Unfortunately that is not feasible. That would basically mean that France and Japan both get a fusion plant (experimental), funded with their own money, a bit of American money and some help from Russian scientists (but no money). Obviously, the US will not be happy with spending money to build a plant for France and Japan, so they will want one of their own. But they just said they don't want to have their own, so we have a contradiction, proving that your idea is unfeasible.
The dream of fusion power is getting no closer. What do you mean "no closer"? The beauty of being an observer is that everything is constantly getting closer - one moment at a time.
If you had to built fusion plant yourself, every moment you spent idle would be yet another delay and the result indeed won't be getting any close. But if other people are expected to build it and you have no say in the matter, then them being idle is already factored in the expected completion date and every day indeed brings you closer to it, if you follow me...
Nobody wants to program AI that will in all cases be more reliable than a robot-human team. What the scientists and engineers want to accomplish is to make a smart robot that will make good enough decisions sufficiently often to offset (together with less time wasted on communications) higher risks of autonomous behavior.
I wonder if there is a way to actually run real Google in parallel to have the links relevant to context pulled from Google through its API and displayed when I read the page (ideally depending on the part of page that is currently on screen).
You are missing the point of the article. The authors write about things they like (unlike movie directors), there is no pressure to write about specific topics or with a certain bias (they only need to be entertaining).
The fact is that most writers don't feel comfortable writing hard SF and one of the reasons is (as you mention) their hostility to technology. They don't feel comfortable with change. The question is why aren't there many authors who are comfortable and the answer is in the article - because it's too difficult and unpredictable. It's no surprise that people like Doctorow write about Singularity - you need to be a geek, a fan of the gadgets/tech, you need to be excited about bio/nano/carbo/astro/whatever (so you need to be relatively young, older SF writers become dinasaurs). A very good point by Stanley Schmidt, editor of Analog magazine.
Several lines of progress [are] converging,You cant lock in on one field in isolation because youll miss how other fields affect it.
So I don't think the problem is the demand for bad sci-fi, but instead the lack of supply.
Clarke is a previous-generation author. He doesn't understand Singularity, he doesn't understand progress beyond humanity. Even his most advanced work (Childhood End) reads pretty uninspired today (technologically). All his ideas are from mid 20th century sci-fi.
These are the things a field mice might be telling another field mice. There are things like collecting grains that will be with us forever, even the best AM (Artificial Mouse) won't create better burrows, etc.
When humans change, they will have a very different (much more complex and advanced) understanding of things and you will have a good laugh looking back at your silly beliefs that "things will always be the way they are because they have always been that way".
Don't forget that flight is impossible and there is probably market for 5 computers in the world. In other words, you are pretty boring. In yet other words, you have problems with basic logic - pointing out things that aren't done yet is not a valid argument for why they won't be done in the future.
There was a method for predicting social changes aside from extrapolating current trends. That method is called historical materialism and it was developed by Karl Marx a good one hundred years ago. The gist of this method is that the superstructure (social and political reality) depends on the basis (our production capabilities). If we apply this method to our world, the conclusion is that in 20-50 years when we develop nanotech and AI the society will transform into communism, when people work for the enjoyment of it and all material goods are free and abundant. Then, a decade or so after that the communist society will bump into the Singularity and the society itself will become obsolete, as every single sentient being on Earth (and beyond) will become completely self-sufficient. Then we will have posthuman world (not society).
So there won't be Sterling's dzaibatsu (sp?) or plain American corporations in the future. There will be no religious tensions too, you are right here. The conflict (there is always a conflict) will probably be between capitalists (who will realise they are quickly becoming obsolete) and the people (who realise they don't need capitalists). If one wants an analogy, the current MPAA/RIAA is a decent one, only for the whole economy.
Sadly, noone from id speaks on really interesting topics. How comes that the trademark Doom 3 feature - per-pixel lighting with stencil shadows - was already implemented in several XBox games and even a budget (!) PC title from Activision Value (Secret Service)? Why id released a game built on essentially 2001-year engine? Why the textures are so low-res? Why the physics engine is barely used?
So far, there have been only a few hints from Carmack that something was amiss at id - the artists working for a year without tools (presumably in 2001), the team having to do some "maturing"... That would be much more intersting.
