Black is already totally lost before move 18. Black's critical blunder was on move 11, 23 ply before the mate.
Seven moves, twelve moves, fifteen moves, whatever-- at some point, very very long before every line is played to an end, the computer stops analyzing subtrees and will inevitably incorrectly evaluate some positions. For the "King's Gambit Solved!" claim to be wrong, that "trap" doesn't have to be set by a human - it just has to exist somewhere in the googols of possibilities. Maybe it doesn't exist, but this analysis is a far cry from a proof.
You're missing the point. The computer can quickly find a mate in 7 from where it's starting its analysis. But it only analyzes move sequences to a certain depth, and checkmates, captures etc beyond that depth won't figure into its evaluation of that sequence of moves.
Winning sacrifices may be evaluated as bad because the computer doesn't explore the line enough to see the compensation, and time-wasting moves may be evaluated as good because they push problems a move further into the future, beyond where the computer stops analyzing. This is called the horizon effect.
Several AI tactics try to make horizon effect problems less frequent, but there's no way to totally avoid such problems without fully exploring the entire game tree. For an opening position like the King's Gambit the game tree is ~10^120; for comparison there are ~10^80 atoms in the observable universe and the Big Bang was less than 10^18 seconds ago, so obviously fully exploring the game tree is not an option.
Both Canada and the US should have gotten rid of not only the penny but also the nickel by now, rounding transactions to the nearest ten cents. The waste of good metal in making pennies which are worth less isn't even half the story; much more importantly, though the whole purpose of currency is to make transactions easier, pennies and nickels simply complicate transactions and waste everybody's time.
If you bothered to read my post you would notice I said those were the performance figures for GK104 and consumer cards. Of course Tesla has fp64 at 1/2 fp32, but to get a worthwhile Tesla card you're looking at ~$2000.
The double precision situation is a lot worse than that. For GK104, fp64 performance is only 1/24 fp32. Previous to this, NV's consumer cards did fp64 at 1/12 (midrange) or 1/8 (high-end) fp32; I guess that wasn't enough handicapping to protect their Tesla line so they bumped it up.
If you need more precision than fp32 and want to use nV consumer GPUs you should consider software emulation. A very simple software double emulation scheme can give you 1/6 - 1/4 of fp32 performance. Of course it's less precise than fp64- it has 48 significand bits (double fp32's 24, less than fp64's 53) and 8 exp. bits (same as fp32, 3 less than fp64), and to get ~1/4 of fp32 performance you have to skip a lot of error/NaN/inf handling type stuff. But it's probably sufficient for a lot of applications where people use fp64. Even software "quad-single" (96 significand bits using 4 32-bit floats) would likely be faster than nV's native fp64.
OTOH, AMD doesn't have much reason to handicap its cards, as you mention, its cards do fp64 at 1/4 fp32-- and that's with full IEEE 754 compliance. They used to be at a big disadvantage for GPGPU, but with their new compute-oriented GCN architecture and their now-huge fp64 lead for $2000 cards, I think a lot of GPGPU folks will switch.
The sampling rate doesn't mean the signal you hear is "smoother." That claim is total garbage and shows immediately that you don't understand what analog-digital or digital-analog conversion is about.
A signal of finite duration can be expressed as the sum of sinusoids ("pure tones"). It takes only two pieces of information to reproduce a perfectly smooth sinusoid: its amplitude and its frequency. Sampling at discrete intervals gives us enough information to reproduce exactly all the sinusoids present in the signal up to half the sampling frequency. That's called the sampling theorem.
Furthermore, you quite assuredly do quite literally deceive yourself thinking you're hearing better sound from a 192 kHz file. This is no insult to you, nor am I saying you're being disingenuous with your claim; it's just that part of being human is that our cognitive biases are often stronger than our sensory perception. Do an ABX double-blind test between your 192kHz file and a version correctly downsampled to 44.1kHz and there's no way you'll tell the difference. Your ears are physically incapable of hearing any frequency anywhere close to the missing frequencies.
Please read the linked article, as Monty does a great job of explaining all of this and more.
At my university, one of the science buildings has a large Foucault pendulum surrounded by a ceramic base. They kept having problems with people messing around with the pendulum (somebody tried to use it as a swing and got injured, and some other idiots managed to steal the pendulum and plop it in a nearby pond). So they put signs on the ceramic base saying
CAUTION: >10,000 OHMS DO NOT TOUCH.
They have had considerably fewer problems since, and people with at least half a clue get a good chuckle.
Economists across the political spectrum- perhaps most notably Greg Mankiw, former chair of Bush's CEA- have long been saying that the US gas tax is at least a dollar lower than would be socially optimal.
