Actually, there is a very good reason why investment and savings are considered to be the same thing: it's because they basically *are* the same.
Look into how a bank makes loans, and what it does with your money when you "save" it with them. They don't keep it locked in a vault for you, like money under a mattress; they loan it back out to people, and pay you out of their fractional reserves when you come calling.
In essence (and I'm glossing over a lot of my Monetary Policy class in college), the bank is making an investment on your behalf. They charge a higher interest rate to the loan recipient than they pay you to keep your money "saved" with them -- this is how banks make a profit.
I mentioned being paid out of the bank's fractional reserve. Because the bank has loaned-out money to people (businesses and individuals), it doesn't have everybody's money at the bank -- it's out being spent by somebody else who thinks they can turn a profit and pay back the bank with the money they make. What happens if everybody goes to the bank and demands their money back, and the bank doesn't have enough available -- i.e., what happens if you see a bank run? Your bank borrows what they need from other banks. Worst-case scenario, they go to the "bank of last resort", a.k.a. a Federal Reserve bank. The Fed waves a magic wand (seriously, it is not transparent enough for anybody besides the Fed to know precisely what they are doing), buys/sells bonds through "open-market operations", and as necessary, creates new money -- which causes inflation. In essence, if the Fed can't handle a bank run (the last time this happened was just prior to the Great Depression, and in fact, is considered by most economists now to be the reason the Depression was as bad as it was), we're all hosed. That said, since the Depression, it has handled some monstrous ones (including Russia's failure to repay its bond commitments, which led to the decline of the Ruble, causing the collapse of some big-name financial firms like Long-Term Capital Management). (OK, I'm not glossing-over as much Monetary Policy as I thought I would...)
Here's a dirty little secret about the FDIC, which insures the money you "save" at the bank: the FDIC only insures about 1-2% of the nation's fractional reserves. Hence, no matter how you slice it, If another Depression-style bank run occurs, we are all fucked.
In truth, savings and investment are considered more-or-less the same thing by economists today, because in the end, they *are* the same thing.
Yours,
A youngster who "saves" in mutual funds... (and in a high-rate savings account, and only what is necessary for paying bills from a checking account. Most of my savings are in my 401k for retirement though...)
Kernels are too complicated to let the illiterate futz about with them. If you don't know what you're doing, then stay the hell out of there!
I agree, insofar as changing the kernel's code is concerned (e.g. diving into the source). But there is still no reason why FreeBSD *must* remain mired in the past, requiring hand-editing a text file, nor is there any reason it *should* be. The only reason it has is because nobody (yes, including me) has taken the time to change the status quo...
You can't abstract complexity away. That is a myth. A GUI does not simplify anything, all it does is give the illusion that something is simple.
And that is the very *essence* of abstraction.:-) That window opening on your desktop? It's executing millions of CPU instructions just displaying to your monitor. Those are millions of instructions that you could have typed by hand instead, if you were so inclined. (But who is?)
Take Perl for example: it is (at its heart) an abstraction of C, which in turn is an abstraction of ASM. Perl's foreach() loop is an abstraction that takes a linked-list containing some type of data in each node and iterates through it. This would take several LOC in C, but only takes 1 in Perl.
That is an abstraction. I'll also use a car analogy: your gas pedal.
A gas pedal is a single, one-dimensional interface manipulable even by the densest idiot with their foot.
Yet, this interface hides the complexity of the ECC, the fuel/air ratios, etc. that are mixed into the engine, to say nothing of controlling engine speeds, the vast engineering that goes into making the engine work properly, etc.. And if you drive an automatic transmission car (as 90% of Americans do), then you're looking at another element that has been abstracted away: shifting between gears 1...n while in Drive mode.
All that through the simple interface of a gas pedal.
The fact of the matter is that abstracting-away complexity is entirely-doable, and we do so in every aspect of our lives. Some examples:
* I don't care that my steak came from a cow that was raised and fed in a cattle farm, brought to slaughter, hit on the head with a hammer, drained of its blood, cut into hunks, then further cut-up into a delicious 8oz. slab of red meat for me to enjoy -- I only care that it costs me $5 at the grocery store and that it is tasty and delicious.
* I don't care that the airplane I fly between NYC and LA is flowing X gallons of fuel to its engines at time t. I don't care where over the U.S. I might be. I don't care what the pilot is doing. These things are all irrelevant to me, so long as I arrive at my destination on-time and safely.
* Your computer keyboard. Those keys you're typing on: do you think about -- as you are typing each, individual key -- what their ASCII character codes are, what voltages are being sent from the keyboard to your PC on each keystroke, the number of CPU cycles it takes to display them to your monitor, etc.? Of course not. That's irrelevant; the fact is that it works, and that's all that matters.
* The web browser you're typing your replies to me in. Every time you select a link, you are, with 1 command, invoking a socket call, an HTTP transaction, and code to render the page you are selecting. That's a ton of CPU cycles used, at the singular request of your one command.
Nobody can understand all the world's complexity all at once -- not you, not me, not anybody else. It is physically-impossible. And knowing that politically, you're a devoted libertarian, you should know enough economics to know this: it's called "specialization". We specialize in certain tasks because there is not enough time in our lives to know and learn everything. (Friedrich Hayek once commented that (and I'm not getting his quote exactly right, but I'm paraphrasing) "people believe lots of silly things because there isn't time in the day
Do you trust that the Flash plugin is safe to use?
Yes, given that the probability that it is not safe to use (assuming I download it from a respectable site, like, oh, Adobe.com), is close to zero.
Of course, the DNS cache for Adobe could be poisoned and redirected to a site where I install what I *think* is Flash, but is actually an exploit.
But that can be said of *any* application -- Flash or otherwise.
Who installs software before knowing what it does?
*You* do, if you have not gone through and analyzed every last line of code in every file in your kernel and userland source, and all your applications too.
Seriously, this quote of yours is open-source ideology taken to a ridiculous extreme, and it proves to me beyond a shadow of a doubt that you have never written any significant amount of code in your life.
There are tens, maybe hundreds of millions of LOC that are compiled to form a desktop FreeBSD installation. Have you looked at every single line? I *seriously* doubt it. And that's in spite of the fact that it's all open-source.
Face it: your OS, your apps, etc. are too complex for you, or I, or anyone else to perfectly understand. And even if we did, they change so often that we could spend all our time doing code-reviews, instead of actually *using* the software.
At some level, you have to trust the people producing your software; the world is much too complex to do otherwise, and you know it.
Can you know for sure what's inside the plugin?
No, because it's not open-source (and I wish it were). But would I read all several million LOC of source if it were -- just to verify for me, personally, that it is safe and secure?
