My apologies. This is/. -- I've actually seen people post such things and *mean it*...
(And admittedly, I myself was once not far from the "all command-line, all the time" camp, using Firefox as about the only GUI app I ran on my Linux desktop for a while. So when I see these sorts of posts, I can't help but laugh...)
We use this at work (we're IBM's bitch; if IBM says jump, we ask "how high?"; if IBM says "pay up!", we ask "how much?")./.'s database doesn't have enough space for the complaints I have and my co-workers about Lotus Notes.
Some highlights from version 6.5: * Copy/pasting text into a memo? Be prepared to wait 3 minutes or more (on a P4 2.53GHz) if it isn't unformatted plaintext, e.g. something as oh-so-fancy as HTML...
* Illogical menu design. Seriously, why are there different "preferences" choices beneath 2 different menu headings?
* Slow, slow, slow due to its sheer obesity. You've had Notes open all day and haven't used it in a while, and you're switching from the calendar to a plaintext memo? Wait a minute while Windows has to load Notes' fat ass out of the swapfile into RAM...
* Want to select multiple emails (say, to drag them into a folder or the trash)? No, you can't do it the usual, worldwide-accepted method of click item 1, hold down SHIFT, click last item in range. You must hold down SHIFT and click each fucking email.
* Want to setup a meeting in the calendar? Go ahead and choose "appointment" in the first combobox, then "meeting" once the creation form is open...
* People are encouraged to build apps using Lotus scripts. And invariably, the apps blow. Coincidence? Crappy developers? OK, both are probably true...
* And then there are the "You've got new mail" pop-up notices which occur sometimes when no email actually shows up in your inbox. Thank you Notes, for breaking my concentration on a project for the the notification of an email which doesn't exist!
Not a day at work goes by that I don't curse the giant steaming heap that is IBM's Lotus Notes. Seriously, the only nice thing I can say about Notes is that its scheduler does a good job of finding free time in peoples' schedules to setup meetings. That happens to work very well, and is quite a time-saver. But otherwise, Notes is fucking garbage, and while I haven't tried Exchange + Outbreak, I can't imagine it would be any worse. (Personally, I wish we'd switch over to a web-based groupware app and ditch these proprietary POS's that MSFT and IBM have for us, but I don't see that happening anytime soon.)
IBM's hardware rocks, but their software almost invariably is so godawful that it makes one wonder if they've implemented the "1,000 monkeys at keyboards will eventually write perfect software" theory. If so, the theory is failing badly... As much as MSFT's software tends to be putrid shit too, it's leaps-and-bounds better and more-consistent in behavior than anything I've seen IBM turn out. IBM realizes this, and that's why they're trying to ride the Linux wave -- IBM can't churn out worthwhile code, so they figure they'll let hobbyists do it for them...
Frankly, if IBM ports Notes to Linux and tries to get people to actually use it, I believe the brand image of Linux vendors (RedHat, etc.) will be cheapened. It will wind up being a negative impact on the viability of Linux as a desktop OS. Seriously, for those who've never used it, that is how bad Notes is; that's how incompetent IBM apparently is at writing solid, well-designed software...
...sure, we'll do that at work, just as soon as we can find a Lotus Notes implementation in Emacs (oh wait, the Emacs OS does groupware, doesn't it?).
Seriously, if you think for a minute any even semi-normal person is going to browse the web with Lynx, you're crazy. Nobody works out of a mainframe session anymore; nobody has login access solely on beefy Unix boxes. 95% of the world uses Windows; some 80% or so use IE. The reality is that except for a very few exceptions, the world moved beyond the life led at a command-prompt and a no-mouse text UI for day-to-day purposes. Backwards-compatibility with old mainframes, sure -- but most office workers, to say nothing of consumers, do not operate out of mainframe terminals.
Join us next time in reality when you've been tossed a nickel and bought yourself a better computer. ("Better", meaning, better than a P90 recovered from the dumpster at a student's dormitory 7 years ago, now running Linux.)
In the social hierarchy of the corporate world, I see really 4 major layers, from top of the pyramid to the bottom:
1) Executives (people who sit in big offices, work long hours, and fly all over the place in corporate jets being effectively a figurehead representative of a corporation, much like a king or a queen of a nation governed not by a king or a queen, but by a parliament (like Britain)) 2) Middle-management (office workers who manage the people who actually do work and sit in meetings to talk a lot) 3) White-collar workers (office workers who generate software, reports, graphs, etc.) 4) Blue-collar workers (janitors, plumbers, construction, etc.)
In the 1980s, when manufacturing was on its way out of the U.S., blue-collar workers were widely told "learn white-collar skills!" White-collar skills became valuable and popular, and helped fuel the boom/bust cycle of IT in the late 1990s/early 2000s.
Now, here we are in 2006, and white-collar workers are being told "learn management skills!" Notice something?
The outsourcing trend is moving up the hierarchical structure.
Now here's the thing to realize: that structure grows ever-narrower in the number of workers needed as you go up to the top -- executives comprise only perhaps a dozen of the people in a Fortune 500 company, whereas the white-collar workers may comprise tens of thousands.
So in effect, we're being told to increase the labor supply of management; this is showing up in the fact that MBAs are a dime-a-dozen now, and top-flight business consultants of the world now suggest that if you don't get an MBA from one of the top 5 universities in the world, then don't waste your time. Lots of people are doing exactly that.
The trouble is, there's no need for all those managers... There will be some demand for them arising out of the need to manage work outsourced to even-larger supplies of white-collar workers in places like India and China -- but will those workers be enough to generate the number of management jobs needed for replacement here?
As there is an exponentially-larger number of people at each layer of lower-level bureaucracy in an organization, and this trend of outsourcing is moving up the bureaucratic structure, not down, it seems to follow that the usefulness of getting a management education will prove to be outdated/useless even more-quickly than the previous waves of migration (blue-to-white collar, white collar-to-management).
In fact, as noted earlier regarding the popularity of MBAs, it seems that it's *already* too late -- the degree has become commoditized as soon as pundits have started recommending it as an alternative to white-collar work.
Making matters worse is that Baby Boomers are going to start retiring en-masse in about 4 years. This reduces American labor supply, driving up wages, and making foreign competition look even more-attractive for outsourcing. (In this respect, that is one argument very much in favor of looser immigration laws -- let the Mexicans in so we can keep our labor costs competitive with the rest of the world and keep our jobs here...)
Prediction? Unless the wages of the rest of the world accelerate even more-quickly -- which, ironically, will only occur through increased trade and outsourcing -- there are going to be a lot of intelligent, hard-working, well-educated, often-wealthy (but not super-rich) Americans becoming increasingly-angry at an exponential rate over the next few years. (It is quite the paradox that what will ultimately save us is the very thing about which we are presently-complaining...)
...has an interest in restricting the labor supply of plumbers to keep their prices artificially-high, hence your high salary.
What plumber is going to take on and train a bunch of new people who will ultimately wind up competing for his job? That would be asinine (yet we in IT do it all the time!)...
That case established the precedent which requires public companies to behave in a manner motivated by profit, not by altruism. This makes sense: the one thing that all shareholders have in common is to invest in businesses for one thing: to make money. Everything else is secondary.
So, in fact, yes, American corporations are, by legal precedent, required to do whatever they can to turn a profit. Cutting costs boosts profit margins; hence, the GP is correct.
Of course, nobody said that profit went straight to shareholders; as you note, boosting the bonuses of the Board of Directors is a major element too which flies under the radar on the grounds that (supposedly) those people at the top have skills which are very scarce, so they can demand such premiums on their abilities. But so long as the company is making a profit, it is within the bounds of that precedent; the real question is "what is the allocation of that increased profit?"...
Of course, privately-held companies can do whatever they like with their profit. That's one of the advantages of private ownership...
In theory, yes, a more-open society with 2-way surveillance probably would be a better society.
But that's idealistic. Is there any society in history in which surveillance -- or any form of power, for that matter -- has ever been two-sided? I know of none.
