Government funding politicizes science, there are good examples in every field of good ideas that can't get funding because they are counter to some special interest group, often with the scientific community itself.
This would be a way of allowing individuals to contribute to directions they personally want or need.
Something to the effect that having the 2nd and 3rd competitors to MicroSoft merge was equivalent to tying their legs together in a race. In the old days, MS loved to have its competitors merge, as it guaranteed they could never win.
Very few mergers of any kind work out well: corporate cultures have much stronger effects than anyone imagines.
Has MS 'won' in any of its acquisitions, in any way but having eliminated competition?
Legislation to keep money out of politics has been tried for 100 years in this country, it doesn't work, ever, at all, not even a little bit.
It may divert the stream from outright bribes into jobs for kids and scholarships for them, or into low-cost property (Obama's recent problem), etc.
Prohibitions of economic flows doesn't work, e.g. drugs, prostitution, FDA regulations (OK, these sort of work, but kill 100s of 1000s in the process),...
If you want $ out of gov, you have to get the gov on a starvation diet, as the gov's spending is the reason for all of the campaign cash.
How hard is this? Does nobody pay attention to ANY history in the modern world?
Current ATC is a centralized system, and has scaled poorly. Proof is the very many 'near misses' due to ATC mistakes every year.
The combination of Global Positioning, "broadcast your vector" and some rules could allow every aircraft to handle its own flight plan, including landing and landing order.
I had that idea 25 years ago, heard that the FAA was investigating it maybe 10 years ago. Nothing since.
Another technology that will put too many experts out of work, so it won't happen.
Switzerland is democratic, Christian/secular, very rich, self-satisfied, socially quite conservative, but have started allowing women to vote and move up in the workplace, assume equality with men, etc.
Switzerland also has big businesses that have done some rather bad things 60 years ago, probably aren't much more moral/ethical now than then.
Nevertheless, they don't have the world constantly critiquing the, nor a problem with fanatics attacking them. Thus, the simple explanations wrt Moslem fanatics (far from the only kind, and still a minority of the suicide bombers -- Hindus are ahead) don't account for the disparity. Switzerland is one of many countries that DO NOT have such problems.
One major difference between the US and Switzerland is that Sw runs a neutral foreign policy.
Do you suppose that is it?
Switzerland doesn't go around committing or supporting massive injustice, the single largest factor in producing terrorists.
Windows contains above 100M lines of code (recollection from some time back, probably more now).
The overall design philosophy is 'tight integration', so everything affects everything.
Any software testing problem is combinatorial: all combinations of inputs checked against all outputs. This is why testing cannot be used to produce a quality product, only to check whether the development process is capable of producing a quality product.
I guarantee you that MS's bug list for each product is in the 10s of 1000s. It is a major effort to even sort through bugs and choose the most critical, consolidate by root-cause, isolate to DLLs, AND REGRESSION-TEST THE FIX(es).
In a large system, the overhead of source code management (checkout, change, test, merge with the release with the bug, and then merge into later releases of code) is enormous. The productivity of people doing bug fixes in these large systems is very low, no matter how expert they are. This is why developers HATE fixing problems in released code.
No large company can fix all their bugs, even when bug fixes don't generate new bugs.
I think the problem is more that Windows has to maintain backward compatibility with previous stupid versions of Windows and all of the stupidities committed by applications in the many previous Windows environments.
The PC hardware isn't the problem: Linux works on a very wide range of hardware.
Every law carves off a slice of the economic pie for the legal profession.
Every member of the legislature has a fundamental conflict of interest, as they do or expect to move between law firms, legislative posts and judicial positions.
Florida has (or had) a Constitutional provision prohibiting lawyers from being members of the legislature. It was not/is not enforced.
List the organizations you hate to deal with. Your list will begin with all gov organiations, then include all heavily-regulated entities (telephone, power, insurance, bank), then the biggest private organizations (food stores and other unionized entities).
