If I had $100 million, I'd probably design and build and fly my own rocket, not pay someone else to do it. I'd have much more fun doing it that way.
I still don't think it's as difficult as people think it is to get into orbit - or to the moon - it's just difficult to do it and not get sued to death. If you're flying yourself, with your own money (not the public's or some investors'), you only really have to answer to yourself (assuming you can get clearance to launch without getting shot out of the air by some country's air force).
I would agree that what I described is different than the original article. My point was not to explain the original article or the GP, but to describe a method which would actually acheive the desired effect: a local slowing of game action so the player has more time to react while keeping a consistent space-time frame for all players - even in reality with special and general relativity, if two things collide in one frame they must collide in another frame (though with perhaps different speeds).
In my example, even if the "faster" people are firing 100 bullets at some frequency, say, 10 Hz, when they enter the slow area the people firing the bullets and the person inside the distortion region will have them arriving at the target at a frequency of, say, 1 Hz. Leading targets will be complicated for the "normal" shooters since the trajectory of the bullet will appear to change as it hits the distortion (think refraction of light through a glass of water). What will happen is the player in the distortion will have more realtime to adjust to the incoming bullets, which is what bullet time does. The difference is that the non-distorted folks will also see things slowed down rather than sped up.
What will happen as the tons of bullets hit the distortion is that they will all appear to cram into each other at the boundary, then leave the boundary at a slower rate. Thus the "poor player" is actually gaining reaction time, not losing it as the other players pump more bullets at their target.
If you don't render the perception of things in this manner, you will have to be content with an avatar appearing to be in one place when it is really somewhere else. Unfortunately I don't think I can make this more clear without some sketches.
What would happen is that the people playing outside the bubble would see everything slow down inside the bubble. Things transitioning from outside to inside would slow down. Things transitioning from inside to outside would appear to speed up.
Viewers inside the bubble would see everything slow - themselves and everything else as well (including things outside the bubble). From this standpoint, everything transitioning into and out of the bubble would remain at constant speed.
The only time you'd have anything strange is when you'd try to kick or punch through the boundary; From the person inside the bubble everything would look normal, but the person "outside" could be all or partially inside the bubble. If the "outsider" is really also an insider, everything is simply slowed down. If the outsider is only partially inside, there would be a very strange effect of having the limbs of the insider speed up as they got close, and his limbs slow down as they tried to go into the region to hit the insider.
This would be spatially and temporally consistent, and would give the correct interpretation of all events. If things "inside" are allowed to appear at "normal" speed while things outside coming in slow down, to compensate for this the external viewer would also see the "inside" guy moving at normal speed but the bullets (or whatever) slowing down. The same wierdness would apply when trying to melee fight across the boundary though - a punch thrown from inside to outside would actually speed up through the transition and a punch thrown from outside to inside would slow down - it would make things kind of interesting as arms stretch and shrink through the boundary...
Like one of the other responders to this hinted at: what's to prevent similar things from being used for other "emotional conditions"?
What happens when/if they find the chemical imbalance that is related to hate? Love? Apathy? Compassion? Obedience? After all, depression is an emotional state as much as these other things. So what happens when someone thinks they can "cure" those things as well?
I'm of the opinion that there are other ways to deal with emotional problems than chemical (or electrochemical, as the case may be) treatments. I admit that I haven't done anything to look into those fields (I'm more into thermo- and electro-mechanical machinery and its control apparatus). The most dangerous aspect I see out of all this is further erosion of the importance of personal responsibility. Now it's "the chemical imbalance caused it" or "the implant to fix the chemical imbalance caused it". What happens when we're no longer responsible for our own actions: the opposite of freedom.
I agree that a problem is the desire for "free-ness"; that was part of what I was trying to convey. This idea of "entitlement to [whatever]" is really causing a lot of problems in society, but delving into that would be too great a digression.
Note also that I said economically efficient, not what is easier for you. While it might be best for a single person to not have to pay a bunch of content providers, if everyone does it that might not be best (for the life of me I can't remember the term for this phenonmenon).