Look at the modern surveillance-state of Britain and China, and the emerging surveillance states of the U.S., Germany, and most other developed nations. In which of those countries do the citizens have the ability to spy on their governments as much as the government spies on them?
That's right: NONE OF THEM.
Brin's vision is an idealistic one, and I wish people would stop referencing that utopian text as though it were in any way realistic.
The practical reality is the same one that has dominated mankind since the creation of institutions: he who has the power makes the rules. Governments are nothing more than warlords in control of a nation, and are in control only because the people let them be in control. The U.S. was founded as a counter-revolution to the idea that people should be afraid of their governments; that "the people should not be afraid of their governments, governments should be afraid of their people."
Unfortunately, that founding view has been in decline since the nation's founding, and particularly since the start of FDR's administration...
So, as a practical, realistic matter on the grounds of fairness, on the basis of world history, there is no reason to support the UAV surveillance-state our current government wants to implement.
When the U.S. govn't is ready to disclose even Top Secret secrets to the public (and try for treason any person who discloses them to non-American citizens -- as I believe the Constitution was originally meant to implement), then we will talk... But that won't happen because Americans now believe in the power of a strong central government and correctly believe that such information will quickly be known to potential enemies if it is made public to U.S. citizens -- to the detriment of the nation.
Thus, as things stand today, a symmetrical surveillance society isn't even close to happening: there is a vast information asymmetry between our government and the governed, and this is a serious problem that will likely never be resolved absent radical change in our government's organization and electoral system.
Do the members of a class define that class? (Think in software terms here for a minute.)
Answer: yes, by definition they do.
If I write a Java/C# class that instantiates a "god" object (wow, I'm creating god? Who knew my awesome powers!) and a "holy prophet" object who claims to speak on behalf of the god object, and creates a collection/linked-list of 1 billion elements, 800 million of which are advocating and saying that their holy book says "spread the word of our holy prophet, by the sword if necessary!", does that mean that this class is defined by a group of largely-insane members?
Yes, by definition.
And, as the promoters of that religion, do they taint its supposedly-peaceful teachings? Yes indeedy... The same is true in politics: the issues perceived as "extreme" which are promoted by nutjobs (be it communism from the left or state-funded religion in public schools from the right) make the other promoters look bad. One bad apple spoils the bunch.
Osama bin Laden, along with Pakistan, Palestine, the various Arab terrorists who hijacked dozens of airliners in the 1970s and 1980s, and so on, have spoiled the religious "apple" of Islam. Islam has a product to sell, but nobody outside their current fanbase is buying, because it's becoming rotten from the inside.
Moderate Muslims exist, but read their moderacy very carefully: even *they* support things like restricting the right of people to publish, say, Danish cartoons making fun of their god. And that is tolerance? Tolerance of others' right to free-speech? Hardly. *True* tolerance of speech requires permitting the speech, no matter how hateful or inciteful or reviling it may be (and this is one of the few things America really gets right compared to other nations).
That isn't to say other religions, Christianity in particular, doesn't have its own flavor of oppression and intolerance. They have historically and that has continued to this day (and will probably continue throughout the remainder of human history). Again, neither Islam nor any other religion can be said to be "tolerant"... It's simply that Islam is the current focus of the world at the moment regarding its ability to transform itself from a religion historically associate with violence and murder into a more-modern, accepting religion.
Christianity has (arguably) managed this. It's taken hundreds of years since the beginning of the Enlightenment, and Christians have been dragged kicking-and-screaming every step of the way into this level of tolerance by the liberal elements of western societies (both the classical, capitalism-supporting elements, and the modern, anti-capitalist elements), but it's more-or-less happened, and today, Christians are happy to use their relative tolerance as a means of moral argumentative leverage against other religions. Christians in the U.S., for example, tolerate the practice of other faiths here, despite their own large internal conflicts with them. They may not like other religions, but at least Christians (for the most part) don't go around killing in the name of their imaginary friend anymore; that (again, arguably) ended in large part with the Crusades. Abortion clinic bombings and arsons are probably the biggest exception here...
Islam is having its own "crusade" now, but is thankfully being held in check by western societies willing to accept a kinder, gentler Islam, if only Islam is willing to become kinder and gentler. Iran, being otherwise relatively-modern as Islamic states go, is seen as the testing grounds as to whether that can actually occur in reality... I understand that there is widespread support among the youth there to open up and become less-repressive, without losing the more-moderate values in their Islamic faith, but the elders are much more-conservative and less-progressive. That's too bad; Islam could use some well-spoken, saner, moderate representatives in the west.
So, once again, we return to the classification question. Is a class defined by its me
Yeah, that argument totally worked for the atom. Just because something hasn't been proven "in 2000 years" does not make it false or even have a high likelihood of being false. It just means it hasn't been proven. Evidence to the contrary of a theory paves the way towards a high probability of the theory being false, but that's not the case here.
Fair enough, although this argument leads to the ability to believe in the existence of anything, no matter how ridiculous. But along an infinite timeline, well, sure, anything is possible...
But the claims made by religion (I'm going to use Christianity here as my example base because I was raised as one) are not nuclear physics. Is it not proveable, at this point, whether or not there was an ark? Whether or not there was a great flood and rain for 40 days and 40 nights? (Could this have been a revisionist understanding of the Ice Age, seeing as the last of that age occurred around 10,000BC, and the Bible as we know it was written around 0BC?) Given that we can estimate periods in Earth's history farther-back than that -- such as when the different periods of dinosaur life existed, tens of millions of years ago -- I doubt that proving or disproving the story of Noah's Ark is much of a stretch.
Yet, where is the proof in favor of that event's occurrence? The last I saw on the subject was some speculation in Popular Mechanics in the late 1990s, about an archeological dig in Turkey, around the area where it is thought that Noah landed his ship.
Or the story of the burning bush? Doesn't lightning set forests on fire on a fairly-regular basis? (indeed, the fact that we now manually clear out underbrush in forests is because we stop these forest fires before they get the chance to do their own destruction...)
And then there's Jesus' body itself. Habeas corpus! ("Produce the body.") Or, since in the arid deserts of the middle-east, his body has (as the Bible itself tells us occurs to all of us) "returned to dust", from whence it came.
Or a baby born to a virgin woman? Give me a break. Unless people knew of artificial insemination 2000 years ago, and I'm pretty darn sure they didn't, this is an impossible feat. More likely, Mary was drugged and raped and didn't know that she had been fucked by some guy the night before (and poof! Like magic, 9 months later a baby shows up - what a "miracle"!). It happens often enough on college campuses; why shouldn't we expect similar behavior out of people 2000 years ago (except for having a far-more limited knowledge of and access to mind-altering drugs)? It's not as though the base instincts of humankind have changed... well, ever. The place for this story is in the trash heap of myths; as Thomas Jefferson once wrote, "The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus by the Supreme Being in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter."
I am much more convinced of perhaps an adaptation of the explanation of religion's existence by the ridiculously-bad Sean Connery movie Zardoz, in 1973 (just after Connery stopped playing James Bond) -- that sometime around 0BC, the upper 20% of society (the elites/nobility, or "immortals" in the movie) decided there needed to be some way to keep the remaining 80% (the peasants/peons, or "brutals" in the movie) in check. They invent this giant flying stone head that claims absurdities like "THE PENIS IS BAD, GUNS ARE GOOD!" and urges them to kill each other. And the 80% of people believe in this thing as being a God!
For as awful as the movie is (in a Manos: The Hands of Fate sort of way), I have to admit, that hippie-inspired interpretation of religion seems more-likely than anything I've seen so far.
People *want* to believe in the ridiculous and the fantastic: witness the popularity of fiction books and movies; witness th
(All religions are intolerant of each other, because each religion defines a mutually-exclusive lock on a God they believe exists (or in atheism's case, doesn't exist). Each religion fights over that lock, and therein lies the religious conflict. And all this fighting assumes their God -- or any god -- actually even exists; over 2000 years of non-proval of a god's existence sure paves the way towards a high probability that he/she/it does not.)
