p>If the market were free to determine the price of software, it would be a very low price. People at large don't see tangible value in something that can be copied at the cost of a couple of joules of electrical energy.
How is this insightful, and why should someone who ignores the cost of years of development be an economist?
Because in a free market, the proper cost of a product is how much someone is willing to pay for it; ask for more, and it won't get sold. This cost is clearly influenced by how difficult the product is to get; Internet makes it very easy to get software, so it makes its cost approach zero.
The one thing muddying the matter is copyright, a socialist measure to limit the actions people can take and therefore artificially drive up the price of whatever is copyrighted. I've noticed that the people who are all for globalization and preventing governments from interfering with the market are - for some strange reason - excluding copyright from this fight against interference. I suspect it's because most socialist measures benefit the people, while copyright benefits corporations.
China is an amazing culture with lots of fantastic history, and racism/culturalism is bad.
Racism is bad, because it is without basis: the actual physical differences between various human populations are very small and mainly cosmetic. Culturalism, on the other hand, has a basis: some cultures are better than others, for some values of better. For example, China seems to be stuck on dictatorship, which is a lot less pleasant to live under than a democracy.
The problem is, "faster" is absolutely not a value judgment. It's testable and quantifiable, and the claim that Opera is "faster," at least according to one benchmark, doesn't seem to be true.
I don't know if Opera is faster, but Firefox has an annoying habit of freezing for a few moments when there are lots of windows/tabs open and you open a new one. It's really, really annoying - almost as annoying as its habit of crashing when there's lots windows/tabs open and I accidentally press Insert when writing a comment on Slashdot.
I guess the fox has some memory control/fragmentation issues...
It's just being pragmatic. If Adolf Hitler had developed a filesystem and named it HitlerFS, nobody would want to use it no matter how amazingly wonderful it was. You can lament this all you like, but it won't change.
Hitler was the force behind autobahns and Volkswagen. Both are in use today.
Both the prosecutor and the defense pretty much axed anybody who expressed any knowledge of the law, typical judicial conventions, or Constitutional knowledge.
Considering the complexity of the law, people who don't study it seriously are likely to have some pretty big misconceptions about it. However, if they think they have knowledge about it, it will likely color their opinions, or they could outright refuse correction. A lawyer can prepare his arguments beforehand, since he knows the law, but he can't know what incorrect assumptions a juror might have, and even if he could, he still wouldn't be used to thinking in their terms.
Or to put it another way: someone who thinks he knows about law is either a wonderful or horrible juror. It would require time and effort to figure out which, so it's easier and safer to just disgard him.
It seemed that if you could name the top ten finalists on American Idol but couldn't name your congressman, governor, or senator, you were just what they wanted. Sheep. Mindless, thoughtless, easily-led sheep.
Not sharing your priorities doesn't make anyone mindless. And what's this talk about "their" senators - Disney is not eligible for juror duty, or is it ?
It's an awful thing, solitary. It crushes your spirit and weakens your resistance more effectively than any other form of mistreatment.... There is little doubt that solitary confinement causes some mental deterioration in even the most resilient of personalities....
Sounds like something the US should endorse/use, eh?
It should be noted that the purpose of any interrogation technique, used by the Army, the CIA or the police, is to crush the spirit of the interrogatee, so he'll submit to his interrogators. So, if such spirit-crushing is in itself unacceptable, regardless of methods, then interrogations is, period.
However, whether or not it is acceptable, using the word "torture" to describe solitary confinement will dilute the meaning of the word, just like using "pedophile" to describe someone who looks at naked pictures of 17-year olds or "sex offender" for someone who urinates in public is slowly but surely making those terms meaningless. "Torture" should be reserved for waterboarding, tearing out ones fingernails, beatings, and other such extreme methods.
Actually, as a presidents - and leaders in general - job is mainly to give tasks to someone else to do, it makes perfect sense to consider their ability to pick competent and trustworthy delegates who get things done right. Thus the quality of their campaign website is not quite as frivolous as it might seem.
Your campaign website is part of your campaign, and if you can't run your own campaign right, why should you be trusted to run the country ?
Wish I could post graphics here, I'm sure you've seen the "campaign poster" that says "Cthulu 2008: why vote for a lesser evil?"