The tough question is whether or not advertising is a "lubricant" for an economy, helping it keep going, or a drag, sucking up resources that could be better spent elsewhere. My guess is that advertising acts as both - for instance, it helps get things moving when there is a truly new product, but I've got to believe its a drag when it's simply for another flavor of diet cola. The fact that it goes both ways is what makes it so annoying - it would be nice if it fell neatly into a single category.
Free markets would balance this out; advertising makes it not a free market. Here's why:
If the [content providers] did not get revenue from advertising, if I didn't pay the [content providers] they would have to stop producing it so I would lose the use of the [content]. If I didn't value this [content] in the first place, as indicated by me not paying, I can't complain that it went away. If, however, I want it to stay, I should be willing to pay for it directly, not indirectly through "advertising tax".
Now, with advertising, who are [content providers] really serving? In a round-about way they are providing [content] to people, but if they lost advertising [revenue] they'd go out of business. So, in reality, these [content providers] are simply subcontracted advertisers, using [content] to get people to view ads. This is a disturbing business model, not because it doesn't work but because it allows people to get the idea that things are free. It's a great ruse by the Big Companies to have you pay to [see stuff] you want (the [content]) through a middle man (the Big Companies) while they (the middle men) take out a cut. It would be far more economically efficient to simply pay the [content provider] in the first place and cut out the middle man.
Note that I don't think the above discussion applies to informational websites by Big Companies about their own products; it is understood that part of their product or service is making you known about it. Now, if I went to, say, Intel's website to look up reference information for a chipset and had to see or block or whatever advertisements for Pepsi, I would seriously wonder about what is going on at Intel's web department.
You are touching on some deep economics concepts here, and I can't say that I have a full understanding (who does anyway) of it, but here are some thoughts.
You correctly point out that without customers for a product or service, those that are providing that product or service won't have enough revenue for the things they want. Now, which is better for society: to institute advertising to convince people to become customers, or to use marketing to find out what types of products or services will gain you customers? I don't know if this can be answered because how do you define "better for society" in this situation? Here's an example: I basically throw out every circular I get in the mail - I'm talking print material that I get at least 4 out of the 6 days mail comes in a week. In my mind, this is a great waste of paper and energy to produce, as those circulars will not get me to buy any more than I would have without them (they might, at best, get me to purchase a certain brand over another with a coupon - if I were already planning on making a purchase). So what would be better - to not hire folks to make those circulars and use less resources and drop prices so I can buy other things, or keep those people employed and sustain the "advertising tax" on all the products/services I use to subsidise these people? I would rather those people not be stuck in advertising and doing neat research or something, and having more money in my pocket to buy the things that the displaced advertisers develop. Hopefully this discourse was not too elementary and my point wasn't lost in the details.
The real problem I see is that very few people are willing to displace themselves to go out on a limb to provide something for which the number of customers is unknown; indeed the system makes this difficult (with things such as health care, as was mentioned by the parent). This leads me to believe that people find living in a system known to be wasteful (in an economic sense here but I believe this applies to things like politics and morality as well) to be better than taking a risk to improve the system. I have not yet seen any good ways in which to encourage this behavior, though I'm doing the best I can at figuring out how to start some projects on my own and "take the risk" so to speak.
I'd love it if you could tell it to always shut down the app when you close it but osx seems to prefer that to be a separate operation).
Hope this helps:
If you just click the red close button in the window, you just close the window; you don't exit the application. To quit you either have to Command-Q or select Quit/Exit from the menu. There is a stronger sense of distinction between an application and its document windows in OSX than in Windows.
The only MacOS application I've ever seen to quit the app when you close the window is Windows Media Player that came with Office X (which, incidentally, I find annoying - at least WMP loads fast on OSX).
Have you ever written a program in an environment where if it malfunctions once during operations, the incident will be investigated by a review board?
But they can't even come close to meeting our electricity needs (with the exception of nuclear).