What do we lose? A portion of a global pie of openly-available information.
We go from having a truly-globalized free-market and free-trade of ideas and opinions, one in which the collective wisdom is available for everyone else in that global crowd, to a protectionist trade of information, in which you have to be a member of some elite, local club and know people to get in and gain access.
I'm thinking of so many parallels in computing and economics this subject makes my head spin; obviously I've started with a clear economics analogy. But what about the analogies from the computing world?
* Warez groups -- You have to know people and gain their trust to get in to some groups and trade with them. They have, in a sense, "regionalized" some of their content that would otherwise be made available (were it not illegal under copyright laws. That's another issue, although related in terms of the protectionist regulation that IP law imposes).
* Businesses -- Want access to internal corporate data? Hack one of their boxes (exploit stupid users with a bot you've written that is attached to an email claiming to have naked pics of Maria Sherapova, although, this assumes the spam filter doesn't detect and discard the message, and that the heuristics of the virus-scanning software doesn't detect your bot as a trojan); social engineer your way to a username/password combo (i.e. play con-artist); or become employed there. Businesses have cordoned-off their proprietary information from the public-at-large, except for product information.
* For-pay websites -- Many newspapers (such as The Economist and the NYTimes) require you to have a subscription to access premium content. They have compartmentalized their proprietary information into a pay-to-play region they've defined.
* Microsoft vs. F/OSS -- What better example for Slashdotters?:-) On one side, you have a closed, proprietary vendor who sections-off their OS code, etc. from the outside, and only if you are a super-player (e.g. a government of a highly-developed nation) can you gain access, and then only under restriction. The OSS world of software, by contrast, is open for all to see. MSFT closes off (regionalizes) their information to the rest of the world; OSS is open to the whole world. One is protectionist about their code; the other, free-as-in-beer and free-as-in-speech free-traders of information.
Those are some present-day examples of what happens when information is sectioned-off from the rest of the world.
Now imagine that being the case with *ALL* information, of all kinds -- not just corporate or proprietary information. Medical information; university research; open-source software; statistical data about a variety of subjects; the list goes on and on.
I began by saying this is a scaling problem. It is, and to make my case clearer from the computing side, answer this simple question: how much combined data do you have on your LAN at the moment?
In a private residence of just one or two people, you might have, at most, a couple TBytes -- and that's if you're recording TV shows and movies all day (legitimately, I assume!). Even on a large engineering university's LAN, you might have no more than a couple PBytes (I'm guessing; my last experience on a uni LAN was in 2001, when there were some 6 TBytes indexed by our unofficial file-share indexer, on a LAN with 26,000 students, plus who knows how much storage space the university's depts. officially had).
Now compare that to the rest of the the 'net 532,897 TBytes, and that was way back in 2002.
There is no reason or excuse for outright political/legislative *bans* on the flow of information on the Internet. Period. Restricting the rates at which that information travels (perhaps by way of packet-shaping), or restricting the access to
Did anybody else misread "KFTC" as "KFC" on first glance? I did, and I wondered why a petty peddler of putrid poultry possessed people to pass prejudice on a purveyor of piss-poor programs...
And if you don't like it, it can be changed with your vote.
You REALLY believe that a SINGLE vote will change *anything*?
I doubt that's what you meant, because you'd be a complete idiot if you believe that, and I don't believe you're an idiot.
Basic arithmetic and some reasonable assumptions show the idiocy of believing in the idea that any single individual's vote counts. Assume:
1) A city's mayoral race between 2 candidates, with a voting population of merely 1,000 people. (It's a small town...) 2) Candidate #1 = 550 votes (55%) 3) Candidate #2 = 449 votes (44.9%) 4) Whoever has the greater percentage of the vote wins.
Now, ask yourself: if you vote for either candidate, have you changed anything? No: the race could come down as 550 to 450, or 551 to 449. Either way, candidate #1 wins, regardless of *your* vote. This example scales to the national level, but obviously becomes more-stark and depreessing as the population size increases.
Hence, *your* vote doesn't matter; *your* vote is irrelevant. (It would be different if the ratio were 500 and 499, because a vote for the latter would tie the election. But this practically never happens (and before the "it happened in FL in 2000!" dopes come out and jump down my throat, I suggest to them looking up the words "anomaly", or "outlier case")).
This is why voting is irrational if a reasonable set of probabilities of winning is known before an individual's vote, as is the case in every election (on the basis of polls and particularly betting markets)... Only for a wholly-uninformed moron could voting be rational; yet, these are exactly the kind of people we *don't* want voting. (Arguably, they come out in droves during every election cycle.)
Voting *can* be rational on other grounds though: personal pleasure, or the ability to say "at least I didn't vote for the guy who's now doing a crappy job in government", etc..
But making a difference in an election? That almost-universally isn't a good reason for voting (nice paradox, I suppose).
In an algorithm communication is limited to only two elements or statements at a time, a predecessor and a successor. In other words, there is a single signal path through the sequential elements. In a non-algorithmic program, by contrast, a predecessor element can communicate with an indefinite number of successor elements. As a result, there are more than one signal path and more than one element may be running synchronously in parallel.
Interesting.
Your example suggests that a one-to-many relationship: 1 signal can communicate with n-many signal recipients; analogous to an email system, if I understand correctly.
How is this different from a multi-threaded app in which one thread changes a variable (so during this change, a mutex or critical section must be used so no other thread can modify it), which is then read by n-many threads on multiple processors?
What examples of signal-model computers exist today (if any)?
Sounds like your conception of libertarianism was defined by Ayn Rand. You're right; Randian libertarians have explicitly stated that "charity is evil".
My guess is that you'd probably like a different flavor of libertarianism. My favorite is that of Milton Friedman. He advocated in Capitalism and Freedom replacing Social Security and welfare with a negative income tax (NIT) -- that NIT, I might add, is already (to a more-limited extent than Friedman proposed) in our tax code now, known as the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC).
Friedman has a humanitarian side to him (and it's started coming out more-bluntly in the last decade or so than in his works prior).
Now, it can easily be argued that all taxation is theft (and it is), and so a NIT isn't justifiable. But out in reality, for better or worse, the vast majority of people accept a certain amount of "theft" for their favorite purposes. Friedman suggests the NIT as a more-efficient replacement for other welfare systems (so fewer taxes would need to be collected to run it).
The great thing about Friedman is that he has two mindsets: his ideals, and what he thinks is practically-achievable goal that moves us towards his ideals. He realizes that fully-libertarian positions aren't popular and aren't going to be acceptable anytime soon, so he has come up with a variety of more-gradual solutions to move us in a libertarian direction -- even if the solutions themselves aren't fully-libertarian.
Friedman's received considerable criticism from the Randians and an-caps (e.g. Murray Rothbard) for not being libertarian "pure" enough. That may be. But Friedman has had a much-greater effect on the world than they have; Friedman is a libertarian that has chosen to live in reality, not one confined to a back office in a medicre university.
Another good, Nobel prize-winning economist to read is Friedrich Hayek...
Personally, I take a stance that is a mix of Milton Friedman and Thomas Jefferson: * A government that has strong law-enforcement, in part because there would be few laws to enforce. Standard laws against murder, rape, robbery, extortion, and fraud (i.e. the laws that probably well over 99.9% of the public agrees-upon) would remain. I remain divided as to whether antitrust laws should remain; I can see arguments and examples from both sides...
* Open, porous borders, filtered by a strong military presence to screen out the worst criminals (terrorists and dictators, yes; drug lords, no, because I don't think the drug trade should be illegal; communists/socialists, no, because political views - however insane - are an issue of free speech).
* Publicly-financed education (though not necessarily publicly *operated*) up through some level adequate for the average person to become gainfully-employed (so about K-12, maybe through an associate's degree)
* A purely-monetary (no food stamps, no federal housing), very-minimal -- but sufficient to the living standards of the locale of the individual -- "safety net" that encourages work and discourages loafing on the public dollar.
