Among the most puzzling mysteries: Mathematicians are pretty sure, but still cannot prove conclusively, that the numbers following 3.141592 occur randomly.
The word random has a very specific mathematical and information-theoretical meaning. In brief: a number, as represented by a sequence of symbols (digits), is random if it is incompressible; that is, if there is no algorithm, expressed using symbols which define a Turing-complete language, which can generate said number using fewer symbols than the number they generate. In other words, it takes fewer characters to write down the number itself than it does to "generate" the number using an algorithm. This is most certainly not the case with pi, as there are many finitely-expressible algorithms out there which generate it.
This project will fail. If he ever gets close to launching commercial payloads, Bush and his gub'ment cowboys will shut them down because "missiles can carry nukes", and "war on terror", and "think of the children", some dumb shit like that. Count on it. And going to a foreign country doesn't work either, space doesn't respect borders. You can't just launch a missile into orbit that only stays over Farawayland. It's gonna pass over someone our gov't cares about, and the Defense Dept will get their panties in a knot.
It seems to me that what Elcomsoft + Sklyarov did is clearly against DMCA.
The software itself isn't the issue, because of the following (repeat after me):
US domestic laws do not apply to people while they are in other countries.
Wanna smoke pot in Amsterdam? Go right ahead. Wanna smoke pot in Washington, DC? Be prepared for jail.
The issue is one of trafficking the software across state lines for the purposes of sale. That's what makes it a federal case. They imported the software and set up a website to sell it, said website being based in the US. That's a no-no. The DMCA is a red herring.
You're missing the point. Passport was designed as single-signon from anywhere in the world. The first consequence of this is that you can't do anything client-side. Doesn't matter if it's OSS or not, it's basic network software design.
The FA goes to great lengths to explain Mac users away as a cult, but I have an alternate explanation. Could it be that Apple offers quality products and services? Microsoft products are awful, and Linux services are awful. Try getting either support group to add a patch for your favorite feature. With MS, you're too small, and their SW is bloated anyway. With Linux, you're too stupid (or you'd just "code it yourself"). As long as the Mac community see the.mac subscription and OS X upgrade charges as "reasonable" rather than "Apple is out to shaft us", look for Mac users to stay with Apple in droves.
Disclaimer: I used to be a Macaddict, but I switched to Linux in college "because I can code", and I never went back.
There is no violation of causality. No information propagates faster than the speed of light.
See this treatment of Bell's Theorem for a well-written counter-argument. Note that the EPR paradox attempted to prove locality by invoking causality (no "spooky action-at-a-distance", according to Einstein), but ended up leading to Bell's work.
DVD CCA (Delaware corp w/HQ in CA) sues Matthew Pavlovich (individual in Iowa) for "misappropriating trade secrets" (DeCSS), and posting them on the LiVid website, seeking an injunction.
MP files a motion contending CA has no jurisdiction.
Appeals court overturns, and eventually gives a statement why the trial court should have jurisdiction.
(This decision) CA Supreme Court decides the trial court doesn't have jurisdiction after all.
Summary of decision:
CA may exercise personal jurisdiction "if the defendant has such minimum contacts with the state that the assertion of jurisdiction does not violate ' "traditional notions of fair play and substantial justice" ' ".
The "minimum contacts" test must be administered on a case-by-case basis -- it's not mechanical.
There are three tests by which a court may exercise specific jurisdiction over a nonresident:
the defendant purposefully availed of forum (CA) benefits;
the controversy is related to the defendant's contacts with the forum;
the assertion of jurisdiction comports with "fair play and substantial justice"
It's not enough to show defendant knew his actions would cause harm in CA. Plaintiff has to establish that CA bears the brunt of the harm. There are several pages showing they don't.
Pavlovich posted on a "Web site accessable to any person with Internet access. Pavlovich never worked in CA. He owned no property in CA, maintained no bank accounts in CA, and had no telephone listings in CA. Neither MP nor his company solicited or transacted any business in CA. The record also contains no evidence of any LiVid contacts with CA." The site was links only, no interactive features. There's no evidence that anyone in CA even visited. One interesting argument: he couldn't have known he'd be harming plaintiffs in CA since the DVD CCA were formed two months after the links went up.