Raising the gas tax would of course discourage pollution, but it would do much more than that. It would do a much much more effective job of encouraging manufacturers to make more efficient cars than the silly CAFE etc laws we keep passing. It would encourage the improvement of our nation's (generally subpar) public transit systems.
It would make it so people bear more the costs of road construction and maintenance in proportion to their actual use of the roads and the wear and congestion they cause. Right now everybody in the nation is subsidizing long commutes, traffic jams, moving all freight by road instead of rail, etc etc. Removing this subsidy not only discourages inefficient road use but also allows other taxes which presently discourage efficient behaviors (like payroll and income taxes) to be decreased, encouraging economic growth.
As a bonus, though we'd want to be careful about this kind of intervention, the tax could be temporarily lowered and only gradually reintroduced in the case of major supply shocks, keeping the price of gas more stable and easing the problem of disruptive adjustments. Post-Katrina gas prices were actually lower on average than they are now, but the suddenness of the increase meant a lot of people, especially contractors and small businesses, were in a lot of pain while overall prices and wages adjusted; this could be ameliorated by using a gas tax as a buffer.
Any of you who commented about your concerns regarding driverless cars' handling of complex situations ever actually driven in Nevada? Especially US 6 or US 50 (the "Loneliest Road in America")?
Nevada is Basin and Range country, and each time you get to the top of a little range you see the road going straight down the range, straight through the featureless stark desert basin, and straight up the next range. People joke all the time about jimmying some way of locking the steering wheel in place, setting an alarm, and getting some shut-eye. Your odds of seeing another car on the road are slim to none. I'm not terribly worried about how AI autopilot would perform in such a situation.
Founders' actions speak louder than words
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The Zuckerberg Tax
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· Score: 1
Most of the founding fathers were themselves very wealthy, and they didn't pass any kind of progressive taxes, much less taxes aimed at equalizing wealth. A few of them waxed eloquent on the dangers of a landed hereditary aristocracy, but by and large these men were the landed hereditary aristocracy. The one who waxed most eloquent on the dangers of concentrated and inherited wealth and the need to spread the wealth around was Jefferson, who inherited a 3000 acre plantation and dozens of slaves and was wealthier than any other president except Washington (more than an order of magnitude wealthier than either Bush). He would not have been able to dedicate his energies to politics without that inheritance and that wealth, and his will provides a counterpoint to his arguments against the right of inheritance.
The founding fathers who actually did something about changing America's economic model and taxation structure- Alexander Hamilton and his allies- were staunchly capitalist and fairly lassiez-faire.
Nothing you said refutes Garrett at all. Sony et al are trying to avoid having to ensure that code they ship complies with the kernel's GPL license. The fact that they're worried about code thrown together by subcontractors rather than code thrown together by an internal subdivision doesn't change the situation at all. They're shipping the stuff and they not only are but unquestionably ought to be legally liable for whatever they ship. Otherwise they're just acting as a fence for copyright theft (well, even worse since they're commissioning the thieves).
It would not be difficult for Sony to demand that their suppliers assume all liability for copyright violations (incl. Sony's costs reaching compliance), give Sony the ability to audit code, or both.
Sony is not proposing to make its suppliers stop using the Linux kernel and tons of other copylefted packages. Replacing Busybox does rather little to reduce what's legally required of them; instead it just conveniently sidesteps the only enforcement operation going on so they can turn a blind eye to suppliers' violations of the kernel license.
It's true that if they always comply with the Busybox license that SFC has no standing for legal action on other violations. But IIRC, SFLC/SFC went through a lot of settlements before they started emphasizing the "GPL death penalty" strategy in which the companies simply said of their own volition "hey, if we're having to go to all this trouble to comply with the Busybox license, we might as well take you up on your offer to help us get to full compliance on the rest of the open source software we're distributing while we're at it, even if the risk of getting sued over the other stuff is slim."
The point is that people want to just not worry about compliance at all, especially if they're subcontracting work to others. There's rarely much of a "competitive advantage"/"trade secret" not to release their modifications-- these are often mundane and only of interest to customers who want control over their devices. They just don't want to bother auditing source, setting up a way to distribute source, etc. Once they're convinced they have to audit their projects to make sure any of them that use Busybox release the relevant source, they might as well look at the rest of the packages they're shipping.
Looks like your skimming didn't profit you much as you missed the entire point. The main point is this quote from Matthew Garrett: "People want a Busybox replacement in order to make it easier to infringe the kernel's license." Sony DOES want to use GPL code in its proprietary products, it just doesn't want to use GPL code from people who actively enforce the license.
