The Civil War was not about the oppression of slaves (contrary to popular belief). It was about the crushing of dissent.
And the particular thing being dissented against was the looming eradication of slavery. Which goes to show that you can be the small band of rebels taking on overwhelming odds and still be the bad guys.
Interpreting a large number of edges over perhaps a large part of the field of view to recognize the immediate environment using a memory of stored models and templates has completely different computational requirements and an entirely different opportunity (or relative lack of it) regarding parallelization.
Determining how well input matches a particular model is independent on how well it matches another model, and can thus be done in parallel. And of course, since neural networks don't separate memory and processing units like von Neuman architecture does, it's hard to see how such operations could avoid parallelism.
The brain is an analog computer. The notion of parallelism is fundamentally different for an analog computer...
Citation needed. Intuitively the difference between a digital and analog computer is that the former has two discrete signal levels while the latter has a continuous band. This doesn't seem to imply anything about the actual structure of the system.
Also, it isn't certain that the brain is actually analog. Individual neurons have discrete "firing" and "not firing" states. Firing rate is often summarized as neuron activation level, since it correlates with energy usage which is what various imaging techniques actually measure, but that doesn't prove that the timing of individual firing events doesn't matter. And if they do, we have a digital system.
In a sense, every single neuron is operating independently and in parallel with the rest. Describing it in terms of parallel processing with digital CPUs makes no sense.
Every single transistor is also operating independently and in parallel with the rest.
On the contrary, science needs to override politics.
And once again conspiracy theories get more wind in their sails.
"Values" based politics has brought us war, depression, and misery. It has to be replaced by What Works. Facts. Results.
"Results" based politics brought us Soviet Union, the Holocaust, Mao's Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, Khmer Rouges, witch hunts, Hiroshima, 9/11, every form of religious persecution ever, and in fact pretty much every atrocity in human history. All of these were done because someone decided the results they were trying to achieve were more important than morality ("values"). That they usually failed to achieve much of anything besides killing a lot of people does not change that, but simply serves to illustrate how hard it is to actually predict the results of your decisions, especially if you're utterly convinced you are more rational/pious/whatever than your opponents.
Otherwise the movie Idiocracy will be a documentary of the future.
So basically your desire to overturn democracy and install philosopher-kings is based on a movie you once saw.
The average person, bluntly put, really isn't all that smart. They struggled through High School math (if they even made it that far), barely understood any science-based classes they were forced to take, and otherwise believes more of what their local religious leadership says than any random guy in a lab coat being interviewed on television. At best the average person would want you to demonstrate how this 'global warming' thing works. At worst, they'll assume it's some world-wide scam to make them pay more money for everything.
So which one is it? Is Joe Average disbelieving AGW because he's a moron or because he's drawing the entirely correct conclusion that agreeing it's true would have negative consequences for him?
It seems to me the worst you can say about Joe is that he's playing stupid, but then again, self-serving self-deception is a pretty much universal human trait. Even your own estimation of average person's intellectual capacity appears to fall into that category.
All those 'scientists' are doing Satans' work anyway, right?
No, but if there's such a being, then viewing other people in the worst possible light so you can feel superior to them is definitely doing so. You'll gets a momentary ego boost at the cost of preventing any hope of cooperation or compromise, so we'll fight for dominance as the world falls apart around us.
I've also been guilty of this, mainly towards Republicans and conservatives in general. At this rate this attitude threatens the very foundations of democracy itself. One can't very well accept compromise with - and much less a defeat to - a person one has convinced oneself is a demon in human form, either literal or metaphorical.
If it is $20/month one does not need to be rich to afford it.
But one does need to be not poor, which is quickly becoming synonymous with rich as the middle class dies.
Also, the $20/month is the price of not being tracked through your car. How much does it cost to opt out of all ways to track you? After all, if you tolerate this, then surely you don't object to that either. It doesn't help you to be able to opt out of any particular cut, if the 999 others you couldn't afford to avoid still bleed you dry.
Yes, too much of anything can kill you. The difference is you can drink enough water to slate your thirst while being well within the range of safe.
