To the grandparent: If you're going to say the levees failed due to poor engineering, fine, but please do not, in the process, downplay the strength of the storm that brought them down.
My point was that, in the grand scheme of things, Katrina was still a small storm. Had she come across as a category 5, nothing would be left in New Orleans. We wouldn't be talking about storm surge coming up canals and coming through breeches in weak sections of the levee, but rather water pouring over the levees into NO directly from the Mississippi. That's a really scary idea, and frankly, virtually impossible to prevent. No matter how high the levees get, they'll be vulernable. That's because the buffer between the city and the Gulf is disappearing rapidly, to the point where NO could be a true coastal city in our lifetime. At that point NO will look more like Holland, which doesn't get the kind of storms that we get in the Gulf.
While not at the end of every aisle, they do post guards at the entrances/exits. Or did you think the Walmart "greeters" were there just to welcome you and help you get a shopping cart?
I doubt that 90 year old "Earl" would be able to catch me.:-)
I don't know whether people are more broke or just more inclined to try it since cashiers just scan everything through absent-mindedly.
I don't know about record stores, but at most places I shop it seems that the cashiers know nothing about the products that they sell, so how would you expect them to know anything about the right price?
While we're talking about lack of product knowledge, let me say that I get kind of tired of asking for help at a store only to be told that I should read the box. I shop online more now because I can actually get the information I need about the product. I've also been known to stand in a store and call the 800 number on the box to ask the manufacturer questions. It's really quite sad.
I think that the bigger question is how much it costs to prevent such theft. If it doesn't happen often, why would a store put in a permanent fix for the problem? They don't station security guards at the end of every aisle to prevent casual stealing, so why is this any different?
Often, there are often unintended negative consequences to what we do no matter how good the planning is.
Any time we think that we can really have a big impact on nature, we're proven wrong. We've spent billions of dollars on levees for New Orleans, yet one small category 3 hurricane is all it takes to breech them. We build sea walls to hold back the ocean, yet after one or two powerful storms they disappear with little or no evidence they ever existed. Tsunamis can level entire coastlines.
The notion that a single building can cause earthquakes is totally preposterous. This sounds more like someone trying to justify a grant or raise money than any serious science.
You seem to be under the impression that all GC languages are made by Microsoft.
Not at all. I was just citing the CLR as one example since it's fairly widely used. You'd also think with all that we've learned about GC on a background thread that Microsoft would have done something different for their new programming environment, but that wasn't the case.
I never heard of anyone having a GC-related debugging problem (as in real bug, not performance) for programs written in one of those languages.
Do those languages perform GC in the background, or do they free resources as they're no longer needed? Do they access external resources such as a database, where holding resources can exhaust the available pool, thereby creating artifically scare resources (which is a bug in my book)?
Most languages that do GC on a background thread have trouble under heavy load because they end up spending lots of time trying to figure out whether they should or shouldn't be cleaning up memory. Also, because most GC systems aren't aware of the difference between physical and virtual memory, they can induce high levels of page faulting even though they think that there's plenty of memory available. Any system that performs GC in the background is going to suck in a high performance environment.
not sure how you can call the former unpredictable...
Because in many systems that employ GC, they try to free resources on background threads for performance. The problem is that a resource can be held way beyond what the developer expects, and suddenly they get faults happening in totally unrelated sections of code. I've seen it a million times before, and I personally think that it's one of the biggest weaknesses of the CLR. When a function is done with a resource, clean it up right then and there. At least then you'll have some chance of figuring out what's going wrong.
Oh, and for all you folks that say that nothing should ever crash in cleanup, think again. Microsoft will tell you that publically, but there are lots of things that you can do to make an app crash in GC, like manually cleaning up some stuff yourself before exiting the function. The GC routine will get very confused trying to clean up a partially cleaned up object.
The solution should not be a manual thing, it should be able to be solved with clever programming (perhaps an idle, lack of mouse movement detection?) its hard enough to train users to use computers to do their jobs, without adding extra load to their fragile little minds.
Agreed. But the more complex you make it, the less likely it is to get done. I've seen threads on Bugzilla go on for years while people argue the nuances of an implementation. Better a manual process than no process at all.
I understand your point, but how about something as simple as a "cleanup memory" button. I too often have several tabs open (4 instances right now with 24 tabs) but most of those tabs will sit idle most of the time, like my PHP/MySQL/M-W.com windows that are mainly used for occasional reference. Being able to force a cleanup would be good. I'd still save the time to reload the entire page, even if it does take a second to redraw when I flip back to the tab.