The thing is, being aware of a (L)GPL violation doesn't give you the legal standing to bring a case against the violator; you have to be the copyright holder. Some (L)GPL projects assign their copyright to the FSF, and the FSF takes care of the legal work from there. But a lot of the most important projects-- for instance, the Linux kernel- have no copyright assignment, and individual coders generally avoid getting involved in the legalities.
Just about the only** legal work being done for (L)GPL enforcement on non-FSF software is done by the Software Freedom Conservancy on behalf of the Busybox developers esp. Erik Andersen. This is a problem, and since they're the only ones involved in enforcement they use a controversial kind of leverage to try to make a bigger difference. When somebody's violated the GPL e.g. by distributing Linux-based router firmware without releasing source, the SFC's legal team tells them their violation of Busybox's GPL license has terminated their ability to use Busybox as per GPLv2 section 4 (the GPL "death penalty"). They can't distribute their Busybox-containing firmware any more -- even if they start shipping source for Busybox in compliance with the GPL -- until they have the copyright holders' permission. The SFC won't give this permission until they comply with the licenses of all the open-source packages included in the firmware-- most importantly, the Linux kernel.
So basically the Busybox guys have been the only reason a lot of people have complied with the kernel's GPL license. The rewrite of Busybox is basically being done so the SFC can't take corporations to task for their failure to comply with the GPL license of other packages.
If a few significant contributors to the kernel banded together, got common legal representation, and had their lawyers contact people about GPL compliance, this would be a lot less of an issue. But they don't.
**I should also mention the folks behind gpl-violation.org, but they are only active in European courts and have not AFAIK done much recently.
There's not a small number of chosen in Mormon belief- you're most likely getting mixed up with the Jehovah's Witnesses, who read Revelation 7 rather literally and thus think there's 144,000 "anointed" who go to heaven; any other faithful people supposedly spend eternity on earth. Mormons actually believe almost everyone will be saved in some sense but there will be differing "degrees of glory." The idea is that though almost all of the wicked will eventually (after death) repent and be cleansed from sin and live in a "kingdom of glory" where external conditions are heavenly, some will never be able to endure the presence of the Father and the Son, and their pains of regret at not having diligently followed Christ will be in some sense "hellish."
Not everyone in mainstream Christianity believes everyone can go to heaven; Calvinists believe Christ died only for the elect who were predestined to salvation and the rest of humanity is SOL. This seems pretty starkly at odds with scripture (God's will is to "have all men to be saved, and to come unto the knowledge of the truth," 1 Timothy 2:4) and with the idea that God is just and loving.
As far as the question of how many will be saved, the closest one gets to an answer in the Bible is Luke 13:23-24 and Matthew 7:13-14, which seem to imply that few are saved but really turn the question more to the difficulty of the way rather than the number.
Universalism- the idea that all will eventually be saved- has usually been associated with "liberal" theology which sets aside a lot of mainstream beliefs (e.g. Unitarian Universalism), but there have been plenty of people with more "conservative"/orthodox beliefs who have believed in some form of universalism. A notable example is George MacDonald, who was a major source of inspiration for C.S. Lewis and others. C.S. Lewis talks of the doors of Hell being locked from the inside i.e. the opportunity to accept salvation is always there but some will choose to reject it for an indefinitely long time, and we can't very well say what happens over the course of the eternities. On this topic I think the story of the quadrillion kilometers from Ivan's nightmare in Brothers Karamazov is both humorous and enlightening.
Your criticism of Mormons for spending money on buildings they believe are dedicated to God seems very similar to Judas Iscariot's complaint in John 12 that the expensive ointment Mary anointed Christ with should have been sold and the money given to the poor (John helpfully adds "not that he cared for the poor; but because he was a thief, and had the bag, and bare what was put therein.") They actually do quite a lot for the poor, especially in disaster relief situations. Life isn't a zero sum game, and plenty of people from all kinds of different religions believe that both giving to the poor and dedicating our best to God are important.
In the scripture you cited, "this book" which can't be added to is the book of Revelation. The Bible wasn't collected together to form a single book until hundreds of years later; Bible-- biblia-- means "books," a collection of 66 (if you're protestant, more if you're Catholic or Orthodox) of them.
If the warning in Revelation 22 really meant "no further canonical revelation" then surely the similarly-worded prohibition in Deuteronomy 4 would mean everything after the books of Moses is non-canonical. Besides, most experts think the second and third epistles of John were composed after the book of Revelation.
Mormons do have a lot of beliefs that differ from mainstream Christians', but claiming they're the Antichrist is nuts.
Well, he is eager to tell you many cheerful facts about the square of the hypotenuse.
If I were feeling a little more poetic I'd try my hand at writing a couple verses of "I Am The Very Model of a Modern Right-wing Candidate," but I'll leave that to somebody else.