Unless you were thirsty due to sweating, in which case you also need to replace the salt you've lost.
MDMA however, any dosage that is high enough to be worth taking is also within that dangerous range.
And with LSD, cannabis and magic mushrooms they aren't. In fact even a non-intoxicating amount of cannabis is worth taking for me, since it makes certain - presumably neurological - problems in my leg go away for a week or so. That's the problem with combining a bunch of substances with completely different effects and mechanisms of actions under a single label. And of course the term "drugs" doesn't include one of the most dangerous of psychoactive substances - alcohol - for some inane reason.
Also, there's the fact that LSD (and reportedly MDMA, but I haven't verified) have tremendous psychiatric potential in helping people overcome various problems, addiction being one of them, ironically enough. It's the War on Drugs that keeps this potential from being exploited under the guidance of professionals, and forces anyone who would do so to rely on black market products of unknown quality.
So the question is, where do you draw the line -- how many IQ points must a substance erase before you're in favor of banning its use -- 30? 80?
That's an excellent question. But if the issue is loss of IQ points, why limit this to "substances"? For example, how many IQ points does inadequate sleep cost? Clearly, we must have a curfew and ban coffee. How about exhaustion from work? Let's ban overtime, and limit daily hours to 4 while we're at it. And of course you are writing your message through speech-to-text while working on a treadmill - good circulation is vital for mental performance, after all - which needs to be mandated, as well.
I think that's a really interesting take on things, but I disagree that it means the twilight of capitalism. It sounds more like the end of long work weeks.
If you get a shorter workweek with the same pay, it's an effective pay rise (which I recommended). If you don't, how will that help? Same total wages = same total demand.
We'll still need a way to choose economic winners and losers, a way to vote that product A fills our needs at a given price better than product B.
Of course we need an economic system. But unfortunately that doesn't mean it'll continue working. We need to fix the problems or suffer the consequences.
That's true even if 100% of the population is on welfare and robots do all the work.
As it happens, citizen pay would be another way to stop the tailspin.
I also think it's a mistake to leave out the service economy. There may well come a time when human labor is entirely worthless, but human conversation is still nice. Won't the most entertaining people still have something worth charging for? Or the prettiest people? Or the most philosophical?
Unfortunately, for service economy to be useful for solving this problem, they would need to pay as wages more money than is spent in their products, otherwise they simply shift demand around. That's not possible without "creative" bookkeeping (which might be what we'll need to eventually resort to anyway).
The issue isn't that people don't want products (be they better mousetraps or entertaining philosophical debates), the issue is that they can't afford them. If human labour is near worthless, how will you get money to pay for such luxuries? And if you can't buy them, then both the philosophers and mousetrap makers will go unemployed and can't afford anything in turn, which causes more people to become unemployed, and so on.
And on and on it goes, led by society's best shouting the battle cry, "it's for your own good!"
Really? Because to me, the battle cry sounds a lot more like "if you don't submit to everything corporations want, you're a communist, and go by the way of Soviet Russia!"
A system that's built on competition self-destructs because it no longer has credible competition. Oh the irony.
On a thinly related topic, I still struggle with the concept of automation of work creating poverty instead of wealth.
It's because our economic system originates from before Industrial Revolution, and was designed to get everyone to "bust their ass" working. It was designed to maximize production in a situation where labour was the limiting factor, and breaks down spectacularly when raw materials (including energy) are.
Total demand = (demand of labour of previous timestep) * (fraction of GDP paid as wages) + min((fraction of GDP paid as profits), constant)
Demand of labour = (avg((total demand), (total demand of previous timestep)) / productivity
As long as productivity stays low, production is limited by workforce, and economy tends towards full employment. If productivity increases faster than wages, as has happened, you eventually hit a situation where total wages of all workers can no longer create enough demand to buy the entire supply. Market prices fall, and companies need to invest on increasing efficiency rather than increasing production to keep their profits up. Since a physical product will always require a certain amount of raw materials, eventually they reach the point where the only thing they can cut is workforce. This causes demand to fall (you can only spend money you have), and thus the economy enters a stall.