DVD CCA claims CA has jurisdiction because "he should have known that third parties may use the misappropriated code to illegally copy movies on DVDs and that licensees of the misappropriated technology resided in CA". [emphasis orig] Accepting this argument would lead to a ruling "in contravention of controlling US Supreme Court precedent". It would give CA jurisdiction over far too many tort cases.
Nevertheless, "DVD CCA has the ability and resources to pursue Pavlovich in another forum such as Indiana or Texas. Our decision today does not foreclose it from doing so. Pavlovich may still face the music -- just not in CA."
Justices Brown, Kennard, Werdegar, and Moreno voted to overturn, Justices Baxter, George, and Chin dissented.
3) If I didn't buy CDs, the artists would stop making music.
Even if I'm talking about purchasing demos straight from the bands themselves. Giving the band my money, no matter how indirectly, helps ensure that they will continue to make music in the future.
One small issue: Your argument that artists wouldn't make music if they weren't paid is utterly false. How many bands do you think make their music without any real hope of making it? Maybe every single garage band?
I hate to be a broken record, but once again, repeat after me:
You can't solve social problems with technology.
DRM is already doomed to failure as an idea, because it's technology that attempts to solve a social problem. Security and encryption will be around for a lot longer, because they don't shaft well-meaning people, but rather target only intruders and thieves.
The idea that copyrights should be non-transferrable. To justify this approach, let's play a logic game. #1: copyright is supposed to encourage innovation. #2: innovation is not done by corporations, but by individuals. Therefore, #3: copyright should be tied directly to innovating individuals. In particular under no circumstances should it be transferrable to any other individual or corporation. Why the hell should some random chick/dude that the author met and married get a damn thing? It's not like they did anything to earn it. Or worse, what rights have some publisher living in a different state whom the author probably only ever met in person once or twice?
The idea the corporations shouldn't be considered "citizens" capable of property rights. This point has been covered already by another poster. Personally, I think this is a flawed position, but I won't debate it further.
The idea that copyright as incentive is flawed. Consider a system in which there were no state-sponsored monopoly for creative works. The only incentive now is to get off your ass and create new stuff, not resting on your laurels. I think this is a very powerful incentive. The consumers of art and literature will know who the real winners are, so you don't have to worry too much about fakes copying your stuff. People will still figure out where to go to get quality, original work. We're kinda picky that way.
The idea the intellectual 'property' is a backwards idea all together. Some of the founding fathers, led by Jefferson, took this approach. His typical example was the idea / flame analogy. An idea is like a flame: if I have one, and I give it to you, you now have light/knowledge, but I have lost nothing, so I have no right to ask for it back.
Copy rights were created in an era in which copying was hard. Copying, via the Internet, is now trivial. It's time for a hard re-examination of these long-held rights. Unfortunately, it will take a Supreme Court challenge to overturn copyright law, since it's granted by the Constitution. I hope and pray that Eldred will win.
I am developing a DRM solution for a major record label. I am a loving slashdot poster and feel the same as all of you. But the client wanted it and I had to oblige or not get the contract.
I hate to break you the bad news, because I like loving slashdotters, but you're part of the problem. I don't blame you, because the job market sucks right now, but nevertheless there we are. You see, ??AA only succeed because they can hire bright guys to code them stuff. The best way to kill them is to go after their braintrust. If this means refusing a job on moral grounds, so be it. Easy to say, hard to do, especially in this environment, but I personally have done it, and I'm not exactly swimming in cash. I have a mortgage payment due the first of every month, and I may have to sell my house soon to cover expenses. But I won't work for the MPAA or RIAA. I'd sooner put my college degree to good use flinging burgers at a local grease joint.
the REAL reason why DRM will fail has nothing to do with the machinery, technologies, protocols, etc. It has everything to do with people. Even if the DRM technologies were perfected right now, people would still find a way around it. Why? Because they want to.
Well said! Everyone, repeat after me:
You cannot solve technological problems through social means.