One of the biggest advantages of Rockbox IMHO is the compressor. Hard to listen to a lot of music-- especially classical music-- in a noisy environment without some dynamic range compression.
No, it's not longer than I realize, it's just that you're ignoring budget issues. For the duration of Apollo, NASA budgets averaged almost 4% of the federal budget. Recent NASA budgets have been about 0.6% i.e. less than a sixth of that. WWII federal government spending was more than 50% of GDP; even with ballooning spending and a recession, the federal budget has been less than 20% of GDP, so if Moon project spending was like WWII spending it'd be about 200% of the current federal budget, i.e. 333x current NASA budgets.
To make a moon base happen twice as fast as a longer-term plan proposes, you have to spend a heck of a lot more than twice as much per year. Nobody would go along with a plan that puts a base on the moon but has us facing Greek-style budget failures, defaults, austerity programs, etc by the time we're through.
That's because the links that person has collected all fly in the face of everything we have learned about macroeconomics in the last fifty years.
Vickrey won the Nobel for his work in microeconomics and had no expertise or merit in macro. He and other reactionaries argued against Friedman's macroeconomics when his ideas were new and Keynes was the received wisdom, and the overwhelming evidence in favor of the monetarists' theories and against the Old Keynesians swept those arguments away back in the 70s. The rest of the links are modern fringe thinkers whose position within economics is just as tenuous as the position of global warming "deniers" in climatology.
Balancing the budget most years really would be a good idea. Trying to maintain liquidity using fiscal policy doesn't really make sense; there are better ways to do that. It's true that balancing the budget every year is foolhardy, but we should probably be balanced or running a slight surplus something like five years of every seven (in harmony with the business cycle). The only deficit spending that really helps is what automatically happens in response to crises: more people come within the scope of government assistance programs and people pay less taxes because of lower income. The deficit spending that comes as a political reaction to crises is really too late to make much of a difference in the short term and is detrimental in the long run.
The basic problem is that Congresscritters have little incentive to think about what makes sense in the long run.
A moon base may not be all that wacky an idea, but building it within 8 years is ridiculous. Ambitious schedules for the Constellation program would barely have had manned launches by then, and we've let that project rot for two years now. I don't think we could have a base finished by 2020 even if we were spending 5x NASA's current budget on the project. We'd have to be spending completely ridiculous sums to even have a chance at making it happen that fast.
Having a long term plan for an extraterrestrial base is a great idea. Trying to foist one on an American public tired of heavy deficit spending when our credit rating is already going south is not. Trying to build it in less than eight years when we have no plan and no existing budget is, well, loony.
You know, a one-way Moon shot would actually be inexpensive and quickly achievable. With that in mind: Newt Gingrich for President of the United States of the Moon (population: 1) 2016!!
Cap-and-trade carbon limits are definitely a tough topic. It's inevitable that some carbon dioxide will be produced in our energy use, and reducing CO2 emissions is extremely costly and involves a high-stakes game of international poker. Also, CO2 levels would have to be tremendously higher than they are now to cause any negative environmental effects outside of warming. I personally would support some carbon taxes (I think cap-and-trade is too vulnerable to political manipulation esp. of who gets the initial credits), especially if we can get international agreement, but I know the debate won't be settled quickly.
But I'm really irritated that we're letting the debate about carbon consume all the attention and other environmental issues are getting ignored. There are a lot of actions that would come at relatively low costs and have huge positive environmental impacts, both w.r.t. warming and otherwise, but we're spending so much time avoiding doing anything about carbon that we're not getting anything else done either.
Second, one of the major sources of methane pollution is the beef industry, and as people in the developing world start to mimic US lifestyles and their meat consumption explodes, the increase in cattle causes tons of other problems as well. We should do more (education, Pigovian taxes, etc) to encourage people to be moderate in meat consumption. All told, cutting meat from your diet for just one day each week does as much for the environment as switching from a gas-guzzler to a Prius.
Third, while people make a big deal about how Brazil has succeeded in reducing the rate of Amazon deforestation, "we're destroying the rainforest more slowly" is not all that great a success. Besides being one of the biggest non-oceanic carbon sinks (which gets turned into a carbon and methane source when cut down, burned, and used for cattle) it's also vital to biodiversity and South American water quality and weather patterns.
Physical textbooks do not require an iDevice to read, do not give Apple a significant cut of first-sale profits, and they can be resold. These are clearly the fatal flaws; the Apple zealot who posted the story (who was also the submitter on the iBooks announcement story) somehow overlooked these.
Slashdot Mirror
Black is already totally lost before move 18. Black's critical blunder was on move 11, 23 ply before the mate.