Absolutely not. There are *MUCH* bigger risks to me in the world -- like being killed in a car accident, or mugged on a train in Chicago, or nuked by some anti-American fucker in Iran or North Korea, or even me destroying my partition table while screwing around with multiple OS installs -- than whether my apps are being hijacked by an official vendor's distribution of an app plugin (which I have never seen or heard of occurring in practice, making it a patently irrational and paranoid fear).
I recognize that my complaints about Java and Flash are not the FreeBSD project's faults. I'm simply stating the reality that -- regardless of fault -- these are things preventing FreeBSD's adoption as a desktop OS.
They weren't (as certain other Slashdotters seem to think) intended to be criticisms of FreeBSD; only statements of reality that FreeBSD must -- somehow -- deal with.
If you can't handle a text editor, then you shouldn't be compiling kernels.
This is an absurd argument. Have you ever mis-typed something? Yes? Oooh, and there goes your kernel build that spent (depending on CPU time and available RAM, and whether you're using a filesystem in RAM to temporarily store the outputted binaries in/usr/obj long enough to copy them somewhere onto your HDD when finished) 15 minutes compiling...
This argument of "use a text editor!" is old and ridiculous (much like the old hacker's/security argument that somebody "deserves to be hacked" if they don't do a huge number of arcane and obscure things to secure their system). It is an argument of scale: I could make the same logical argument you do that we should all be running our OSs by entering in ASM commands. After all -- if you don't know ASM, you shouldn't be running a computer.
If you can't issue instructions in ASM, you shouldn't be using a computer. Right?
No, of course not, that's silly. The state of computing advanced far beyond this stage half a century ago. Your command-line and text editor is an abstraction away from machine language, for efficiency's sake and for the sake of reducing user-caused errors.
The same is true of every GUI... it's another abstraction away from user-caused failures and an abstraction away from the complexity that engenders it. This abstraction brings computing to ever-less-computer-savvy people, yes. And is that a bad thing? Of course not.
You can't reasonably get away with claiming that a particular technology is good just because "that's the way my grandpappy did it when he was a young buck pounding the keyboard".
All I proposed was an ncurses interface through which kernel builds could be accomplished. FreeBSD already uses ncurses for the installer, so I hardly think an ncurses interface is too "advanced" for FreeBSD...
(Oh, and for the record in the vi/emacs holy war, I wield and much-prefer VIM over other *nix text editors.)
I don't like blinking/moving stuff while browsing webpages.
Agreed. Unfortunately, there are lots of sites where blinking and moving stuff is all-too-common...
Yea, that's a bug, in my opinion.
...and yet, still a reason, no?:)
Wow... how much performance did you get?
I didn't measure it exactly, but XF86 (back when it was XF86, not XOrg) did *feel* a bit snappier after changing the "cpu" option from i386 to i686, as well as (referring to the 5.x-STABLE series) removing debugging support once I believed the build to be stable (predictably, removing debugging output was a bigger factor).
They're not huge increases, I'll grant you, but they were noticeable nonetheless...
kernel.debug is inside/usr/obj and debugging is enabled by default.
That's cool if that's the way 6.0 is configured. I haven't built a kernel/world since 5.x (because 6.0 is so awesomely stable, I love it:) ), and at that time, kernel debugging was required to be set in the kernel config file (e.g. for the INVARIANTS option)...
Uninformed decisions? It's incredible that you decided to come to that conclusion, considering that you know nothing about me. Try looking in the mirror kid.
I have read the FreeBSD Handbook all the way through, twice, and have referenced it lots of other times. When I need the Handbook (like, when doing a world + kernel update), I follow it religiously. When I don't know how to do something, or something is not working for me, I follow it religiously.
Flash? Who the hell needs it and why is it essential for a desktop?
Well, unless you surf using Lynx or Links, you are going to run across websites that use Flash. Lots of them. Some of them -- stupidly -- require Flash for navigation.
Love it or hate it, that is the reality, and reality is not optional.
Since when you need to compile a kernel?
Uh, for hardware support? For IPSEC support? For performance? To enable debugging? I have recompiled my FBSD kernels for all of these reasons at one time or another.
In the not-so-old days of FBSD 5.x, one had to compile in support for IPFW. And in the days of 4.x, compiling in CD-RW support was necessary.
The same will be true for different elements of functionality for FBSD going-forward, unless *all* elements of the OS are compiled as modules and loaded dynamically... And last I checked, that's not the case.
You think a desktop user wants to do this?
You think a desktop user who is technically-competent enough to run FreeBSD is not willing and able to compile a kernel -- and is willing to do so if they require some functionality that is not supported by GENERIC?
"Normal" people don't use FreeBSD (and in fact, have never heard of it, and in almost every case, IME, certainly do not care), and "normal" people need Flash (and Quicktime, and Windows Media Player DRM, and a whole range of other crap we in the OSS world don't like). End of story.
Wow, brilliant deduction Watson. Hoewever, it is wrong.
Do you have any concept of the idea of time periods ("quantums", as Kirk McKusick calls them in "The Design and Implementation of BSD 4.4", in reference to the time allocated to a particular process to be run before task-switching) -- as in, the periods during which, some resource (be it a file, socket, or whatever) is polled? Moreover, do you have any conception of how such periods might change over time?
In college (i.e., until about last year or so), I checked freebsd.org weekly, if not daily.
However, in the real world, there is less time for such things, and my interest in FreeBSD has waned somewhat.
For the last year or so, I have not checked freebsd.org daily, weekly, or even monthly. I've checked it maybe twice in the last year, and I haven't been there in months. And it was only LAST MONTH that the news on Java on FreeBSD changed significantly. Do you not recognize this?
Finally, how the fuck did you come to the conclusion that I'm "dissing" FreeBSD? In case your knee-jerk, ideologically-blinded eyes didn't notice, I said in my original post:
Look, I love FreeBSD and prefer it to Linux. Its overall design is more sophisticated, saner, and better-organized than Linux, and I find the ports system to be better-designed and more-useful than Gentoo's portage (where are the descriptions of each port in portage guys? I want to know if what I'm about to install is really what I want, and I don't want to have to go google it first!). All that, and FBSD exists under a free-as-in-freedom, rather than free-as-in-communism license. I've run it on my server for years, and with the huge, disappointing exception of the 5.[01] days, it's very stable (current uptime with 6.0-RELEASE is 159 days)....
FBSD 6.0 is certainly the most usable desktop release yet, and it's thisclose to there for me. But still, not quite.
(emphasis added here for effect)
That is FAR from a damning criticism of FreeBSD. I'm pointing out FreeBSD's flaws. Does not EVERY OS have flaws -- including FreeBSD?
In summary, like unfortunately all too many in the OSS world (and the political world, for that matter), you are an idiotic, ideological nutjob zealot prick, and are arguably one of the key problems FreeBSD has to wider acceptance. You, frankly, are a cancer on the fantastic project that is FreeBSD.