The ones you like to go to are the neighborhood bar, Nordstroms (at least in the old days when they had a good incentive plan), and Trader Joe's.
Giving money to government increases the world's dissatisfaction, poverty and death rates.
I believe that you are asserting that you have a mental model of the world's integrated socio-politico-economic systems sufficiently detailed that you can calculate the outcome of cutting taxes vs not cutting taxes, and thereby KNOW that Bush is doing the wrong thing.
How many 100s of 1000s of equations are in your model? This is a huge intellectual task, fully as complex as a proof to a major mathematical problem. Have you published the model in a peer-reviewed journal?
How much storage does the set of initial conditions take? How ever did you collect those initial conditions without disrupting the economy?
How many TeraFLOPS for how many megaYears does projecting each model ahead one year take? How ever did you prevent the power usage this from affecting the economy you are trying to study?
How did you measure "Best", as the outcomes of the 2 models must have differed greatly in 100s of dimensions, and in more minor ways in 1000s of dimensions?
True, the Articles of Confederation failed to give the advocates of powerful government what they wanted. How else did it fail?
The FF's commented on the problems of unrestricted democracy (rule by the mob) many times.
We have moved toward Democracy in many areas, e.g. direct election of Senators.
The Constitution enumerated the powers granted to government. Without a Constitutional amendment, the congress and executive have assumed nearly unlimited powers. 90% of the Federal government rides on the Supreme Court's re-interpretation of the Interstate Commerce Clause.
WRT the treatment of foreign prisoners, I bet it makes a hell of a big difference in the outcomes that SCOTUS took their side.
Because he would spend even more gov $ than Bush, who is one of the all-time greats in gov growth?
Or because he has promised to grow the military faster than Bush? (He has.)
Or because he will repeal the anti-Constitutional PATRIOT act and all its anti-Constitutiona predecessors? And roll back the FBI/CIA/military power in civil affairs? (Kerry criticizes Bush for doing too little in all this?)
Sorry, there is no difference between these fools.
If you want freedom, you have to vote for it, and that means Libertarian or Constitution.
Democracy is an unstable form of government. That is why the US Constitution specified a republic, and why the move to and adulation of DEMOCRACY has been a bad idea.
The manipulation of the mob is always easy, and modern media and concentrated media ownership has mad it even easier. Now, even a boob like Bush can succeed.
The US Constitution also tried to limit government power to prevent a boob like Bush from doing great damage. Too bad we ignore those parts of the Constitution, also.
Slashdot Mirror
Complete BS.
Go read the DOE report that restarted their funding for cold fusion research. Pay particular attention to the minority opinion here.
Pons and Fleishman did nothing wrong, are vindicated on every single charge against them.
High-energy physics didn't want its $15B funding cut, the underlying reason for all of these attacks.
Your sig reveals a very stupid mind.
Government funding politicizes science, there are good examples in every field of good ideas that can't get funding because they are counter to some special interest group, often with the scientific community itself.
This would be a way of allowing individuals to contribute to directions they personally want or need.
Lew
Something to the effect that having the 2nd and 3rd competitors to MicroSoft merge was equivalent to tying their legs together in a race. In the old days, MS loved to have its competitors merge, as it guaranteed they could never win.
Very few mergers of any kind work out well: corporate cultures have much stronger effects than anyone imagines.
Has MS 'won' in any of its acquisitions, in any way but having eliminated competition?
Legislation to keep money out of politics has been tried for 100 years in this country, it doesn't work, ever, at all, not even a little bit.
It may divert the stream from outright bribes into jobs for kids and scholarships for them, or into low-cost property (Obama's recent problem), etc.
Prohibitions of economic flows doesn't work, e.g. drugs, prostitution, FDA regulations (OK, these sort of work, but kill 100s of 1000s in the process),
If you want $ out of gov, you have to get the gov on a starvation diet, as the gov's spending is the reason for all of the campaign cash.