I'm not totally sure that I subscribe to your theory that Firefox is doing the right thing. If you start closing tabs/windows, you'll find that the memory is not cleaned up properly. I'd call that a leak.
We looked at using mdadm for monitoring and it's not that we're opposed to it. We chose the cron path more or less for the sake of simplicity. Rather than firing off yet another program to monitor something, we just rely on cron and link in a script to cron.hourly. We really like the fact that cron will notify us hourly so that we don't lose an email, forget about the problem, or just get complacent. There's nothing wrong with a little in-your-face action when you've got a failed drive.
I guess we could look at running mdadm with -1 in our cron script. That would address your concern about grep and format changes to/proc/mdstat.
In that case, I prefer the 20+ years of testing that NFS has endured...
I agree that NFS has been around longer, but that doesn't necessarily make it better. Have you never had a mount lock up on you that couldn't be recovered? It happened regularly to me. Doing research to fix the problem led me to the real reason that I selected Samba - the community behind it. Say what you will, but there sure seem to be a lot more people running Samba than NFS these days. There doesn't seem to be an equivalent to samba.org in the NFS world. The NFS site on sourceforge has had virtually no activity in a long time.
over the Microsoft-designed, barely-documented, moving-target Samba format
Is your problem that it does't work, or that Microsoft designed it? I don't think you should pick a protocol based on who built it. That samba.org team has done an excellent job of reverse-engineering the protocol, and I've been able to get Samba on Linux to do things that SMB in Windows has troubles with (like serving shares over the Internet). My biggest complaint with SMB (the protocol) is that once you open ports 137-139 then you're exposing a lot of other stuff like printer shares. I haven't tried port 445 yet, which I believe only serves up SMB.
Yeah, I realized when I bought it that it wasn't going to be perfect. The idea is to get maybe 75% of the way there, and if I really truly lose the media then I'll revert to the safe box at the bank. The same can happen at the bank too - a fire so hot that most stuff melts. Thankfully media can be replicated easily and kept in two places.
I might get hammered for saying this.. but I would recommend using Software RAID if you are using a recent kernel (i.e. 2.6).
We've been running software RAID for a while now and love it. The problem with hardware RAID is that in order to talk to the controller, you have to have special drivers. Why do you need to talk to the controller? Well, how are you going to tell if something goes wrong with a drive and it needs to be replaced? I once worked for a company that had all its RAID drives fail over time but no one knew it because they weren't getting notified. So it was just like having a single drive failure and they lost all of the data.
For our Linux boxes, we just run the following bash script every hour in cron:
#!/bin/bash grep -A 100 -B 100 _/proc/mdstat if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then uname -n fi
Cron will spit out a log to root and you'll get notified of the trouble. Much easier than writing custom code.
What I don't understand is why people dual boot any more. Either virtualize the hardware or buy another box. For a couple hundred bucks you can get a great headless machine and then you just load it up with as much disk as you want. It would likely be much less money than buying a really good hardware RAID controller for an existing machine.
I hear stories about people not being able to read CDs/DVDs that they've burned, but I have to wonder what they're doing wrong. Whenever I burn, I verify the media to ensure that what I burned actually matches what was on the drive. I've had some problems with crappy drives (I'll never buy another NEC burner again) and some bad media (which I immediately destroy), but once I've verified them then I never have any problems reading them. I always burn 2 copies - one for the safe at home (for fire protection) and another for the safe deposit box at the bank. Should my home burn to the ground and the fire protection fail, I still have another copy. I've automated everything, so it takes me about 1 minute a day to back everything up, plus a trip once a month to the bank to get everything off-site.
I've used both NFS and Samba. NFS was slow, hard to get set up, and would lock up mounts on a regular basis. The only real trouble that I've run into with Samba is transfering files over 4GB, but I'm not 100% sure that that's a Samba problem.
The other problem is that you'll still have to periodically close out the browser to free all the memory that's in use, meaning that you have to reload all those pages that you have open in various tabs. Forgive me for comparing Firefox to Windows, but I have to effectively "reboot" Firefox from time to time in order to get all that memory back. It makes it harder to send the message that Linux doesn't suffer from the same problems that Windows does when you have to restart the browser.