First, intersting post, thx. As for the reference, the last place I read about it was Managing for the Future a collection of articles and essays by Peter Drucker written around 1990.
Your guess that material costs go down is correct. Despite the increasing shortage of raw materials, prices for most of them went down in the second half of the 20th century. But what happened with wages was different - the amount of direct labour needed per 1$ of output decreased (actually the amount of raw materials used decreased too).
The rest of the costs are capital and knowledge. Some products, such as Intel processors, are almost 99% capital and knowledge. It's almost completely irrelevant to them what the labour costs are. Car manufacturers, such as Toyota, may have direct labour costs as low as 10% of total. In other indistries it varies, but according to Drucker, overall trend was a decrease.
Of course, the capital (machines, robots, etc.) had to be produced at some point and direct labour was used there too, but a particular company doesn't need to care about it - and the multiplicator effect ensures that labour can continue to become less relevant (Will Smith would call it using machines to make machines).
What I've heard from an actual data recovery company, not an Anonymous on the Internet, is that there has been no research so far that resulted in a recovery of a data fragment from a disk using external tools such as an electron microscope or some such. Yes, it has been proven that there are detectable traces of old data after it's overwritten, but there is no proof that it can be actually recovered on a useful scale.
So my suggestion is to simply overwrite the file. ANY safe deletion utility is ok, because even overwriting the file once with anything will work. Alternatively, you can just fill the partition by copying random files (an archive is sufficiently random, or just generate a new file) there. Noone will be able to recover your overwritten data, not even NSA.
Again, there is no evidence that overwritten files can be read from the HDD.
Torvalds started an OS which is used a lot in science, helping explain the universe. You, know, in 20 years it might become hard to tell who was more important.
Actually about 15 years ago Drucker quoted labour costs as low as 5% for some industries and 15% for car manufacturers, IIRC. And labour costs as a percentage of total never go up. So whatever advantages China et al. have, it is not as simple as lower salaries. On the other hand, it should not be that difficult to compete for American or a Swiss manufacturer if you must.
Re:And now for something completely different...
on
Life After Doom
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· Score: 1
In Soviet Russia there weren't any cheerleaders, because Soviet people did not objectify women.
According to both Epic and 3D Realms, DNF is using the latest Unreal engine (as of early 2004). Presumably, that's the Unreal 3 engine (then the game may be out in early 2006) or, if it's the older version (unlikely), the game may be out any time now.
I think we can all now admit that id Software screwed this up. Or almost screwed this up, if you are a fan.
The gameplay in the game is far from perfect, a lot of the hype was unfounded. The game also does not have revolutionary graphics, the art direction and animation are great, but things as basic as walls look worse than in Far Cry or even Painkiller. (Compare these two, for instance: 1, 2).
The xBox version is still incomplete, the PC version took 4 years to develop, much longer than they expected, the id probably had some internal problems (that Carmack refers to as "maturing of the team"). While all that is not as bad as the HL2 or DNF story, it's far from perfect, very far. The fact that Crytek managed to pull off being the first with a next-gen shooter is a strong blow to Valve and id.
Now id talks about licensing the engine and it's great, I am sure they will sell quite a few copies, but if you were shopping for a modern engine today, Unreal 3 looks much better. Doom 3 engine was great in 2001, when it was first shown at MacWorld - I don't see a significant improvement in quality since then. Games on Unreal 3 engine are expected in early 2006 (less than two years from now) and there are many companies doing them, so at least some of them are likely to do it on time. Doom 3 games will come after than (since they haven't started yet) and I don't think a 5-year old engine will have a change next to U3 without major additional improvements.
I wouldn't call Doom 3 a failure for id, but it's not a big success either. It's nice that they finally chose to sell the movie rights, that will make them some good money. But I hope they call really get the team together and do better for their next game, otherwise the IP they are planning to build will not be worth much. And if the team can't build games on John's engines quickly enough, the title of game engine god will soon go to Tim Sweeney (or something like that).
It's funny how almost every sentence in your post is false and full of prejudice. Rather it would be funny if it wasn't so sad. Why do Americans have so much hatred for something which never threatened them (only in their nightmares, or in response to their own threats)? Possibly because they do not understand it.
