Sure, monopolies are just one aspect to imperfect information, but some of the other aspects you mention are hardly solvable, at least any time soon, at least completely.
I was making a point about Bill Gates and his contribution to the imperfections of the current version of capitalism, not about capitalism in general.
"Honey, where's the butter?"
"There is none."
That rejoinder doesn't imply there is no butter anywhere in the universe. Context is important.
The only problem with capitalism is that monopolies (hi, Bill!) distort Adam Smith's free market.
As for aiding the poor... food aid clobbers the only useful sector of third world economies, and agricultural tariffs prevent them from getting any realistic prices for what's left. The third world is left with no way to better themselves. They end up dependent on handouts from rich countries.
And my fav current topic, the patronizing smugdiots who want to send food (which destroys their only chance at self-sufficiency and export income) to the third world instead of OLPC laptops (which saves them money compared to physical distribution of outdated textbooks in foreign languages). Or want to shove Windows on more expensive less capable laptops at them to lock them into a foreign monopoly instead of free source from which they can learn.
Hell of a way to keep 'em down on the non-farm. See what you can do about that, Bill.
See, here's teh de41. That post was sarcastic. Ff it had not been, your outrage would have been valid. As it is, it was, and your was not, and you blew it.
See how easy it is once you grasp the core fundamental basis of it all?
Exactly his point -- the server was configured to allow this access and had no security measure in place. On the internet it is accepted that when lacking anything to the contrary it is legal to push every available button and to walk through every unlocked door.
On the internet?!? Pray tell, what law says this? You use "it is legal" and I do not think you know what it means.
Its sort of like being able to convict someone of trespass when they:
1. Walk in the front door of your open for business coffee shop;
2. They help themselves to the candy from the "Free - Take all you like" bin;
3. You don't say anything but call the police
Not quite; the sign actually says "Free to employees" but is on the counter, accessible to the public, and not guarded. Zone transfers are not meant for the general public, but for "partner" servers. I think the server was as poorly admined as the candy bin in my example, that the judge ruled properly in a narrow sense, and that if the defendant had not also been charged with other crimes, it would be silly.
Well, except for the US, which is being destroyed by Republicans. But that's ok, just wait til after the elections, then it will be Democrats doing the destroying.
And of course China, which is being destroyed by the Communists. Or, wait, are they capitalists now? Well, never mind, they aren't Muslim, and that's all that counts. They are quite capable of destroying their own country and seem to have done remarkably well at it several times. Sometimes they had help from western colonizers, and several times from the Japanese, but on the whole, they do a decent job themselves.
And I am sure you can find other exceptions, but those are best left as an exercise to the students. Students, you know, mostly young, they too do a fine job of destroying their country, regardless of which country that is or if it is even the same country they are students in. Just ask their parents and teachers.
That's rich. Australia was turning aboriginal kids over to white families on racist grounds in the 70s, I think it was. I remember reading about Canada having some similar policy into the 80s, but have no references.
Police nowhere "protect", they only respond to gather evidence. I doubt there's a police force in the world which actually claims to protect citizens against individual crimes. They may say they deter crimes, but to protect? Ha! How many rapes were prevented by police stopping the rape in progress? And tell me again, if gun control works, why Britain's gun crimes went up aftfter guns were banned?
Blacks in the south who used guns to defend themselves from a corrupt government -- state, county, city elected officials, police, judges -- who were in league with the KKK. They shot back and stopped the outrages, and that was the ONLY reason the federal government stepped in -- niggers with guns freaked them out.
You read up on them, and then tell me guns have no use except evil. You explain how blacks defending themselves against a corrupt oppressive government is anything but good, and then explain to me how all the patronizing whites looked the other way and pretended Martin Luther King completed his march to Selma without armed patrols around the nightly camps.
You nanny staters with your smug patronizing attitude that individuals must defer to the almighty government, whose Supreme Court has ruled several times that police are not obligated to defend individuals -- yes, you, who think everyone should follow your moral guidelines, that you are a superior thinker for the ages and conditions can never change -- go ahead, I dare you -- read up on the Deacons for Defense and Justice of just 40 years ago, and then tell me how your patronizing smugness can prevent a repeat today.
You can't, because it will happen again, and I hope there are heroes like the Deacons to come save your sorry ass.
Why not implement effective gun registration at a federal level? Provide strict punishments for unregistered firearms, with some inital grace period and a gun buyback scheme. Basically clear out the unregistered guns. If you dry up the pool of firearms for criminals, then there is no need for citizens to be armed against the criminals.