This is a big problem in my mind: rather than focusing on how to use less energy and address the root cause of the issue, we're spending all kinds of effort on how to provide more energy and perpetuate the "more more more!" mindset.
Think about that 60 watt lightbulb (or collection of lightbulbs) over your head. Do an interesting experiment and see how long you can sustain a 60W output on an excersize bike, or treadmill, or whatever. (Here's a hint: 60W is lifting 44.25 pounds 1 foot in one second. How many times would you like to do that in a hour?)
If a million people switched all the lightbulbs in their houses from 60W incandescents to those new 15W fluorescents, you'd do more for reducing operating pollution (I don't know how they compare in terms of production and disposal) and strain on the power grids than coming up with a new fuel. And this could happen today, in the span of about 10 hours, assuming there is a large enough supply in retail stores.
The government subsidies of which you speak are, I guess, the same rural as they are urban now that I think about it; they just wear different clothes. However, for the example I gave with the family I know, I know they're not getting farm subsidies (because they don't count as a farm). It was this to which I was referring, not the commercial farms. I suppose I shall have to look into that a little more.
Incidentally, I think that farm subsidies are actually keeping the farmers at the "bottom" of the economy when they should really be at the top - they are, after all, the real pillars of a functioning society: without food not much else matters.
Re:I agree. The very idea of such a penalty is evi
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Death Penalty For Hackers?
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· Score: 4, Interesting
That's an interesting description of 'poor' on several accounts. Mostly I'd note that it's pretty poor that people somewhere deemed computer literacy more important than food and self-sustaining trade skill education. Obviously they understood the importance of education in breaking out of the poverty cycle, but it seems a little misplaced to me. And you had cable but no food? That seems as much a crime as drugs to me.
The contrast between urban poor and rural is also kind of striking; rural poor don't bother with any of the 'distractions' - they are too busy actually out working in a field somewhere to grow food, repair their house, etc. Rural poor actually make it a point to try and not have to depend on the government to get them out of dire straits - a marked difference from urban poor (observe: red counties vs. blue counties). In fact, sometimes it's hard to define what rural poor really is: I've known some people who by most measures were dirt poor, but they: owned a piece of property, had a house, had enough food to eat, and had enough running water and resources to not be stricken by disease, and enough surplus to have free time to go on nice trips around their area (the Appalachians). And these folks were not uneducated either. The big difference is that they didn't worry about gadgets, television, the latest fashions, whatever. They were content with what they had, and they had enough to not live a life of hardship. Yes, they had to work, but were they poor? In some ways I think they are richer than I am.
I have to somewhat agree with the ancestor posts in that when you commit crimes you are effectively saying that you don't want to adhere to the social contract established, so I don't believe a criminal is entitled to all the rights afforded to non-criminals. However, I do admit that the punishment should fit the crime, so, for instance, the death penalty for stealing a pack of gum would not be appropriate. However, removing the thief's right to walk around unattended in a store isn't really out of the question.
I might also comment on your view that the fact that a system could punitively execute someone for a crime they did not commit renderes all executions unacceptable is dangerous, because what is to stop folks from applying the same logic to lesser punishments? For instance, is it worth not having prisons to avoid imprisoning one innocent person? Is it worth not taking away people's drivers licenses because someone innocent had his revoked? There is also the flip side: is it worth killing 1 innocent person to prevent the death of 10 innocent persons (for this I mean by having a system that has the death penalty you execute an innocent as well as some guilty who would have killed 10 if they were not executed)? You must be very careful when using reductio ad absurdum.
(All that said, I must stipulate that as far as punitive executions go, I will at most agree with it on a case-by-case basis rather than an automatic sentence for crimes X Y and Z - and I cannot even tell you in what cases I'd agree with it).
Don't you have to define what you mean by "succeed" in order to make that statement meaningful?
