suck up whatever gets thrown at a program is just asking for DoS in many cases. Furthermore truncation is not something strl* was designed to fix. These are drop in replacements for the broken, slow strn* functions. They couldn't fix truncation in the way you and Ulrich want and be compleate replacements.
3) You already said above that roll-your-own was likely to get messed up. It's also stupid to have a few dozen open source apps carting around the code instead of putting it in a library. The GNU C library is one of the only C libraries without this functionality, because of that many programers continue to make the same mistakes that the strl* functions were intended to fix. Not including good, frequently used, defacto standardized code is a really dumb idea, especially when the excuse is that people didn't use the overkill GNU solution.
These functions demonstrably prevent common coding mistakes, prevent buffer overflow attacks, and improve code security. There is every reason to include them in glibc. Not including them was pure ego and NIH syndrome.
These areguements are all repetition of the same bs that came up when strlcpy and strlcat patches were submitted. 1) It is true that they are not in the POSIX, ANSI, ISO, or Single UNIX standards, but neither is a ton of the other stuff in glibc. They are a defacto standard however. Many OS apps use them and there is a BSD-license reference implementation. Not implementing something because sun can't copy and paste correctly is about as silly as arguements come. If anything the arguement that roll-your-own tends to get messed up is an arguement FOR inclusion not against. 2) asprintf is (a gnuism which is also non-standard) less used then the strl* functions. The strl* functions are admittedly not as general as a *printf but they are much faster and are near drop in replacements for old code. asprintf is simply not a workable replacement for strlcpy or strlcat. Why should you do a full printf just to cpy or cat a string? 3) You already said above that roll-your-own was likely to get messed up. It's also stupid to have a few dozen open source apps carting around the code instead of putting it in a library. The GNU C library is one of the only C libraries without this functionality and programers continue to make the same mistakes that the strl* functions were intended to fix. Not include good, frequently used, defacto standardized code is a really dumb idea. Complaining that people could use an inferior GNU fix doesn't change the fact that the industry is standardizing de facto on strl*.
autoconf? Hell no! That stuff is some of the most bloated stuff the FSF makes. If you really want to fix the code look at how SSH handles portability. That's a much better way to do it.
And while he happens to be right in this case, I don't think very highly of him. He's clearly very bright, but the poster above who said that Ulrich had a bigger ego than Theo was spot on. Too often, he lets his ego and NIH syndrome get in the way.
For example glibc is the only major C library that doesn't support the new buffer proctected string functions originally written by OpenBSD (at least last time I checked). These fuctions are faster, safer, and easier to use then the POSIX ones and are supported not just on BSDs but almost every commercial UNIX. Source compatability alone would dictate including them.
Drepper however has repeatedly refused to include them because they work and they make it too easy to not code buffer overflows (no this is not a joke). According to Drepper programmers should be good/smart enough not to mess up something so simple as a string buffer so including a defacto standard that makes it easy to get it right is inappropriate. WTF?
At least in theory the extra omph from the hydrogen could offset the costs, slightly raising total system efficiency, but obviously not by that much.
Ofcourse there is nothing that prevents these technologies from working together...
It costs energy to break up the H2O into Hydrogen and Oxygen. This comes from burning fuel, BUT the hydrogen and Oxygen you produce increase the efficiency of the combustion process. If extra efficiency is enough to offset the energy costs to get it, you get system that is overall more efficient.
At least in theory this device can work. In practice I'm not so sure that the reliability of the engine won't be negatively impacted. The negative impact might be fixable with appropriate retuning however.