Leave your room in daddy's basement, get a real job, and go get laid. It'll do you a world of good.
That is (good) news to me. Thanks for the link (and no thanks for assuming trollishness, although it's understandable on/., particularly relating to BSD).
No, I didn't bother to look for that news, because I tried using FBSD 6.0 on my laptop as a desktop OS a few months ago, and the behavior I described was the behavior I saw. News about Java on FBSD being as slow to trickle out as it is -- since a Sun-official JRE and JDK release on FBSD was originally negotiated waaay back in Dec. 2001, there really hasn't been any major news regarding the Sun-FreeBSD Foundation's relationship until the news you cited -- I have no reason to assume based on past history that Java on FBSD would actually have come out with a native binary distribution between the last time I used it and this/. article's posting. And I have about a zillion more important and useful things to do with my limited free time than spend it watching the FBSD Project's every move (and unfortunately, my job does not entail working on FBSD in any way).
It's not a troll, fool. Try installing native Java from a port (*not* a package) sometime.
For fsck's sake, why don't you go back and read my post in full? I never said there was not native Java. Yes, I remember when FBSD Foundation and Sun negotiated native Java, a few years ago.
Jesus. I know people on/. are illiterate reactionary tards, but you really take the cake this week.
Java has been dead on the desktop for almost 8 years, so who cares.
You mean, like with Eclipse/WebSphere Application Developer and Azureus dead-on-the-desktop?
Java may suck on the desktop (certainly it does compared to C#/.NET, but at least Java has a chance of being portable to other OSs or devices), and there aren't many apps worth speaking-of (note that the two above use SWT, not one of the native Sun Java GUI libs), but it still sees heavy use, particularly inside large organizations.
* Mix multiple audio inputs to/dev/dsp, rather than one app locking access to that device to the exclusion of all others. Linux does this via ALSA, but FBSD has no similar, new audio architecture to replace OSS (as ALSA finally has). KDE's artsd + artsdsp is available, but we all know that the entire arts package sucks horribly.
* Have better Java and Flash support. Ever try to get native Java working on FreeBSD? First you have to download the Linux Java distribution, install it, then download the FBSD patchset for native Java, build and install it. This takes a day, even on my 2.4GHz, 768MB laptop. And Flash? Don't make me laugh. Flash support is attemptedly enabled via a wrapper, but the Flash version that is currently stable is 5. I'm running 7 on the Gentoo install I'm typing this on, and that's behind the Windows world's Flash version 8.
* Similar to the Java problem, too many apps in FBSD require Linux support. If I'm going to run a Linux app on FBSD, why not just run Linux? Moreover, if parallel FBSD and Linux binaries are necessary (as with Java), then this is going to be a monster waste of HDD space.
* Make compiling the kernel easier. Yes, configuring the kernel is doable by hand, but as any newbie programmer should be able to tell you, the more opportunity you have for human input, the more opportunity there is for failure. More typing/manual config means a higher probability that some piece of kernel functionality goes missing in the build. Why not an ncurses interface with basic (but I must emphasize, also imperfect) dependency resolution, like Linux has?
Look, I love FreeBSD and prefer it to Linux. Its overall design is more sophisticated, saner, and better-organized than Linux, and I find the ports system to be better-designed and more-useful than Gentoo's portage (where are the descriptions of each port in portage guys? I want to know if what I'm about to install is really what I want, and I don't want to have to go google it first!). All that, and FBSD exists under a free-as-in-freedom, rather than free-as-in-communism license. I've run it on my server for years, and with the huge, disappointing exception of the 5.[01] days, it's very stable (current uptime with 6.0-RELEASE is 159 days).
But over various times in the last 6 years, I have tried it as a desktop, and every time I have, there has always been some FBSD-specific behavior that has caused me to switch back to Windows or Linux. FBSD 6.0 is certainly the most usable desktop release yet, and it's thisclose to there for me. But still, not quite. (Frankly, I want an OSX box, and my next laptop will almost undoubtedly be a dual-core MacBook. Then I can have the best of all worlds: a FBSD userland, compatibility with most OSS *nix apps, and commercial-ware app availability. But until then...)
So, I'm happy with FBSD maintaining its role as a rock-solid server OS. Let's not assume everything is a nail when holding a hammer here...
Thanks. Yes, that makes much more sense now.:-) (I'm not sure I totally like that particular pay structure design, but at least it makes some economic sense now.)
As another example of sheep-like behavior, Americans will happily trade their grocery privacy for a 10%/year discount (which, if health insurance companies ever get wind of their customers' grocery shopping records -- which, given that information tends towards a liquid-like free-flow, is more-likely than not to happen eventually -- will wind up costing those customers a lot more when the insurer finds out how much sugared soda they drink, Cheetos they eat, etc.).
80% of Americans are worthless (or as Gordon Gekko put it, "80% of Americans have no net worth" - but the correlation between political worth and financial worth tends to be strong); the "trivial many", just like 80% of the rest of the world's population. You're not going to get any sort of "uprising" in defense of freedom in America -- not until it is much, MUCH too late (i.e., well after the gun bans come, after more speech restrictions are enacted, after the ability to travel internationally is blocked by heavily-armed military personnel, etc.).
You can't change the world. But you can act to limit your own personal involvement as it changes around you...
Here is my suggested model for improving the problem: You should be able to make no more money than the people for whom you are directly responsible.
So your idea is to cap the salary of every employee at the lowest employee's rate? Uhhh, riiiight...
Here's why it would work this way: assume:
A = CEO B = VP C = Director D = Manager E = Peon developer/engineer/janitor/whatever
A is responsible for B, B is responsible for C, and so on down the line. This is standard corporate hierarchy (though the titles may vary, depending on the number of layers of bureaucracy).
By your rule, D cannot earn more than E; hence, D <= E. By your rule, C cannot earn more than D; hence, C <= D. By your rule, B cannot earn more than C; hence, B <= C. By your rule, A cannot earn more than B; hence, A <= B.
Hence, the CEO makes no more than the janitor. Assuming you don't believe in corporate communism (unless decided-upon by all the owners, in which case, it's fine by me too), I think your math is off.
I'm all for slashing CxO compensation. But I prefer re-arranging the way shareholder voting works such that the various shareholders who are pissed-off (many of them are institutional, no less) actually have the clout to do something about it... Britain has a better version of shareholder democracy than the U.S. does, in this respect. CxO skills are not as rare as they lead people to believe, and investors know it -- they're just largely powerless to do anything about it.
Bad sample? Did you buy the second bottle from the same store in the same 1-2 days? If so, it's possible you gotten bottles from the same bad batch.
Also try the cans; I speak from experience when I say they are "fizzy".
Regardless, the fizziness has nothing to do with whether the drink is sweetened by Splenda or NutraSweet. The fizziness is CO2 injected after mixing the syrup; those sweeteners are mixed-in while making the syrup...