In any case, I would actually argue the opposite case: the only way to truly be successful is to be a generalist, or at the very least be extremely adaptable. Specialisation is usually the opposite of adaptability - excepting, of course, the odd situation where you specialise in adaptability.
I think the problem with businesses (and humanity at large, actually) is they seem to think that they shouldn't have to change.
I agree that trying do determine a dollar figure for "benefits of WiFi" is really unobvious. For instance, what does a 'benefit of $25' mean? It could either mean that I would get the equivalent of $25 more than I didn't have before for the same amount of work, or that I could get the same amount of "stuff" I have now for the equivalent of $25 less with the same amount of work I have, or somewhere between the two. In my situation, $25 benefit is 10 gallons of gasoline or a week of groceries, or half the cost of Internet access, or 85% of my phone bill, or 25% my power bill, etc. I don't see how WiFi can give me any of those things, because it also doesn't reduce the amount of time I have to work for my pay. If anything, it just means I have to do more for my pay ("increased productivity" in this sense really lowers the value of each task, generally requiring me to complete more tasks to get the same benefit).
I'm not sure how "improved access" will reduce traffic and fuel costs; this is a policy issue rather than a technical one. Current wired network infrastructure would support telecommuting on mass scales, but businesses do not allow this. That would be a great benefit, but it would have the hidden detraction of less separation between domicile and workplace.
Your example does not really refute what I wrote. In your example, the programmer is compensated for his work so he's content to continue to do that work. How the employer chooses to distribute that work has no material bearing on the programmer in this case (it may, perhaps, have philosophical bearing). The employer must, somewhere, receive revenue with which to compensate the programmer; if it did not it could not compensate the programmer and, likely, the work would not be done.
The fact remains that, open source or not, work is only done by people who have appropriate compensation, either from performing the work in question or some other work that enables them to do the work in question.
While I don't know that I can comment on your claim that using [alternative 1] is a "better background" than [alternative 2] (such a qualitative statement requires what you mean by 'better'), I often wonder about the long-term economics of software gratis.
The question boils down to how the producers of "free" software make a living. If they have a low enough cost of living to spend their free time writing software to give away, then this is great. This is actually whay I think is happening, because folks wouldn't do anything that takes away from their time to earn a living. This is great because it means that the producers of the software are not, from their standpoint, losing anthing.
The only way I can see students being "encouraged to produce open source software" is to reduce the cost of living so people have the free time and resources to write it and to foster altruism so people will use that free time to help others.
The dangers I see here are that governments are typically not good at using cost savings to improve services; I think a lot more civic involvement would help ensure that costs are kept in check and services up to par - and that is true even with "proprietary" software use.
The problem with a statement like that is you have incorrect assumptions about the system in which you're making the statement - this is also an important aspect of things like Godel.
For instance, what does it mean to lift something? What does it mean to create something? What do you mean by 'can do anything'? You have to define those things first - rigorously - before you can even approach your question. The odd thing is, I believe folks have done this before, and they have discovered that the question as posed above is ill-formed. It's kind of like the "So have you stopped beating your wife?" question, where the only responses are "no","yes", and "I cannot answer the question 'yes' or 'no' as it is posed because the assumptions are incorrect."
Ah - brain fart on my part. Maglevs have a good deal less noise than vehicles that touch the ground. Also, it's interesting to note that, if I recall, maglevs are linear induction motors - so they don't have any of the nasty noises associated with propulsion produced by air pressure gradients (as with jets, propellers, or combustion engines).
So, yes, I guess that a train would be "quiet" compared to some other vehicles, but that's still pretty darn loud in my book.
I was waiting for a Blaine comment. But everyone always forgets Patricia.;)
Oddly enough, even subsonic travel can be loud: do you people have any idea how not quiet something moving 200+ MPH is going to be? I had the joys of working in acoustic wind tunnels, and you'd be amazed at how much of the noise of your car at 80mph is actually just wind - even in the luxury "quiet" cars. And yes, I know the bullet trains are more optimised for aerodynamics, but you can't get around physics. And I wouldn't want to be anywhere near the tunnels...