Because there is no such beast as effective gun registration. Criminals can get guns any time they want. You can't get rid of guns until you get your hands on them.
Gun crime in Britain went up AFTER they banned them. How effective is that? An island nation -- they ought to be able to control guns pretty damned easily, and they didn't.
I take it, then, that you have no argument at all against my other points?
I find it interesting that one of the arguments in favor of Australia's gun control was to reduce suicides. Yet the only thing that changed was the distribution of suicides by type; the absolute number stayed the same. That was useful.
I never looked into your stats. But then, maybe I am a troll, and by objecting to just the one argument and implicitly accepting the others, you have been trolled.
Great, bring up a fundamental point which was not in play. I was responding to the guy who wondered why they don't just wire up old fashioned mechanical switches and tons of wiring. And you were responding to... what?
We have strict gun control because having a large bore semi-auto isn't as useful as knowing that muggers and bank theives don't have them.
I love this sentiment, as if criminals actually pay attention to that one law and ignore the others. Why don't you also stop mugging and bank thievery by outlawing those activities too?
We can't have certain pets but in exchange we have a country free of certain pests.
Let's see, rabbits and cane toads come to mind,and all the pests introduced to control them, and the pests introduced to control those pests... works well, eh?
The rest of your "benefits" are pretty much well defined as something you like and therefore good, except for the games rating, which you don't like on a technicality but are willing to put up with anyway.
Sounds like the prototypical nanny state, and the nanny droid to go along with it.
What I especially find intriguing about nanny states is how so many crimes are victimless, only a crime because the rulers thinks the peasants are too ignorant to think for themselves. Then they throw in gun control, basically creating new victims (the murdered, the raped, the assaulted) who are not allowed to defend themselves against the bad guys except by a truly undemocratic feature -- their physical conditioning. The elderly, the weak, the sick, all are prevented from using that most democratic and equalizing tool, the gun, to defend themselves.
Only a nanny state would not only create victimless crimes, but also create victims.
The main reason to oppose voting on laws rather than lawmakers is because the sheer number of votes required would quickly turn 99% of the voters into non-voters. That might be an argument in its favor because requiring a minimum turnout would quickly reduce the number of laws enacted, but you also have the problem of generating the laws to vote on -- since we are doing away with lawmakers, we'd have to have a scaled up version of California's initiative process, where you gather signatures on a petition. That would result in probably hundreds of petitions circulating at any given moment, most poorly worded and some at odds with each other.
Here's a guess. Cars have a lot of wires coming out of all the controls mounted on the steering column. In fact, the mechanical way you suggest has been on common use for many many years, but it requires a separate wire for each function, and the wiring harness is simply getting horrendously expensive and even hard to fit in physically. Thus they are moving to a signaling system, where one wire, like a simplified Ethernet in crude terms, connects all devices, and instead of on/off voltages, they know respond to actual encoded signals.
Maybe it's the same with airliners. Look at all the functions that are possible at each seat: no smoking, seat belts, soon no cell phones, attendant alert light and button, and all the entertainment possibilities.
Much simpler to have one Ethernet connecting all devices. Maybe there is a master controller at each seat, and it connects via old fashioned wires to each device, or maybe every device is directly connected to the master network. Either way, it simplifies a lot of wiring. Sure, each node is now more expensive, but instead of running one wire just for each seat light and switch, now you have just one wire period (other than power).
This setup would also make it a lot easier to reconfigure the seating divisions, to change the divisions between classes, who knows.
In the first place, none of the really disruptive ideas (if any) out of their research labs has hit any of their software. Look at the crap they think clever -- Clippy for Pete's sake.
In the second place, calling anything in Vista innovative is a real stretch, let alone disruptive. Its biggest feature is all the DRM that makes it so crappy.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, monopolies are just one aspect to imperfect information, but some of the other aspects you mention are hardly solvable, at least any time soon, at least completely.
I was making a point about Bill Gates and his contribution to the imperfections of the current version of capitalism, not about capitalism in general.
"Honey, where's the butter?"
"There is none."
That rejoinder doesn't imply there is no butter anywhere in the universe. Context is important.
And all those problems you mention are part of capitalism? War in Iraq? US military-industrial complex? Too much debt?
Jeez buddy.
The only problem with capitalism is that monopolies (hi, Bill!) distort Adam Smith's free market.