Conversely, you cannot solve social problems through technological means.
DRM per se is fine. It's a technology, neither good nor evil. (In an ideal world, of course, it wouldn't be a necessary technology, but that's an argument for another day.) Its de facto application, however, is to attempt to solve a social problem, copyright infringement, hence it is doomed to fail.
It requires the intervention of a large, government-sponsored, Big Brother company (or the government itself) to enforce.
It erodes civil liberties and privacy.
It purports to charge for something which has previously been obtained freely, and still can be with zero effort.
It won't stop spam, because spammers will pass the cost of sending email along to their sponsors, whose marketing departments will gladly pay it as a cost of doing business (it's even tax deductible).
Support Internet Mail 2000 instead. It's a totally optional MTA system which would make spam truly expensive to send.
What about soda fountains at McDonalds (or wherever you buy your greasy fat)? They charge you $1.25 for seventeen cents of syrup and some essentially free carbonated water. It's the highest profit margin in the food industry, but it's merely a simultaneous choice by EVERY restaurant to do it.
The extra charge is for convenience. If everyone that went to McDonalds bought a soda at the gas station down the street first, McD would go out of business. People are willing to pay the extra dollar for the convenience of one-stop shopping.
And now, you're not really buying a single product, you're buying a "meal". In the long run, the profit on the meal will approach zero due to market price setting (assuming enough restaurants enter the market and offer the same selection). If McD is making a long-term profit on their meals, then they're not playing in an open market.
Artificial "Intelligence"
on
ALICE vs. ALICE
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Wisdom is using experience to provide you with many choices. Intelligence is being able to pick the most appropriate choice.
You can have Artificial Wisdom, that's easy. Just give ALICE (or whomever) a large enough data set. But Artificial Intelligence requires context (state), fluidity, adaptability, and insight. AIML processors are certainly not intelligent; in fact, the search-and-replace methodology employed is rather overtly non-intelligent. An Excel spreadsheet could do the same thing.
Fewer Employees + Same Work + Greater Threat of Layoff + Dearth of Other Jobs = Higher Productivity
Attitudes like this (by management) are why line workers hate their managers. You don't get higher productivity, you get lower morale. If people are able to produce more after a round of layoffs, it means they weren't working 100% before, which is management's fault (for any of a number of reasons). Ponder this until you become enlightened.
You see, there are additional contributing factors to the equation that offer significant motivation to the Fewer Remaining Employees.
You're right there, motivation to send out resumes, go back to school, get a cert in some unrelated field. Think rats and a sinking ship. If people are working at 100% capacity and the company is laying off... you figure it out.
If you aren't more productive, there are numerous others that are presently unemployed who will happily be more productive.
No, there are many others out there who will fill your job and have the same morale problems within a few weeks. I hope you aren't working as a manager anywhere. I can't imagine you are, or you'd know this. You're basically giving companies an excuse to use coersion and force as a management tool. If you advocate a Ben-Hur style "whip them until they row" management philosophy, then you're right on the money. Just please tell potential hires about it first, OK? You'll save yourself boatloads in turnover training costs.
How long do we have to wait until NASA becomes as ingenious as they were in the sixties?
Three years. Here's the timetable:
Next week: Iraq fails to approve the UN resolution; Shrub starts WW3 by invading them.
The war lasts two years. Everyone is too scared to use nukes except for Israel, but they fall to biological agents early in the war. War eventually ends when Shrub realizes that no American really gives two shits about his mandate, and surrenders after a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll.
After the war, a second Cold War develops against a new Mideast Arab Bloc; we need to go back to the moon to prove that our dicks really ARE bigger than theirs. NASA gets more money than Social Security and Welfare in the following budget year, and five years later we all get flying cars.
Let me recommend "Spirited Away" to everyone. This is not your typical jerky graphics, guns blazing loud obnoxious Anime film. The graphics are great. But more important is the story line and the pacing. Its slow and methodical and completely enthralling. Groundbreaking even.
if anyone thinks that modern civilization will instantly collapse by the loss of GPS.... ther are the same morons that believed that Y2K was something to actually worry about.