You can get 828 feet if you lay them all flat. (That'd only be about.75 feet per book, which is 9 inches - a little tall for a book but not unreasonable). I don't know why'd you do this, other than to use facts to show that you can take up lots of space with your books.
...and you should be able to hack anything you own -- it's yours.
Hrm. It just struck me that the problem with this statement is that most people agree, if you modify it to read (emphasis added):
...and you should be able to hack anything you own as long as it doesn't endanger anyone, deprive them of privacy, deprive them of something else, etc. -- it's yours.
This is part of the issue that the technically savvy face in the modern world. For instance, I could probably hack my car to get better fuel economy and more power, but turn it into something that emits a lot more NOx and CO2. I own the vehicle (it's actually paid for, a 2002 model). Should I have the right to do this? I cannot say that I have an answer to that.
The problem arises because it's hard to define what "endanger someone" or "deprive someone of something" means in most contexts. It's not like everything is simple like murder, theft of physical property, or other 'physical' issues. Take, for instance, the issue of DVD regions. The only reason this exists is political, and it's really unclear as to what damage would result from not having region-coded DVDs. Yes, I know about piracy and the "loss" of revenue, and I can understand the industry arguments, but I don't know that I agree with them. (If 10,000 people pay $10 each for a CD and give me $100,000, and 30,000 other people made copies, listen to the music, what did those 30,000 people "steal" from me anyway? It didn't cost me anything to produce those extra 30,000 CDs, so I didn't lose anything. The extra 30,000 copies didn't deprive anyone else of having a copy either. If, perhaps, I didn't think that $100,000 was enough to make more music I'll do something else, so that original bit of music is the only bit that will ever be out there. It does not make economic sense to continue to derive income from a non-scarce commodity for a lifetime; revenue should be proportional to services rendered or wealth created, not "I gave society this thing once, so keep giving me money forever". But I digress.)
Mostly the reasons for all the "do not hack your own stuff" laws comes from, especially in the United States, the desire to push all liability onto the manufacturers; this necessarily takes away some freedom. If, as a public, we want the freedom to hack our stuff, we have to take the responsibility for the possible consequences back upon ourselves.
Slashdot Mirror
I still don't think it's as difficult as people think it is to get into orbit - or to the moon - it's just difficult to do it and not get sued to death. If you're flying yourself, with your own money (not the public's or some investors'), you only really have to answer to yourself (assuming you can get clearance to launch without getting shot out of the air by some country's air force).
In my example, even if the "faster" people are firing 100 bullets at some frequency, say, 10 Hz, when they enter the slow area the people firing the bullets and the person inside the distortion region will have them arriving at the target at a frequency of, say, 1 Hz. Leading targets will be complicated for the "normal" shooters since the trajectory of the bullet will appear to change as it hits the distortion (think refraction of light through a glass of water). What will happen is the player in the distortion will have more realtime to adjust to the incoming bullets, which is what bullet time does. The difference is that the non-distorted folks will also see things slowed down rather than sped up.
What will happen as the tons of bullets hit the distortion is that they will all appear to cram into each other at the boundary, then leave the boundary at a slower rate. Thus the "poor player" is actually gaining reaction time, not losing it as the other players pump more bullets at their target.
If you don't render the perception of things in this manner, you will have to be content with an avatar appearing to be in one place when it is really somewhere else. Unfortunately I don't think I can make this more clear without some sketches.
Viewers inside the bubble would see everything slow - themselves and everything else as well (including things outside the bubble). From this standpoint, everything transitioning into and out of the bubble would remain at constant speed.
The only time you'd have anything strange is when you'd try to kick or punch through the boundary; From the person inside the bubble everything would look normal, but the person "outside" could be all or partially inside the bubble. If the "outsider" is really also an insider, everything is simply slowed down. If the outsider is only partially inside, there would be a very strange effect of having the limbs of the insider speed up as they got close, and his limbs slow down as they tried to go into the region to hit the insider.