Seven moves, twelve moves, fifteen moves, whatever-- at some point, very very long before every line is played to an end, the computer stops analyzing subtrees and will inevitably incorrectly evaluate some positions. For the "King's Gambit Solved!" claim to be wrong, that "trap" doesn't have to be set by a human - it just has to exist somewhere in the googols of possibilities. Maybe it doesn't exist, but this analysis is a far cry from a proof.
You're missing the point. The computer can quickly find a mate in 7 from where it's starting its analysis. But it only analyzes move sequences to a certain depth, and checkmates, captures etc beyond that depth won't figure into its evaluation of that sequence of moves.
Winning sacrifices may be evaluated as bad because the computer doesn't explore the line enough to see the compensation, and time-wasting moves may be evaluated as good because they push problems a move further into the future, beyond where the computer stops analyzing. This is called the horizon effect.
Several AI tactics try to make horizon effect problems less frequent, but there's no way to totally avoid such problems without fully exploring the entire game tree. For an opening position like the King's Gambit the game tree is ~10^120; for comparison there are ~10^80 atoms in the observable universe and the Big Bang was less than 10^18 seconds ago, so obviously fully exploring the game tree is not an option.
Both Canada and the US should have gotten rid of not only the penny but also the nickel by now, rounding transactions to the nearest ten cents. The waste of good metal in making pennies which are worth less isn't even half the story; much more importantly, though the whole purpose of currency is to make transactions easier, pennies and nickels simply complicate transactions and waste everybody's time.
See also this well-done youtube video.
Try reading, it's fun!
If you bothered to read my post you would notice I said those were the performance figures for GK104 and consumer cards. Of course Tesla has fp64 at 1/2 fp32, but to get a worthwhile Tesla card you're looking at ~$2000.
That should say "sub-$2000 cards" - I forgot that slashdot eats less than signs unless you use HTML entities.
The double precision situation is a lot worse than that. For GK104, fp64 performance is only 1/24 fp32. Previous to this, NV's consumer cards did fp64 at 1/12 (midrange) or 1/8 (high-end) fp32; I guess that wasn't enough handicapping to protect their Tesla line so they bumped it up.
If you need more precision than fp32 and want to use nV consumer GPUs you should consider software emulation. A very simple software double emulation scheme can give you 1/6 - 1/4 of fp32 performance. Of course it's less precise than fp64- it has 48 significand bits (double fp32's 24, less than fp64's 53) and 8 exp. bits (same as fp32, 3 less than fp64), and to get ~1/4 of fp32 performance you have to skip a lot of error/NaN/inf handling type stuff. But it's probably sufficient for a lot of applications where people use fp64. Even software "quad-single" (96 significand bits using 4 32-bit floats) would likely be faster than nV's native fp64.
OTOH, AMD doesn't have much reason to handicap its cards, as you mention, its cards do fp64 at 1/4 fp32-- and that's with full IEEE 754 compliance. They used to be at a big disadvantage for GPGPU, but with their new compute-oriented GCN architecture and their now-huge fp64 lead for $2000 cards, I think a lot of GPGPU folks will switch.
The sampling rate doesn't mean the signal you hear is "smoother." That claim is total garbage and shows immediately that you don't understand what analog-digital or digital-analog conversion is about.
A signal of finite duration can be expressed as the sum of sinusoids ("pure tones"). It takes only two pieces of information to reproduce a perfectly smooth sinusoid: its amplitude and its frequency. Sampling at discrete intervals gives us enough information to reproduce exactly all the sinusoids present in the signal up to half the sampling frequency. That's called the sampling theorem.
Furthermore, you quite assuredly do quite literally deceive yourself thinking you're hearing better sound from a 192 kHz file. This is no insult to you, nor am I saying you're being disingenuous with your claim; it's just that part of being human is that our cognitive biases are often stronger than our sensory perception. Do an ABX double-blind test between your 192kHz file and a version correctly downsampled to 44.1kHz and there's no way you'll tell the difference. Your ears are physically incapable of hearing any frequency anywhere close to the missing frequencies.
Please read the linked article, as Monty does a great job of explaining all of this and more.
At my university, one of the science buildings has a large Foucault pendulum surrounded by a ceramic base. They kept having problems with people messing around with the pendulum (somebody tried to use it as a swing and got injured, and some other idiots managed to steal the pendulum and plop it in a nearby pond). So they put signs on the ceramic base saying
CAUTION: >10,000 OHMS
DO NOT TOUCH.
They have had considerably fewer problems since, and people with at least half a clue get a good chuckle.
Economists across the political spectrum- perhaps most notably Greg Mankiw, former chair of Bush's CEA- have long been saying that the US gas tax is at least a dollar lower than would be socially optimal.