I absolutely LOVE revisionist history. Y2K was stopped by being prepared. If we hadn't spent many thousands of man-years fixing the problem, you'd be singing a different tune, Jack.
It still doesnt matter GPS navigation is for convience only. anyone needing to do absolute navigation still has several other forms that do not rely on any electronic device and one super accurate navigation system that doesnt care if the poles are north/south or even southwest and northeast. A sextant is a great device that can only be thwarted by stopping the rotation of the planet.
Ever see a bird or a wildebeest use a sextant? No? Then have you ever seen an ecosystem without birds or wildebeests?
I know this is a troll, but I have to bite. Being a Libertarian myself, I have to defend the cause and educate the masses. The basic Libertarian goal is "Everyone should be free to do whatever they like, as long as that means everyone and not just you".
I'm going to preface my responses by saying that (IMO) one of government's key responsibilities in a capitalist society is handling market externalities, those things (like the environment and national defense) that are not in the direct interests of individual corporations, but otherwise leaving the market alone. Note that this stance has nothing to do with liberty, but economics.
Libertarian's ideal of 'less government' seems to include doing away with all environmental and public safety laws that might get in the way of corporations turning a profit. No more pesky anti-monopoly laws, either.
The environment is a market externality, hence should be covered by government. Public safety is core Libertarian philosophy, and also covered. As far as monopoly laws, you're right, they go out the window. Like those artificial monopoly laws granted for copyright and other IP. No more bogus patents. Not all monopolies are good, not all monopolies are bad. It's the Libertarian view that economic monopolies have nothing to do with liberty, so the government should have no policy one way or the other. Of course, an Objectivist might say that the market will eventually sort itself out, but I'll leave that argument for another thread.
Fire and police departments would be privatized. Can't afford protection? Too bad, social darwinism says you don't deserve to live, anyway.
People confuse Libertarianism with Social Darwinism a lot. There is a very good reason for this. Libertarians tend to be fairly good at being independent and thinking for themselves, and thus according to theory, more likely to survive in a Social Darwinist environment (or so they would have you believe).
In any event, this claim is ridiculous. Police and fire departments protect the public's liberties. If someone shoots a gun at you, the police arrest them. If your neighbor's house is on fire, the firemen save yours. Therefore, these roles serve important functions. Libertarians are focused on liberty, not money. If these services are better privatized, then so be it, as long as we have them.
Water and electricity would certainly be cheaper if they were completely unregulated monopolies, right?
Heh, you seem to be confusing indoor plumbing and electrical power with some sort of God-given right. Seriously. Millions of people in the world don't have either. Be thankful you have them.
In any event, if electric companies charge too much for their power, they lose customers and go under. If they don't, who cares if it's a monopoly? Again, Objectivist philosophy, not Libertarian.
Libertarianism in a nutshell: I've got mine, screw the rest of you.
Let me rephrase:
Libertarianism in a nutshell: I've got mine, you are free to get what's yours.
Don't confuse Libertarianism with Objectivism or Social Darwinism. The three philosophies overlap, but not enough for you to sling hateful mud like you have.
Slashdot Mirror
Among the most puzzling mysteries: Mathematicians are pretty sure, but still cannot prove conclusively, that the numbers following 3.141592 occur randomly.
The word random has a very specific mathematical and information-theoretical meaning. In brief: a number, as represented by a sequence of symbols (digits), is random if it is incompressible; that is, if there is no algorithm, expressed using symbols which define a Turing-complete language, which can generate said number using fewer symbols than the number they generate. In other words, it takes fewer characters to write down the number itself than it does to "generate" the number using an algorithm. This is most certainly not the case with pi, as there are many finitely-expressible algorithms out there which generate it.
Good idea, bad government.
The software itself isn't the issue, because of the following (repeat after me):
Wanna smoke pot in Amsterdam? Go right ahead. Wanna smoke pot in Washington, DC? Be prepared for jail.The issue is one of trafficking the software across state lines for the purposes of sale. That's what makes it a federal case. They imported the software and set up a website to sell it, said website being based in the US. That's a no-no. The DMCA is a red herring.