This would be spatially and temporally consistent, and would give the correct interpretation of all events. If things "inside" are allowed to appear at "normal" speed while things outside coming in slow down, to compensate for this the external viewer would also see the "inside" guy moving at normal speed but the bullets (or whatever) slowing down. The same wierdness would apply when trying to melee fight across the boundary though - a punch thrown from inside to outside would actually speed up through the transition and a punch thrown from outside to inside would slow down - it would make things kind of interesting as arms stretch and shrink through the boundary...
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What happens when/if they find the chemical imbalance that is related to hate? Love? Apathy? Compassion? Obedience? After all, depression is an emotional state as much as these other things. So what happens when someone thinks they can "cure" those things as well?
I'm of the opinion that there are other ways to deal with emotional problems than chemical (or electrochemical, as the case may be) treatments. I admit that I haven't done anything to look into those fields (I'm more into thermo- and electro-mechanical machinery and its control apparatus). The most dangerous aspect I see out of all this is further erosion of the importance of personal responsibility. Now it's "the chemical imbalance caused it" or "the implant to fix the chemical imbalance caused it". What happens when we're no longer responsible for our own actions: the opposite of freedom.
Note also that I said economically efficient, not what is easier for you. While it might be best for a single person to not have to pay a bunch of content providers, if everyone does it that might not be best (for the life of me I can't remember the term for this phenonmenon).
The tough question is whether or not advertising is a "lubricant" for an economy, helping it keep going, or a drag, sucking up resources that could be better spent elsewhere. My guess is that advertising acts as both - for instance, it helps get things moving when there is a truly new product, but I've got to believe its a drag when it's simply for another flavor of diet cola. The fact that it goes both ways is what makes it so annoying - it would be nice if it fell neatly into a single category.
If the [content providers] did not get revenue from advertising, if I didn't pay the [content providers] they would have to stop producing it so I would lose the use of the [content]. If I didn't value this [content] in the first place, as indicated by me not paying, I can't complain that it went away. If, however, I want it to stay, I should be willing to pay for it directly, not indirectly through "advertising tax".
Now, with advertising, who are [content providers] really serving? In a round-about way they are providing [content] to people, but if they lost advertising [revenue] they'd go out of business. So, in reality, these [content providers] are simply subcontracted advertisers, using [content] to get people to view ads. This is a disturbing business model, not because it doesn't work but because it allows people to get the idea that things are free. It's a great ruse by the Big Companies to have you pay to [see stuff] you want (the [content]) through a middle man (the Big Companies) while they (the middle men) take out a cut. It would be far more economically efficient to simply pay the [content provider] in the first place and cut out the middle man.
Note that I don't think the above discussion applies to informational websites by Big Companies about their own products; it is understood that part of their product or service is making you known about it. Now, if I went to, say, Intel's website to look up reference information for a chipset and had to see or block or whatever advertisements for Pepsi, I would seriously wonder about what is going on at Intel's web department.
You correctly point out that without customers for a product or service, those that are providing that product or service won't have enough revenue for the things they want. Now, which is better for society: to institute advertising to convince people to become customers, or to use marketing to find out what types of products or services will gain you customers? I don't know if this can be answered because how do you define "better for society" in this situation? Here's an example: I basically throw out every circular I get in the mail - I'm talking print material that I get at least 4 out of the 6 days mail comes in a week. In my mind, this is a great waste of paper and energy to produce, as those circulars will not get me to buy any more than I would have without them (they might, at best, get me to purchase a certain brand over another with a coupon - if I were already planning on making a purchase). So what would be better - to not hire folks to make those circulars and use less resources and drop prices so I can buy other things, or keep those people employed and sustain the "advertising tax" on all the products/services I use to subsidise these people? I would rather those people not be stuck in advertising and doing neat research or something, and having more money in my pocket to buy the things that the displaced advertisers develop. Hopefully this discourse was not too elementary and my point wasn't lost in the details.