...and tell me that you could've predicted where computer security was going for the next 50 years then.
DDoS attacks? Botnets? Spam zombies? "Old school" viruses (and by old school, I mean it seems like these kind of viruses have become less-common than they were in the early-mid 1990s) that wipe your whole HDD? Mail clients that auto-execute a scripting language that a maliciously-minded high schooler can understand? Exploit-discovery tools like Metasploit? (or heck, even the very concept of an "exploit"?)
These things weren't conceived-of then. Not on anybody's radar at all. Remember, this was a time when IBM was selling computers to the 5 people in the world they said might have a use for them...
Yet Alan Cox has the nuts to come to us, saying "listen to me! I hack on Linux's kernel, and now I have an MBA, so I can predict the future now!"? He may be as close to a good predictor of the future of computer security as we have, but my point is that there are FAR too many variables -- far too much emergent behavior and unpredictable events -- between now and 50 years from now for he or anybody else to make a competent projection out that far.
...the guy sitting out in a parking lot with a directed RFID reader, stealing your identity as you walk into the grocery store.
Implantable RFID in humans is as dangerous an idea as I've ever heard.
Look, governments have historically used identity documents to track and sometimes murder their citizens. Iraq did it, prior to the 2003 U.S. attack on it. China still does it. (do a find for "id card") (Granted, these abuses are all based on national ID cards. But the technology is irrelevant, because the identity being checked is the same, and both technologies reveal much of the same information to the reader.)
The larger point needs to be made: If the government has no reason to identify you -- and why would it unless you're suspected of a crime or traveling internationally -- then why do people need ID cards/implanted RFID chips?
To the developer who posted this article: Are you a member of a cattle herd? Seriously, WTF is wrong with you? People like you who blindly promote technology for technology's sake, IMO, are idiots. Technology is a means to an end, not an end in itself.
In any case, it appears that my predictions of popular RFID implants are speeding along quite well. Mandatory implants of all U.S. citizens in 20 years, here we come! All hail the new totalitarian tracking state!
You're right: I forgot an audit trail of badge-in/badge-out times. Preferably it would be openly-viewable to all employees, but at minimum, it ought to be monitored by an independent auditor to ensure things are on the up-and-up -- just as financial records are (supposed to be) monitored by some reasonably-independent auditing entity.
Any company of any significant size already has the means of this sort of time-tracking by way of building-access authentication. My employer stores badge-in/out records for a while as well, in case a manager wants to review an employee's claimed working time against his actual in/out times.
A 3 hour lunch? It'd better be in the boss's office. Claim a badge-in at 6AM when it was really 10AM? The records would show that to be a lie. Leave at 3PM for a golf outing? Again, check the records...
Now, where I can see potential for abuse is in management claiming that lunch and golf outings are "work". For example, a golf outing might be claimed as work b/c they happen to be golfing with potential customers -- a wine-n-dine affair. There would have to be more fine-grained elements to determine whether somebody was really working or not for this idea to, er, work...
Unfortunately, the more-detailed such regulations get (i.e. the more conditions that must be tested), the more they morph into hideous, complex beasts like the IRS tax code... (IMO, its complexity is both a strength and a serious weakness.)
Nobody in a company may work more hours per week than either the manager to whom they directly-report. Developers wouldn't be permitted to work longer than their manager, their manager couldn't work longer than their director, their director couldn't work longer than their VP, and their VP couldn't work longer than their President/CEO, etc..
That way, how hard the company works depends entirely on how hard the top-level management -- which is already paid hundreds of times more than the lower-level employees (and for skills which are not nearly as rare as they would have us believe, nor for performance that is often in any way competent or worthy of the pay). It would ensure that those who are most highly-paid are also the ones working the longest hours.
It makes sense organizationally too (since virtually-all businesses have a top-down, hierarchical organizational structure -- just like the any socialist government): if there is work to be done, then the people doing the work need to be guided by management (just as if you have a couple threads running in a multithreaded app, you need a thread manager to ensure they play nicely).
I'm sure some of my libertarian fans will mod me down "-1, Commie". But let's face it: the alternative is what? Contract disputes in court? For over 100 years, contract law hasn't the absolutist teeth that libertarians want to have enforced. Would it work if we did? Maybe -- and it's a nice ideal in any case.
But such an ideal is not reality, and as the conservative writer Thomas Sowell likes to say, "reality is not optional."
Your post is almost devoid of useful content, and you're an AC, so I don't feel particularly compelled to respond.
That said, there are 2 kinds of logic: hard and soft logic.
Hard logic is the kind used by mathematicians and software developers (I am one). It follows a set of absolute rules which *MUST* work. e.g.: if (x > 3), then print "x is greater than 3" endif
Soft logic, however, is actually reasoning. It behaves in a logical manner, but is based on examples of real-world behaviors, not hard-and-fast rules. Thus, it is based on factors of both unconscious (but because the brain is a statistical device (learning occurs through sufficiently-high levels of neuronal stimulation, which often requires repetition), still-counted) probability and emotion. For example:
George W. Bush is George H. Bush's son. George H. Bush attacked Iraq and was a target of the Iraqis in that war. Therefore, George W. Bush will attack Iraq.
See the difference? This latter example *behaves* logically -- it has 2 true premises, and a true conclusion. The conclusion would seem to follow, if we assume that W. wants to retaliate for "trying to kill my daddy" (which is an easy conclusion to jump to, and may even be true).
BUT, there is no reason to believe, on the basis of heredity alone, that George W. Bush will attack Iraq -- as this latter example suggests. This is "soft" logic. The conclusion requires a hidden assumption -- this is the essence of soft logic: one or more hidden assumption to reach a conclusion. Hard logic lays all factors out on the table (the factors may be way-off or wrongly-conceived, but they still must come together to form a specific, singular, no-arguments-about-it result).
Hard logic requires the use of control statements or math. Soft logic requires accurate premises and conclusions, but the premises needn't actually be directly-connected.
HOWEVER: seemingly-soft logic can actually be "hard" logic. For example:
The elevator's suspension cable will break if another person gets on. Another person gets on the elevator. Therefore, the elevator's suspension cable breaks.
If the first premise is true, and the second is true, then the third *must* be true. This looks like soft logic because it is stated in english and not in a programming language or math scribbles, but because it contains quantifiable elements and a strictly-defined path towards the conclusion which either must or must not occur, it is hard logic.
Likewise, hard logic can defy reason. Take numerology as the classic example: it's mathematically possible to "prove" that girls are evil. We know girls aren't evil, yet the math undeniably suggests it's true. The factors are all there, and structurally and computationally, the algebra does correctly conclude, on the basis of the parameters, that girls are evil.