Raising the gas tax would of course discourage pollution, but it would do much more than that. It would do a much much more effective job of encouraging manufacturers to make more efficient cars than the silly CAFE etc laws we keep passing. It would encourage the improvement of our nation's (generally subpar) public transit systems.
It would make it so people bear more the costs of road construction and maintenance in proportion to their actual use of the roads and the wear and congestion they cause. Right now everybody in the nation is subsidizing long commutes, traffic jams, moving all freight by road instead of rail, etc etc. Removing this subsidy not only discourages inefficient road use but also allows other taxes which presently discourage efficient behaviors (like payroll and income taxes) to be decreased, encouraging economic growth.
As a bonus, though we'd want to be careful about this kind of intervention, the tax could be temporarily lowered and only gradually reintroduced in the case of major supply shocks, keeping the price of gas more stable and easing the problem of disruptive adjustments. Post-Katrina gas prices were actually lower on average than they are now, but the suddenness of the increase meant a lot of people, especially contractors and small businesses, were in a lot of pain while overall prices and wages adjusted; this could be ameliorated by using a gas tax as a buffer.
Any of you who commented about your concerns regarding driverless cars' handling of complex situations ever actually driven in Nevada? Especially US 6 or US 50 (the "Loneliest Road in America")?
Nevada is Basin and Range country, and each time you get to the top of a little range you see the road going straight down the range, straight through the featureless stark desert basin, and straight up the next range. People joke all the time about jimmying some way of locking the steering wheel in place, setting an alarm, and getting some shut-eye. Your odds of seeing another car on the road are slim to none. I'm not terribly worried about how AI autopilot would perform in such a situation.
Most of the founding fathers were themselves very wealthy, and they didn't pass any kind of progressive taxes, much less taxes aimed at equalizing wealth. A few of them waxed eloquent on the dangers of a landed hereditary aristocracy, but by and large these men were the landed hereditary aristocracy. The one who waxed most eloquent on the dangers of concentrated and inherited wealth and the need to spread the wealth around was Jefferson, who inherited a 3000 acre plantation and dozens of slaves and was wealthier than any other president except Washington (more than an order of magnitude wealthier than either Bush). He would not have been able to dedicate his energies to politics without that inheritance and that wealth, and his will provides a counterpoint to his arguments against the right of inheritance.
The founding fathers who actually did something about changing America's economic model and taxation structure- Alexander Hamilton and his allies- were staunchly capitalist and fairly lassiez-faire.
Nothing you said refutes Garrett at all. Sony et al are trying to avoid having to ensure that code they ship complies with the kernel's GPL license. The fact that they're worried about code thrown together by subcontractors rather than code thrown together by an internal subdivision doesn't change the situation at all. They're shipping the stuff and they not only are but unquestionably ought to be legally liable for whatever they ship. Otherwise they're just acting as a fence for copyright theft (well, even worse since they're commissioning the thieves).
It would not be difficult for Sony to demand that their suppliers assume all liability for copyright violations (incl. Sony's costs reaching compliance), give Sony the ability to audit code, or both.
Sony is not proposing to make its suppliers stop using the Linux kernel and tons of other copylefted packages. Replacing Busybox does rather little to reduce what's legally required of them; instead it just conveniently sidesteps the only enforcement operation going on so they can turn a blind eye to suppliers' violations of the kernel license.
It's true that if they always comply with the Busybox license that SFC has no standing for legal action on other violations. But IIRC, SFLC/SFC went through a lot of settlements before they started emphasizing the "GPL death penalty" strategy in which the companies simply said of their own volition "hey, if we're having to go to all this trouble to comply with the Busybox license, we might as well take you up on your offer to help us get to full compliance on the rest of the open source software we're distributing while we're at it, even if the risk of getting sued over the other stuff is slim."
The point is that people want to just not worry about compliance at all, especially if they're subcontracting work to others. There's rarely much of a "competitive advantage"/"trade secret" not to release their modifications-- these are often mundane and only of interest to customers who want control over their devices. They just don't want to bother auditing source, setting up a way to distribute source, etc. Once they're convinced they have to audit their projects to make sure any of them that use Busybox release the relevant source, they might as well look at the rest of the packages they're shipping.
Looks like your skimming didn't profit you much as you missed the entire point. The main point is this quote from Matthew Garrett: "People want a Busybox replacement in order to make it easier to infringe the kernel's license." Sony DOES want to use GPL code in its proprietary products, it just doesn't want to use GPL code from people who actively enforce the license.
The thing is, being aware of a (L)GPL violation doesn't give you the legal standing to bring a case against the violator; you have to be the copyright holder. Some (L)GPL projects assign their copyright to the FSF, and the FSF takes care of the legal work from there. But a lot of the most important projects-- for instance, the Linux kernel- have no copyright assignment, and individual coders generally avoid getting involved in the legalities.