This is also why stimulus isn't working: investment now goes to cutting workforce - and thus demand - further, not expanding production. The only way to actually fix the economy would be to increase the buying power of Joe Average. This, in practice, means drastically increasing wages and unemployment benefit, in other words, to move income from the rich to the poor. That seems unlikely to happen, especially under a Republican government, so I guess we're seeing the twilight of capitalism.
Of course, it's also possible to keep demand up and economy working by giving credit with reckless abandon and hope you can keep juggling an ever more complex web of financial instruments to obfuscate that. But who would be stupid enough to risk the fate of their country - and their own golden goose, and possibly the entire Western civilization - for that, rather than just ensure people are paid enough?
I actually support legalization. And I also support employers testing prospective employees. If you want to work for XYZ Corporation, then XYZ Corporation has a right to make sure you aren't stoned when you come to work. This is one of the ways they can check to see if you are stoned. Bummer for you that THC doesn't get filtered out quickly.
So in other words, you don't support legalization, you support letting XYZ Corporation in effect make its own laws.
It's nice to know fascism is alive and well.
The question I have, is do you want the job more than you want to smoke pot, or not. Make your choice. It seems like you have made your choice. Just remember, you turned down the job so you can smoke pot, so you can't complain about not having a job.
You can choose to bow to the Beast, or you can be punished by being shut outside the economy. In the latter case the Beast is blameless and you can't complain, because after all you rejected its Mark of your own free will.
Are you certain you aren't getting your archangels mixed up?
Was that because it's actually complex, or because the notation reads like an ancient Egyptian curse translated to Greek? Because that seems to be the first problem of pretty much every mathematical explanation of physics I've ever seen: they insist on using greek letters to denote both variables and operands, rather than English words. As a result the average person can't read the formula, and thus can only comprehend it as a pictogram.
Imagine if the textbook was written with the same standards we have for programs: variables and functions must have descriptive names, operations must have comments explaining why they're being done, and the syntax needs to be consistent (mechanically parsable). Would quantum mechanics - or general relativity, or whatever - still be beyond average person's grasp?
Current physics textbooks jump right from "Hello world" of physics to hand-tuned assembly. But the concepts being described are not, in fact, that hard to comprehend. It's the description itself that's an impenetrable mess.
What counts is what capabilities you have in the end.
What matters is what proof of capability you have in the end. The goal of grades is to let employers (or med school, or whatever) to rank applicants without bothering to test them themselves. Consequently, what matters to the student is the letter in the report card, not whether they know the course material. And that means if the most effective way to increase said grade is to intimidate the professor, or to cheat, that's exactly what the student will do.
This is true in general: the harder you try to measure results, the less likely you are to get actual results, since people will focus on exploiting the weaknesses of your ranking system. Current financial crisis is perhaps the ultimate example of this phenomenom, but it happens everywhere performance is measured.
Try this, leave your home and car unlocked so that others can have free access to your stuff. Your stuff wants to be free, let it go.
Someone takes my car, I won't have a car anymore. Someone copies this message and reposts it on another site, chances are I'll never even know.
But guess what? The company who built my car didn't get paid the price equivalent to the value of all the use I'll derive from it over its lifetime. If they did, there would by definition be no reason for me to buy it. The same goes for the baker who made my bread, the constructors who built my house, the textile workers who made my clothes, the scientists who figured out how to use the electricity that powers my computer, etc. Every single person gets paid less than their work is worth, otherwise hiring them was pointless at best. Yet it's only the artists who go to conniptions over the idea that someone might hear a song or see a film or play a game they produced without them getting a cut.
Lots of artist types think they're special little snowlakes and entitled to be treated like that, and to some extent the world obliges as part of their payment. But only to some extent. MAFIAA has been paid their fair share for their content, and no one's going to feel sorry for them just because they think they deserve more.
Capitalism isn't a political system, it's an economic system, and it's not going to fail.
