But since you are unemployed (robots do everything, remember) you don't have any money, however little it takes to buy food.
Unless, of course, I own some land and a few robots which farm it for me. I could even have a robotic secretary offering the surplus products of my robot's labour to people who's robots are producing things I might want, in exchange of said things. To simplify the logistics of all this, the robotic secretaries might wish to establish a credit system, and some of them might even earn some credits for their owners by handling these logistics...
The situation you describe is simply one where you get food - or, more generally, guaranteed minimum income - without having to work. You get all the benefits of owning a bunch of slaves without any of the moral or practical problems. It's also very likely that, after the initial period of lazing around, you'd find something to busy yourself with (and possibly earn extra credits), such as programming, art or whatever.
This is a good thing, as it frees people from being wage slaves and wasting their lifes doing jobs they hate, freeing them to do things they want instead.
In fact the recent boom in manufacturing has created the greatest improvement in the living standards of Chinese people since...well, since ever. Why on earth do you think they leave the countryside by tens of millions to come and work in factories in the cities?
Because being abused in a factory is still better than living in a farm, the same reason why Europeans left farms during the Industrial Revolution to work in factories. The conditions in those factories were still horrible enough that it gave birth to communism.
It follows the same pattern as the industrial revolution in Britain which improved the lives of average people more than anything since the invention of agriculture.
Of course it did, as technical development always does, but only after the worst abuses had been stopped.
Stone hearted conservative answer: So what if it is?
I just explained it to you: it twists the markets and causes them to misoptimize.
We as a nation benefit from having access to goods for a lot lower price than the price at which we can produce them ourselves.
No, we don't. The importers of cheap goods benefit in the short term by being able to undercut domestic manufacturers, causing those domestic manufacturers to either go bankrupt or lower their standards of pay and treatment of workforce to match China. This, in turn, causes said workforce to have lower income, which lowers their standard of living unless they take debt, which of course can't happen endlessly. It also makes them dependent on cheap Chinese imports while eating the initial benefits. The end result is economic ruin, which is what has been happening lately.
What do we care how they do it, by abusing their workers, polluting their cities or subsidizing their industries. It would all amounts to the same thing, benefit to us at their expense (see youtube video in the previous post)
They build their industries up, we lose them. Also, please understand that pollution doesn't stay in place, it spreads from China to the whole globe, including where we live.
. Sure we lose some of the jobs in a specific industry but we gain more jobs and more wealth overall.
Where do these new jobs come from? Where does this new wealth come from? If our production is done in China, we are paying Chinese to do it, which means that wealth is leaving out economy. We are losing wealth, not gaining it, and lowering wages eat away any benefits from cheaper price of imports. And as people keep getting poorer, it gets harder and harder to start new companies or keep old ones going, since people can't afford your products.
The only ones who benefit from this situation are the heads of multinational corporations. Our economy is very near the point of no return, we have to do something about this problem while we still can.
No, I was only addressing one half of the point which I thought might appeal more to the bleeding heart liberals. Tariffs are bad for us too. They might for a short time protect some of the union jobs in a specific industry but they are harmful for the wider economy because they deprive our industry and consumers of cheaper products.
Chinese products are cheaper because the workforce is abused. That's another way of saying that they aren't cheaper at all, Foxxconn has simply managed to succesfully externalize part of the cost to be paid by said Chinese workers rather than buyers. This is bad from the economic standpoint, since it encourages behavior where the total costs are actually greater.
An import tariff for such products is good because it forces the end user to pay for all the costs of the product, thus allowing free market to optimize resource usage. This is also the idea behind carbon credits and other such devices often derided by, ironically enough, free-market fundamentalists.
As an exercise, think about what would have happened to the USA computer industry if from the start we had laws that ensured that all computer components had to be made by unionized factories in Michigan.
All computer components should have all of their costs included in their final price, including but not limited to pollution, injuries etc. caused by the operation of the manufacturing plants. If necessary, if for example a factory operates outside US jurisdiction and gains a price advantage by polluting with abandon, tariffs should be used to enforce this.