Just about the only** legal work being done for (L)GPL enforcement on non-FSF software is done by the Software Freedom Conservancy on behalf of the Busybox developers esp. Erik Andersen. This is a problem, and since they're the only ones involved in enforcement they use a controversial kind of leverage to try to make a bigger difference. When somebody's violated the GPL e.g. by distributing Linux-based router firmware without releasing source, the SFC's legal team tells them their violation of Busybox's GPL license has terminated their ability to use Busybox as per GPLv2 section 4 (the GPL "death penalty"). They can't distribute their Busybox-containing firmware any more -- even if they start shipping source for Busybox in compliance with the GPL -- until they have the copyright holders' permission. The SFC won't give this permission until they comply with the licenses of all the open-source packages included in the firmware-- most importantly, the Linux kernel.
So basically the Busybox guys have been the only reason a lot of people have complied with the kernel's GPL license. The rewrite of Busybox is basically being done so the SFC can't take corporations to task for their failure to comply with the GPL license of other packages.
If a few significant contributors to the kernel banded together, got common legal representation, and had their lawyers contact people about GPL compliance, this would be a lot less of an issue. But they don't.
**I should also mention the folks behind gpl-violation.org, but they are only active in European courts and have not AFAIK done much recently.
There's not a small number of chosen in Mormon belief- you're most likely getting mixed up with the Jehovah's Witnesses, who read Revelation 7 rather literally and thus think there's 144,000 "anointed" who go to heaven; any other faithful people supposedly spend eternity on earth. Mormons actually believe almost everyone will be saved in some sense but there will be differing "degrees of glory." The idea is that though almost all of the wicked will eventually (after death) repent and be cleansed from sin and live in a "kingdom of glory" where external conditions are heavenly, some will never be able to endure the presence of the Father and the Son, and their pains of regret at not having diligently followed Christ will be in some sense "hellish."
Not everyone in mainstream Christianity believes everyone can go to heaven; Calvinists believe Christ died only for the elect who were predestined to salvation and the rest of humanity is SOL. This seems pretty starkly at odds with scripture (God's will is to "have all men to be saved, and to come unto the knowledge of the truth," 1 Timothy 2:4) and with the idea that God is just and loving.
As far as the question of how many will be saved, the closest one gets to an answer in the Bible is Luke 13:23-24 and Matthew 7:13-14, which seem to imply that few are saved but really turn the question more to the difficulty of the way rather than the number.
Universalism- the idea that all will eventually be saved- has usually been associated with "liberal" theology which sets aside a lot of mainstream beliefs (e.g. Unitarian Universalism), but there have been plenty of people with more "conservative"/orthodox beliefs who have believed in some form of universalism. A notable example is George MacDonald, who was a major source of inspiration for C.S. Lewis and others. C.S. Lewis talks of the doors of Hell being locked from the inside i.e. the opportunity to accept salvation is always there but some will choose to reject it for an indefinitely long time, and we can't very well say what happens over the course of the eternities. On this topic I think the story of the quadrillion kilometers from Ivan's nightmare in Brothers Karamazov is both humorous and enlightening.
Your criticism of Mormons for spending money on buildings they believe are dedicated to God seems very similar to Judas Iscariot's complaint in John 12 that the expensive ointment Mary anointed Christ with should have been sold and the money given to the poor (John helpfully adds "not that he cared for the poor; but because he was a thief, and had the bag, and bare what was put therein.") They actually do quite a lot for the poor, especially in disaster relief situations. Life isn't a zero sum game, and plenty of people from all kinds of different religions believe that both giving to the poor and dedicating our best to God are important.
In the scripture you cited, "this book" which can't be added to is the book of Revelation. The Bible wasn't collected together to form a single book until hundreds of years later; Bible-- biblia-- means "books," a collection of 66 (if you're protestant, more if you're Catholic or Orthodox) of them.
If the warning in Revelation 22 really meant "no further canonical revelation" then surely the similarly-worded prohibition in Deuteronomy 4 would mean everything after the books of Moses is non-canonical. Besides, most experts think the second and third epistles of John were composed after the book of Revelation.
Mormons do have a lot of beliefs that differ from mainstream Christians', but claiming they're the Antichrist is nuts.
Well, he is eager to tell you many cheerful facts about the square of the hypotenuse.
If I were feeling a little more poetic I'd try my hand at writing a couple verses of "I Am The Very Model of a Modern Right-wing Candidate," but I'll leave that to somebody else.