An economic system doesn't exist in isolation, but is simply a subsystem of society in general. It is dependent on the political system for allowing or disallowing certain behaviours - for example, it's rather hard to be a capitalist in a society that limits property rights. Capitalism is failing because it's increasingly incapable of providing for people's needs, such as security, yet it requires their willing participation to exist. That participation is evaporating; the fondest wish of most people I know is to retire - in other words, quit their participation in the system. The only reason they won't is the whip of poverty, but that's an inherently unstable situation - a challenger won't have trouble finding support simply by virtue of not being capitalism.
It will always work because it's goal is for the people participating to make money, and they do.
Really? Because most people are making less and working harder for it, assuming they haven't been rendered unemployed and thus not only poor but also objects of scorn.
I think capitalism is great and is perhaps the only economic system that can work.
That's an odd notion, given that it has existed for a few hundred of the (tens of) thousands of years humans have had economic systems.
But it can be kept separate from gov't to a much larger extent than we now do.
No, it can't. Every law has economic conclusions which must be considered. Nor is it fair nor wise to simply dismiss the concerns of people or institutions affected. A society cannot avoid having economy, thus it can't avoid having an economic policy.
A Ponzi scheme is when you use money from later investors to pay earlier ones to create an illusion of a profitable business where none exists. For a hardware vendor to pull a Ponzi scheme on their customers would require them to conduct some weird "send us a computer, we'll send you two later" stunt. Not delivering paid-for hardware is a simply fraud, not a Ponzi scheme.
Seriously, stop calling every shady business practice a Ponzi scheme.
Factory work is going to be exhausting no matter what the shift, right?
Why would it be? The whole idea of a factory is to have enough volume of production that investing in machines becomes profitable. It's not a Wheel of Pain.
Obviously, incompetent management can turn any workplace into a Hell on Earth, but that's a separate issue.
Americans don't want to narrow the digital or any other divides. They just want to be on the other side. So they fight for what little social mobility is left, and those who do get across blame those who didn't for their situation, since this allows them to take credit for what was mostly dumb luck. All are too busy fighting to get across to wonder who stole all the earth that used to bridge the divide.
All the while the fat cats are laughing at the stupid peons, which keeps them too busy to realize that they, in turn, are about to face the end of their world. After all, economy can't work without people having income, thus the ever-worsening debt crises as the credit system tries to compensate and reaches its limits. The current one is already bad enough that only government intervention kept the economy from completely collapsing, but even the state is running an ever-increasing tab, so who's gonna save them both the next time?
All in all, a lot of self-styled masters of the world are about to fail their performance reviews, hard. It'll be interesting to see what'll take their place, assuming there's anything left standing, of course.
He might as well have said that as a form of government, dictatorship is superior to democracy.
Well, in a democracy, the people might vote based on their best interests rather than your ideological goals. Also, they're all stupid sheeple anyway, so why should they get to veto your brillant plans?
Communism fell due to setting the goals and secular religion of a few elites above the well-being of the masses. Now capitalism is about to fall due to acquiring a monopoly and abusing the shit out of it. History loves irony, it seems.
Drop GPL v3, most everyone I know isn't going to touch you with a 10 foot pole if you use GPLv3. Just like using GPL is a matter of principle, NOT using v3 is a matter of principle for many people.
Perhaps. But the important question is: are these the kind of people you want within 10 feet of your code, or anything valuable for that matter? After all, GPLv3 was made to close loopholes in GPLv2, so the cynic in me wonders just why one would object to it, unless one was looking towards to exploiting these loopholes.
Well, the POV-Ray format includes a full programming language. That's one of the reasons why POV-Ray has been considered very powerful for hand-authored contents - you just automate stuff instead of doing everything by hand.
POV-Ray programming language is roughly equivalent to C precompiler. Calling it "powerful" says more about the competition than the language itself.
Slashdot Mirror
And the particular thing being dissented against was the looming eradication of slavery. Which goes to show that you can be the small band of rebels taking on overwhelming odds and still be the bad guys.
Determining how well input matches a particular model is independent on how well it matches another model, and can thus be done in parallel. And of course, since neural networks don't separate memory and processing units like von Neuman architecture does, it's hard to see how such operations could avoid parallelism.