That being said, I think that Firefox is still the best browser on the planet.
That is unless you are arguing that governments can't opperate things that don't involve innovation almost constant innovation.
In general, I'd say that it's more a matter of how much the government can do it make it easier for private companies to do business. At the height of the space program, NASA still had private contractors doing work, they just spec'd it out. Otherwise, anything that government does is generally very inefficient, mainly because they lack a profit motive. More on that in a bit.
Post Office - I'm glad you picked this one first. The Post Office was put into place to help people communicate across the country, yet they've lost sight of this mission. Did the Post Office invent the fax machine, or email? When faced with these new methods of communication, what has been its response? I would think by now that the Post Office would be retooling itself to meet the needs of its customers, yet it continues to fight new technology that doesn't help it deliver "letters". At least we've cut our subsidies of this monster.
Power companies in many counties all over the country - I'm not sure about where you live, but a big one here in the Pacific Northwest is the Bonneville Power Administration. Again, another subsidized program that can't pay its bills. Actually, its more of a welfare program for the people in our area. There's no reason that citizens of Washington and Oregon shouldn't be paying market rates for power.
Coast guard - The Coast Guard is a national defense item, and it's unclear to me how you make this a profit center. I think that the framers of the Constitution were right in giving the Federal government the power of national defense. Even so, many private companies are participating in the War in Iraq and delivering goods and services for less money. (And the soldiers love having businesses like Pizza Hut to remind them of home.)
Now, on to a few you didn't mention:
Amtrak - Running trains isn't tough, yet Amtrak continues to lose billions. Yet another jobs/welfare program.
The War on Drugs/Prohibition - We get our collective asses kicked by a bunch of guys in wagons and small boats/aircraft.
The War on Poverty - Been fighting that one now for 70 years, and how much further ahead are we?
Again, I think that because government lacks a profit motive, they quickly lose sight of the mission. Putting government in charge of finding new drugs (how we got started down this path) might work initially, but ultimately it will lead to yet another government behemoth that lacks clarity of purpose and pushes its own agenda. Should the government create drugs, or should it promote health? If you made the argument that the US government has an interest in making its citizens healther then I'd agree, and a single agency that overlooks drug development, exercise, nutrition, and disease control would be great.
In any case given that you agree the government was able to do this sort of work how does that not constitute an "on-going program" and more than "a jump start"?
Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo were all jump-starts. Totally new technology, lots of cool new stuff. The Shuttle, on the other hand, is mainly a refinement of existing technology. Delta wing craft, able to operate in the vacuum of space, OMS engines, fuel cells, cryogenic engines, solid fuel rockets - all existing, fairly well proven technology. The only interesting new stuff in the Shuttle were the heat shields (non-ablative) and some of the redundant computer technology, although similar fault-tolerant computer hardware had already flown on deep-space missions. If NASA had been able to pursue technologies like nuclear propulsion then I think that you could make the claim that NASA was leading the charge. But since the early 70s, NASA really hasn't done much that it hadn't already done before. You could probably argue that SkyLab was unique in that it started us down the path of long duration missions. ISS is, quite frankly, a joke and terrible waste of good resources. Both the Shuttle and ISS are poster children for how not to run a space program unless you want a really expensive jobs program.
IMHO the next major logical step for space is resolving the issues with deep sea
I agree. When you figure that 70% of our Earth's resources are under water, this is a good place to focus. While some things are obviously different under water than in space (like how do you do a "space walk" in a high pressure environment that's deeper than just a few feet), there are a lot of similarities. I'd think that isolating a crew under water for a couple of years would do a pretty good job of approximating the physiological effects of a long-distance trip to Mars, and you could do it for significantly less than what we're spending on manned spaceflight today.
Ok, I think I see the disconnect here. When you say "copying", you mean reproducing. I totally agree. If Madonna writes a song and I re-record it, that's just fine. What I'm talking about is literally making a copy of the CD and selling it. Meaning that Madonna did the work all the way up to burning the CD. I just bought a copy, brought it to the radio station, and asked them for $1. Still Madonna's voice, but I get the profit. That's just wrong.
Now translate this to software. I come up with a good idea. I write an actual piece of code - an implementation. Unless I want to give it away (F/OSS), I should have the right to protect that specific implementation. To take it away and give it to someone else is just plain wrong. If they want to reverse engineer it or duplicate the effects then that's just fine by me. In fact, I think we encourage that behavior.