How hard is this? Does nobody pay attention to ANY history in the modern world?
Anti-terrorism efforts are always a bet against human ingenuity.
This is a perfect way of preventing any ingenuity on your own side, not that there is much of that in any gov effort.
Lew
Current ATC is a centralized system, and has scaled poorly. Proof is the very many 'near misses' due to ATC mistakes every year.
The combination of Global Positioning, "broadcast your vector" and some rules could allow every aircraft to handle its own flight plan, including landing and landing order.
I had that idea 25 years ago, heard that the FAA was investigating it maybe 10 years ago. Nothing since.
Another technology that will put too many experts out of work, so it won't happen.
Lew
Every time a law is passed, it carves off a slice of the GDP for the legal profession: more lawyers, more prosecutors, more judges.
Thus, any reform that eliminates or simplifies laws will fail.
Thus, the collapse of the entire edifice is the only way forward. Cooperating with a dysfunctional system is the fastest way to bring it down.
Lew
Otherwise, they are very hard to tell from rocks
Switzerland is democratic, Christian/secular, very rich, self-satisfied, socially quite conservative, but have started allowing women to vote and move up in the workplace, assume equality with men, etc.
Switzerland also has big businesses that have done some rather bad things 60 years ago, probably aren't much more moral/ethical now than then.
Nevertheless, they don't have the world constantly critiquing the, nor a problem with fanatics attacking them. Thus, the simple explanations wrt Moslem fanatics (far from the only kind, and still a minority of the suicide bombers -- Hindus are ahead) don't account for the disparity. Switzerland is one of many countries that DO NOT have such problems.
One major difference between the US and Switzerland is that Sw runs a neutral foreign policy.
Do you suppose that is it?
Switzerland doesn't go around committing or supporting massive injustice, the single largest factor in producing terrorists.
Lew
SPLC over-hypes all trends that might increase donations.
There is indeed hate speech. There are indeed KKK, skinhead, etc. types in the world.
But not nearly as many as SPLC would have us to believe.
They are not the only organizations that need fearsome enemies, so there is a systemic bias amplifying our consciousness of tiny groups.
There are almost always much bigger problems we should by paying attention to.
Lew
Ex-soldiers have very much lower crime rates than the rest of the population.
Note that the current set of political leaders have NOT been to war. I believe this is generally true for modern wars.
Have you ever had courses that train you to search for and evaluate evidence? Use Logic?
Windows contains above 100M lines of code (recollection from some time back, probably more now).
The overall design philosophy is 'tight integration', so everything affects everything.
Any software testing problem is combinatorial: all combinations of inputs checked against all outputs. This is why testing cannot be used to produce a quality product, only to check whether the development process is capable of producing a quality product.
I guarantee you that MS's bug list for each product is in the 10s of 1000s. It is a major effort to even sort through bugs and choose the most critical, consolidate by root-cause, isolate to DLLs, AND REGRESSION-TEST THE FIX(es).
In a large system, the overhead of source code management (checkout, change, test, merge with the release with the bug, and then merge into later releases of code) is enormous. The productivity of people doing bug fixes in these large systems is very low, no matter how expert they are. This is why developers HATE fixing problems in released code.
No large company can fix all their bugs, even when bug fixes don't generate new bugs.
Lew
I think the problem is more that Windows has to maintain backward compatibility with previous stupid versions of Windows and all of the stupidities committed by applications in the many previous Windows environments.
The PC hardware isn't the problem: Linux works on a very wide range of hardware.
Lew
I believe the story here is that Micron Technology organized the price fixing ring, then informed the government(s), thereby obtaining immunity.
This is an interesting strategy for handling competition, but dont' fool yourselves that it means lower prices for anyone.
Lew
Every law carves off a slice of the economic pie for the legal profession.
Every member of the legislature has a fundamental conflict of interest, as they do or expect to move between law firms, legislative posts and judicial positions.