Citation needed. Intuitively the difference between a digital and analog computer is that the former has two discrete signal levels while the latter has a continuous band. This doesn't seem to imply anything about the actual structure of the system.
Also, it isn't certain that the brain is actually analog. Individual neurons have discrete "firing" and "not firing" states. Firing rate is often summarized as neuron activation level, since it correlates with energy usage which is what various imaging techniques actually measure, but that doesn't prove that the timing of individual firing events doesn't matter. And if they do, we have a digital system.
Every single transistor is also operating independently and in parallel with the rest.
And once again conspiracy theories get more wind in their sails.
"Results" based politics brought us Soviet Union, the Holocaust, Mao's Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, Khmer Rouges, witch hunts, Hiroshima, 9/11, every form of religious persecution ever, and in fact pretty much every atrocity in human history. All of these were done because someone decided the results they were trying to achieve were more important than morality ("values"). That they usually failed to achieve much of anything besides killing a lot of people does not change that, but simply serves to illustrate how hard it is to actually predict the results of your decisions, especially if you're utterly convinced you are more rational/pious/whatever than your opponents.
So basically your desire to overturn democracy and install philosopher-kings is based on a movie you once saw.
So which one is it? Is Joe Average disbelieving AGW because he's a moron or because he's drawing the entirely correct conclusion that agreeing it's true would have negative consequences for him?
It seems to me the worst you can say about Joe is that he's playing stupid, but then again, self-serving self-deception is a pretty much universal human trait. Even your own estimation of average person's intellectual capacity appears to fall into that category.
No, but if there's such a being, then viewing other people in the worst possible light so you can feel superior to them is definitely doing so. You'll gets a momentary ego boost at the cost of preventing any hope of cooperation or compromise, so we'll fight for dominance as the world falls apart around us.
I've also been guilty of this, mainly towards Republicans and conservatives in general. At this rate this attitude threatens the very foundations of democracy itself. One can't very well accept compromise with - and much less a defeat to - a person one has convinced oneself is a demon in human form, either literal or metaphorical.
But one does need to be not poor, which is quickly becoming synonymous with rich as the middle class dies.
Also, the $20/month is the price of not being tracked through your car. How much does it cost to opt out of all ways to track you? After all, if you tolerate this, then surely you don't object to that either. It doesn't help you to be able to opt out of any particular cut, if the 999 others you couldn't afford to avoid still bleed you dry.
So in practice, it's voluntary to the rich and mandatory to everyone else.
I have to admit, Republicans sure got to work fast.
Unless you were thirsty due to sweating, in which case you also need to replace the salt you've lost.
And with LSD, cannabis and magic mushrooms they aren't. In fact even a non-intoxicating amount of cannabis is worth taking for me, since it makes certain - presumably neurological - problems in my leg go away for a week or so. That's the problem with combining a bunch of substances with completely different effects and mechanisms of actions under a single label. And of course the term "drugs" doesn't include one of the most dangerous of psychoactive substances - alcohol - for some inane reason.
Also, there's the fact that LSD (and reportedly MDMA, but I haven't verified) have tremendous psychiatric potential in helping people overcome various problems, addiction being one of them, ironically enough. It's the War on Drugs that keeps this potential from being exploited under the guidance of professionals, and forces anyone who would do so to rely on black market products of unknown quality.
That's an excellent question. But if the issue is loss of IQ points, why limit this to "substances"? For example, how many IQ points does inadequate sleep cost? Clearly, we must have a curfew and ban coffee. How about exhaustion from work? Let's ban overtime, and limit daily hours to 4 while we're at it. And of course you are writing your message through speech-to-text while working on a treadmill - good circulation is vital for mental performance, after all - which needs to be mandated, as well.
So. Where do you draw the line?
If you get a shorter workweek with the same pay, it's an effective pay rise (which I recommended). If you don't, how will that help? Same total wages = same total demand.
Of course we need an economic system. But unfortunately that doesn't mean it'll continue working. We need to fix the problems or suffer the consequences.
As it happens, citizen pay would be another way to stop the tailspin.