The thing is, I'm not at all certain that Cthulu wouldn't be the lesser evil. Lovecraft repeateadly said that when Cthulu's people return, they'll set humanity free (from morals) before destroying us all. An alien invasion to free poor oppressed people, even if it kills them; sounds awfully familiar, doesnt it ? But at least His Tentacledness is honest about the killing part and doesn't come up with forged "evidence" to justify it.
Or they will buy a new one and just retrofit the damn thing to work around a kill switch. Just slap an old V8 in there, or build their own electronic fuel injection control (almost trivially easy) and shield the hell out of it and the kill switch is dead itself.
You could still kill it by using flame retardant gas or something. The engine sucks it in with air, gets into the combustion chamber, and keeps combustion from occurring, stopping the engine and preventing it from being restarted. Sure, you need to be close to use it; but I got the impression that this would be an alternative to simply shooting the boat to pieces, so that shouldn't be a problem.
How to keep the gas from being deadly to the boat pilot, however, is.
How in the world can you 'safely stop' and aircraft in flight?!
Maybe with some kind of net with lots of parachutes attached ? It catches the aircraft, the parachutes employe and cause enough drag to make it unmaneuverable, then it floats gently to the ground.
You'd also likely need something to kill the engines, thought. A fire retardant gas, perhaps ?
And congratulations for US government to safe on the development costs by posting this story to Slashdot and getting all of us geeks do the mindstorming for them - very sneaky, that:). Now if they could put the same amount of cunning into capturing Osama...
Maybe. There's also an argument that a pedophile who's busy fapping to pictures can't simultaneously be out there abusing kids, and is less likely to do so at all, since he relieved his urges with porn. Furthermore, it's also quite possible that closing down free sources of child pornography - such as these newsgroups - will make the people who want this kind of stuff to the pay sources, making them more profitable and thus increasing the incentive to produce child pornography.
I believe a better solution would be to monitor access in accordance with existing law, without censoring anything. People who access the material can then be investigated, once again in accordance with current law.
Generally speaking, I don't like laws which make accessing material illegal. How can merely seeing something be criminal ?
This works in every country where being unpatriotic is considered bad. If, however, being unpatriotic is not only tolerated but even encouraged you're not going to win over anyone. That's the advantage of self-loathing: You can't con the entire nation into doing something stupid by appealing to their patriotism.
But you can con them easily by appealing to their self-loathing: "Only I can prevent Nazi symphatizers from getting power ! Anyone who disagrees with me is helping the Nazis ! You're either with me or with the Nazis !"
Patriotism isn't the problem, the lack of cynicism is. Getting lost in a rousing speech is easy, so easy no one would ever believe just how gullible they can be, not until they've been fooled once. Hell, read what Tolkien said about Saruman's Voice: it applies to every good politician.
The solution is to train yourself to not react emotionally, but calmly dissect what's being said, and comparing it against the known dirty tricks. "Only you can set you free" from the cult of personality.
Finland is one of the countries where this kind of censorship is being used and it has shown that lots of legal sites get blocked too "accidentally". One of the most extreme examples is that the site which criticises the censorship got blocked because it listed addresses of the blocked sites.
But on the good side, it got me using Tor, and removed whatever lingering respect of authority I still had left:).
So I will ABSOLUTELY complain about the high cost of gasoline and ABSOLUTELY put forth Free Market ideas on how to resolve the gas price issue, because your perception of my "obvious" needs is apparently completely skewed by your Moonbat Leftism.
If you need to put forth ideas on how to lower gas price, then clearly the Free Market isn't solving the problem. In fact the very act of putting those ideas forth is leftist; after all, that's what leftism is - guiding/controlling the economy, rather than simply letting it set whatever price it will.
Welcome to the Red Side, comrade d3ac0n. Give in to your lust for cheap gasoline and bring worth ideas about how to guide the economy towards it... it is your destiny.
Of course, you are free to ignore my ideas, as I won't be telling you how to live your life. We Conservative/Libertarian types are like that. As long as you aren't breaking the law or hurting anyone else, you are free to live your life as you see fit.
Sadly, it isn't that simple. We live in the same world, so everything I do affects you and everything you do affects me. The car you drive not only uses gasoline, which helps drive up the price, making me pay more, but also returns the burned gasoline back to the air in the form of pollutants, increasing the ods that I'll get a lung cancer and die young. Is the effect so strong that I should have a say in the matter ? Maybe, maybe not; a situation where you have no personal freedom is intolerable, but so is a situation where you completely ignore the effects on other people. Somewhere between these extremes lies an acceptable compromise.