The space project lasted for 25 years and had huge accomplishments.
If the 25 years you're talking about the early fifties until the mid 70's then I'd agree. The space program (primarily the manned space program, on which the vast majority of dollars have been spent) has produced very little of value in the last 30 years, especially for the money expended. The next logical step into space is commericial, which NASA is not geared for.
For example, just because I copy a madonna song doesn't mean that I'm claiming in the slightest to be her, or the author of her song, or restricting what she does with her copy in the slightest.
Sure you are. Let's say Madonna goes to a radio station and says, "I want $2.00 every time you play my song." Now I come along and say to the same station, "I'll sell you exactly the same song, but for $1.00." I've just undercut the artist by $1.00/copy, yet I haven't done a lick of work other than copying Madonna's CD. Don't you see a problem with this?
Have you seen that new Jack-in-the-Box commercial where the antenna ball gets photocopied? I have to laugh every time I see the hole at the bottom of the ball where the antenna goes. At least that's what I think it is.
If your efforts lead to a live concert before 50K people at $50 a pop, then who'se to complain?
I think that you'd agree that if I spent the money to promote the concert, sell the tickets, and hire the roadies then I should enjoy the profits from the concert. If someone were to come along at the last minute, lock me in a back room, and perform the concert on my behalf then that would be wrong. Yet that's exactly what happens if someone takes my source code and starts selling my work. Again, we'd both agree that we should be able to stage our own concerts, but it seems like in your world you'd allow someone to steal another's work.
I think you have things backwards here. Just protection of property, freedom, and other rights lead to powerfull incentives, but coercion of incentive does not lead to justice or freedom. Properties don't exist for the sake of incentive, they exist to allocate limited resources - and that acts as a powerfull incentive.
I live in Seattle where a popular belief is that you are who you are because government enables you. But I see it the other way around - government exists to serve its citizens, and that any benefit we derive from our government is because we paid for it. Does freedom exist because of our government? Not really. Freedom exists because the citizens value it, and because we give of our lives and resources to provide it.
Slashdot Mirror
My point was that, in the grand scheme of things, Katrina was still a small storm. Had she come across as a category 5, nothing would be left in New Orleans. We wouldn't be talking about storm surge coming up canals and coming through breeches in weak sections of the levee, but rather water pouring over the levees into NO directly from the Mississippi. That's a really scary idea, and frankly, virtually impossible to prevent. No matter how high the levees get, they'll be vulernable. That's because the buffer between the city and the Gulf is disappearing rapidly, to the point where NO could be a true coastal city in our lifetime. At that point NO will look more like Holland, which doesn't get the kind of storms that we get in the Gulf.
I doubt that 90 year old "Earl" would be able to catch me. :-)
I don't know about record stores, but at most places I shop it seems that the cashiers know nothing about the products that they sell, so how would you expect them to know anything about the right price?
While we're talking about lack of product knowledge, let me say that I get kind of tired of asking for help at a store only to be told that I should read the box. I shop online more now because I can actually get the information I need about the product. I've also been known to stand in a store and call the 800 number on the box to ask the manufacturer questions. It's really quite sad.
I think that he should be happy he didn't get caught in Singapore. I understand that their caning punishment isn't very pleasant.
I think that the bigger question is how much it costs to prevent such theft. If it doesn't happen often, why would a store put in a permanent fix for the problem? They don't station security guards at the end of every aisle to prevent casual stealing, so why is this any different?
Any time we think that we can really have a big impact on nature, we're proven wrong. We've spent billions of dollars on levees for New Orleans, yet one small category 3 hurricane is all it takes to breech them. We build sea walls to hold back the ocean, yet after one or two powerful storms they disappear with little or no evidence they ever existed. Tsunamis can level entire coastlines.
The notion that a single building can cause earthquakes is totally preposterous. This sounds more like someone trying to justify a grant or raise money than any serious science.
Not at all. I was just citing the CLR as one example since it's fairly widely used. You'd also think with all that we've learned about GC on a background thread that Microsoft would have done something different for their new programming environment, but that wasn't the case.
I never heard of anyone having a GC-related debugging problem (as in real bug, not performance) for programs written in one of those languages.
Do those languages perform GC in the background, or do they free resources as they're no longer needed? Do they access external resources such as a database, where holding resources can exhaust the available pool, thereby creating artifically scare resources (which is a bug in my book)?