First, oligarchs are the manifestation of capitalism, not anything else. Concentration of capital in private hands is a result of capitalism. If that is not capitalistic, I don't know what is. The prosperity in China is the result of huge capital investments, which are in turn results of openining the economy. Whether it's capitalist or communist, the economy will in most cases grow when you infuse lots of capital in it. The only argument that can be made from Chinese experience is that central control of the economy can be beneficial, while relinquishing that control (like in Russia) can be deadly, because free market sometimes fails spectacularly. Your comment about lack of infrastructure in Russia is outright ignorant.
2. My argument was completely relevant to your speculation about why America is prosperous. Because it wasn't plundered by occupants, that's why, among other things. This is relevant to capitalism vs communism in as much as it invalidates your argument that the USA is rich simply because it is capitalist.
You don't see two nations with free trade going to war, do you? Look up "History" in the library.
3. Your argument about communism bankrupting Russia is retarded. Capitalism bankrupted Russia, as any economic indicator will tell. You can't argue with facts (or, should I say, a rational person can't argue with facts - it appears you can)
So in a few countries communist government killed many people. So what? How is that related to them being communist? Given that the majority (99%) of communist leaders didn't start mass repressions and only a handful of them did, perhahs something else was at work?
Following Marx's directions, the Soviet Union put alot of power into the hands of a few I suspect you don't know what you are talking about, because you never read Marx and pick up all your information about communism from propaganda in your school. Am I correct?
If you want to throw in private education into the mix, no educational system in the world produces the results that private institutions do in the United States. Except, not surprisingly, the educational system of the Soviet Union.:) Funny that USSR was renowned for having the best systems of both school and university education.
4. I haven't read any of Fukuyama's material, so I don't really know what you're trying to say about that... I am just trying to say that your beliefs in the eternal firmness of the capitalist society closely resemble that particular brand of bullshit that was spouted by Fukuyama and refuted countless times. No wonder that you came with the same idea without reading his (or other) books - you don't need much education or intelligence to shout "Our system is the best, their system is the evil!"
It's kind of funny, while you're ignoring the many many millions of people killed, or otherwise forced to revert to neolithic standards of living, by communism, you continue to claim that communism is not only inevitable, but also a beneficial thing. You don't know what neolithic age is, do you? Communism is not really beneficial per se (it's spelled "per se", not "per say", because it comes from Latin, but they don't teach it in the brilliant private institutions of the US), it's just the most feasible social order when you have nearly unlimited productive capability. Read Marshall Brain's Manna to get a simple explanation of how it may work. Ironically, Brain is also a victim of American anti-communist propaganda (or he just doesn't want to scare people like you) and denies that he is writing about communism, even though he is
Well, I am not. Quoting from some communist book by memory: "The work in a communist society will change from a hard duty into a primary human need, will become creative." or some such. The point is that in the future hard and boring manual labour will cease to be necessary for obvious reasons (it can be done by machines/nanomachines). So the only things left for humans to do will be creative, challenging, interesting, exciting, etc. You won't need to force people to work, because the enjoyment of labour will be a sufficient factor.
Communism failed in the past because the society wasn't ready. According to Marx, Russian revolution was a theoretical mistake, because the transition to communism must have happened in the most developed industrial nations and Russia was one of the least developed. That meant the Soviet Union had to struggle to achieve necessary technological and industrial capabilities and (though one can say it almost succeeded) failed. When a particular society is ready for communism, motivation can no longer limit such transition.
First, Russia is a capitalist country. I think it was even courteously accepted by the US as a country with market economy recently. Russian is capitalist by any measure, from the most basic definition (means of production are privately owned) to any definition you care to invent. The only thing missing is a decent stock market.
Secondly, correlation does not equal causation. Basic logical fallacy on your side. People who know history understand that the economic success of the US is related to lots of things, free enterprise being important, but far from the most important. Just for starters, there were no military operations on the US soil for how long now?
Thirdly, communism increased liberty and prosperity in most countries (except for the Eastern Europe) where it was introduced. At least initially, I freely admit that afterwards it often became corrupted and led to many deaths. BTW, strike Cubans from your list, last time I checked, there weren't millions killed by communists there. And when we are talking about Korea and Vietnam, communists hardly are to blame, unless, of course, the USA is a communist country. No argument about China and Russia, though, except that deaths weren't caused by communism per se, but by particular crazy/corrupted/evil leaders, just like it happened thoroughout human history everywhere. And despite what your poorly educated friends say (anekdotes are not evidence), by any objective metric Cuban educational system is quite decent.