Libertarianism tries to argue that there is no need to compromise, that personal freedom trumps everything. I can't accept that, because if I did, and my neighbor decided to turn his yard into a toxic dump, I'd have no recourse. I'm a weak, fragile being, and need protection from other people and their predations. Libertarianists deny the need for such protection, and are often outright contemptuous for admitting such needs; but the simple fact is that if Libertarianism ever managed to gain power, the society would tear itself apart very fast. After all, if the society doesn't force my neighbor to consider the effects of his actions on me, then I have little choice but to do so myself; and when my friends and his friends join the brawl, we have a small civil war going. And the same would happen over and over again, everywhere.
Libertarianists usually blame the Government of being the "biggest threat to human life and liberty"; but it should be noticed that modern-type government is a very recent invention. Before that power was held by landlords, whose power - as the name suggests - was based on owning land, and thus being able to afford to hire mercenaries to enforce their will as absolute law; it was the rise of centralized government which crushed this feudal system, and abolishing it would simply transfer the power back to whoever can hire the most guns. Libertarian victory would result in less, not more, freedom for most people, with the only exception being those who are already rich and who would no longer have anything holding back their predations on common people.
That's why libertarianism is a minor party and likely to stay that way: not because people are "sheep", as many adherents of the idea so contemptuously declare, but because people are smart enough to realize that the likely result of abolishing the government or significantly weakening it would be for them to get shafted.
I wonder if I'll be getting offtopic for this... oh well.
See how that works? Everyone lives the way they want and we all get along. It's all about Freedom.
Yes. Straight until the way you want to live conflicts with how someone else wants to live by, for example, driving up gas price or polluting the air. Then we won't be getting along so well anymore:).
Drive 40 miles to unload and ride bikes around a 3 mile loop? It may get to the point that people actually ride bikes in their own neighborhoods. (Gasp.)
Since their neighborhoods have people driving SUVs while talking in cellphones, I'd say that riding a bike there can indeed be considered a Gasp-inducing experience;(.
I stand by the fact that people survived, in Buffalo, without SUV's for quite a long time.
This is a stupid argument. People also survived without penicillin, electricity, indoor plumping, houses themselves, clothes, fire, in fact without any technology whatsoever. The fact that their descendants - us - are around today is proof of that. So by your standard no technology is actually neccessary, and you should go sleep naked in a snow cave.
4x4 does not make driving in the snow safer.
This is true. Perhaps the parent was talking about getting stuck rather than getting into an accident ?
If you somehow knew you were going to have a head-on collision with a car whose parking brake came loose on a steep hill, would you rather take the hit in a) a light, high-tech car with a bunch of safety features, or b) the exact same car with a ton of pig-iron welded to the front?
I'll take option c: a light, small car, in which I have good chances of avoiding the collision. And even if I don't, at least I didn't have to pay for the gasoline to haul a ton of pig-iron up a steep hill:).
Ah, no. A flywheel has this generally useful but in this case, harmful tendency to tend to remain in its plane of rotation. So you can't mount it directly in a vehicle. You could mount it on 3D gimbals, but the cost and complexity and maybe the flywheel tend to go through the roof.
Or you simply mount it so the axis of rotation is vertical. Then you market the car as having an ultra-advanced rollover resistance device based on cutting-edge physics:).
Slashdot Mirror
They aren't idiots, but highly paid professionals. Presumably paid by the same corporations who paid for this law.
Because in a free market, the proper cost of a product is how much someone is willing to pay for it; ask for more, and it won't get sold. This cost is clearly influenced by how difficult the product is to get; Internet makes it very easy to get software, so it makes its cost approach zero.
The one thing muddying the matter is copyright, a socialist measure to limit the actions people can take and therefore artificially drive up the price of whatever is copyrighted. I've noticed that the people who are all for globalization and preventing governments from interfering with the market are - for some strange reason - excluding copyright from this fight against interference. I suspect it's because most socialist measures benefit the people, while copyright benefits corporations.