... food aid clobbers the only useful sector of third world economies, and agricultural tariffs prevent them from getting any realistic prices for what's left. The third world is left with no way to better themselves. They end up dependent on handouts from rich countries.
As for aiding the poor
And my fav current topic, the patronizing smugdiots who want to send food (which destroys their only chance at self-sufficiency and export income) to the third world instead of OLPC laptops (which saves them money compared to physical distribution of outdated textbooks in foreign languages). Or want to shove Windows on more expensive less capable laptops at them to lock them into a foreign monopoly instead of free source from which they can learn.
Hell of a way to keep 'em down on the non-farm. See what you can do about that, Bill.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article3216737.ece/
I hate links to blogs which contain the real link and add nothing. Why not just link to th eoriginal story in the first place?
See, here's teh de41. That post was sarcastic. Ff it had not been, your outrage would have been valid. As it is, it was, and your was not, and you blew it.
See how easy it is once you grasp the core fundamental basis of it all?
Is that you, HAL?
I must be really dense. How the heck does over-the-air TV broadcast get anything from the home back to the net? Dialup?
Exactly his point -- the server was configured to allow this access and had no security measure in place. On the internet it is accepted that when lacking anything to the contrary it is legal to push every available button and to walk through every unlocked door.
On the internet?!? Pray tell, what law says this? You use "it is legal" and I do not think you know what it means.
Maroon.
Its sort of like being able to convict someone of trespass when they:
1. Walk in the front door of your open for business coffee shop;
2. They help themselves to the candy from the "Free - Take all you like" bin;
3. You don't say anything but call the police
Not quite; the sign actually says "Free to employees" but is on the counter, accessible to the public, and not guarded. Zone transfers are not meant for the general public, but for "partner" servers. I think the server was as poorly admined as the candy bin in my example, that the judge ruled properly in a narrow sense, and that if the defendant had not also been charged with other crimes, it would be silly.
Don't mention Jimmy Cagney. That was just Hollywood.
Muslims are destroying every country on Earth.
Well, except for the US, which is being destroyed by Republicans. But that's ok, just wait til after the elections, then it will be Democrats doing the destroying.
And of course China, which is being destroyed by the Communists. Or, wait, are they capitalists now? Well, never mind, they aren't Muslim, and that's all that counts. They are quite capable of destroying their own country and seem to have done remarkably well at it several times. Sometimes they had help from western colonizers, and several times from the Japanese, but on the whole, they do a decent job themselves.
And I am sure you can find other exceptions, but those are best left as an exercise to the students. Students, you know, mostly young, they too do a fine job of destroying their country, regardless of which country that is or if it is even the same country they are students in. Just ask their parents and teachers.
No, poster could be US Republican, or Australian John Howard, or Venezuelan Hugo Chavez, or ....
Next to nothing, it's the best solution. But someone else has already suggested nothing, so I claim second prize.
We need a new rating, Whoosh, for humorless droids who feel the need to correct jokes.
That's rich. Australia was turning aboriginal kids over to white families on racist grounds in the 70s, I think it was. I remember reading about Canada having some similar policy into the 80s, but have no references.
Police nowhere "protect", they only respond to gather evidence. I doubt there's a police force in the world which actually claims to protect citizens against individual crimes. They may say they deter crimes, but to protect? Ha! How many rapes were prevented by police stopping the rape in progress? And tell me again, if gun control works, why Britain's gun crimes went up aftfter guns were banned?
Version 1.0 has the screwed up acronym.
Version 1.0 SP1 will correct it to the incorrect FaSAT.
Version 2.0 will change it to FaST.
Version 3.0 will be FSAT.
Why don't you go look up the Deacons for Defense? Here are a couple of links:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0335034/
http://www.amazon.com/Deacons-Defense-Resistance-Rights-Movement/dp/0807857025/ref=pd_bbs_sr_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1199740596&sr=8-3
Blacks in the south who used guns to defend themselves from a corrupt government -- state, county, city elected officials, police, judges -- who were in league with the KKK. They shot back and stopped the outrages, and that was the ONLY reason the federal government stepped in -- niggers with guns freaked them out.
You read up on them, and then tell me guns have no use except evil. You explain how blacks defending themselves against a corrupt oppressive government is anything but good, and then explain to me how all the patronizing whites looked the other way and pretended Martin Luther King completed his march to Selma without armed patrols around the nightly camps.