Most languages that do GC on a background thread have trouble under heavy load because they end up spending lots of time trying to figure out whether they should or shouldn't be cleaning up memory. Also, because most GC systems aren't aware of the difference between physical and virtual memory, they can induce high levels of page faulting even though they think that there's plenty of memory available. Any system that performs GC in the background is going to suck in a high performance environment.
Because in many systems that employ GC, they try to free resources on background threads for performance. The problem is that a resource can be held way beyond what the developer expects, and suddenly they get faults happening in totally unrelated sections of code. I've seen it a million times before, and I personally think that it's one of the biggest weaknesses of the CLR. When a function is done with a resource, clean it up right then and there. At least then you'll have some chance of figuring out what's going wrong.
Oh, and for all you folks that say that nothing should ever crash in cleanup, think again. Microsoft will tell you that publically, but there are lots of things that you can do to make an app crash in GC, like manually cleaning up some stuff yourself before exiting the function. The GC routine will get very confused trying to clean up a partially cleaned up object.
Thanks for the tip. This is definitely preferable to rebooting the box, which is never the right solution. :-)
Agreed. But the more complex you make it, the less likely it is to get done. I've seen threads on Bugzilla go on for years while people argue the nuances of an implementation. Better a manual process than no process at all.
I'm not totally sure that I subscribe to your theory that Firefox is doing the right thing. If you start closing tabs/windows, you'll find that the memory is not cleaned up properly. I'd call that a leak.
I guess we could look at running mdadm with -1 in our cron script. That would address your concern about grep and format changes to /proc/mdstat.
I agree that NFS has been around longer, but that doesn't necessarily make it better. Have you never had a mount lock up on you that couldn't be recovered? It happened regularly to me. Doing research to fix the problem led me to the real reason that I selected Samba - the community behind it. Say what you will, but there sure seem to be a lot more people running Samba than NFS these days. There doesn't seem to be an equivalent to samba.org in the NFS world. The NFS site on sourceforge has had virtually no activity in a long time.
over the Microsoft-designed, barely-documented, moving-target Samba format
Is your problem that it does't work, or that Microsoft designed it? I don't think you should pick a protocol based on who built it. That samba.org team has done an excellent job of reverse-engineering the protocol, and I've been able to get Samba on Linux to do things that SMB in Windows has troubles with (like serving shares over the Internet). My biggest complaint with SMB (the protocol) is that once you open ports 137-139 then you're exposing a lot of other stuff like printer shares. I haven't tried port 445 yet, which I believe only serves up SMB.
Yeah, I realized when I bought it that it wasn't going to be perfect. The idea is to get maybe 75% of the way there, and if I really truly lose the media then I'll revert to the safe box at the bank. The same can happen at the bank too - a fire so hot that most stuff melts. Thankfully media can be replicated easily and kept in two places.
We've been running software RAID for a while now and love it. The problem with hardware RAID is that in order to talk to the controller, you have to have special drivers. Why do you need to talk to the controller? Well, how are you going to tell if something goes wrong with a drive and it needs to be replaced? I once worked for a company that had all its RAID drives fail over time but no one knew it because they weren't getting notified. So it was just like having a single drive failure and they lost all of the data.
For our Linux boxes, we just run the following bash script every hour in cron:
Cron will spit out a log to root and you'll get notified of the trouble. Much easier than writing custom code.
What I don't understand is why people dual boot any more. Either virtualize the hardware or buy another box. For a couple hundred bucks you can get a great headless machine and then you just load it up with as much disk as you want. It would likely be much less money than buying a really good hardware RAID controller for an existing machine.
I hear stories about people not being able to read CDs/DVDs that they've burned, but I have to wonder what they're doing wrong. Whenever I burn, I verify the media to ensure that what I burned actually matches what was on the drive. I've had some problems with crappy drives (I'll never buy another NEC burner again) and some bad media (which I immediately destroy), but once I've verified them then I never have any problems reading them. I always burn 2 copies - one for the safe at home (for fire protection) and another for the safe deposit box at the bank. Should my home burn to the ground and the fire protection fail, I still have another copy. I've automated everything, so it takes me about 1 minute a day to back everything up, plus a trip once a month to the bank to get everything off-site.
I've used both NFS and Samba. NFS was slow, hard to get set up, and would lock up mounts on a regular basis. The only real trouble that I've run into with Samba is transfering files over 4GB, but I'm not 100% sure that that's a Samba problem.