Failure to do so will result in market failure. You cannot have a free market if everyone can simply steal from others - which is what externalizing costs is really doing. Free markets can only work if you are forced to pay for all the costs of whatever choice you make, and that requires tariff in a world with different jurisdictions.
There are, of course, ethical reasons to stop multinational corporations from killing Chinese workers in the name of profit, but I'm addressing the half of the point which I think might appeal more to the stone-hearted conservatists.
Teacher assigns paper, student drafts it in whatever editor on whatever OS on whatever architecture he wants, prints it, turns it in. Whats the problem?
Waste of paper and ink, not to mention having to buy a printer. How about accepting both paper and PDF?
Maybe their goals are higher than creating corporate equivalent ditch diggers.
No matter what their goals are, that's what most of the students end up being, if they are lucky and get employed that is. Most people are losers and never do anything significant, simply because the bottom of the pyramid is wider than the top.
I remember seeing a Slashdot sig which said something to the effect that "masses fear libertarianism because they'll be judged by their merit under it". And, you know what? It was absolutely correct. Most people are about average, so of course they end up demanding policies that benefit the average person rather than the elites, real or self-deluded.
Most people will end up their society's equivalent of ditch-diggers, so a public school needs to teach them how to use shovels, so they can make a living.
Note, sorting is only ONE example of a class of algorithms that might have to be performed. Pretty much any useful algorithm would in some way leak information about the plaintext, in a way that would be visible to people who don't have your private key. That defeats the whole purpose. Might as well just upload all your data XOR encrypted.
Could you encrypt the algorithm itself? That is, just like you use the key to transform the cleartext to ciphertext, you would use the key to transfer the original algorithm to a "ciphered" algorithm, which operates on that ciphertext, producing more ciphertext, which, when decrypted, will be the same as if you'd run the original algorithm on the original cleartext. Basically, your "cloud provider" would not know either your data or what you're doing to it.
And XOR encryption is just fine, as long as you XOR against a random bit string and keep it to yourself:).
"He" was not the problem. His ambitions were never the problem. The problem was the nazi's idea of social justice, and their utter refusal to accept the obvious : that it could not now, not ever, happen for economic reasons.
Ah yes, national healthcare leads to death camps, never mind that it didn't in most of the world. Do you right-wing lunatics actually believe the shit you're spouting, or do you just think the rest of us are stupid enough to believe it?
Space Shuttle (government run operation) costs US$ 1 Billion per launch. The new Space-X Falcon 9 (private operation) is expected to cost US$ 55 Million per launch.
According to Wikipedia, a Space Shuttle launch costs $450 million, or less than half of what you said. Apart from that, Falcon lifts 10 tons and Space Shuttle 24, Falcon was build decades later with far more advanced technology, and there's the little thing about Falcon not in active service yet, so its cost per launch is really unknown.
I understand that this "government is inefficient and private industry efficient" meme is popular right now, but it caused the current financial crisis, so please stop it already.
I think the scientists and managers who work for ITER must be the 'academic type' who have had no or very little contact with the real world that has to live within its means. So we are seeing typical government style bureaucracy and the resultant cost escalations.
ITER is a research reactor, and research programs in general can use all the money they can get.
The rain literally cleans the air by collecting particles on the way down. Rain is far from being clean like the stuff that springs from your water tab.
So wait ten minutes after rain starts before starting to collect it. Most particles should have been flushed out by then.
Then again, breathing these particles doesn't apparently kill me, so I really don't understand how drinking them would.
Simply for the sake of generating electricity, kick-starting your plant with an A-bomb is not a viable alternative...
Why not? Just build a huge cylinder, adapt Project Orion pusher-plate as a pistonhead, and connect to a generator through a crankshaft and flywheel. Hmm... I think I'd better patent this "internal thermonuclear engine" - it's even completely carbon-neutral:).
Correct, but in that instant when a fusion reactor fails, due to some disruption event, the plasma can dump all of its energy onto the walls of the fusion reactor. In current tokamak experiments, we just get some melting of the inner tiles when we have plasma disruptions. But with a full-scale reactor, there might be enough energy to blow open the wall.