You nanny staters with your smug patronizing attitude that individuals must defer to the almighty government, whose Supreme Court has ruled several times that police are not obligated to defend individuals -- yes, you, who think everyone should follow your moral guidelines, that you are a superior thinker for the ages and conditions can never change -- go ahead, I dare you -- read up on the Deacons for Defense and Justice of just 40 years ago, and then tell me how your patronizing smugness can prevent a repeat today.
You can't, because it will happen again, and I hope there are heroes like the Deacons to come save your sorry ass.
Why not implement effective gun registration at a federal level? Provide strict punishments for unregistered firearms, with some inital grace period and a gun buyback scheme. Basically clear out the unregistered guns. If you dry up the pool of firearms for criminals, then there is no need for citizens to be armed against the criminals.
Because there is no such beast as effective gun registration. Criminals can get guns any time they want. You can't get rid of guns until you get your hands on them.
Gun crime in Britain went up AFTER they banned them. How effective is that? An island nation -- they ought to be able to control guns pretty damned easily, and they didn't.
I take it, then, that you have no argument at all against my other points?
I find it interesting that one of the arguments in favor of Australia's gun control was to reduce suicides. Yet the only thing that changed was the distribution of suicides by type; the absolute number stayed the same. That was useful.
I never looked into your stats. But then, maybe I am a troll, and by objecting to just the one argument and implicitly accepting the others, you have been trolled.
That would be fun too.
Great, bring up a fundamental point which was not in play. I was responding to the guy who wondered why they don't just wire up old fashioned mechanical switches and tons of wiring. And you were responding to ... what?
Thanks! Shidiots like that are a pain.
We have strict gun control because having a large bore semi-auto isn't as useful as knowing that muggers and bank theives don't have them.
... works well, eh?
I love this sentiment, as if criminals actually pay attention to that one law and ignore the others. Why don't you also stop mugging and bank thievery by outlawing those activities too?
We can't have certain pets but in exchange we have a country free of certain pests.
Let's see, rabbits and cane toads come to mind,and all the pests introduced to control them, and the pests introduced to control those pests
The rest of your "benefits" are pretty much well defined as something you like and therefore good, except for the games rating, which you don't like on a technicality but are willing to put up with anyway.
Sounds like the prototypical nanny state, and the nanny droid to go along with it.
What I especially find intriguing about nanny states is how so many crimes are victimless, only a crime because the rulers thinks the peasants are too ignorant to think for themselves. Then they throw in gun control, basically creating new victims (the murdered, the raped, the assaulted) who are not allowed to defend themselves against the bad guys except by a truly undemocratic feature -- their physical conditioning. The elderly, the weak, the sick, all are prevented from using that most democratic and equalizing tool, the gun, to defend themselves.
Only a nanny state would not only create victimless crimes, but also create victims.
The main reason to oppose voting on laws rather than lawmakers is because the sheer number of votes required would quickly turn 99% of the voters into non-voters. That might be an argument in its favor because requiring a minimum turnout would quickly reduce the number of laws enacted, but you also have the problem of generating the laws to vote on -- since we are doing away with lawmakers, we'd have to have a scaled up version of California's initiative process, where you gather signatures on a petition. That would result in probably hundreds of petitions circulating at any given moment, most poorly worded and some at odds with each other.
It's a recipe for disaster.
Here's a guess. Cars have a lot of wires coming out of all the controls mounted on the steering column. In fact, the mechanical way you suggest has been on common use for many many years, but it requires a separate wire for each function, and the wiring harness is simply getting horrendously expensive and even hard to fit in physically. Thus they are moving to a signaling system, where one wire, like a simplified Ethernet in crude terms, connects all devices, and instead of on/off voltages, they know respond to actual encoded signals.
Maybe it's the same with airliners. Look at all the functions that are possible at each seat: no smoking, seat belts, soon no cell phones, attendant alert light and button, and all the entertainment possibilities.
Much simpler to have one Ethernet connecting all devices. Maybe there is a master controller at each seat, and it connects via old fashioned wires to each device, or maybe every device is directly connected to the master network. Either way, it simplifies a lot of wiring. Sure, each node is now more expensive, but instead of running one wire just for each seat light and switch, now you have just one wire period (other than power).
This setup would also make it a lot easier to reconfigure the seating divisions, to change the divisions between classes, who knows.
That's my guess, and I'm sticking with it.
In the first place, none of the really disruptive ideas (if any) out of their research labs has hit any of their software. Look at the crap they think clever -- Clippy for Pete's sake.
In the second place, calling anything in Vista innovative is a real stretch, let alone disruptive. Its biggest feature is all the DRM that makes it so crappy.