The real problem I see is that very few people are willing to displace themselves to go out on a limb to provide something for which the number of customers is unknown; indeed the system makes this difficult (with things such as health care, as was mentioned by the parent). This leads me to believe that people find living in a system known to be wasteful (in an economic sense here but I believe this applies to things like politics and morality as well) to be better than taking a risk to improve the system. I have not yet seen any good ways in which to encourage this behavior, though I'm doing the best I can at figuring out how to start some projects on my own and "take the risk" so to speak.
If you just click the red close button in the window, you just close the window; you don't exit the application. To quit you either have to Command-Q or select Quit/Exit from the menu. There is a stronger sense of distinction between an application and its document windows in OSX than in Windows.
The only MacOS application I've ever seen to quit the app when you close the window is Windows Media Player that came with Office X (which, incidentally, I find annoying - at least WMP loads fast on OSX).
This is a big problem in my mind: rather than focusing on how to use less energy and address the root cause of the issue, we're spending all kinds of effort on how to provide more energy and perpetuate the "more more more!" mindset.
Think about that 60 watt lightbulb (or collection of lightbulbs) over your head. Do an interesting experiment and see how long you can sustain a 60W output on an excersize bike, or treadmill, or whatever. (Here's a hint: 60W is lifting 44.25 pounds 1 foot in one second. How many times would you like to do that in a hour?)
If a million people switched all the lightbulbs in their houses from 60W incandescents to those new 15W fluorescents, you'd do more for reducing operating pollution (I don't know how they compare in terms of production and disposal) and strain on the power grids than coming up with a new fuel. And this could happen today, in the span of about 10 hours, assuming there is a large enough supply in retail stores.
Incidentally, I think that farm subsidies are actually keeping the farmers at the "bottom" of the economy when they should really be at the top - they are, after all, the real pillars of a functioning society: without food not much else matters.
The contrast between urban poor and rural is also kind of striking; rural poor don't bother with any of the 'distractions' - they are too busy actually out working in a field somewhere to grow food, repair their house, etc. Rural poor actually make it a point to try and not have to depend on the government to get them out of dire straits - a marked difference from urban poor (observe: red counties vs. blue counties). In fact, sometimes it's hard to define what rural poor really is: I've known some people who by most measures were dirt poor, but they: owned a piece of property, had a house, had enough food to eat, and had enough running water and resources to not be stricken by disease, and enough surplus to have free time to go on nice trips around their area (the Appalachians). And these folks were not uneducated either. The big difference is that they didn't worry about gadgets, television, the latest fashions, whatever. They were content with what they had, and they had enough to not live a life of hardship. Yes, they had to work, but were they poor? In some ways I think they are richer than I am.
I might also comment on your view that the fact that a system could punitively execute someone for a crime they did not commit renderes all executions unacceptable is dangerous, because what is to stop folks from applying the same logic to lesser punishments? For instance, is it worth not having prisons to avoid imprisoning one innocent person? Is it worth not taking away people's drivers licenses because someone innocent had his revoked? There is also the flip side: is it worth killing 1 innocent person to prevent the death of 10 innocent persons (for this I mean by having a system that has the death penalty you execute an innocent as well as some guilty who would have killed 10 if they were not executed)? You must be very careful when using reductio ad absurdum.
(All that said, I must stipulate that as far as punitive executions go, I will at most agree with it on a case-by-case basis rather than an automatic sentence for crimes X Y and Z - and I cannot even tell you in what cases I'd agree with it).
In any case, I would actually argue the opposite case: the only way to truly be successful is to be a generalist, or at the very least be extremely adaptable. Specialisation is usually the opposite of adaptability - excepting, of course, the odd situation where you specialise in adaptability.
I think the problem with businesses (and humanity at large, actually) is they seem to think that they shouldn't have to change.
I'm not sure how "improved access" will reduce traffic and fuel costs; this is a policy issue rather than a technical one. Current wired network infrastructure would support telecommuting on mass scales, but businesses do not allow this. That would be a great benefit, but it would have the hidden detraction of less separation between domicile and workplace.