Yet, if we look at this example of "hard" logic and dig beyond its superficial calculation procedure -- which is hard logic -- and examine the individual factors, we find that this is actually soft logic. Why? Because one of the premises is based on a quote which is actually just the opinion of various philosophers. Money isn't really "the root of all evil" (even though some emotionally believe so). Not, that is, unless you consider yourself a communist, because after all, money represents goods and services -- tangible things which, when viewed directly (and not through the pointer of money), we don't consider evil.
This last example is just the sort of "logic" that is employed by social scientists everywhere, particularly economists. Their process flows and math and statistical calculations may all be correct -- but the data they use has some bias or some flawed premise (whether intentional or not), causing the the results from these data to be skewed. That's why 2 economists c
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Actually, there is a very good reason why investment and savings are considered to be the same thing: it's because they basically *are* the same.
Look into how a bank makes loans, and what it does with your money when you "save" it with them. They don't keep it locked in a vault for you, like money under a mattress; they loan it back out to people, and pay you out of their fractional reserves when you come calling.
In essence (and I'm glossing over a lot of my Monetary Policy class in college), the bank is making an investment on your behalf. They charge a higher interest rate to the loan recipient than they pay you to keep your money "saved" with them -- this is how banks make a profit.
I mentioned being paid out of the bank's fractional reserve. Because the bank has loaned-out money to people (businesses and individuals), it doesn't have everybody's money at the bank -- it's out being spent by somebody else who thinks they can turn a profit and pay back the bank with the money they make. What happens if everybody goes to the bank and demands their money back, and the bank doesn't have enough available -- i.e., what happens if you see a bank run? Your bank borrows what they need from other banks. Worst-case scenario, they go to the "bank of last resort", a.k.a. a Federal Reserve bank. The Fed waves a magic wand (seriously, it is not transparent enough for anybody besides the Fed to know precisely what they are doing), buys/sells bonds through "open-market operations", and as necessary, creates new money -- which causes inflation. In essence, if the Fed can't handle a bank run (the last time this happened was just prior to the Great Depression, and in fact, is considered by most economists now to be the reason the Depression was as bad as it was), we're all hosed. That said, since the Depression, it has handled some monstrous ones (including Russia's failure to repay its bond commitments, which led to the decline of the Ruble, causing the collapse of some big-name financial firms like Long-Term Capital Management). (OK, I'm not glossing-over as much Monetary Policy as I thought I would...)
Here's a dirty little secret about the FDIC, which insures the money you "save" at the bank: the FDIC only insures about 1-2% of the nation's fractional reserves. Hence, no matter how you slice it, If another Depression-style bank run occurs, we are all fucked.
In truth, savings and investment are considered more-or-less the same thing by economists today, because in the end, they *are* the same thing.
Yours,
A youngster who "saves" in mutual funds... (and in a high-rate savings account, and only what is necessary for paying bills from a checking account. Most of my savings are in my 401k for retirement though...)
I agree, insofar as changing the kernel's code is concerned (e.g. diving into the source). But there is still no reason why FreeBSD *must* remain mired in the past, requiring hand-editing a text file, nor is there any reason it *should* be. The only reason it has is because nobody (yes, including me) has taken the time to change the status quo...
And that is the very *essence* of abstraction. :-) That window opening on your desktop? It's executing millions of CPU instructions just displaying to your monitor. Those are millions of instructions that you could have typed by hand instead, if you were so inclined. (But who is?)
Take Perl for example: it is (at its heart) an abstraction of C, which in turn is an abstraction of ASM. Perl's foreach() loop is an abstraction that takes a linked-list containing some type of data in each node and iterates through it. This would take several LOC in C, but only takes 1 in Perl.
That is an abstraction. I'll also use a car analogy: your gas pedal.
A gas pedal is a single, one-dimensional interface manipulable even by the densest idiot with their foot.
Yet, this interface hides the complexity of the ECC, the fuel/air ratios, etc. that are mixed into the engine, to say nothing of controlling engine speeds, the vast engineering that goes into making the engine work properly, etc.. And if you drive an automatic transmission car (as 90% of Americans do), then you're looking at another element that has been abstracted away: shifting between gears 1...n while in Drive mode.
All that through the simple interface of a gas pedal.
The fact of the matter is that abstracting-away complexity is entirely-doable, and we do so in every aspect of our lives. Some examples:
* I don't care that my steak came from a cow that was raised and fed in a cattle farm, brought to slaughter, hit on the head with a hammer, drained of its blood, cut into hunks, then further cut-up into a delicious 8oz. slab of red meat for me to enjoy -- I only care that it costs me $5 at the grocery store and that it is tasty and delicious.
* I don't care that the airplane I fly between NYC and LA is flowing X gallons of fuel to its engines at time t. I don't care where over the U.S. I might be. I don't care what the pilot is doing. These things are all irrelevant to me, so long as I arrive at my destination on-time and safely.
* Your computer keyboard. Those keys you're typing on: do you think about -- as you are typing each, individual key -- what their ASCII character codes are, what voltages are being sent from the keyboard to your PC on each keystroke, the number of CPU cycles it takes to display them to your monitor, etc.? Of course not. That's irrelevant; the fact is that it works, and that's all that matters.
* The web browser you're typing your replies to me in. Every time you select a link, you are, with 1 command, invoking a socket call, an HTTP transaction, and code to render the page you are selecting. That's a ton of CPU cycles used, at the singular request of your one command.
Nobody can understand all the world's complexity all at once -- not you, not me, not anybody else. It is physically-impossible. And knowing that politically, you're a devoted libertarian, you should know enough economics to know this: it's called "specialization". We specialize in certain tasks because there is not enough time in our lives to know and learn everything. (Friedrich Hayek once commented that (and I'm not getting his quote exactly right, but I'm paraphrasing) "people believe lots of silly things because there isn't time in the day
Yes, given that the probability that it is not safe to use (assuming I download it from a respectable site, like, oh, Adobe.com), is close to zero.
Of course, the DNS cache for Adobe could be poisoned and redirected to a site where I install what I *think* is Flash, but is actually an exploit.
But that can be said of *any* application -- Flash or otherwise.
*You* do, if you have not gone through and analyzed every last line of code in every file in your kernel and userland source, and all your applications too.
Seriously, this quote of yours is open-source ideology taken to a ridiculous extreme, and it proves to me beyond a shadow of a doubt that you have never written any significant amount of code in your life.
There are tens, maybe hundreds of millions of LOC that are compiled to form a desktop FreeBSD installation. Have you looked at every single line? I *seriously* doubt it. And that's in spite of the fact that it's all open-source.
Face it: your OS, your apps, etc. are too complex for you, or I, or anyone else to perfectly understand. And even if we did, they change so often that we could spend all our time doing code-reviews, instead of actually *using* the software.
At some level, you have to trust the people producing your software; the world is much too complex to do otherwise, and you know it.