No, that's not possible. In a Tokamak-style reactor the magnetic coils which contain the plasma are anchored to the wall. The wall is already bearing all the force the plasma can exert. If plasma gets disrupted, it's pressure and temperature drop rapidly, making the wall bear less, not more, stress.
That's why fusion reactor is safe: any kind of malfunction will cause energy levels to go down, not up. It simply can't produce more energy than it normally does at full power.
Besides, if the wall did get damaged and hydrogen escaped, so what? The fuel is hydrogen and end result helium. Both are much lighter than air and will rapidly rise to the top of atmosphere and disperse into space from there.
Well, Brett, I see you didn't even bother to read the articles. The summary blatantly misrepresents the environmentalist groups.
Whenever I see the words "nuclear" and "environmentalist" near each other, my first assumption is that said environmentalists are protesting against nuclear power. In fact it seems to me that Greenpeace is the biggest obstacle to actually protecting the environment nowadays, thanks to their idiotic anti-nuclear stance. It also doesn't help that you can't really talk about protecting your environment without first convincing your audience that you aren't some kind of nutcase wanting humanity to die off, thanks to these nutcases.
Just imagine how bad a sane Hitler could have been.
Not bad at all? He wouldn't had started the Holocaust, wouldn't had started WWII, and would likely not have sought dictatorial power in the first place. He'd been just a politician amongst many, or possibly a painter as he originally wanted to be.
Encrypting sender and recipient is hard and in the summary it's clear that it's mostly sender and recipient that's being recorded. Who's talking to who is more important for data mining than what you're actually saying to each other.
Purposely infect your machine with a spambot or two and drown the signal under the noise. Feed the Carnivore...
Some might assert that information is overclassified, or classified such as to hide wrongdoing or illegal or questionably behavior. Fine, but:
1. You don't get to make that determination yourself. However...
Yes, you do. Otherwise we wouldn't be having this conversation. Ultimately, it is you who determines your actions.
2....if you do, this kind of decision is a moral/ethical one which must necessarily be tempered with consequences. I.e., if, in a free and democratic society, you really believe that a piece of classified information should be released, and you're going to unilaterally decide to do release it because of your own personal beliefs or convictions, you should be willing to pay your society's consequences for it.
Either releasing a document is right or it isn't. If it's right, why suffer for doing the right thing if you can avoid it? And if it's not right, suffering a punishment for it doesn't make it any more right.
Your own personal view on whether something should or shouldn't be classified is irrelevant. There are well-known and established processes that govern classification.
Oh, sure. But if I get my hands on classified material, and have the opportunity to publish it without getting found out, it's my personal view on whether that material should or shouldn't be classified that determines whether I will.
You aren't entitled to sell someone else's creation, ever, at all, but the law recognizes there are limits to how much burden the law can take, so it gives you the privilege of doing so after two generations.
You created it. Then you sold someone a copy. At that point, the copy is that someone else's property. It's not yours anymore. That someone else is, in fact, entitled to sell it, or make a hundred thousand copies and sellign them. Copyright law tries to subvert this to give financial incentive for creation, but has itself been long since twisted to the point of being a hindrance rather than help for the growth of human culture.
Unlike, say, property laws, copyright law is contrary to human nature and most people's understanding of right and wrong. That's why it gets broken constantly and casually. Your assertion that making copies of information after mere two generations(!) have had a monopoly artificially enforced is a "privilege" is ridiculous.
How much you pay for it depends entirely on how much you're willing to pay for it. That's true of every transaction for anything, even in command economies (and the failure to recognize that is why command economies are even more inefficient than free markets).
Yeah, command economies usually develop a black market where the real economic activity takes place, since people find the rules ridiculous. The black market for getting around copyright law is known as "Pirate Bay".
Video calling is simply redundant in Britain. Wherever you are, you can simply say: "Mr. Policeman, could you please forward a copy of this surveillance footage to Mr. So-and-so?"
More likely there'd be just one or two, at trillionaire status, and everything else would be subsidiaries of them.