Florida has (or had) a Constitutional provision prohibiting lawyers from being members of the legislature. It was not/is not enforced.
Lew
Simplistic moralist. Much more of a business writer, not tech writer, making simplistic moralism even less interesting.
But, I stopped reading newspapers much, as everything is online via Google.
So, even the foolish Rodriguez at the Murky News doesn't bother me any more.
Lew
Guys, name one government function that works.
List the organizations you hate to deal with. Your list will begin with all gov organiations, then include all heavily-regulated entities (telephone, power, insurance, bank), then the biggest private organizations (food stores and other unionized entities).
The ones you like to go to are the neighborhood bar, Nordstroms (at least in the old days when they had a good incentive plan), and Trader Joe's.
Giving money to government increases the world's dissatisfaction, poverty and death rates.
Lew
NASA is a huge waste of $. It accomplishes very little very slowly.
The idea that it can be reformed in some way is complete fantasy.
Think of its management processes as a code base that has been hacked by a lot of untalented people over 30 years.
Abolition is the only possible reform.
Lew
I believe that you are asserting that you have a mental model of the world's integrated socio-politico-economic systems sufficiently detailed that you can calculate the outcome of cutting taxes vs not cutting taxes, and thereby KNOW that Bush is doing the wrong thing.
How many 100s of 1000s of equations are in your model? This is a huge intellectual task, fully as complex as a proof to a major mathematical problem. Have you published the model in a peer-reviewed journal?
How much storage does the set of initial conditions take? How ever did you collect those initial conditions without disrupting the economy?
How many TeraFLOPS for how many megaYears does projecting each model ahead one year take? How ever did you prevent the power usage this from affecting the economy you are trying to study?
How did you measure "Best", as the outcomes of the 2 models must have differed greatly in 100s of dimensions, and in more minor ways in 1000s of dimensions?
Inquiring minds want to know.
Lew
True, the Articles of Confederation failed to give the advocates of powerful government what they wanted. How else did it fail?
The FF's commented on the problems of unrestricted democracy (rule by the mob) many times.
We have moved toward Democracy in many areas, e.g. direct election of Senators.
The Constitution enumerated the powers granted to government. Without a Constitutional amendment, the congress and executive have assumed nearly unlimited powers. 90% of the Federal government rides on the Supreme Court's re-interpretation of the Interstate Commerce Clause.
WRT the treatment of foreign prisoners, I bet it makes a hell of a big difference in the outcomes that SCOTUS took their side.
Lew
So, tell me again how Kerry would be better.
Because he would spend even more gov $ than Bush, who is one of the all-time greats in gov growth?
Or because he has promised to grow the military faster than Bush? (He has.)
Or because he will repeal the anti-Constitutional PATRIOT act and all its anti-Constitutiona predecessors? And roll back the FBI/CIA/military power in civil affairs? (Kerry criticizes Bush for doing too little in all this?)
Sorry, there is no difference between these fools.
If you want freedom, you have to vote for it, and that means Libertarian or Constitution.
Lew
Democracy is an unstable form of government. That is why the US Constitution specified a republic, and why the move to and adulation of DEMOCRACY has been a bad idea.
The manipulation of the mob is always easy, and modern media and concentrated media ownership has mad it even easier. Now, even a boob like Bush can succeed.
The US Constitution also tried to limit government power to prevent a boob like Bush from doing great damage. Too bad we ignore those parts of the Constitution, also.
Lew
The US gov already uses the world's most sophisticated propaganda, tho Bush's big lies have gotten so big a lot of people are beginning to notice.
Moore may as well be working for Republicans as a distractor. Certainly he makes their jobs easier.
Lew
The high-energy guys don't want to admit this, and very little mainstream academic research has been done.
However, a lot of professor emeritii have been working on it. The papers don't report affiliations.
There are good reviews available via Google, convincing to all but the seriously ideological.
Lew