No, because it's not open-source (and I wish it were). But would I read all several million LOC of source if it were -- just to verify for me, personally, that it is safe and secure?
Absolutely not. There are *MUCH* bigger risks to me in the world -- like being killed in a car accident, or mugged on a train in Chicago, or nuked by some anti-American fucker in Iran or North Korea, or even me destroying my partition table while screwing around with multiple OS installs -- than whether my apps are being hijacked by an official vendor's distribution of an app plugin (which I have never seen or heard of occurring in practice, making it a patently irrational and paranoid fear).
They weren't (as certain other Slashdotters seem to think) intended to be criticisms of FreeBSD; only statements of reality that FreeBSD must -- somehow -- deal with.
This is an absurd argument. Have you ever mis-typed something? Yes? Oooh, and there goes your kernel build that spent (depending on CPU time and available RAM, and whether you're using a filesystem in RAM to temporarily store the outputted binaries in
This argument of "use a text editor!" is old and ridiculous (much like the old hacker's/security argument that somebody "deserves to be hacked" if they don't do a huge number of arcane and obscure things to secure their system). It is an argument of scale: I could make the same logical argument you do that we should all be running our OSs by entering in ASM commands. After all -- if you don't know ASM, you shouldn't be running a computer.
If you can't issue instructions in ASM, you shouldn't be using a computer. Right?
No, of course not, that's silly. The state of computing advanced far beyond this stage half a century ago. Your command-line and text editor is an abstraction away from machine language, for efficiency's sake and for the sake of reducing user-caused errors.
The same is true of every GUI... it's another abstraction away from user-caused failures and an abstraction away from the complexity that engenders it. This abstraction brings computing to ever-less-computer-savvy people, yes. And is that a bad thing? Of course not.
You can't reasonably get away with claiming that a particular technology is good just because "that's the way my grandpappy did it when he was a young buck pounding the keyboard".
All I proposed was an ncurses interface through which kernel builds could be accomplished. FreeBSD already uses ncurses for the installer, so I hardly think an ncurses interface is too "advanced" for FreeBSD...
(Oh, and for the record in the vi/emacs holy war, I wield and much-prefer VIM over other *nix text editors.)
Agreed. Unfortunately, there are lots of sites where blinking and moving stuff is all-too-common...
I didn't measure it exactly, but XF86 (back when it was XF86, not XOrg) did *feel* a bit snappier after changing the "cpu" option from i386 to i686, as well as (referring to the 5.x-STABLE series) removing debugging support once I believed the build to be stable (predictably, removing debugging output was a bigger factor).
They're not huge increases, I'll grant you, but they were noticeable nonetheless...
That's cool if that's the way 6.0 is configured. I haven't built a kernel/world since 5.x (because 6.0 is so awesomely stable, I love it
Uninformed decisions? It's incredible that you decided to come to that conclusion, considering that you know nothing about me. Try looking in the mirror kid.
I have read the FreeBSD Handbook all the way through, twice, and have referenced it lots of other times. When I need the Handbook (like, when doing a world + kernel update), I follow it religiously. When I don't know how to do something, or something is not working for me, I follow it religiously.
Well, unless you surf using Lynx or Links, you are going to run across websites that use Flash. Lots of them. Some of them -- stupidly -- require Flash for navigation.
Love it or hate it, that is the reality, and reality is not optional.
Uh, for hardware support? For IPSEC support? For performance? To enable debugging? I have recompiled my FBSD kernels for all of these reasons at one time or another.
In the not-so-old days of FBSD 5.x, one had to compile in support for IPFW. And in the days of 4.x, compiling in CD-RW support was necessary.
The same will be true for different elements of functionality for FBSD going-forward, unless *all* elements of the OS are compiled as modules and loaded dynamically... And last I checked, that's not the case.
You think a desktop user who is technically-competent enough to run FreeBSD is not willing and able to compile a kernel -- and is willing to do so if they require some functionality that is not supported by GENERIC?
"Normal" people don't use FreeBSD (and in fact, have never heard of it, and in almost every case, IME, certainly do not care), and "normal" people need Flash (and Quicktime, and Windows Media Player DRM, and a whole range of other crap we in the OSS world don't like). End of story.
Do you have any concept of the idea of time periods ("quantums", as Kirk McKusick calls them in "The Design and Implementation of BSD 4.4", in reference to the time allocated to a particular process to be run before task-switching) -- as in, the periods during which, some resource (be it a file, socket, or whatever) is polled? Moreover, do you have any conception of how such periods might change over time?
In college (i.e., until about last year or so), I checked freebsd.org weekly, if not daily.
However, in the real world, there is less time for such things, and my interest in FreeBSD has waned somewhat.
For the last year or so, I have not checked freebsd.org daily, weekly, or even monthly. I've checked it maybe twice in the last year, and I haven't been there in months. And it was only LAST MONTH that the news on Java on FreeBSD changed significantly. Do you not recognize this?
Finally, how the fuck did you come to the conclusion that I'm "dissing" FreeBSD? In case your knee-jerk, ideologically-blinded eyes didn't notice, I said in my original post:
(emphasis added here for effect)
That is FAR from a damning criticism of FreeBSD. I'm pointing out FreeBSD's flaws. Does not EVERY OS have flaws -- including FreeBSD?
In summary, like unfortunately all too many in the OSS world (and the political world, for that matter), you are an idiotic, ideological nutjob zealot prick, and are arguably one of the key problems FreeBSD has to wider acceptance. You, frankly, are a cancer on the fantastic project that is FreeBSD.
Leave your room in daddy's basement, get a real job, and go get laid. It'll do you a world of good.
Sweet! I'll have to try that sometime. Thanks for the tip. :)
That is (good) news to me. Thanks for the link (and no thanks for assuming trollishness, although it's understandable on /., particularly relating to BSD).
/. article's posting. And I have about a zillion more important and useful things to do with my limited free time than spend it watching the FBSD Project's every move (and unfortunately, my job does not entail working on FBSD in any way).
No, I didn't bother to look for that news, because I tried using FBSD 6.0 on my laptop as a desktop OS a few months ago, and the behavior I described was the behavior I saw. News about Java on FBSD being as slow to trickle out as it is -- since a Sun-official JRE and JDK release on FBSD was originally negotiated waaay back in Dec. 2001, there really hasn't been any major news regarding the Sun-FreeBSD Foundation's relationship until the news you cited -- I have no reason to assume based on past history that Java on FBSD would actually have come out with a native binary distribution between the last time I used it and this
At least you're less-reactionary than the other frothing-at-the-mouth person who replied...
It's not a troll, fool. Try installing native Java from a port (*not* a package) sometime.
/. are illiterate reactionary tards, but you really take the cake this week.
For fsck's sake, why don't you go back and read my post in full? I never said there was not native Java. Yes, I remember when FBSD Foundation and Sun negotiated native Java, a few years ago.