There has always been, and will continue to be until the end of the universe as we know it, a direct correlation with the freedom of markets to the liberty and prosperity of a people. More Fukuyamish nonsense, thanks. But reality is different from our personal beliefs. There is simply no way that communism will not be built in the 21st century. If civilization survives, humanity will make a transition to communism, because of such mundane and prosaic thing as development of means of production. It is the basis which ultimately determines the superstructure. Modern technologies will inevitably result in a communist state, unless the technological progress suddenly stops, which it won't.
P.S. Oh, thanks for the compliment, BTW. Real polite that was. Your mother would be proud.
Microsoft has objected to people helping them distribute SP2. That's why the eDonkey2000 network is great. If they decided to distribute it there, it would be impossible to shut down, because you only need to know the size and the MD5 checksum to download it.
Russian Federation. A transition from communism to capitalism. The greatest drop in industrial output ever. More than 50% decrease in production, compared with less than 30% during the Great Depression in the US.
Almost half of the people live in poverty (real poverty, when they don't have enough to eat healthy food), GDP is still >10% lower than in 1990, Nobel prize winner in physics gets 100$/month (the highest official salary for a scientist in Russia - 2800 rubles). In neighbouring Belarus GDP is 3% greater than in 1990, scientists earn almost twice as much as in Russia and there is no such widespread poverty.
Capitalism doesn't "work". It just happens that most prosperous countries are capitalist (or call themselves such).
P.S. If you compare Tsarist Russia and Soviet Russia, communism did increase both liberty and prosperity. If you look at Vietnam, China, Cuba, etc., communism did increase both liberty and prosperity.
P.P.S. I freely admit that communism had a lot of problems, and in many implementations these problems led to a lot of suffering. Doesn't mean it always fails (and will fail in the future) though.
And why is that? Communism is an economic system where everything is free. It's a perfect model for open source - people work, because they enjoy doing something and they get as much products (software) as they want. This IS communism, but Americans perceive the word as an insult and feel the need to defend Linux from being called communism... for some psychological reasons.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately that is not feasible. That would basically mean that France and Japan both get a fusion plant (experimental), funded with their own money, a bit of American money and some help from Russian scientists (but no money). Obviously, the US will not be happy with spending money to build a plant for France and Japan, so they will want one of their own. But they just said they don't want to have their own, so we have a contradiction, proving that your idea is unfeasible.
The dream of fusion power is getting no closer.
What do you mean "no closer"? The beauty of being an observer is that everything is constantly getting closer - one moment at a time.
If you had to built fusion plant yourself, every moment you spent idle would be yet another delay and the result indeed won't be getting any close. But if other people are expected to build it and you have no say in the matter, then them being idle is already factored in the expected completion date and every day indeed brings you closer to it, if you follow me...
Nobody wants to program AI that will in all cases be more reliable than a robot-human team. What the scientists and engineers want to accomplish is to make a smart robot that will make good enough decisions sufficiently often to offset (together with less time wasted on communications) higher risks of autonomous behavior.
I wonder if there is a way to actually run real Google in parallel to have the links relevant to context pulled from Google through its API and displayed when I read the page (ideally depending on the part of page that is currently on screen).
The fact is that most writers don't feel comfortable writing hard SF and one of the reasons is (as you mention) their hostility to technology. They don't feel comfortable with change. The question is why aren't there many authors who are comfortable and the answer is in the article - because it's too difficult and unpredictable. It's no surprise that people like Doctorow write about Singularity - you need to be a geek, a fan of the gadgets/tech, you need to be excited about bio/nano/carbo/astro/whatever (so you need to be relatively young, older SF writers become dinasaurs). A very good point by Stanley Schmidt, editor of Analog magazine.
So I don't think the problem is the demand for bad sci-fi, but instead the lack of supply.
Clarke is a previous-generation author. He doesn't understand Singularity, he doesn't understand progress beyond humanity. Even his most advanced work (Childhood End) reads pretty uninspired today (technologically). All his ideas are from mid 20th century sci-fi.
These are the things a field mice might be telling another field mice. There are things like collecting grains that will be with us forever, even the best AM (Artificial Mouse) won't create better burrows, etc.