The fact remains that, open source or not, work is only done by people who have appropriate compensation, either from performing the work in question or some other work that enables them to do the work in question.
The question boils down to how the producers of "free" software make a living. If they have a low enough cost of living to spend their free time writing software to give away, then this is great. This is actually whay I think is happening, because folks wouldn't do anything that takes away from their time to earn a living. This is great because it means that the producers of the software are not, from their standpoint, losing anthing.
The only way I can see students being "encouraged to produce open source software" is to reduce the cost of living so people have the free time and resources to write it and to foster altruism so people will use that free time to help others.
The dangers I see here are that governments are typically not good at using cost savings to improve services; I think a lot more civic involvement would help ensure that costs are kept in check and services up to par - and that is true even with "proprietary" software use.
For instance, what does it mean to lift something? What does it mean to create something? What do you mean by 'can do anything'? You have to define those things first - rigorously - before you can even approach your question. The odd thing is, I believe folks have done this before, and they have discovered that the question as posed above is ill-formed. It's kind of like the "So have you stopped beating your wife?" question, where the only responses are "no","yes", and "I cannot answer the question 'yes' or 'no' as it is posed because the assumptions are incorrect."
So, yes, I guess that a train would be "quiet" compared to some other vehicles, but that's still pretty darn loud in my book.
I just got a 1213.9, but I'm trying to see how short I can get and actually hit the thing (so far the 760's seems to be it...)
Oddly enough, even subsonic travel can be loud: do you people have any idea how not quiet something moving 200+ MPH is going to be? I had the joys of working in acoustic wind tunnels, and you'd be amazed at how much of the noise of your car at 80mph is actually just wind - even in the luxury "quiet" cars. And yes, I know the bullet trains are more optimised for aerodynamics, but you can't get around physics. And I wouldn't want to be anywhere near the tunnels...
(Apologies if someone else beat me to this observation).
You can get 828 feet if you lay them all flat. (That'd only be about .75 feet per book, which is 9 inches - a little tall for a book but not unreasonable). I don't know why'd you do this, other than to use facts to show that you can take up lots of space with your books.
...and you should be able to hack anything you own as long as it doesn't endanger anyone, deprive them of privacy, deprive them of something else, etc. -- it's yours.
This is part of the issue that the technically savvy face in the modern world. For instance, I could probably hack my car to get better fuel economy and more power, but turn it into something that emits a lot more NOx and CO2. I own the vehicle (it's actually paid for, a 2002 model). Should I have the right to do this? I cannot say that I have an answer to that.
The problem arises because it's hard to define what "endanger someone" or "deprive someone of something" means in most contexts. It's not like everything is simple like murder, theft of physical property, or other 'physical' issues. Take, for instance, the issue of DVD regions. The only reason this exists is political, and it's really unclear as to what damage would result from not having region-coded DVDs. Yes, I know about piracy and the "loss" of revenue, and I can understand the industry arguments, but I don't know that I agree with them. (If 10,000 people pay $10 each for a CD and give me $100,000, and 30,000 other people made copies, listen to the music, what did those 30,000 people "steal" from me anyway? It didn't cost me anything to produce those extra 30,000 CDs, so I didn't lose anything. The extra 30,000 copies didn't deprive anyone else of having a copy either. If, perhaps, I didn't think that $100,000 was enough to make more music I'll do something else, so that original bit of music is the only bit that will ever be out there. It does not make economic sense to continue to derive income from a non-scarce commodity for a lifetime; revenue should be proportional to services rendered or wealth created, not "I gave society this thing once, so keep giving me money forever". But I digress.)
Mostly the reasons for all the "do not hack your own stuff" laws comes from, especially in the United States, the desire to push all liability onto the manufacturers; this necessarily takes away some freedom. If, as a public, we want the freedom to hack our stuff, we have to take the responsibility for the possible consequences back upon ourselves.