Friedman's NIT as he envisioned it is about as close a solution as I've yet seen to this ideal. My view is that it should be just enough to afford something akin to a prison cell with the crappiest, cheapest food in the land, but also a strong, significant means of helping people find gainful work, so that they spend less time on what essentially amounts to a welfare roll. People shouldn't starve or freeze to death, and there is considerable value in having people know that they can take entrepreneurial risks without fear of death if failure occurs. But at the same time, the effects of failure must be felt, to discourage the moral hazard of a too-risky entrepreneurial behavior...
Other than those points, there isn't much else I think the govn't should do.
However, remaining in line with my Friedmanian view that these ideas need to be impleme
* Pres: Michael Badnarik (Libertarian) * VP: that nutjob PhD-in-metaphysics-from-an-unaccredited-Iowa-colle ge running-mate of Badnarik's (Libertarian) * 2 other Congressional positions: Democrats (because the incumbents were Republicans, and no Libertarians were running)
I didn't vote for a single Republican, although, I did vote in the Republican primary to try and get a *sane*, freedom-loving, honest-to-god fiscally-conservative, Iraq war-criticizing-before-it-was-acceptable-in-the-GO P Republican nominated for the Congressional bid. Alas, no luck.
Truth is, I didn't like anybody I voted for; Badnarik and his sidekick are crazies who represent exactly the sort of failure the LP has enshrined year after year. But all of the above were the lesser of all (major) evils...
Credit card companies know what you buy and where.
No they don't. Look at your statements: the individual *items* purchased are not listed. Only the merchant name (and perhaps address) is, along with the transaction price, of course.
CC companies do not, in fact, know what specific items you are purchasing (at least not yet). Guesses can be made based on the merchant (e.g. "Big Al's Sex Toy Shop - Atlanta, GA" might tell the CC company a bit about your sex habits), but they won't know that you purchased a black, 24" triple-ended model from RubberCo...
Re:Economists are amazed by old trend - again
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FYI, The Economist is not a collection of economists. Many of their authors have education in economics, and some specialize in econ and finance, but they have a broader set of writers than that. Most of them do still have a social science background (typically poli. sci) though.
If people out there really want to protect our rights, it's really simple, and it doesn't involve threatening to shoot people, shooting people, or getting shot.
Oh, it very much involves threatening to shoot people. Citizens fighting a corrupt county government via potentially-violent (if not actually violent) means in the U.S. has a history leading up to events as recently as 1946. (Possibly later too, but I'm not aware of such events.)
At the end of the day, there is only 1 ultimate, unwritten language which works: violence and force. Whether we like it or not, the whole of history shows that he who has the bigger gun makes the rules...
If the people have no gun at all, then they are very much at the mercy of their extremely well-armed government. (And the rich and powerful who have the money and connections to buy off officials in the government to allow them special privileges to have such arms as well, if need be, or at least the use of their protection. Just look at some of the labor strikes of the late 1800s, in which the national guard defended businesses from their workers, even though the military, according to the Constitution, is not permitted to serve a police role on U.S. soil (after all, that isn't what they're trained for; they're trained to be ruthless killing machines -- hardly what you want when there may be a )...)
In terms of pure cash-flow, fast food is *not* cheaper than cooking at home. I account for every penny of every expense I have, and it is always cheaper (in purely monetary terms) for me to buy food at the grocery store and cook it myself. I can cook spaghetti ($0.88/package/4 meals/package) + meat sauce ($3/jar/4 meals/jar) for about $0.98/meal. Throw in half a bag of frozen vegetables (about $1.50) and you're looking at $1.50; approx. $2.00 with an 8oz glass of decent diet fruit juice.
Try *that* at Fazolis...
Similar math works out for hamburgers, potatoes, and diet soda. I've tried it; it works, even for better-quality burgers than you find at McD's.
Now, throw in a non-cash-flow variable -- like the value of my time, and assuming my at-home time is worth the same as my at-work time -- then yes, you're quite correct, it's cheaper to buy fast food. But since I typically don't make any extra money on the side with my time after work, my time after work is effectively worthless (in the marketplace; however, it's worth something to me in the intangible sense that I'm happier having some free time, which has positive effects on my work during at-work time)...
Teddy Roosevelt supported the death tax too, to limit this effect. (Not that I necessarily agree with the death tax; I have a mixed opinion of it. I see good and bad sides to it.)
Govt research and investments. Reducing taxes could crimp government research and investments in education -- the source of innovations that create jobs. With less education, growing numbers of workers can't get ahead.
2 things:
1) Just because govn't doesn't invest in R&D doesn't mean R&D doesn't get done. Private industry can, and *does* such investment -- just look at IBM, or Microsoft, or HP, or Ford, or GM, or BMW, or... [insert company here]
True, "fundamental" R&D (e.g. nuclear physics) doesn't usually get done by business. This is due to the fact that there is no clear link between that work and a marketable product that people want; hence, businesses tend not (in reality, even though nothing prevents them in theory) to take on this kind of R&D until such a link can be reasonably-assured to exist. And there's a fair case (IMO) for govn't research of those areas -- but only if the market fails to provide it after a certain amount of time and capital has passed...
2) Just because less taxes are going to R&D now doesn't mean we need a tax increase; nor do we need a tax decrease (although, I don't see much wrong with this, so long as we have commensurate spending cuts too -- but this is exceedingly-rare, and neither major U.S. party is committed to this kind of discipline). Rather, to avoid a lot of partisan squabbling, we could do much-better with our existing tax rates by re-allocating our existing taxes to more science/tech funding.
If it were me, I'd start by decreasing the military's funding by some declining-rate figure (linearly, and keeping basing the future cuts on existing funding, we could start with 5% in year 1, then 4% in year 2, 3% in year 3, on through year 5, for a total nominal (not inflation-adjusted) cut of 15% from the original figure). Given that we spend $400 billion/year on the military, this would result in a first-year re-allocation of $20 billion; then it'd be $60 billion/year for each year after 5 years.
Now, many would argue that the military is a big source of R&D already -- that we're just taking from one source of heavy R&D spending and dumping it into another, purer (and less-militaristic) form, so it becomes effectively a shell-game. There's some truth in that, and arguably, the Internet is the perfect ironic example of that. But at the same time, the R&D the military does is, obviously, military-centric. There's no reason it must be, and there's little reason to believe that in absence of govn't spending on TCP/IP development that internetworks of networks would've arisen via private funding (however, I greatly doubt they would've been compatible with each other for several years, if ever -- just look at the various cellphone networks as an example (to say nothing of the panoply of P2P network protocols) -- and that sort of protocol compatibility is (at the Internet's core) what made the Internet the success it is).
So, in my world, we'd cut from other wasteful programs too -- like most Congressmens' pork-barrel projects (a $423 million Alaskan bridge-to-nowhere, anyone?). Govn't-funded foreign aid. Drug war enforcement. Trade barrier enforcement. Medicare. Corporate welfare. Social Security. ANYTHING the govn't deals-in which involves "no-bid" contracts with private firms (e.g. Halliburton in Iraq; Medicare prescription drugs, etc. Monopoly suppliers jack up prices, thus reaming taxpayers by govn't fiat (or outright corruption, as in the Bush administration's case)). In my book, any one of these are fair targets (to some degree) for cuts so that more R&D can occur...
Adam Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations that the *only* thing which imp
Funny -- the Iraqi insurgents have been doing a reasonable job of fucking us up and draining us of our "resolve", haven't they?
And they have nothing more than small arms and car-bombs... Against our 130,000 world's-best-equipped (mostly) soldiers plus Iraq's own growing police force and military that we've been training.
Prior to Dubya's War on Brown People, I didn't think that millions of Americans with small-arms and IEDs would stand a chance against the incredible might of the world's only remaining superpower. Now I'm not so sure; particularly if many members of our military are sympathetic to the plight of the American people fighting them in response to the (perceived, if not real) repression imposed by our government...
This is the first movie I will be seeing in a theater since the ultra-shakey Bourne Supremacy. I have high hopes that VfV will be a fantastic piece of work awash in a sea of crap...