When humans change, they will have a very different (much more complex and advanced) understanding of things and you will have a good laugh looking back at your silly beliefs that "things will always be the way they are because they have always been that way".
Don't forget that flight is impossible and there is probably market for 5 computers in the world. In other words, you are pretty boring. In yet other words, you have problems with basic logic - pointing out things that aren't done yet is not a valid argument for why they won't be done in the future.
P.S. Did I say you are boring?
There was a method for predicting social changes aside from extrapolating current trends. That method is called historical materialism and it was developed by Karl Marx a good one hundred years ago. The gist of this method is that the superstructure (social and political reality) depends on the basis (our production capabilities). If we apply this method to our world, the conclusion is that in 20-50 years when we develop nanotech and AI the society will transform into communism, when people work for the enjoyment of it and all material goods are free and abundant. Then, a decade or so after that the communist society will bump into the Singularity and the society itself will become obsolete, as every single sentient being on Earth (and beyond) will become completely self-sufficient. Then we will have posthuman world (not society).
So there won't be Sterling's dzaibatsu (sp?) or plain American corporations in the future. There will be no religious tensions too, you are right here. The conflict (there is always a conflict) will probably be between capitalists (who will realise they are quickly becoming obsolete) and the people (who realise they don't need capitalists). If one wants an analogy, the current MPAA/RIAA is a decent one, only for the whole economy.
Sadly, noone from id speaks on really interesting topics. How comes that the trademark Doom 3 feature - per-pixel lighting with stencil shadows - was already implemented in several XBox games and even a budget (!) PC title from Activision Value (Secret Service)? Why id released a game built on essentially 2001-year engine? Why the textures are so low-res? Why the physics engine is barely used?
So far, there have been only a few hints from Carmack that something was amiss at id - the artists working for a year without tools (presumably in 2001), the team having to do some "maturing"... That would be much more intersting.
And George Broussard promised he will deliver a wunderchild by the end of this year and it will be the best child the world has ever seen!
First, intersting post, thx. As for the reference, the last place I read about it was Managing for the Future a collection of articles and essays by Peter Drucker written around 1990.
Your guess that material costs go down is correct. Despite the increasing shortage of raw materials, prices for most of them went down in the second half of the 20th century. But what happened with wages was different - the amount of direct labour needed per 1$ of output decreased (actually the amount of raw materials used decreased too).
The rest of the costs are capital and knowledge. Some products, such as Intel processors, are almost 99% capital and knowledge. It's almost completely irrelevant to them what the labour costs are. Car manufacturers, such as Toyota, may have direct labour costs as low as 10% of total. In other indistries it varies, but according to Drucker, overall trend was a decrease.
Of course, the capital (machines, robots, etc.) had to be produced at some point and direct labour was used there too, but a particular company doesn't need to care about it - and the multiplicator effect ensures that labour can continue to become less relevant (Will Smith would call it using machines to make machines).
Good point. I should have been more specific. Direct labour costs usually go down as a fraction of total costs.
What I've heard from an actual data recovery company, not an Anonymous on the Internet, is that there has been no research so far that resulted in a recovery of a data fragment from a disk using external tools such as an electron microscope or some such. Yes, it has been proven that there are detectable traces of old data after it's overwritten, but there is no proof that it can be actually recovered on a useful scale.
So my suggestion is to simply overwrite the file. ANY safe deletion utility is ok, because even overwriting the file once with anything will work. Alternatively, you can just fill the partition by copying random files (an archive is sufficiently random, or just generate a new file) there. Noone will be able to recover your overwritten data, not even NSA.
Again, there is no evidence that overwritten files can be read from the HDD.
Torvalds started an OS which is used a lot in science, helping explain the universe. You, know, in 20 years it might become hard to tell who was more important.
Actually about 15 years ago Drucker quoted labour costs as low as 5% for some industries and 15% for car manufacturers, IIRC. And labour costs as a percentage of total never go up. So whatever advantages China et al. have, it is not as simple as lower salaries. On the other hand, it should not be that difficult to compete for American or a Swiss manufacturer if you must.
In Soviet Russia there weren't any cheerleaders, because Soviet people did not objectify women.