Racism is bad, because it is without basis: the actual physical differences between various human populations are very small and mainly cosmetic. Culturalism, on the other hand, has a basis: some cultures are better than others, for some values of better. For example, China seems to be stuck on dictatorship, which is a lot less pleasant to live under than a democracy.
I don't know if Opera is faster, but Firefox has an annoying habit of freezing for a few moments when there are lots of windows/tabs open and you open a new one. It's really, really annoying - almost as annoying as its habit of crashing when there's lots windows/tabs open and I accidentally press Insert when writing a comment on Slashdot.
I guess the fox has some memory control/fragmentation issues...
Hitler was the force behind autobahns and Volkswagen. Both are in use today.
And it would clearly be "Ein FS" ;).
How is "null" distinct from "NULL" in C ?
Considering the complexity of the law, people who don't study it seriously are likely to have some pretty big misconceptions about it. However, if they think they have knowledge about it, it will likely color their opinions, or they could outright refuse correction. A lawyer can prepare his arguments beforehand, since he knows the law, but he can't know what incorrect assumptions a juror might have, and even if he could, he still wouldn't be used to thinking in their terms.
Or to put it another way: someone who thinks he knows about law is either a wonderful or horrible juror. It would require time and effort to figure out which, so it's easier and safer to just disgard him.
Not sharing your priorities doesn't make anyone mindless. And what's this talk about "their" senators - Disney is not eligible for juror duty, or is it ?
It should be noted that the purpose of any interrogation technique, used by the Army, the CIA or the police, is to crush the spirit of the interrogatee, so he'll submit to his interrogators. So, if such spirit-crushing is in itself unacceptable, regardless of methods, then interrogations is, period.
However, whether or not it is acceptable, using the word "torture" to describe solitary confinement will dilute the meaning of the word, just like using "pedophile" to describe someone who looks at naked pictures of 17-year olds or "sex offender" for someone who urinates in public is slowly but surely making those terms meaningless. "Torture" should be reserved for waterboarding, tearing out ones fingernails, beatings, and other such extreme methods.
Actually, as a presidents - and leaders in general - job is mainly to give tasks to someone else to do, it makes perfect sense to consider their ability to pick competent and trustworthy delegates who get things done right. Thus the quality of their campaign website is not quite as frivolous as it might seem.
Your campaign website is part of your campaign, and if you can't run your own campaign right, why should you be trusted to run the country ?
Cthulhu is the lesser evil here ;(.
The thing is, I'm not at all certain that Cthulu wouldn't be the lesser evil. Lovecraft repeateadly said that when Cthulu's people return, they'll set humanity free (from morals) before destroying us all. An alien invasion to free poor oppressed people, even if it kills them; sounds awfully familiar, doesnt it ? But at least His Tentacledness is honest about the killing part and doesn't come up with forged "evidence" to justify it.
Cthulu for president: The Lesser Evil !
You could still kill it by using flame retardant gas or something. The engine sucks it in with air, gets into the combustion chamber, and keeps combustion from occurring, stopping the engine and preventing it from being restarted. Sure, you need to be close to use it; but I got the impression that this would be an alternative to simply shooting the boat to pieces, so that shouldn't be a problem.
How to keep the gas from being deadly to the boat pilot, however, is.
Maybe with some kind of net with lots of parachutes attached ? It catches the aircraft, the parachutes employe and cause enough drag to make it unmaneuverable, then it floats gently to the ground.
You'd also likely need something to kill the engines, thought. A fire retardant gas, perhaps ?
And congratulations for US government to safe on the development costs by posting this story to Slashdot and getting all of us geeks do the mindstorming for them - very sneaky, that :). Now if they could put the same amount of cunning into capturing Osama...
Maybe. There's also an argument that a pedophile who's busy fapping to pictures can't simultaneously be out there abusing kids, and is less likely to do so at all, since he relieved his urges with porn. Furthermore, it's also quite possible that closing down free sources of child pornography - such as these newsgroups - will make the people who want this kind of stuff to the pay sources, making them more profitable and thus increasing the incentive to produce child pornography.
Generally speaking, I don't like laws which make accessing material illegal. How can merely seeing something be criminal ?
Yeah, but he had sex with an aide. Surely you agree that that's a far serious crime than merely starting a few wars and high treason ?
But you can con them easily by appealing to their self-loathing: "Only I can prevent Nazi symphatizers from getting power ! Anyone who disagrees with me is helping the Nazis ! You're either with me or with the Nazis !"