You're missing the point. Passport was designed as single-signon from anywhere in the world. The first consequence of this is that you can't do anything client-side. Doesn't matter if it's OSS or not, it's basic network software design.
Disclaimer: I used to be a Macaddict, but I switched to Linux in college "because I can code", and I never went back.
See this treatment of Bell's Theorem for a well-written counter-argument. Note that the EPR paradox attempted to prove locality by invoking causality (no "spooky action-at-a-distance", according to Einstein), but ended up leading to Bell's work.
The Anti-Leech FAQ page attempts to install Gator on your computer.
Case history:
- DVD CCA (Delaware corp w/HQ in CA) sues Matthew Pavlovich (individual in Iowa) for "misappropriating trade secrets" (DeCSS), and posting them on the LiVid website, seeking an injunction.
- MP files a motion contending CA has no jurisdiction.
- Appeals court overturns, and eventually gives a statement why the trial court should have jurisdiction.
- (This decision) CA Supreme Court decides the trial court doesn't have jurisdiction after all.
Summary of decision:- CA may exercise personal jurisdiction "if the defendant has such minimum contacts with the state that the assertion of jurisdiction does not violate ' "traditional notions of fair play and substantial justice" ' ".
- The "minimum contacts" test must be administered on a case-by-case basis -- it's not mechanical.
- There are three tests by which a court may exercise specific jurisdiction over a nonresident:
- the defendant purposefully availed of forum (CA) benefits;
- the controversy is related to the defendant's contacts with the forum;
- the assertion of jurisdiction comports with "fair play and substantial justice"
- It's not enough to show defendant knew his actions would cause harm in CA. Plaintiff has to establish that CA bears the brunt of the harm. There are several pages showing they don't.
- Pavlovich posted on a "Web site accessable to any person with Internet access. Pavlovich never worked in CA. He owned no property in CA, maintained no bank accounts in CA, and had no telephone listings in CA. Neither MP nor his company solicited or transacted any business in CA. The record also contains no evidence of any LiVid contacts with CA." The site was links only, no interactive features. There's no evidence that anyone in CA even visited. One interesting argument: he couldn't have known he'd be harming plaintiffs in CA since the DVD CCA were formed two months after the links went up.
- DVD CCA claims CA has jurisdiction because "he should have known that third parties may use the misappropriated code to illegally copy movies on DVDs and that licensees of the misappropriated technology resided in CA". [emphasis orig] Accepting this argument would lead to a ruling "in contravention of controlling US Supreme Court precedent". It would give CA jurisdiction over far too many tort cases.
- Nevertheless, "DVD CCA has the ability and resources to pursue Pavlovich in another forum such as Indiana or Texas. Our decision today does not foreclose it from doing so. Pavlovich may still face the music -- just not in CA."
Justices Brown, Kennard, Werdegar, and Moreno voted to overturn, Justices Baxter, George, and Chin dissented.Even if I'm talking about purchasing demos straight from the bands themselves. Giving the band my money, no matter how indirectly, helps ensure that they will continue to make music in the future.
One small issue: Your argument that artists wouldn't make music if they weren't paid is utterly false. How many bands do you think make their music without any real hope of making it? Maybe every single garage band?
People do art because people like doing art.
Here are several ideas, in no particular order:
- The idea that copyrights should be non-transferrable. To justify this approach, let's play a logic game. #1: copyright is supposed to encourage innovation. #2: innovation is not done by corporations, but by individuals. Therefore, #3: copyright should be tied directly to innovating individuals. In particular under no circumstances should it be transferrable to any other individual or corporation. Why the hell should some random chick/dude that the author met and married get a damn thing? It's not like they did anything to earn it. Or worse, what rights have some publisher living in a different state whom the author probably only ever met in person once or twice?
- The idea the corporations shouldn't be considered "citizens" capable of property rights. This point has been covered already by another poster. Personally, I think this is a flawed position, but I won't debate it further.