And The One would, of course, control everything, and thus be an archetypical instance of a totalitarian government. In fact wasn't that the goal of fascism?
Open Source software (at least the GPL or similar, which is typically what people mean) is utterly dependent on the "government monopoly protection" of Copyright. Without that, you don't have "Open Source", you have "Public Domain".
And that's just fine, since any specialized version you might make is also in public domain. GPL exists to hack around copyright law.
What if I don't need support? That's why Red Hat and other liberated software companies will probably never see 1 billion. Bottom Line: A lot of us are cheapasses.;-)
A specialized technician will likely still fix the problem faster than a jack-of-all-trades, even if the jack can do it too. That's why division of labour exists in the first place.
So, as the company size grows, it will eventually become cheaper to call a specialist than try to fix things yourself, or even arrange one to come in periodically to ensure that everything keeps runnign smoothly. In the meantime, getting you used to using RHLinux will make it more likely that you keep using it until that treshold is reached.
Even a cheapass is likely to end up buying things rather than doing them himself, simply because the opportunity cost is greater.
The fact that you feel the need to ask that question illustrates the problem. Should a program require different binaries for Windows Starter vs. Home Basic vs. Home Premium vs. Professional vs. Ultimate vs. Server?
Those are the same OS with different add-on bundles. And as it happens, getting older programs to work in newer Windows versions can be quite a problem.
Are you trying to say that downloading and using open source software is equivalent to mass copyright infringement of music, books, and movies? That's patently ridiculous.
Except from a software vendors point of view it is, in fact, equivalent. All competition is.
Proprietary software writers aren't "losing" money because somebody chooses a competitor. It wasn't their money in the first place and historic profits do not grant you the undying right to future profits.
They "lose" money in exactly the same way as they "lose" money when you pirate a program: in the form of potential profits.
The only way closed source software writers lose money is if someone actually pirates their stuff that would have paid had the pirated copy not been available. FLOSS has absolutely nothing to do with that at all.
This isn't true. Just like pirated copy of Photoshop is alternative to paying for it, so is Gimp. FOSS competes with proprietary software, just like pirated copies do, and competition lowers profits, which is apparently counted as "loss" by you.
Either FOSS causes losses to proprietary software vendors by giving people alternatives to paying for software, or piracy doesn't either. Either not getting as much profit as you might have in some hypothethical alternative reality is a loss or it isn't. You can't have it both ways.
Slashdot Mirror
Unless, of course, I own some land and a few robots which farm it for me. I could even have a robotic secretary offering the surplus products of my robot's labour to people who's robots are producing things I might want, in exchange of said things. To simplify the logistics of all this, the robotic secretaries might wish to establish a credit system, and some of them might even earn some credits for their owners by handling these logistics...
The situation you describe is simply one where you get food - or, more generally, guaranteed minimum income - without having to work. You get all the benefits of owning a bunch of slaves without any of the moral or practical problems. It's also very likely that, after the initial period of lazing around, you'd find something to busy yourself with (and possibly earn extra credits), such as programming, art or whatever.
This is a good thing, as it frees people from being wage slaves and wasting their lifes doing jobs they hate, freeing them to do things they want instead.
Because being abused in a factory is still better than living in a farm, the same reason why Europeans left farms during the Industrial Revolution to work in factories. The conditions in those factories were still horrible enough that it gave birth to communism.
Of course it did, as technical development always does, but only after the worst abuses had been stopped.
I just explained it to you: it twists the markets and causes them to misoptimize.
No, we don't. The importers of cheap goods benefit in the short term by being able to undercut domestic manufacturers, causing those domestic manufacturers to either go bankrupt or lower their standards of pay and treatment of workforce to match China. This, in turn, causes said workforce to have lower income, which lowers their standard of living unless they take debt, which of course can't happen endlessly. It also makes them dependent on cheap Chinese imports while eating the initial benefits. The end result is economic ruin, which is what has been happening lately.
They build their industries up, we lose them. Also, please understand that pollution doesn't stay in place, it spreads from China to the whole globe, including where we live.