Patriotism isn't the problem, the lack of cynicism is. Getting lost in a rousing speech is easy, so easy no one would ever believe just how gullible they can be, not until they've been fooled once. Hell, read what Tolkien said about Saruman's Voice: it applies to every good politician.
The solution is to train yourself to not react emotionally, but calmly dissect what's being said, and comparing it against the known dirty tricks. "Only you can set you free" from the cult of personality.
But on the good side, it got me using Tor, and removed whatever lingering respect of authority I still had left :).
If you need to put forth ideas on how to lower gas price, then clearly the Free Market isn't solving the problem. In fact the very act of putting those ideas forth is leftist; after all, that's what leftism is - guiding/controlling the economy, rather than simply letting it set whatever price it will.
Welcome to the Red Side, comrade d3ac0n. Give in to your lust for cheap gasoline and bring worth ideas about how to guide the economy towards it... it is your destiny.
Sadly, it isn't that simple. We live in the same world, so everything I do affects you and everything you do affects me. The car you drive not only uses gasoline, which helps drive up the price, making me pay more, but also returns the burned gasoline back to the air in the form of pollutants, increasing the ods that I'll get a lung cancer and die young. Is the effect so strong that I should have a say in the matter ? Maybe, maybe not; a situation where you have no personal freedom is intolerable, but so is a situation where you completely ignore the effects on other people. Somewhere between these extremes lies an acceptable compromise.
Libertarianism tries to argue that there is no need to compromise, that personal freedom trumps everything. I can't accept that, because if I did, and my neighbor decided to turn his yard into a toxic dump, I'd have no recourse. I'm a weak, fragile being, and need protection from other people and their predations. Libertarianists deny the need for such protection, and are often outright contemptuous for admitting such needs; but the simple fact is that if Libertarianism ever managed to gain power, the society would tear itself apart very fast. After all, if the society doesn't force my neighbor to consider the effects of his actions on me, then I have little choice but to do so myself; and when my friends and his friends join the brawl, we have a small civil war going. And the same would happen over and over again, everywhere.
Libertarianists usually blame the Government of being the "biggest threat to human life and liberty"; but it should be noticed that modern-type government is a very recent invention. Before that power was held by landlords, whose power - as the name suggests - was based on owning land, and thus being able to afford to hire mercenaries to enforce their will as absolute law; it was the rise of centralized government which crushed this feudal system, and abolishing it would simply transfer the power back to whoever can hire the most guns. Libertarian victory would result in less, not more, freedom for most people, with the only exception being those who are already rich and who would no longer have anything holding back their predations on common people.
That's why libertarianism is a minor party and likely to stay that way: not because people are "sheep", as many adherents of the idea so contemptuously declare, but because people are smart enough to realize that the likely result of abolishing the government or significantly weakening it would be for them to get shafted.
I wonder if I'll be getting offtopic for this... oh well.
Yes. Straight until the way you want to live conflicts with how someone else wants to live by, for example, driving up gas price or polluting the air. Then we won't be getting along so well anymore :).
Since their neighborhoods have people driving SUVs while talking in cellphones, I'd say that riding a bike there can indeed be considered a Gasp-inducing experience ;(.
This is a stupid argument. People also survived without penicillin, electricity, indoor plumping, houses themselves, clothes, fire, in fact without any technology whatsoever. The fact that their descendants - us - are around today is proof of that. So by your standard no technology is actually neccessary, and you should go sleep naked in a snow cave.
This is true. Perhaps the parent was talking about getting stuck rather than getting into an accident ?
I'll take option c: a light, small car, in which I have good chances of avoiding the collision. And even if I don't, at least I didn't have to pay for the gasoline to haul a ton of pig-iron up a steep hill :).
Or you simply mount it so the axis of rotation is vertical. Then you market the car as having an ultra-advanced rollover resistance device based on cutting-edge physics :).
Have an evil cleric rebuke them until they are commanded ? Microsoft Managers should be able to use half their manager level for that...
Every mathemathical truth is obvious, since it follows from the postulates. And every algorithm is obvious in hindsight.
Simple to whom ? The patent examiner, who gets to read the obfuscated patent claim ?
Username and password are usually "username" and "password", so it's not like this is much of a peed bumb.