That being said, I think that Firefox is still the best browser on the planet.
In general, I'd say that it's more a matter of how much the government can do it make it easier for private companies to do business. At the height of the space program, NASA still had private contractors doing work, they just spec'd it out. Otherwise, anything that government does is generally very inefficient, mainly because they lack a profit motive. More on that in a bit.
Now, on to a few you didn't mention:
Again, I think that because government lacks a profit motive, they quickly lose sight of the mission. Putting government in charge of finding new drugs (how we got started down this path) might work initially, but ultimately it will lead to yet another government behemoth that lacks clarity of purpose and pushes its own agenda. Should the government create drugs, or should it promote health? If you made the argument that the US government has an interest in making its citizens healther then I'd agree, and a single agency that overlooks drug development, exercise, nutrition, and disease control would be great.
Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo were all jump-starts. Totally new technology, lots of cool new stuff. The Shuttle, on the other hand, is mainly a refinement of existing technology. Delta wing craft, able to operate in the vacuum of space, OMS engines, fuel cells, cryogenic engines, solid fuel rockets - all existing, fairly well proven technology. The only interesting new stuff in the Shuttle were the heat shields (non-ablative) and some of the redundant computer technology, although similar fault-tolerant computer hardware had already flown on deep-space missions. If NASA had been able to pursue technologies like nuclear propulsion then I think that you could make the claim that NASA was leading the charge. But since the early 70s, NASA really hasn't done much that it hadn't already done before. You could probably argue that SkyLab was unique in that it started us down the path of long duration missions. ISS is, quite frankly, a joke and terrible waste of good resources. Both the Shuttle and ISS are poster children for how not to run a space program unless you want a really expensive jobs program.
IMHO the next major logical step for space is resolving the issues with deep sea
I agree. When you figure that 70% of our Earth's resources are under water, this is a good place to focus. While some things are obviously different under water than in space (like how do you do a "space walk" in a high pressure environment that's deeper than just a few feet), there are a lot of similarities. I'd think that isolating a crew under water for a couple of years would do a pretty good job of approximating the physiological effects of a long-distance trip to Mars, and you could do it for significantly less than what we're spending on manned spaceflight today.
Now translate this to software. I come up with a good idea. I write an actual piece of code - an implementation. Unless I want to give it away (F/OSS), I should have the right to protect that specific implementation. To take it away and give it to someone else is just plain wrong. If they want to reverse engineer it or duplicate the effects then that's just fine by me. In fact, I think we encourage that behavior.
Are we on the same page here?
If the 25 years you're talking about the early fifties until the mid 70's then I'd agree. The space program (primarily the manned space program, on which the vast majority of dollars have been spent) has produced very little of value in the last 30 years, especially for the money expended. The next logical step into space is commericial, which NASA is not geared for.
Sure you are. Let's say Madonna goes to a radio station and says, "I want $2.00 every time you play my song." Now I come along and say to the same station, "I'll sell you exactly the same song, but for $1.00." I've just undercut the artist by $1.00/copy, yet I haven't done a lick of work other than copying Madonna's CD. Don't you see a problem with this?
I live in San Diego
I'm so sorry. :-)
Have you seen that new Jack-in-the-Box commercial where the antenna ball gets photocopied? I have to laugh every time I see the hole at the bottom of the ball where the antenna goes. At least that's what I think it is.
I think that you'd agree that if I spent the money to promote the concert, sell the tickets, and hire the roadies then I should enjoy the profits from the concert. If someone were to come along at the last minute, lock me in a back room, and perform the concert on my behalf then that would be wrong. Yet that's exactly what happens if someone takes my source code and starts selling my work. Again, we'd both agree that we should be able to stage our own concerts, but it seems like in your world you'd allow someone to steal another's work.
I think you have things backwards here. Just protection of property, freedom, and other rights lead to powerfull incentives, but coercion of incentive does not lead to justice or freedom. Properties don't exist for the sake of incentive, they exist to allocate limited resources - and that acts as a powerfull incentive.
I live in Seattle where a popular belief is that you are who you are because government enables you. But I see it the other way around - government exists to serve its citizens, and that any benefit we derive from our government is because we paid for it. Does freedom exist because of our government? Not really. Freedom exists because the citizens value it, and because we give of our lives and resources to provide it.