Where do these new jobs come from? Where does this new wealth come from? If our production is done in China, we are paying Chinese to do it, which means that wealth is leaving out economy. We are losing wealth, not gaining it, and lowering wages eat away any benefits from cheaper price of imports. And as people keep getting poorer, it gets harder and harder to start new companies or keep old ones going, since people can't afford your products.
The only ones who benefit from this situation are the heads of multinational corporations. Our economy is very near the point of no return, we have to do something about this problem while we still can.
Chinese products are cheaper because the workforce is abused. That's another way of saying that they aren't cheaper at all, Foxxconn has simply managed to succesfully externalize part of the cost to be paid by said Chinese workers rather than buyers. This is bad from the economic standpoint, since it encourages behavior where the total costs are actually greater.
An import tariff for such products is good because it forces the end user to pay for all the costs of the product, thus allowing free market to optimize resource usage. This is also the idea behind carbon credits and other such devices often derided by, ironically enough, free-market fundamentalists.
All computer components should have all of their costs included in their final price, including but not limited to pollution, injuries etc. caused by the operation of the manufacturing plants. If necessary, if for example a factory operates outside US jurisdiction and gains a price advantage by polluting with abandon, tariffs should be used to enforce this.
Failure to do so will result in market failure. You cannot have a free market if everyone can simply steal from others - which is what externalizing costs is really doing. Free markets can only work if you are forced to pay for all the costs of whatever choice you make, and that requires tariff in a world with different jurisdictions.
There are, of course, ethical reasons to stop multinational corporations from killing Chinese workers in the name of profit, but I'm addressing the half of the point which I think might appeal more to the stone-hearted conservatists.
China allows multinational companies to own and use factories there so it isn't communist, now is it?
Waste of paper and ink, not to mention having to buy a printer. How about accepting both paper and PDF?
No matter what their goals are, that's what most of the students end up being, if they are lucky and get employed that is. Most people are losers and never do anything significant, simply because the bottom of the pyramid is wider than the top.
I remember seeing a Slashdot sig which said something to the effect that "masses fear libertarianism because they'll be judged by their merit under it". And, you know what? It was absolutely correct. Most people are about average, so of course they end up demanding policies that benefit the average person rather than the elites, real or self-deluded.
Most people will end up their society's equivalent of ditch-diggers, so a public school needs to teach them how to use shovels, so they can make a living.
A lot of places charge employees for parking because they can. They're businesses, if they can get money from you they will.
Could you encrypt the algorithm itself? That is, just like you use the key to transform the cleartext to ciphertext, you would use the key to transfer the original algorithm to a "ciphered" algorithm, which operates on that ciphertext, producing more ciphertext, which, when decrypted, will be the same as if you'd run the original algorithm on the original cleartext. Basically, your "cloud provider" would not know either your data or what you're doing to it.
And XOR encryption is just fine, as long as you XOR against a random bit string and keep it to yourself :).
Ah yes, national healthcare leads to death camps, never mind that it didn't in most of the world. Do you right-wing lunatics actually believe the shit you're spouting, or do you just think the rest of us are stupid enough to believe it?
According to Wikipedia, a Space Shuttle launch costs $450 million, or less than half of what you said. Apart from that, Falcon lifts 10 tons and Space Shuttle 24, Falcon was build decades later with far more advanced technology, and there's the little thing about Falcon not in active service yet, so its cost per launch is really unknown.
I understand that this "government is inefficient and private industry efficient" meme is popular right now, but it caused the current financial crisis, so please stop it already.
ITER is a research reactor, and research programs in general can use all the money they can get.
So wait ten minutes after rain starts before starting to collect it. Most particles should have been flushed out by then.
Then again, breathing these particles doesn't apparently kill me, so I really don't understand how drinking them would.
Why not? Just build a huge cylinder, adapt Project Orion pusher-plate as a pistonhead, and connect to a generator through a crankshaft and flywheel. Hmm... I think I'd better patent this "internal thermonuclear engine" - it's even completely carbon-neutral :).