I'm considering using U-Haul. They appear to have wonderful service, new, reliable, high-quality trucks, superb prices, and a competent inventory system.
What's your opinion?;P (kidding, kidding...)
(BTW, now that you've moved west by 2 timezones, are you still an econ. prof., or have you switched to the private sector?)
Slashdot Mirror
My apologies. This is /. -- I've actually seen people post such things and *mean it*...
(And admittedly, I myself was once not far from the "all command-line, all the time" camp, using Firefox as about the only GUI app I ran on my Linux desktop for a while. So when I see these sorts of posts, I can't help but laugh...)
We use this at work (we're IBM's bitch; if IBM says jump, we ask "how high?"; if IBM says "pay up!", we ask "how much?"). /.'s database doesn't have enough space for the complaints I have and my co-workers about Lotus Notes.
Some highlights from version 6.5:
* Copy/pasting text into a memo? Be prepared to wait 3 minutes or more (on a P4 2.53GHz) if it isn't unformatted plaintext, e.g. something as oh-so-fancy as HTML...
* Illogical menu design. Seriously, why are there different "preferences" choices beneath 2 different menu headings?
* Slow, slow, slow due to its sheer obesity. You've had Notes open all day and haven't used it in a while, and you're switching from the calendar to a plaintext memo? Wait a minute while Windows has to load Notes' fat ass out of the swapfile into RAM...
* Want to select multiple emails (say, to drag them into a folder or the trash)? No, you can't do it the usual, worldwide-accepted method of click item 1, hold down SHIFT, click last item in range. You must hold down SHIFT and click each fucking email.
* Want to setup a meeting in the calendar? Go ahead and choose "appointment" in the first combobox, then "meeting" once the creation form is open...
* People are encouraged to build apps using Lotus scripts. And invariably, the apps blow. Coincidence? Crappy developers? OK, both are probably true...
* And then there are the "You've got new mail" pop-up notices which occur sometimes when no email actually shows up in your inbox. Thank you Notes, for breaking my concentration on a project for the the notification of an email which doesn't exist!
Not a day at work goes by that I don't curse the giant steaming heap that is IBM's Lotus Notes. Seriously, the only nice thing I can say about Notes is that its scheduler does a good job of finding free time in peoples' schedules to setup meetings. That happens to work very well, and is quite a time-saver. But otherwise, Notes is fucking garbage, and while I haven't tried Exchange + Outbreak, I can't imagine it would be any worse. (Personally, I wish we'd switch over to a web-based groupware app and ditch these proprietary POS's that MSFT and IBM have for us, but I don't see that happening anytime soon.)
IBM's hardware rocks, but their software almost invariably is so godawful that it makes one wonder if they've implemented the "1,000 monkeys at keyboards will eventually write perfect software" theory. If so, the theory is failing badly... As much as MSFT's software tends to be putrid shit too, it's leaps-and-bounds better and more-consistent in behavior than anything I've seen IBM turn out. IBM realizes this, and that's why they're trying to ride the Linux wave -- IBM can't churn out worthwhile code, so they figure they'll let hobbyists do it for them...
Frankly, if IBM ports Notes to Linux and tries to get people to actually use it, I believe the brand image of Linux vendors (RedHat, etc.) will be cheapened. It will wind up being a negative impact on the viability of Linux as a desktop OS. Seriously, for those who've never used it, that is how bad Notes is; that's how incompetent IBM apparently is at writing solid, well-designed software...
...sure, we'll do that at work, just as soon as we can find a Lotus Notes implementation in Emacs (oh wait, the Emacs OS does groupware, doesn't it?).
Seriously, if you think for a minute any even semi-normal person is going to browse the web with Lynx, you're crazy. Nobody works out of a mainframe session anymore; nobody has login access solely on beefy Unix boxes. 95% of the world uses Windows; some 80% or so use IE. The reality is that except for a very few exceptions, the world moved beyond the life led at a command-prompt and a no-mouse text UI for day-to-day purposes. Backwards-compatibility with old mainframes, sure -- but most office workers, to say nothing of consumers, do not operate out of mainframe terminals.
Join us next time in reality when you've been tossed a nickel and bought yourself a better computer. ("Better", meaning, better than a P90 recovered from the dumpster at a student's dormitory 7 years ago, now running Linux.)
In the social hierarchy of the corporate world, I see really 4 major layers, from top of the pyramid to the bottom:
1) Executives (people who sit in big offices, work long hours, and fly all over the place in corporate jets being effectively a figurehead representative of a corporation, much like a king or a queen of a nation governed not by a king or a queen, but by a parliament (like Britain))
2) Middle-management (office workers who manage the people who actually do work and sit in meetings to talk a lot)
3) White-collar workers (office workers who generate software, reports, graphs, etc.)
4) Blue-collar workers (janitors, plumbers, construction, etc.)
In the 1980s, when manufacturing was on its way out of the U.S., blue-collar workers were widely told "learn white-collar skills!" White-collar skills became valuable and popular, and helped fuel the boom/bust cycle of IT in the late 1990s/early 2000s.
Now, here we are in 2006, and white-collar workers are being told "learn management skills!" Notice something?
The outsourcing trend is moving up the hierarchical structure.
Now here's the thing to realize: that structure grows ever-narrower in the number of workers needed as you go up to the top -- executives comprise only perhaps a dozen of the people in a Fortune 500 company, whereas the white-collar workers may comprise tens of thousands.
So in effect, we're being told to increase the labor supply of management; this is showing up in the fact that MBAs are a dime-a-dozen now, and top-flight business consultants of the world now suggest that if you don't get an MBA from one of the top 5 universities in the world, then don't waste your time. Lots of people are doing exactly that.
The trouble is, there's no need for all those managers... There will be some demand for them arising out of the need to manage work outsourced to even-larger supplies of white-collar workers in places like India and China -- but will those workers be enough to generate the number of management jobs needed for replacement here?
As there is an exponentially-larger number of people at each layer of lower-level bureaucracy in an organization, and this trend of outsourcing is moving up the bureaucratic structure, not down, it seems to follow that the usefulness of getting a management education will prove to be outdated/useless even more-quickly than the previous waves of migration (blue-to-white collar, white collar-to-management).
In fact, as noted earlier regarding the popularity of MBAs, it seems that it's *already* too late -- the degree has become commoditized as soon as pundits have started recommending it as an alternative to white-collar work.
Making matters worse is that Baby Boomers are going to start retiring en-masse in about 4 years. This reduces American labor supply, driving up wages, and making foreign competition look even more-attractive for outsourcing. (In this respect, that is one argument very much in favor of looser immigration laws -- let the Mexicans in so we can keep our labor costs competitive with the rest of the world and keep our jobs here...)
Prediction? Unless the wages of the rest of the world accelerate even more-quickly -- which, ironically, will only occur through increased trade and outsourcing -- there are going to be a lot of intelligent, hard-working, well-educated, often-wealthy (but not super-rich) Americans becoming increasingly-angry at an exponential rate over the next few years. (It is quite the paradox that what will ultimately save us is the very thing about which we are presently-complaining...)
...has an interest in restricting the labor supply of plumbers to keep their prices artificially-high, hence your high salary.
What plumber is going to take on and train a bunch of new people who will ultimately wind up competing for his job? That would be asinine (yet we in IT do it all the time!)...
Actually, the GP has a legitimate point. Take a look at the case of Dodge v. Ford Motor Co. in 1919.
That case established the precedent which requires public companies to behave in a manner motivated by profit, not by altruism. This makes sense: the one thing that all shareholders have in common is to invest in businesses for one thing: to make money. Everything else is secondary.
So, in fact, yes, American corporations are, by legal precedent, required to do whatever they can to turn a profit. Cutting costs boosts profit margins; hence, the GP is correct.
Of course, nobody said that profit went straight to shareholders; as you note, boosting the bonuses of the Board of Directors is a major element too which flies under the radar on the grounds that (supposedly) those people at the top have skills which are very scarce, so they can demand such premiums on their abilities. But so long as the company is making a profit, it is within the bounds of that precedent; the real question is "what is the allocation of that increased profit?"...