Unfortunately, for service economy to be useful for solving this problem, they would need to pay as wages more money than is spent in their products, otherwise they simply shift demand around. That's not possible without "creative" bookkeeping (which might be what we'll need to eventually resort to anyway).
The issue isn't that people don't want products (be they better mousetraps or entertaining philosophical debates), the issue is that they can't afford them. If human labour is near worthless, how will you get money to pay for such luxuries? And if you can't buy them, then both the philosophers and mousetrap makers will go unemployed and can't afford anything in turn, which causes more people to become unemployed, and so on.
Really? Because to me, the battle cry sounds a lot more like "if you don't submit to everything corporations want, you're a communist, and go by the way of Soviet Russia!"
A system that's built on competition self-destructs because it no longer has credible competition. Oh the irony.
It's because our economic system originates from before Industrial Revolution, and was designed to get everyone to "bust their ass" working. It was designed to maximize production in a situation where labour was the limiting factor, and breaks down spectacularly when raw materials (including energy) are.
Total demand = (demand of labour of previous timestep) * (fraction of GDP paid as wages) + min((fraction of GDP paid as profits), constant)
Demand of labour = (avg((total demand), (total demand of previous timestep)) / productivity
As long as productivity stays low, production is limited by workforce, and economy tends towards full employment. If productivity increases faster than wages, as has happened, you eventually hit a situation where total wages of all workers can no longer create enough demand to buy the entire supply. Market prices fall, and companies need to invest on increasing efficiency rather than increasing production to keep their profits up. Since a physical product will always require a certain amount of raw materials, eventually they reach the point where the only thing they can cut is workforce. This causes demand to fall (you can only spend money you have), and thus the economy enters a stall.
This is also why stimulus isn't working: investment now goes to cutting workforce - and thus demand - further, not expanding production. The only way to actually fix the economy would be to increase the buying power of Joe Average. This, in practice, means drastically increasing wages and unemployment benefit, in other words, to move income from the rich to the poor. That seems unlikely to happen, especially under a Republican government, so I guess we're seeing the twilight of capitalism.
Of course, it's also possible to keep demand up and economy working by giving credit with reckless abandon and hope you can keep juggling an ever more complex web of financial instruments to obfuscate that. But who would be stupid enough to risk the fate of their country - and their own golden goose, and possibly the entire Western civilization - for that, rather than just ensure people are paid enough?
So in other words, you don't support legalization, you support letting XYZ Corporation in effect make its own laws.
It's nice to know fascism is alive and well.
You can choose to bow to the Beast, or you can be punished by being shut outside the economy. In the latter case the Beast is blameless and you can't complain, because after all you rejected its Mark of your own free will.
Are you certain you aren't getting your archangels mixed up?
Was that because it's actually complex, or because the notation reads like an ancient Egyptian curse translated to Greek? Because that seems to be the first problem of pretty much every mathematical explanation of physics I've ever seen: they insist on using greek letters to denote both variables and operands, rather than English words. As a result the average person can't read the formula, and thus can only comprehend it as a pictogram.
Imagine if the textbook was written with the same standards we have for programs: variables and functions must have descriptive names, operations must have comments explaining why they're being done, and the syntax needs to be consistent (mechanically parsable). Would quantum mechanics - or general relativity, or whatever - still be beyond average person's grasp?
Current physics textbooks jump right from "Hello world" of physics to hand-tuned assembly. But the concepts being described are not, in fact, that hard to comprehend. It's the description itself that's an impenetrable mess.
What matters is what proof of capability you have in the end. The goal of grades is to let employers (or med school, or whatever) to rank applicants without bothering to test them themselves. Consequently, what matters to the student is the letter in the report card, not whether they know the course material. And that means if the most effective way to increase said grade is to intimidate the professor, or to cheat, that's exactly what the student will do.
This is true in general: the harder you try to measure results, the less likely you are to get actual results, since people will focus on exploiting the weaknesses of your ranking system. Current financial crisis is perhaps the ultimate example of this phenomenom, but it happens everywhere performance is measured.
Someone takes my car, I won't have a car anymore. Someone copies this message and reposts it on another site, chances are I'll never even know.