No, that's not possible. In a Tokamak-style reactor the magnetic coils which contain the plasma are anchored to the wall. The wall is already bearing all the force the plasma can exert. If plasma gets disrupted, it's pressure and temperature drop rapidly, making the wall bear less, not more, stress.
That's why fusion reactor is safe: any kind of malfunction will cause energy levels to go down, not up. It simply can't produce more energy than it normally does at full power.
Besides, if the wall did get damaged and hydrogen escaped, so what? The fuel is hydrogen and end result helium. Both are much lighter than air and will rapidly rise to the top of atmosphere and disperse into space from there.
Whenever I see the words "nuclear" and "environmentalist" near each other, my first assumption is that said environmentalists are protesting against nuclear power. In fact it seems to me that Greenpeace is the biggest obstacle to actually protecting the environment nowadays, thanks to their idiotic anti-nuclear stance. It also doesn't help that you can't really talk about protecting your environment without first convincing your audience that you aren't some kind of nutcase wanting humanity to die off, thanks to these nutcases.
Not bad at all? He wouldn't had started the Holocaust, wouldn't had started WWII, and would likely not have sought dictatorial power in the first place. He'd been just a politician amongst many, or possibly a painter as he originally wanted to be.
Purposely infect your machine with a spambot or two and drown the signal under the noise. Feed the Carnivore...
What a weird fetish.
Yes, you do. Otherwise we wouldn't be having this conversation. Ultimately, it is you who determines your actions.
Either releasing a document is right or it isn't. If it's right, why suffer for doing the right thing if you can avoid it? And if it's not right, suffering a punishment for it doesn't make it any more right.
Oh, sure. But if I get my hands on classified material, and have the opportunity to publish it without getting found out, it's my personal view on whether that material should or shouldn't be classified that determines whether I will.
You created it. Then you sold someone a copy. At that point, the copy is that someone else's property. It's not yours anymore. That someone else is, in fact, entitled to sell it, or make a hundred thousand copies and sellign them. Copyright law tries to subvert this to give financial incentive for creation, but has itself been long since twisted to the point of being a hindrance rather than help for the growth of human culture.
Unlike, say, property laws, copyright law is contrary to human nature and most people's understanding of right and wrong. That's why it gets broken constantly and casually. Your assertion that making copies of information after mere two generations(!) have had a monopoly artificially enforced is a "privilege" is ridiculous.
Yeah, command economies usually develop a black market where the real economic activity takes place, since people find the rules ridiculous. The black market for getting around copyright law is known as "Pirate Bay".
Video calling is simply redundant in Britain. Wherever you are, you can simply say: "Mr. Policeman, could you please forward a copy of this surveillance footage to Mr. So-and-so?"
And The One would, of course, control everything, and thus be an archetypical instance of a totalitarian government. In fact wasn't that the goal of fascism?
And that's just fine, since any specialized version you might make is also in public domain. GPL exists to hack around copyright law.
A specialized technician will likely still fix the problem faster than a jack-of-all-trades, even if the jack can do it too. That's why division of labour exists in the first place.
So, as the company size grows, it will eventually become cheaper to call a specialist than try to fix things yourself, or even arrange one to come in periodically to ensure that everything keeps runnign smoothly. In the meantime, getting you used to using RHLinux will make it more likely that you keep using it until that treshold is reached.
Even a cheapass is likely to end up buying things rather than doing them himself, simply because the opportunity cost is greater.
Those are the same OS with different add-on bundles. And as it happens, getting older programs to work in newer Windows versions can be quite a problem.
Except from a software vendors point of view it is, in fact, equivalent. All competition is.
They "lose" money in exactly the same way as they "lose" money when you pirate a program: in the form of potential profits.
This isn't true. Just like pirated copy of Photoshop is alternative to paying for it, so is Gimp. FOSS competes with proprietary software, just like pirated copies do, and competition lowers profits, which is apparently counted as "loss" by you.
Either FOSS causes losses to proprietary software vendors by giving people alternatives to paying for software, or piracy doesn't either. Either not getting as much profit as you might have in some hypothethical alternative reality is a loss or it isn't. You can't have it both ways.
Very good, Larry. Short, but pointless.