Of course, privately-held companies can do whatever they like with their profit. That's one of the advantages of private ownership...
In theory, yes, a more-open society with 2-way surveillance probably would be a better society.
But that's idealistic. Is there any society in history in which surveillance -- or any form of power, for that matter -- has ever been two-sided? I know of none.
Look at the modern surveillance-state of Britain and China, and the emerging surveillance states of the U.S., Germany, and most other developed nations. In which of those countries do the citizens have the ability to spy on their governments as much as the government spies on them?
That's right: NONE OF THEM.
Brin's vision is an idealistic one, and I wish people would stop referencing that utopian text as though it were in any way realistic.
The practical reality is the same one that has dominated mankind since the creation of institutions: he who has the power makes the rules. Governments are nothing more than warlords in control of a nation, and are in control only because the people let them be in control. The U.S. was founded as a counter-revolution to the idea that people should be afraid of their governments; that "the people should not be afraid of their governments, governments should be afraid of their people."
Unfortunately, that founding view has been in decline since the nation's founding, and particularly since the start of FDR's administration...
So, as a practical, realistic matter on the grounds of fairness, on the basis of world history, there is no reason to support the UAV surveillance-state our current government wants to implement.
When the U.S. govn't is ready to disclose even Top Secret secrets to the public (and try for treason any person who discloses them to non-American citizens -- as I believe the Constitution was originally meant to implement), then we will talk... But that won't happen because Americans now believe in the power of a strong central government and correctly believe that such information will quickly be known to potential enemies if it is made public to U.S. citizens -- to the detriment of the nation.
Thus, as things stand today, a symmetrical surveillance society isn't even close to happening: there is a vast information asymmetry between our government and the governed, and this is a serious problem that will likely never be resolved absent radical change in our government's organization and electoral system.
Do the members of a class define that class? (Think in software terms here for a minute.)
Answer: yes, by definition they do.
If I write a Java/C# class that instantiates a "god" object (wow, I'm creating god? Who knew my awesome powers!) and a "holy prophet" object who claims to speak on behalf of the god object, and creates a collection/linked-list of 1 billion elements, 800 million of which are advocating and saying that their holy book says "spread the word of our holy prophet, by the sword if necessary!", does that mean that this class is defined by a group of largely-insane members?
Yes, by definition.
And, as the promoters of that religion, do they taint its supposedly-peaceful teachings? Yes indeedy... The same is true in politics: the issues perceived as "extreme" which are promoted by nutjobs (be it communism from the left or state-funded religion in public schools from the right) make the other promoters look bad. One bad apple spoils the bunch.
Osama bin Laden, along with Pakistan, Palestine, the various Arab terrorists who hijacked dozens of airliners in the 1970s and 1980s, and so on, have spoiled the religious "apple" of Islam. Islam has a product to sell, but nobody outside their current fanbase is buying, because it's becoming rotten from the inside.
Moderate Muslims exist, but read their moderacy very carefully: even *they* support things like restricting the right of people to publish, say, Danish cartoons making fun of their god. And that is tolerance? Tolerance of others' right to free-speech? Hardly. *True* tolerance of speech requires permitting the speech, no matter how hateful or inciteful or reviling it may be (and this is one of the few things America really gets right compared to other nations).
That isn't to say other religions, Christianity in particular, doesn't have its own flavor of oppression and intolerance. They have historically and that has continued to this day (and will probably continue throughout the remainder of human history). Again, neither Islam nor any other religion can be said to be "tolerant"... It's simply that Islam is the current focus of the world at the moment regarding its ability to transform itself from a religion historically associate with violence and murder into a more-modern, accepting religion.
Christianity has (arguably) managed this. It's taken hundreds of years since the beginning of the Enlightenment, and Christians have been dragged kicking-and-screaming every step of the way into this level of tolerance by the liberal elements of western societies (both the classical, capitalism-supporting elements, and the modern, anti-capitalist elements), but it's more-or-less happened, and today, Christians are happy to use their relative tolerance as a means of moral argumentative leverage against other religions. Christians in the U.S., for example, tolerate the practice of other faiths here, despite their own large internal conflicts with them. They may not like other religions, but at least Christians (for the most part) don't go around killing in the name of their imaginary friend anymore; that (again, arguably) ended in large part with the Crusades. Abortion clinic bombings and arsons are probably the biggest exception here...
Islam is having its own "crusade" now, but is thankfully being held in check by western societies willing to accept a kinder, gentler Islam, if only Islam is willing to become kinder and gentler. Iran, being otherwise relatively-modern as Islamic states go, is seen as the testing grounds as to whether that can actually occur in reality... I understand that there is widespread support among the youth there to open up and become less-repressive, without losing the more-moderate values in their Islamic faith, but the elders are much more-conservative and less-progressive. That's too bad; Islam could use some well-spoken, saner, moderate representatives in the west.
So, once again, we return to the classification question. Is a class defined by its me
Fair enough, although this argument leads to the ability to believe in the existence of anything, no matter how ridiculous. But along an infinite timeline, well, sure, anything is possible...
But the claims made by religion (I'm going to use Christianity here as my example base because I was raised as one) are not nuclear physics. Is it not proveable, at this point, whether or not there was an ark? Whether or not there was a great flood and rain for 40 days and 40 nights? (Could this have been a revisionist understanding of the Ice Age, seeing as the last of that age occurred around 10,000BC, and the Bible as we know it was written around 0BC?) Given that we can estimate periods in Earth's history farther-back than that -- such as when the different periods of dinosaur life existed, tens of millions of years ago -- I doubt that proving or disproving the story of Noah's Ark is much of a stretch.
Yet, where is the proof in favor of that event's occurrence? The last I saw on the subject was some speculation in Popular Mechanics in the late 1990s, about an archeological dig in Turkey, around the area where it is thought that Noah landed his ship.
Or the story of the burning bush? Doesn't lightning set forests on fire on a fairly-regular basis? (indeed, the fact that we now manually clear out underbrush in forests is because we stop these forest fires before they get the chance to do their own destruction...)
And then there's Jesus' body itself. Habeas corpus! ("Produce the body.") Or, since in the arid deserts of the middle-east, his body has (as the Bible itself tells us occurs to all of us) "returned to dust", from whence it came.
Or a baby born to a virgin woman? Give me a break. Unless people knew of artificial insemination 2000 years ago, and I'm pretty darn sure they didn't, this is an impossible feat. More likely, Mary was drugged and raped and didn't know that she had been fucked by some guy the night before (and poof! Like magic, 9 months later a baby shows up - what a "miracle"!). It happens often enough on college campuses; why shouldn't we expect similar behavior out of people 2000 years ago (except for having a far-more limited knowledge of and access to mind-altering drugs)? It's not as though the base instincts of humankind have changed... well, ever. The place for this story is in the trash heap of myths; as Thomas Jefferson once wrote, "The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus by the Supreme Being in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter."
I am much more convinced of perhaps an adaptation of the explanation of religion's existence by the ridiculously-bad Sean Connery movie Zardoz, in 1973 (just after Connery stopped playing James Bond) -- that sometime around 0BC, the upper 20% of society (the elites/nobility, or "immortals" in the movie) decided there needed to be some way to keep the remaining 80% (the peasants/peons, or "brutals" in the movie) in check. They invent this giant flying stone head that claims absurdities like "THE PENIS IS BAD, GUNS ARE GOOD!" and urges them to kill each other. And the 80% of people believe in this thing as being a God!
For as awful as the movie is (in a Manos: The Hands of Fate sort of way), I have to admit, that hippie-inspired interpretation of religion seems more-likely than anything I've seen so far.
People *want* to believe in the ridiculous and the fantastic: witness the popularity of fiction books and movies; witness th
...free and tolerant Islamic society we hear so much about!