Jesus. I know people on
You mean, like with Eclipse/WebSphere Application Developer and Azureus dead-on-the-desktop?
Java may suck on the desktop (certainly it does compared to C#/.NET, but at least Java has a chance of being portable to other OSs or devices), and there aren't many apps worth speaking-of (note that the two above use SWT, not one of the native Sun Java GUI libs), but it still sees heavy use, particularly inside large organizations.
If only it would:
/dev/dsp, rather than one app locking access to that device to the exclusion of all others. Linux does this via ALSA, but FBSD has no similar, new audio architecture to replace OSS (as ALSA finally has). KDE's artsd + artsdsp is available, but we all know that the entire arts package sucks horribly.
* Mix multiple audio inputs to
* Have better Java and Flash support. Ever try to get native Java working on FreeBSD? First you have to download the Linux Java distribution, install it, then download the FBSD patchset for native Java, build and install it. This takes a day, even on my 2.4GHz, 768MB laptop. And Flash? Don't make me laugh. Flash support is attemptedly enabled via a wrapper, but the Flash version that is currently stable is 5. I'm running 7 on the Gentoo install I'm typing this on, and that's behind the Windows world's Flash version 8.
* Similar to the Java problem, too many apps in FBSD require Linux support. If I'm going to run a Linux app on FBSD, why not just run Linux? Moreover, if parallel FBSD and Linux binaries are necessary (as with Java), then this is going to be a monster waste of HDD space.
* Make compiling the kernel easier. Yes, configuring the kernel is doable by hand, but as any newbie programmer should be able to tell you, the more opportunity you have for human input, the more opportunity there is for failure. More typing/manual config means a higher probability that some piece of kernel functionality goes missing in the build. Why not an ncurses interface with basic (but I must emphasize, also imperfect) dependency resolution, like Linux has?
Look, I love FreeBSD and prefer it to Linux. Its overall design is more sophisticated, saner, and better-organized than Linux, and I find the ports system to be better-designed and more-useful than Gentoo's portage (where are the descriptions of each port in portage guys? I want to know if what I'm about to install is really what I want, and I don't want to have to go google it first!). All that, and FBSD exists under a free-as-in-freedom, rather than free-as-in-communism license. I've run it on my server for years, and with the huge, disappointing exception of the 5.[01] days, it's very stable (current uptime with 6.0-RELEASE is 159 days).
But over various times in the last 6 years, I have tried it as a desktop, and every time I have, there has always been some FBSD-specific behavior that has caused me to switch back to Windows or Linux. FBSD 6.0 is certainly the most usable desktop release yet, and it's thisclose to there for me. But still, not quite. (Frankly, I want an OSX box, and my next laptop will almost undoubtedly be a dual-core MacBook. Then I can have the best of all worlds: a FBSD userland, compatibility with most OSS *nix apps, and commercial-ware app availability. But until then...)
So, I'm happy with FBSD maintaining its role as a rock-solid server OS. Let's not assume everything is a nail when holding a hammer here...
Thanks. Yes, that makes much more sense now. :-) (I'm not sure I totally like that particular pay structure design, but at least it makes some economic sense now.)
Nonsense. At last count, nearly 40% of all Americans thought the 1st Amendment went too far in its protections -- even though most of them couldn't name 1st Amendment's 5 protections from government. Only 1 of those protections could be named by more than 20% of Americans (free speech, of course)...
As another example of sheep-like behavior, Americans will happily trade their grocery privacy for a 10%/year discount (which, if health insurance companies ever get wind of their customers' grocery shopping records -- which, given that information tends towards a liquid-like free-flow, is more-likely than not to happen eventually -- will wind up costing those customers a lot more when the insurer finds out how much sugared soda they drink, Cheetos they eat, etc.).
80% of Americans are worthless (or as Gordon Gekko put it, "80% of Americans have no net worth" - but the correlation between political worth and financial worth tends to be strong); the "trivial many", just like 80% of the rest of the world's population. You're not going to get any sort of "uprising" in defense of freedom in America -- not until it is much, MUCH too late (i.e., well after the gun bans come, after more speech restrictions are enacted, after the ability to travel internationally is blocked by heavily-armed military personnel, etc.).
You can't change the world. But you can act to limit your own personal involvement as it changes around you...
So your idea is to cap the salary of every employee at the lowest employee's rate? Uhhh, riiiight...
Here's why it would work this way: assume:
A = CEO
B = VP
C = Director
D = Manager
E = Peon developer/engineer/janitor/whatever
A is responsible for B, B is responsible for C, and so on down the line. This is standard corporate hierarchy (though the titles may vary, depending on the number of layers of bureaucracy).
By your rule, D cannot earn more than E; hence, D <= E.
By your rule, C cannot earn more than D; hence, C <= D.
By your rule, B cannot earn more than C; hence, B <= C.
By your rule, A cannot earn more than B; hence, A <= B.
Hence, the CEO makes no more than the janitor. Assuming you don't believe in corporate communism (unless decided-upon by all the owners, in which case, it's fine by me too), I think your math is off.
I'm all for slashing CxO compensation. But I prefer re-arranging the way shareholder voting works such that the various shareholders who are pissed-off (many of them are institutional, no less) actually have the clout to do something about it... Britain has a better version of shareholder democracy than the U.S. does, in this respect. CxO skills are not as rare as they lead people to believe, and investors know it -- they're just largely powerless to do anything about it.
Ha, maybe. :)
/ a/2004/09/15/FDGA58M7L21.DTL&o=3 I'm not finding diags. for Nutrasweet in a 30 sec. googling...)
In any case, Splenda is more chemically-similar to sugar than Nutrasweet is, which explains the more-similar taste. (Molecular structure of sugar and Splenda here: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/object/article?f=/c
I've always consumed diet sodas; that's what my parents got me hooked-on, and so that's what I'm used-to. Sugared sodas taste "weird" to me...
Bad sample? Did you buy the second bottle from the same store in the same 1-2 days? If so, it's possible you gotten bottles from the same bad batch.
Also try the cans; I speak from experience when I say they are "fizzy".
Regardless, the fizziness has nothing to do with whether the drink is sweetened by Splenda or NutraSweet. The fizziness is CO2 injected after mixing the syrup; those sweeteners are mixed-in while making the syrup...
...and tell me that you could've predicted where computer security was going for the next 50 years then.
DDoS attacks? Botnets? Spam zombies? "Old school" viruses (and by old school, I mean it seems like these kind of viruses have become less-common than they were in the early-mid 1990s) that wipe your whole HDD? Mail clients that auto-execute a scripting language that a maliciously-minded high schooler can understand? Exploit-discovery tools like Metasploit? (or heck, even the very concept of an "exploit"?)