According to both Epic and 3D Realms, DNF is using the latest Unreal engine (as of early 2004). Presumably, that's the Unreal 3 engine (then the game may be out in early 2006) or, if it's the older version (unlikely), the game may be out any time now.
I think we can all now admit that id Software screwed this up. Or almost screwed this up, if you are a fan.
The gameplay in the game is far from perfect, a lot of the hype was unfounded. The game also does not have revolutionary graphics, the art direction and animation are great, but things as basic as walls look worse than in Far Cry or even Painkiller. (Compare these two, for instance: 1, 2).
The xBox version is still incomplete, the PC version took 4 years to develop, much longer than they expected, the id probably had some internal problems (that Carmack refers to as "maturing of the team"). While all that is not as bad as the HL2 or DNF story, it's far from perfect, very far. The fact that Crytek managed to pull off being the first with a next-gen shooter is a strong blow to Valve and id.
Now id talks about licensing the engine and it's great, I am sure they will sell quite a few copies, but if you were shopping for a modern engine today, Unreal 3 looks much better. Doom 3 engine was great in 2001, when it was first shown at MacWorld - I don't see a significant improvement in quality since then. Games on Unreal 3 engine are expected in early 2006 (less than two years from now) and there are many companies doing them, so at least some of them are likely to do it on time. Doom 3 games will come after than (since they haven't started yet) and I don't think a 5-year old engine will have a change next to U3 without major additional improvements.
I wouldn't call Doom 3 a failure for id, but it's not a big success either. It's nice that they finally chose to sell the movie rights, that will make them some good money. But I hope they call really get the team together and do better for their next game, otherwise the IP they are planning to build will not be worth much. And if the team can't build games on John's engines quickly enough, the title of game engine god will soon go to Tim Sweeney (or something like that).
It's funny how almost every sentence in your post is false and full of prejudice. Rather it would be funny if it wasn't so sad. Why do Americans have so much hatred for something which never threatened them (only in their nightmares, or in response to their own threats)? Possibly because they do not understand it.
:) Funny that USSR was renowned for having the best systems of both school and university education.
First, oligarchs are the manifestation of capitalism, not anything else. Concentration of capital in private hands is a result of capitalism. If that is not capitalistic, I don't know what is. The prosperity in China is the result of huge capital investments, which are in turn results of openining the economy. Whether it's capitalist or communist, the economy will in most cases grow when you infuse lots of capital in it. The only argument that can be made from Chinese experience is that central control of the economy can be beneficial, while relinquishing that control (like in Russia) can be deadly, because free market sometimes fails spectacularly. Your comment about lack of infrastructure in Russia is outright ignorant.
2. My argument was completely relevant to your speculation about why America is prosperous. Because it wasn't plundered by occupants, that's why, among other things. This is relevant to capitalism vs communism in as much as it invalidates your argument that the USA is rich simply because it is capitalist.
You don't see two nations with free trade going to war, do you?
Look up "History" in the library.
3. Your argument about communism bankrupting Russia is retarded. Capitalism bankrupted Russia, as any economic indicator will tell. You can't argue with facts (or, should I say, a rational person can't argue with facts - it appears you can)
So in a few countries communist government killed many people. So what? How is that related to them being communist? Given that the majority (99%) of communist leaders didn't start mass repressions and only a handful of them did, perhahs something else was at work?
Following Marx's directions, the Soviet Union put alot of power into the hands of a few
I suspect you don't know what you are talking about, because you never read Marx and pick up all your information about communism from propaganda in your school. Am I correct?
If you want to throw in private education into the mix, no educational system in the world produces the results that private institutions do in the United States.
Except, not surprisingly, the educational system of the Soviet Union.
4. I haven't read any of Fukuyama's material, so I don't really know what you're trying to say about that...
I am just trying to say that your beliefs in the eternal firmness of the capitalist society closely resemble that particular brand of bullshit that was spouted by Fukuyama and refuted countless times. No wonder that you came with the same idea without reading his (or other) books - you don't need much education or intelligence to shout "Our system is the best, their system is the evil!"
It's kind of funny, while you're ignoring the many many millions of people killed, or otherwise forced to revert to neolithic standards of living, by communism, you continue to claim that communism is not only inevitable, but also a beneficial thing.