- The idea that copyright as incentive is flawed. Consider a system in which there were no state-sponsored monopoly for creative works. The only incentive now is to get off your ass and create new stuff, not resting on your laurels. I think this is a very powerful incentive. The consumers of art and literature will know who the real winners are, so you don't have to worry too much about fakes copying your stuff. People will still figure out where to go to get quality, original work. We're kinda picky that way.
- The idea the intellectual 'property' is a backwards idea all together. Some of the founding fathers, led by Jefferson, took this approach. His typical example was the idea / flame analogy. An idea is like a flame: if I have one, and I give it to you, you now have light/knowledge, but I have lost nothing, so I have no right to ask for it back.
Copy rights were created in an era in which copying was hard. Copying, via the Internet, is now trivial. It's time for a hard re-examination of these long-held rights. Unfortunately, it will take a Supreme Court challenge to overturn copyright law, since it's granted by the Constitution. I hope and pray that Eldred will win.1) The Nazis aren't going away, abductions are on the rise, we are getting seeing them everywhere, now even on our street.
2) Why not give enough information to the Gestapo so that they can kidnap Jews at a time that I might actually like?
Do you see anything wrong with your logic now?
I hate to break you the bad news, because I like loving slashdotters, but you're part of the problem. I don't blame you, because the job market sucks right now, but nevertheless there we are. You see, ??AA only succeed because they can hire bright guys to code them stuff. The best way to kill them is to go after their braintrust. If this means refusing a job on moral grounds, so be it. Easy to say, hard to do, especially in this environment, but I personally have done it, and I'm not exactly swimming in cash. I have a mortgage payment due the first of every month, and I may have to sell my house soon to cover expenses. But I won't work for the MPAA or RIAA. I'd sooner put my college degree to good use flinging burgers at a local grease joint.
Well said! Everyone, repeat after me:
- You cannot solve technological problems through social means.
- Conversely, you cannot solve social problems through technological means.
DRM per se is fine. It's a technology, neither good nor evil. (In an ideal world, of course, it wouldn't be a necessary technology, but that's an argument for another day.) Its de facto application, however, is to attempt to solve a social problem, copyright infringement, hence it is doomed to fail.Ah, I beg to differ. Pour orange juice on a motherboard. Totally disfunctional in a few seconds. Now pour orange juice on your head.
Brain 1, Computers 0.
- It requires the intervention of a large, government-sponsored, Big Brother company (or the government itself) to enforce.
- It erodes civil liberties and privacy.
- It purports to charge for something which has previously been obtained freely, and still can be with zero effort.
- It won't stop spam, because spammers will pass the cost of sending email along to their sponsors, whose marketing departments will gladly pay it as a cost of doing business (it's even tax deductible).
Support Internet Mail 2000 instead. It's a totally optional MTA system which would make spam truly expensive to send.The extra charge is for convenience. If everyone that went to McDonalds bought a soda at the gas station down the street first, McD would go out of business. People are willing to pay the extra dollar for the convenience of one-stop shopping.
And now, you're not really buying a single product, you're buying a "meal". In the long run, the profit on the meal will approach zero due to market price setting (assuming enough restaurants enter the market and offer the same selection). If McD is making a long-term profit on their meals, then they're not playing in an open market.
Intelligence is being able to pick the most appropriate choice.
You can have Artificial Wisdom, that's easy. Just give ALICE (or whomever) a large enough data set. But Artificial Intelligence requires context (state), fluidity, adaptability, and insight. AIML processors are certainly not intelligent; in fact, the search-and-replace methodology employed is rather overtly non-intelligent. An Excel spreadsheet could do the same thing.
Please let's not get excited about this as AI.
Entertainment. Linux sucks at giving me entertainment. Windows is great for it.
Attitudes like this (by management) are why line workers hate their managers. You don't get higher productivity, you get lower morale. If people are able to produce more after a round of layoffs, it means they weren't working 100% before, which is management's fault (for any of a number of reasons). Ponder this until you become enlightened.
You see, there are additional contributing factors to the equation that offer significant motivation to the Fewer Remaining Employees.
You're right there, motivation to send out resumes, go back to school, get a cert in some unrelated field. Think rats and a sinking ship. If people are working at 100% capacity and the company is laying off... you figure it out.