These things weren't conceived-of then. Not on anybody's radar at all. Remember, this was a time when IBM was selling computers to the 5 people in the world they said might have a use for them...
Yet Alan Cox has the nuts to come to us, saying "listen to me! I hack on Linux's kernel, and now I have an MBA, so I can predict the future now!"? He may be as close to a good predictor of the future of computer security as we have, but my point is that there are FAR too many variables -- far too much emergent behavior and unpredictable events -- between now and 50 years from now for he or anybody else to make a competent projection out that far.
For all Cox knows, the human race could be exterminated in 2015 by a nuclear war with the >Russians and the Islamic world, fueled by rising inflation or even a currency meltdown somewhere (possibly even the U.S.).
...the guy sitting out in a parking lot with a directed RFID reader, stealing your identity as you walk into the grocery store.
Implantable RFID in humans is as dangerous an idea as I've ever heard.
Look, governments have historically used identity documents to track and sometimes murder their citizens. Iraq did it, prior to the 2003 U.S. attack on it. China still does it. (do a find for "id card") (Granted, these abuses are all based on national ID cards. But the technology is irrelevant, because the identity being checked is the same, and both technologies reveal much of the same information to the reader.)
The larger point needs to be made: If the government has no reason to identify you -- and why would it unless you're suspected of a crime or traveling internationally -- then why do people need ID cards/implanted RFID chips?
To the developer who posted this article: Are you a member of a cattle herd? Seriously, WTF is wrong with you? People like you who blindly promote technology for technology's sake, IMO, are idiots. Technology is a means to an end, not an end in itself.
In any case, it appears that my predictions of popular RFID implants are speeding along quite well. Mandatory implants of all U.S. citizens in 20 years, here we come! All hail the new totalitarian tracking state!
...I'll believe it when I see it!
You're right: I forgot an audit trail of badge-in/badge-out times. Preferably it would be openly-viewable to all employees, but at minimum, it ought to be monitored by an independent auditor to ensure things are on the up-and-up -- just as financial records are (supposed to be) monitored by some reasonably-independent auditing entity.
Any company of any significant size already has the means of this sort of time-tracking by way of building-access authentication. My employer stores badge-in/out records for a while as well, in case a manager wants to review an employee's claimed working time against his actual in/out times.
A 3 hour lunch? It'd better be in the boss's office. Claim a badge-in at 6AM when it was really 10AM? The records would show that to be a lie. Leave at 3PM for a golf outing? Again, check the records...
Now, where I can see potential for abuse is in management claiming that lunch and golf outings are "work". For example, a golf outing might be claimed as work b/c they happen to be golfing with potential customers -- a wine-n-dine affair. There would have to be more fine-grained elements to determine whether somebody was really working or not for this idea to, er, work...
Unfortunately, the more-detailed such regulations get (i.e. the more conditions that must be tested), the more they morph into hideous, complex beasts like the IRS tax code... (IMO, its complexity is both a strength and a serious weakness.)
...here's an idea for a flexible regulation:
Nobody in a company may work more hours per week than either the manager to whom they directly-report. Developers wouldn't be permitted to work longer than their manager, their manager couldn't work longer than their director, their director couldn't work longer than their VP, and their VP couldn't work longer than their President/CEO, etc..
That way, how hard the company works depends entirely on how hard the top-level management -- which is already paid hundreds of times more than the lower-level employees (and for skills which are not nearly as rare as they would have us believe, nor for performance that is often in any way competent or worthy of the pay). It would ensure that those who are most highly-paid are also the ones working the longest hours.
It makes sense organizationally too (since virtually-all businesses have a top-down, hierarchical organizational structure -- just like the any socialist government): if there is work to be done, then the people doing the work need to be guided by management (just as if you have a couple threads running in a multithreaded app, you need a thread manager to ensure they play nicely).
I'm sure some of my libertarian fans will mod me down "-1, Commie". But let's face it: the alternative is what? Contract disputes in court? For over 100 years, contract law hasn't the absolutist teeth that libertarians want to have enforced. Would it work if we did? Maybe -- and it's a nice ideal in any case.
But such an ideal is not reality, and as the conservative writer Thomas Sowell likes to say, "reality is not optional."
Awesome, I've been trolled. Thanks.
That said, there are 2 kinds of logic: hard and soft logic.
Hard logic is the kind used by mathematicians and software developers (I am one). It follows a set of absolute rules which *MUST* work. e.g.:
if (x > 3), then
print "x is greater than 3"
endif
Soft logic, however, is actually reasoning. It behaves in a logical manner, but is based on examples of real-world behaviors, not hard-and-fast rules. Thus, it is based on factors of both unconscious (but because the brain is a statistical device (learning occurs through sufficiently-high levels of neuronal stimulation, which often requires repetition), still-counted) probability and emotion. For example:
See the difference? This latter example *behaves* logically -- it has 2 true premises, and a true conclusion. The conclusion would seem to follow, if we assume that W. wants to retaliate for "trying to kill my daddy" (which is an easy conclusion to jump to, and may even be true).
BUT, there is no reason to believe, on the basis of heredity alone, that George W. Bush will attack Iraq -- as this latter example suggests. This is "soft" logic. The conclusion requires a hidden assumption -- this is the essence of soft logic: one or more hidden assumption to reach a conclusion. Hard logic lays all factors out on the table (the factors may be way-off or wrongly-conceived, but they still must come together to form a specific, singular, no-arguments-about-it result).
Hard logic requires the use of control statements or math. Soft logic requires accurate premises and conclusions, but the premises needn't actually be directly-connected.
HOWEVER: seemingly-soft logic can actually be "hard" logic. For example:
If the first premise is true, and the second is true, then the third *must* be true. This looks like soft logic because it is stated in english and not in a programming language or math scribbles, but because it contains quantifiable elements and a strictly-defined path towards the conclusion which either must or must not occur, it is hard logic.
Likewise, hard logic can defy reason. Take numerology as the classic example: it's mathematically possible to "prove" that girls are evil. We know girls aren't evil, yet the math undeniably suggests it's true. The factors are all there, and structurally and computationally, the algebra does correctly conclude, on the basis of the parameters, that girls are evil.
Yet, if we look at this example of "hard" logic and dig beyond its superficial calculation procedure -- which is hard logic -- and examine the individual factors, we find that this is actually soft logic. Why? Because one of the premises is based on a quote which is actually just the opinion of various philosophers. Money isn't really "the root of all evil" (even though some emotionally believe so). Not, that is, unless you consider yourself a communist, because after all, money represents goods and services -- tangible things which, when viewed directly (and not through the pointer of money), we don't consider evil.
This last example is just the sort of "logic" that is employed by social scientists everywhere, particularly economists. Their process flows and math and statistical calculations may all be correct -- but the data they use has some bias or some flawed premise (whether intentional or not), causing the the results from these data to be skewed. That's why 2 economists c