You don't know what neolithic age is, do you? Communism is not really beneficial per se (it's spelled "per se", not "per say", because it comes from Latin, but they don't teach it in the brilliant private institutions of the US), it's just the most feasible social order when you have nearly unlimited productive capability. Read Marshall Brain's Manna to get a simple explanation of how it may work. Ironically, Brain is also a victim of American anti-communist propaganda (or he just doesn't want to scare people like you) and denies that he is writing about communism, even though he is
Well, I am not. Quoting from some communist book by memory: "The work in a communist society will change from a hard duty into a primary human need, will become creative." or some such. The point is that in the future hard and boring manual labour will cease to be necessary for obvious reasons (it can be done by machines/nanomachines). So the only things left for humans to do will be creative, challenging, interesting, exciting, etc. You won't need to force people to work, because the enjoyment of labour will be a sufficient factor.
Communism failed in the past because the society wasn't ready. According to Marx, Russian revolution was a theoretical mistake, because the transition to communism must have happened in the most developed industrial nations and Russia was one of the least developed. That meant the Soviet Union had to struggle to achieve necessary technological and industrial capabilities and (though one can say it almost succeeded) failed. When a particular society is ready for communism, motivation can no longer limit such transition.
First, Russia is a capitalist country. I think it was even courteously accepted by the US as a country with market economy recently. Russian is capitalist by any measure, from the most basic definition (means of production are privately owned) to any definition you care to invent. The only thing missing is a decent stock market.
Secondly, correlation does not equal causation. Basic logical fallacy on your side. People who know history understand that the economic success of the US is related to lots of things, free enterprise being important, but far from the most important. Just for starters, there were no military operations on the US soil for how long now?
Thirdly, communism increased liberty and prosperity in most countries (except for the Eastern Europe) where it was introduced. At least initially, I freely admit that afterwards it often became corrupted and led to many deaths. BTW, strike Cubans from your list, last time I checked, there weren't millions killed by communists there. And when we are talking about Korea and Vietnam, communists hardly are to blame, unless, of course, the USA is a communist country. No argument about China and Russia, though, except that deaths weren't caused by communism per se, but by particular crazy/corrupted/evil leaders, just like it happened thoroughout human history everywhere. And despite what your poorly educated friends say (anekdotes are not evidence), by any objective metric Cuban educational system is quite decent.
There has always been, and will continue to be until the end of the universe as we know it, a direct correlation with the freedom of markets to the liberty and prosperity of a people.
More Fukuyamish nonsense, thanks. But reality is different from our personal beliefs. There is simply no way that communism will not be built in the 21st century. If civilization survives, humanity will make a transition to communism, because of such mundane and prosaic thing as development of means of production. It is the basis which ultimately determines the superstructure. Modern technologies will inevitably result in a communist state, unless the technological progress suddenly stops, which it won't.
P.S. Oh, thanks for the compliment, BTW. Real polite that was. Your mother would be proud.
Microsoft has objected to people helping them distribute SP2.
That's why the eDonkey2000 network is great. If they decided to distribute it there, it would be impossible to shut down, because you only need to know the size and the MD5 checksum to download it.
Russian Federation. A transition from communism to capitalism. The greatest drop in industrial output ever. More than 50% decrease in production, compared with less than 30% during the Great Depression in the US.
Almost half of the people live in poverty (real poverty, when they don't have enough to eat healthy food), GDP is still >10% lower than in 1990, Nobel prize winner in physics gets 100$/month (the highest official salary for a scientist in Russia - 2800 rubles). In neighbouring Belarus GDP is 3% greater than in 1990, scientists earn almost twice as much as in Russia and there is no such widespread poverty.
Capitalism doesn't "work". It just happens that most prosperous countries are capitalist (or call themselves such).
P.S. If you compare Tsarist Russia and Soviet Russia, communism did increase both liberty and prosperity. If you look at Vietnam, China, Cuba, etc., communism did increase both liberty and prosperity.
P.P.S. I freely admit that communism had a lot of problems, and in many implementations these problems led to a lot of suffering. Doesn't mean it always fails (and will fail in the future) though.
And why is that? Communism is an economic system where everything is free. It's a perfect model for open source - people work, because they enjoy doing something and they get as much products (software) as they want. This IS communism, but Americans perceive the word as an insult and feel the need to defend Linux from being called communism... for some psychological reasons.