If you aren't more productive, there are numerous others that are presently unemployed who will happily be more productive.
No, there are many others out there who will fill your job and have the same morale problems within a few weeks. I hope you aren't working as a manager anywhere. I can't imagine you are, or you'd know this. You're basically giving companies an excuse to use coersion and force as a management tool. If you advocate a Ben-Hur style "whip them until they row" management philosophy, then you're right on the money. Just please tell potential hires about it first, OK? You'll save yourself boatloads in turnover training costs.
Thank God! We can finally see an end to 40 years of irresponsible programmers!
Three years. Here's the timetable:
- Next week: Iraq fails to approve the UN resolution; Shrub starts WW3 by invading them.
- The war lasts two years. Everyone is too scared to use nukes except for Israel, but they fall to biological agents early in the war. War eventually ends when Shrub realizes that no American really gives two shits about his mandate, and surrenders after a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll.
- After the war, a second Cold War develops against a new Mideast Arab Bloc; we need to go back to the moon to prove that our dicks really ARE bigger than theirs. NASA gets more money than Social Security and Welfare in the following budget year, and five years later we all get flying cars.
[/haha-only-serious]#!/usr/bin/perl -w
$post =~ s/Anime/American/;
print $post;
I absolutely LOVE revisionist history. Y2K was stopped by being prepared. If we hadn't spent many thousands of man-years fixing the problem, you'd be singing a different tune, Jack.
It still doesnt matter GPS navigation is for convience only. anyone needing to do absolute navigation still has several other forms that do not rely on any electronic device and one super accurate navigation system that doesnt care if the poles are north/south or even southwest and northeast. A sextant is a great device that can only be thwarted by stopping the rotation of the planet.
Ever see a bird or a wildebeest use a sextant? No? Then have you ever seen an ecosystem without birds or wildebeests?
I'm going to preface my responses by saying that (IMO) one of government's key responsibilities in a capitalist society is handling market externalities, those things (like the environment and national defense) that are not in the direct interests of individual corporations, but otherwise leaving the market alone. Note that this stance has nothing to do with liberty, but economics.
Libertarian's ideal of 'less government' seems to include doing away with all environmental and public safety laws that might get in the way of corporations turning a profit. No more pesky anti-monopoly laws, either.
The environment is a market externality, hence should be covered by government. Public safety is core Libertarian philosophy, and also covered. As far as monopoly laws, you're right, they go out the window. Like those artificial monopoly laws granted for copyright and other IP. No more bogus patents. Not all monopolies are good, not all monopolies are bad. It's the Libertarian view that economic monopolies have nothing to do with liberty, so the government should have no policy one way or the other. Of course, an Objectivist might say that the market will eventually sort itself out, but I'll leave that argument for another thread.
Fire and police departments would be privatized. Can't afford protection? Too bad, social darwinism says you don't deserve to live, anyway.
People confuse Libertarianism with Social Darwinism a lot. There is a very good reason for this. Libertarians tend to be fairly good at being independent and thinking for themselves, and thus according to theory, more likely to survive in a Social Darwinist environment (or so they would have you believe).
In any event, this claim is ridiculous. Police and fire departments protect the public's liberties. If someone shoots a gun at you, the police arrest them. If your neighbor's house is on fire, the firemen save yours. Therefore, these roles serve important functions. Libertarians are focused on liberty, not money. If these services are better privatized, then so be it, as long as we have them.
Water and electricity would certainly be cheaper if they were completely unregulated monopolies, right?
Heh, you seem to be confusing indoor plumbing and electrical power with some sort of God-given right. Seriously. Millions of people in the world don't have either. Be thankful you have them.
In any event, if electric companies charge too much for their power, they lose customers and go under. If they don't, who cares if it's a monopoly? Again, Objectivist philosophy, not Libertarian.
Libertarianism in a nutshell: I've got mine, screw the rest of you.
Let me rephrase:
Don't confuse Libertarianism with Objectivism or Social Darwinism. The three philosophies overlap, but not enough for you to sling hateful mud like you have.