One of the biggest advantages of Rockbox IMHO is the compressor. Hard to listen to a lot of music-- especially classical music-- in a noisy environment without some dynamic range compression.
No, it's not longer than I realize, it's just that you're ignoring budget issues. For the duration of Apollo, NASA budgets averaged almost 4% of the federal budget. Recent NASA budgets have been about 0.6% i.e. less than a sixth of that. WWII federal government spending was more than 50% of GDP; even with ballooning spending and a recession, the federal budget has been less than 20% of GDP, so if Moon project spending was like WWII spending it'd be about 200% of the current federal budget, i.e. 333x current NASA budgets.
To make a moon base happen twice as fast as a longer-term plan proposes, you have to spend a heck of a lot more than twice as much per year. Nobody would go along with a plan that puts a base on the moon but has us facing Greek-style budget failures, defaults, austerity programs, etc by the time we're through.
That's because the links that person has collected all fly in the face of everything we have learned about macroeconomics in the last fifty years.
Vickrey won the Nobel for his work in microeconomics and had no expertise or merit in macro. He and other reactionaries argued against Friedman's macroeconomics when his ideas were new and Keynes was the received wisdom, and the overwhelming evidence in favor of the monetarists' theories and against the Old Keynesians swept those arguments away back in the 70s. The rest of the links are modern fringe thinkers whose position within economics is just as tenuous as the position of global warming "deniers" in climatology.
Balancing the budget most years really would be a good idea. Trying to maintain liquidity using fiscal policy doesn't really make sense; there are better ways to do that. It's true that balancing the budget every year is foolhardy, but we should probably be balanced or running a slight surplus something like five years of every seven (in harmony with the business cycle). The only deficit spending that really helps is what automatically happens in response to crises: more people come within the scope of government assistance programs and people pay less taxes because of lower income. The deficit spending that comes as a political reaction to crises is really too late to make much of a difference in the short term and is detrimental in the long run.
The basic problem is that Congresscritters have little incentive to think about what makes sense in the long run.
A moon base may not be all that wacky an idea, but building it within 8 years is ridiculous. Ambitious schedules for the Constellation program would barely have had manned launches by then, and we've let that project rot for two years now. I don't think we could have a base finished by 2020 even if we were spending 5x NASA's current budget on the project. We'd have to be spending completely ridiculous sums to even have a chance at making it happen that fast.
Having a long term plan for an extraterrestrial base is a great idea. Trying to foist one on an American public tired of heavy deficit spending when our credit rating is already going south is not. Trying to build it in less than eight years when we have no plan and no existing budget is, well, loony.
You know, a one-way Moon shot would actually be inexpensive and quickly achievable. With that in mind: Newt Gingrich for President of the United States of the Moon (population: 1) 2016!!
Cap-and-trade carbon limits are definitely a tough topic. It's inevitable that some carbon dioxide will be produced in our energy use, and reducing CO2 emissions is extremely costly and involves a high-stakes game of international poker. Also, CO2 levels would have to be tremendously higher than they are now to cause any negative environmental effects outside of warming. I personally would support some carbon taxes (I think cap-and-trade is too vulnerable to political manipulation esp. of who gets the initial credits), especially if we can get international agreement, but I know the debate won't be settled quickly.
But I'm really irritated that we're letting the debate about carbon consume all the attention and other environmental issues are getting ignored. There are a lot of actions that would come at relatively low costs and have huge positive environmental impacts, both w.r.t. warming and otherwise, but we're spending so much time avoiding doing anything about carbon that we're not getting anything else done either.
As examples, I'll mention three somewhat-related things we ought to take action on without delay. First, methane and particulate pollution are big contributors to global warming but also have tons of other negative effects including direct effects on human health. We could make drastic reductions in these at a much lower cost than cutting carbon emissions.
Second, one of the major sources of methane pollution is the beef industry, and as people in the developing world start to mimic US lifestyles and their meat consumption explodes, the increase in cattle causes tons of other problems as well. We should do more (education, Pigovian taxes, etc) to encourage people to be moderate in meat consumption. All told, cutting meat from your diet for just one day each week does as much for the environment as switching from a gas-guzzler to a Prius.
Third, while people make a big deal about how Brazil has succeeded in reducing the rate of Amazon deforestation, "we're destroying the rainforest more slowly" is not all that great a success. Besides being one of the biggest non-oceanic carbon sinks (which gets turned into a carbon and methane source when cut down, burned, and used for cattle) it's also vital to biodiversity and South American water quality and weather patterns.
Physical textbooks do not require an iDevice to read, do not give Apple a significant cut of first-sale profits, and they can be resold. These are clearly the fatal flaws; the Apple zealot who posted the story (who was also the submitter on the iBooks announcement story) somehow overlooked these.