(All religions are intolerant of each other, because each religion defines a mutually-exclusive lock on a God they believe exists (or in atheism's case, doesn't exist). Each religion fights over that lock, and therein lies the religious conflict. And all this fighting assumes their God -- or any god -- actually even exists; over 2000 years of non-proval of a god's existence sure paves the way towards a high probability that he/she/it does not.)
What do we lose? A portion of a global pie of openly-available information.
:-) On one side, you have a closed, proprietary vendor who sections-off their OS code, etc. from the outside, and only if you are a super-player (e.g. a government of a highly-developed nation) can you gain access, and then only under restriction. The OSS world of software, by contrast, is open for all to see. MSFT closes off (regionalizes) their information to the rest of the world; OSS is open to the whole world. One is protectionist about their code; the other, free-as-in-beer and free-as-in-speech free-traders of information.
We go from having a truly-globalized free-market and free-trade of ideas and opinions, one in which the collective wisdom is available for everyone else in that global crowd, to a protectionist trade of information, in which you have to be a member of some elite, local club and know people to get in and gain access.
I'm thinking of so many parallels in computing and economics this subject makes my head spin; obviously I've started with a clear economics analogy. But what about the analogies from the computing world?
* Warez groups -- You have to know people and gain their trust to get in to some groups and trade with them. They have, in a sense, "regionalized" some of their content that would otherwise be made available (were it not illegal under copyright laws. That's another issue, although related in terms of the protectionist regulation that IP law imposes).
* Businesses -- Want access to internal corporate data? Hack one of their boxes (exploit stupid users with a bot you've written that is attached to an email claiming to have naked pics of Maria Sherapova, although, this assumes the spam filter doesn't detect and discard the message, and that the heuristics of the virus-scanning software doesn't detect your bot as a trojan); social engineer your way to a username/password combo (i.e. play con-artist); or become employed there. Businesses have cordoned-off their proprietary information from the public-at-large, except for product information.
* For-pay websites -- Many newspapers (such as The Economist and the NYTimes) require you to have a subscription to access premium content. They have compartmentalized their proprietary information into a pay-to-play region they've defined.
* Microsoft vs. F/OSS -- What better example for Slashdotters?
Those are some present-day examples of what happens when information is sectioned-off from the rest of the world.
Now imagine that being the case with *ALL* information, of all kinds -- not just corporate or proprietary information. Medical information; university research; open-source software; statistical data about a variety of subjects; the list goes on and on.
I began by saying this is a scaling problem. It is, and to make my case clearer from the computing side, answer this simple question: how much combined data do you have on your LAN at the moment?
In a private residence of just one or two people, you might have, at most, a couple TBytes -- and that's if you're recording TV shows and movies all day (legitimately, I assume!). Even on a large engineering university's LAN, you might have no more than a couple PBytes (I'm guessing; my last experience on a uni LAN was in 2001, when there were some 6 TBytes indexed by our unofficial file-share indexer, on a LAN with 26,000 students, plus who knows how much storage space the university's depts. officially had).
Now compare that to the rest of the the 'net 532,897 TBytes, and that was way back in 2002.
There is no reason or excuse for outright political/legislative *bans* on the flow of information on the Internet. Period. Restricting the rates at which that information travels (perhaps by way of packet-shaping), or restricting the access to
Did anybody else misread "KFTC" as "KFC" on first glance? I did, and I wondered why a petty peddler of putrid poultry possessed people to pass prejudice on a purveyor of piss-poor programs...
You REALLY believe that a SINGLE vote will change *anything*?
I doubt that's what you meant, because you'd be a complete idiot if you believe that, and I don't believe you're an idiot.
Basic arithmetic and some reasonable assumptions show the idiocy of believing in the idea that any single individual's vote counts. Assume:
1) A city's mayoral race between 2 candidates, with a voting population of merely 1,000 people. (It's a small town...)
2) Candidate #1 = 550 votes (55%)
3) Candidate #2 = 449 votes (44.9%)
4) Whoever has the greater percentage of the vote wins.
Now, ask yourself: if you vote for either candidate, have you changed anything? No: the race could come down as 550 to 450, or 551 to 449. Either way, candidate #1 wins, regardless of *your* vote. This example scales to the national level, but obviously becomes more-stark and depreessing as the population size increases.
Hence, *your* vote doesn't matter; *your* vote is irrelevant. (It would be different if the ratio were 500 and 499, because a vote for the latter would tie the election. But this practically never happens (and before the "it happened in FL in 2000!" dopes come out and jump down my throat, I suggest to them looking up the words "anomaly", or "outlier case")).
This is why voting is irrational if a reasonable set of probabilities of winning is known before an individual's vote, as is the case in every election (on the basis of polls and particularly betting markets)... Only for a wholly-uninformed moron could voting be rational; yet, these are exactly the kind of people we *don't* want voting. (Arguably, they come out in droves during every election cycle.)
Voting *can* be rational on other grounds though: personal pleasure, or the ability to say "at least I didn't vote for the guy who's now doing a crappy job in government", etc..
But making a difference in an election? That almost-universally isn't a good reason for voting (nice paradox, I suppose).
Interesting.
Your example suggests that a one-to-many relationship: 1 signal can communicate with n-many signal recipients; analogous to an email system, if I understand correctly.
How is this different from a multi-threaded app in which one thread changes a variable (so during this change, a mutex or critical section must be used so no other thread can modify it), which is then read by n-many threads on multiple processors?
What examples of signal-model computers exist today (if any)?
...that Parliament was going to be blown-up on Nov. 5!
(Great movie BTW, go see it!)
Sounds like your conception of libertarianism was defined by Ayn Rand. You're right; Randian libertarians have explicitly stated that "charity is evil".
My guess is that you'd probably like a different flavor of libertarianism. My favorite is that of Milton Friedman. He advocated in Capitalism and Freedom replacing Social Security and welfare with a negative income tax (NIT) -- that NIT, I might add, is already (to a more-limited extent than Friedman proposed) in our tax code now, known as the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC).
Friedman has a humanitarian side to him (and it's started coming out more-bluntly in the last decade or so than in his works prior).
Now, it can easily be argued that all taxation is theft (and it is), and so a NIT isn't justifiable. But out in reality, for better or worse, the vast majority of people accept a certain amount of "theft" for their favorite purposes. Friedman suggests the NIT as a more-efficient replacement for other welfare systems (so fewer taxes would need to be collected to run it).
The great thing about Friedman is that he has two mindsets: his ideals, and what he thinks is practically-achievable goal that moves us towards his ideals. He realizes that fully-libertarian positions aren't popular and aren't going to be acceptable anytime soon, so he has come up with a variety of more-gradual solutions to move us in a libertarian direction -- even if the solutions themselves aren't fully-libertarian.
Friedman's received considerable criticism from the Randians and an-caps (e.g. Murray Rothbard) for not being libertarian "pure" enough. That may be. But Friedman has had a much-greater effect on the world than they have; Friedman is a libertarian that has chosen to live in reality, not one confined to a back office in a medicre university.
Another good, Nobel prize-winning economist to read is Friedrich Hayek...
Personally, I take a stance that is a mix of Milton Friedman and Thomas Jefferson:
* A government that has strong law-enforcement, in part because there would be few laws to enforce. Standard laws against murder, rape, robbery, extortion, and fraud (i.e. the laws that probably well over 99.9% of the public agrees-upon) would remain. I remain divided as to whether antitrust laws should remain; I can see arguments and examples from both sides...
* Open, porous borders, filtered by a strong military presence to screen out the worst criminals (terrorists and dictators, yes; drug lords, no, because I don't think the drug trade should be illegal; communists/socialists, no, because political views - however insane - are an issue of free speech).
* Publicly-financed education (though not necessarily publicly *operated*) up through some level adequate for the average person to become gainfully-employed (so about K-12, maybe through an associate's degree)
* A purely-monetary (no food stamps, no federal housing), very-minimal -- but sufficient to the living standards of the locale of the individual -- "safety net" that encourages work and discourages loafing on the public dollar.