But guess what? The company who built my car didn't get paid the price equivalent to the value of all the use I'll derive from it over its lifetime. If they did, there would by definition be no reason for me to buy it. The same goes for the baker who made my bread, the constructors who built my house, the textile workers who made my clothes, the scientists who figured out how to use the electricity that powers my computer, etc. Every single person gets paid less than their work is worth, otherwise hiring them was pointless at best. Yet it's only the artists who go to conniptions over the idea that someone might hear a song or see a film or play a game they produced without them getting a cut.
Lots of artist types think they're special little snowlakes and entitled to be treated like that, and to some extent the world obliges as part of their payment. But only to some extent. MAFIAA has been paid their fair share for their content, and no one's going to feel sorry for them just because they think they deserve more.
An economic system doesn't exist in isolation, but is simply a subsystem of society in general. It is dependent on the political system for allowing or disallowing certain behaviours - for example, it's rather hard to be a capitalist in a society that limits property rights. Capitalism is failing because it's increasingly incapable of providing for people's needs, such as security, yet it requires their willing participation to exist. That participation is evaporating; the fondest wish of most people I know is to retire - in other words, quit their participation in the system. The only reason they won't is the whip of poverty, but that's an inherently unstable situation - a challenger won't have trouble finding support simply by virtue of not being capitalism.
Really? Because most people are making less and working harder for it, assuming they haven't been rendered unemployed and thus not only poor but also objects of scorn.
That's an odd notion, given that it has existed for a few hundred of the (tens of) thousands of years humans have had economic systems.
No, it can't. Every law has economic conclusions which must be considered. Nor is it fair nor wise to simply dismiss the concerns of people or institutions affected. A society cannot avoid having economy, thus it can't avoid having an economic policy.
A Ponzi scheme is when you use money from later investors to pay earlier ones to create an illusion of a profitable business where none exists. For a hardware vendor to pull a Ponzi scheme on their customers would require them to conduct some weird "send us a computer, we'll send you two later" stunt. Not delivering paid-for hardware is a simply fraud, not a Ponzi scheme.
Seriously, stop calling every shady business practice a Ponzi scheme.
Why would it be? The whole idea of a factory is to have enough volume of production that investing in machines becomes profitable. It's not a Wheel of Pain.
Obviously, incompetent management can turn any workplace into a Hell on Earth, but that's a separate issue.
Americans don't want to narrow the digital or any other divides. They just want to be on the other side. So they fight for what little social mobility is left, and those who do get across blame those who didn't for their situation, since this allows them to take credit for what was mostly dumb luck. All are too busy fighting to get across to wonder who stole all the earth that used to bridge the divide.
All the while the fat cats are laughing at the stupid peons, which keeps them too busy to realize that they, in turn, are about to face the end of their world. After all, economy can't work without people having income, thus the ever-worsening debt crises as the credit system tries to compensate and reaches its limits. The current one is already bad enough that only government intervention kept the economy from completely collapsing, but even the state is running an ever-increasing tab, so who's gonna save them both the next time?
All in all, a lot of self-styled masters of the world are about to fail their performance reviews, hard. It'll be interesting to see what'll take their place, assuming there's anything left standing, of course.
I'm all for legalizing, but maybe you should be sober while piloting a spaceship?
Well, in a democracy, the people might vote based on their best interests rather than your ideological goals. Also, they're all stupid sheeple anyway, so why should they get to veto your brillant plans?
Communism fell due to setting the goals and secular religion of a few elites above the well-being of the masses. Now capitalism is about to fall due to acquiring a monopoly and abusing the shit out of it. History loves irony, it seems.
Perhaps. But the important question is: are these the kind of people you want within 10 feet of your code, or anything valuable for that matter? After all, GPLv3 was made to close loopholes in GPLv2, so the cynic in me wonders just why one would object to it, unless one was looking towards to exploiting these loopholes.
POV-Ray programming language is roughly equivalent to C precompiler. Calling it "powerful" says more about the competition than the language itself.
Every major power depends on international trade to the extent that if they're trying to take down the GPS, the world is already doomed.