Friedman's NIT as he envisioned it is about as close a solution as I've yet seen to this ideal. My view is that it should be just enough to afford something akin to a prison cell with the crappiest, cheapest food in the land, but also a strong, significant means of helping people find gainful work, so that they spend less time on what essentially amounts to a welfare roll. People shouldn't starve or freeze to death, and there is considerable value in having people know that they can take entrepreneurial risks without fear of death if failure occurs. But at the same time, the effects of failure must be felt, to discourage the moral hazard of a too-risky entrepreneurial behavior...
Other than those points, there isn't much else I think the govn't should do.
However, remaining in line with my Friedmanian view that these ideas need to be impleme
In the November 2004 election, I voted for:
e ge running-mate of Badnarik's (Libertarian)
O P Republican nominated for the Congressional bid. Alas, no luck.
* Pres: Michael Badnarik (Libertarian)
* VP: that nutjob PhD-in-metaphysics-from-an-unaccredited-Iowa-coll
* 2 other Congressional positions: Democrats (because the incumbents were Republicans, and no Libertarians were running)
I didn't vote for a single Republican, although, I did vote in the Republican primary to try and get a *sane*, freedom-loving, honest-to-god fiscally-conservative, Iraq war-criticizing-before-it-was-acceptable-in-the-G
Truth is, I didn't like anybody I voted for; Badnarik and his sidekick are crazies who represent exactly the sort of failure the LP has enshrined year after year. But all of the above were the lesser of all (major) evils...
No they don't. Look at your statements: the individual *items* purchased are not listed. Only the merchant name (and perhaps address) is, along with the transaction price, of course.
CC companies do not, in fact, know what specific items you are purchasing (at least not yet). Guesses can be made based on the merchant (e.g. "Big Al's Sex Toy Shop - Atlanta, GA" might tell the CC company a bit about your sex habits), but they won't know that you purchased a black, 24" triple-ended model from RubberCo...
FYI, The Economist is not a collection of economists. Many of their authors have education in economics, and some specialize in econ and finance, but they have a broader set of writers than that. Most of them do still have a social science background (typically poli. sci) though.
Oh, it very much involves threatening to shoot people. Citizens fighting a corrupt county government via potentially-violent (if not actually violent) means in the U.S. has a history leading up to events as recently as 1946. (Possibly later too, but I'm not aware of such events.)
At the end of the day, there is only 1 ultimate, unwritten language which works: violence and force. Whether we like it or not, the whole of history shows that he who has the bigger gun makes the rules...
If the people have no gun at all, then they are very much at the mercy of their extremely well-armed government. (And the rich and powerful who have the money and connections to buy off officials in the government to allow them special privileges to have such arms as well, if need be, or at least the use of their protection. Just look at some of the labor strikes of the late 1800s, in which the national guard defended businesses from their workers, even though the military, according to the Constitution, is not permitted to serve a police role on U.S. soil (after all, that isn't what they're trained for; they're trained to be ruthless killing machines -- hardly what you want when there may be a )...)
In terms of pure cash-flow, fast food is *not* cheaper than cooking at home. I account for every penny of every expense I have, and it is always cheaper (in purely monetary terms) for me to buy food at the grocery store and cook it myself. I can cook spaghetti ($0.88/package/4 meals/package) + meat sauce ($3/jar/4 meals/jar) for about $0.98/meal. Throw in half a bag of frozen vegetables (about $1.50) and you're looking at $1.50; approx. $2.00 with an 8oz glass of decent diet fruit juice.
Try *that* at Fazolis...
Similar math works out for hamburgers, potatoes, and diet soda. I've tried it; it works, even for better-quality burgers than you find at McD's.
Now, throw in a non-cash-flow variable -- like the value of my time, and assuming my at-home time is worth the same as my at-work time -- then yes, you're quite correct, it's cheaper to buy fast food. But since I typically don't make any extra money on the side with my time after work, my time after work is effectively worthless (in the marketplace; however, it's worth something to me in the intangible sense that I'm happier having some free time, which has positive effects on my work during at-work time)...
Teddy Roosevelt supported the death tax too, to limit this effect. (Not that I necessarily agree with the death tax; I have a mixed opinion of it. I see good and bad sides to it.)
2 things:
1) Just because govn't doesn't invest in R&D doesn't mean R&D doesn't get done. Private industry can, and *does* such investment -- just look at IBM, or Microsoft, or HP, or Ford, or GM, or BMW, or... [insert company here]
True, "fundamental" R&D (e.g. nuclear physics) doesn't usually get done by business. This is due to the fact that there is no clear link between that work and a marketable product that people want; hence, businesses tend not (in reality, even though nothing prevents them in theory) to take on this kind of R&D until such a link can be reasonably-assured to exist. And there's a fair case (IMO) for govn't research of those areas -- but only if the market fails to provide it after a certain amount of time and capital has passed...
2) Just because less taxes are going to R&D now doesn't mean we need a tax increase; nor do we need a tax decrease (although, I don't see much wrong with this, so long as we have commensurate spending cuts too -- but this is exceedingly-rare, and neither major U.S. party is committed to this kind of discipline). Rather, to avoid a lot of partisan squabbling, we could do much-better with our existing tax rates by re-allocating our existing taxes to more science/tech funding.
If it were me, I'd start by decreasing the military's funding by some declining-rate figure (linearly, and keeping basing the future cuts on existing funding, we could start with 5% in year 1, then 4% in year 2, 3% in year 3, on through year 5, for a total nominal (not inflation-adjusted) cut of 15% from the original figure). Given that we spend $400 billion/year on the military, this would result in a first-year re-allocation of $20 billion; then it'd be $60 billion/year for each year after 5 years.
Now, many would argue that the military is a big source of R&D already -- that we're just taking from one source of heavy R&D spending and dumping it into another, purer (and less-militaristic) form, so it becomes effectively a shell-game. There's some truth in that, and arguably, the Internet is the perfect ironic example of that. But at the same time, the R&D the military does is, obviously, military-centric. There's no reason it must be, and there's little reason to believe that in absence of govn't spending on TCP/IP development that internetworks of networks would've arisen via private funding (however, I greatly doubt they would've been compatible with each other for several years, if ever -- just look at the various cellphone networks as an example (to say nothing of the panoply of P2P network protocols) -- and that sort of protocol compatibility is (at the Internet's core) what made the Internet the success it is).
So, in my world, we'd cut from other wasteful programs too -- like most Congressmens' pork-barrel projects (a $423 million Alaskan bridge-to-nowhere, anyone?). Govn't-funded foreign aid. Drug war enforcement. Trade barrier enforcement. Medicare. Corporate welfare. Social Security. ANYTHING the govn't deals-in which involves "no-bid" contracts with private firms (e.g. Halliburton in Iraq; Medicare prescription drugs, etc. Monopoly suppliers jack up prices, thus reaming taxpayers by govn't fiat (or outright corruption, as in the Bush administration's case)). In my book, any one of these are fair targets (to some degree) for cuts so that more R&D can occur...
Adam Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations that the *only* thing which imp
Funny -- the Iraqi insurgents have been doing a reasonable job of fucking us up and draining us of our "resolve", haven't they?
And they have nothing more than small arms and car-bombs... Against our 130,000 world's-best-equipped (mostly) soldiers plus Iraq's own growing police force and military that we've been training.
Prior to Dubya's War on Brown People, I didn't think that millions of Americans with small-arms and IEDs would stand a chance against the incredible might of the world's only remaining superpower. Now I'm not so sure; particularly if many members of our military are sympathetic to the plight of the American people fighting them in response to the (perceived, if not real) repression imposed by our government...
(Watch me get modded: -1, Dangerous)
This is the first movie I will be seeing in a theater since the ultra-shakey Bourne Supremacy. I have high hopes that VfV will be a fantastic piece of work awash in a sea of crap...
I'm considering using U-Haul. They appear to have wonderful service, new, reliable, high-quality trucks, superb prices, and a competent inventory system.
;P (kidding, kidding...)
What's your opinion?
(BTW, now that you've moved west by 2 timezones, are you still an econ. prof., or have you switched to the private sector?)