Maybe we should look at it from the reverse angle.
A commercial software company, if they want to charge actual money for a product, has to offer something more, or at least different, from what can be had for free. So they specialize in pretty GUI's (even if that may compromise usability on the expert level) and/or timely features (even if they are faddish).
Free software is ususally written by experts, for experts. I would guess the main reason it has what usability it does is because rolling out free software soultions to regular users makes life easier for the experts who have to fix problems for the regular users. When we make Linux easy enough for grandma, it makes life easier for us.
Too lazy to google for it, but there was an incident in Taiwan where a guy got locked inside his BMW 7-series due to a WinCE lock-up. He had to call for help on his cellphone.
That depends on how many times the code is executed vs. how many higher-level programmers will be inconveninced. If you are writing library code used in a simulation of the Big Bang on a supercomputer, it may be more cost-effective to leave consistency checks out. Or real time applications: When you have to decide to kick a defective jar off the conveyor before it moves past the kick-out mechanism, too-slow software won't work at all (unless you slow the whole factory down), but unsafe software may only require an attendant to re-start the system once every few hours.
If RIP were open source, terminal emulators could have folded the code in and added that feature with much less effort. Or RIP could have taken the form of a plug-in. For example, most Amiga terminal programs supported XPR (external protocol) and could add kermit, zmodem, qwk, or whatever just by dropping the needed xpr*.library in your library directory (though most supported zmodem natively anyway).
as a SysOp it was near impossible to get people to download the graphical client
Heh, a sysop once mailed me, unsolicited, a floppy with the RIP client. The 5" floppy with the MSDOS client didn't work in my Amiga though...Which brings up the point: I don't think RIP was cross-platform at all. If it had been open source it might have had a run in the Gopher/Archie/WWW playoffs and--who knows--a suitably evolved form might have won out over WWW.
It was amazing, though, what could be done with ANSI. Much like how amazing what is being done with WWW/HTML is today. And we have the parallel of Windows' broken ANSI support in the terminal emulator with broken HTML support in IE. Hmmmm....
How short our memories are. The 70% tax rates of the 70's created all sorts of weird distortions in the economy: clever tax shleters leading to rules to close loopholes leading to impossibly complex tax codes (even worse than now), and so on. The result was all sorts of investments being guided by tax implications instead of economic merit. In some cases very productive people (whose skills were highly in demand) simply stayed home because the only other choice was working for the tax man. What didn't happen was higher tax receipts; the income disappeared.
Also, income tax taxes...well...income...not wealth. This is why ther uber-rich are often supporters of steep income taxes; their income is in the past (which makes them rich now), so taxing future income closes out competitors who might bid against them for oceanfront property in the Hamptons.
In the end, everyone lost because of the drag on the economy. The tax cuts of the 80's made the rich richer, but they also made the the poor richer. The principal losers were the politically-connected elite and spoiled-brat heirs & heiresses.
A Neuros is a cheaper, but not as cool-looking, alternative to an iPod. For $250 you get 20 GB and an FM transmitter. And it plays.ogg. Hide it under the seat and blindly hit the pause button whenever you get out.
A belt clip on an iPod/iRiver/Dell DJ will let you walk out without stashing it. But those require a separate FM transmitter thingy (and a budget for AAA cells).
I did follow the link to your blog, and concur that battery-powered vehicles are feasable when their role is limited to city commuting. Your proposal in that Blade Runner discussion, however, is an efficiency play (in my previous efficiency/substitution taxonomy) whereas mine is more like a substitution.
I would dispute that, because passenger vehicles consume most of the oil, that we should attack their consumption first. By that reasoning, word processors should have preceded mainframes, because typewriters vastly outnumbered corporate accounting offices in 1950. Today, office workstations probably total much more computing power than mainframes, but mainframes had to come first because they had a more immediate payoff.
I say a more appropriate figure of merit is how much oil we save per dollar of capital cost. A cargo truck will, over its lifetime (a million miles at 8 mpg), have fuel costs roughly twice the vehicle cost, while a passenger car's fuel costs are about equal to the vehicle cost (200,000 mi at 20 mpg). So for $X billion, we save more oil with electric trucks than with electric cars. The cars can electrify later, when (and if) existing infrastructure makes that economic.
I have sorta come to the same conclusion as you, that the real obstacle to finding alternatives to oil is that current transportation technology requires flammble liquids. Nothing else can store enough energy in a mobile container. You either have to use less fuel (efficiency strategy) or find another source of flammable liquid (substitution strategy).
Hydrogen is a pure play on efficiency. But thermodynamic efficiency is one of those things where the early gains are easy, but super-efficiency is tough to maintain. Watch for how Iceland fares with hydrogen vehicles. We have there a modern society sparsely populating a volcanic island that has nary a drop of oil nor lump of coal. But geothermal energy is all over the place. If hydrogen can't work there then it can't work anywhere. Battery-powered cars are another pure efficency play.
The most direct substitution strategy is Canadian tar sands. We also have methanol derived from natural gas or gasoline synthesized from coal. Biodiesel is in there too but I have doubts that that can scale up to replace oil.
Methanol fuel cells mix the two stratgies, a liquid fuel not as cheap as current gas or diesel, with fuel cells that are not as efficient as hydrogen.
But there is another way...
When we look at the capital costs changing infrastructure, the prospect of electrifying the transportation network doesn't look so bad. We can start with the railroads. (Europe and the northeast corridor are already there). Standardizing voltages and catenary dimensions for highways would be a proper role for gov't, better than sponsoring random research projects, anyhow. The busiest superhighways and largest cargo trucks will electrify first, and then the process can move incrementally from there. Incrementalism is important; it gives feedback on what is and is not economic. The more wires we string, the less oil we use. By the end of the process, if it goes this far, city traffic will run on batteries, long-distance travel will run off catenary, and liquid fuels will be used only by country folk. That leaves out aircraft of course; the only way out there is to substitute high-speed rail for air travel.
Sample bias alert!
Very few things were made by the human hand more than 10,000 years ago (even fewer that were intended to last this long), so of course few things have lasted till now.
But there are some things: Neandertal stone tools, prehistoric cave paintings.
Can Congress extend copyright laws to say, 1000 years? 1000000 years? These are still technically limited.
I can't remember if it got into the majority opinion, but that issue did come up. There is precedent for laws against perpetuities, avoiding real estate regulations by not selling a property, but leasing it for a zillion years, and so on. Most of these laws have time limits comparable to the current length of copyrights.
The Brits, however, don't seem to have a problem with thousand-year (or more) leases. Look at the real estate market in Chelsea and everyone is selling (or re-assigning, I guess) 999 year leases. Don't know what purpose that serves; maybe someone has to technically own the whole lot of 'em to claim some title of nobility (Earl of Chelsea?). But then I don't know what purpose a title of nobility serves, either.
Remember the days when you bought FM converters to hear FM on your car's AM radio? You can do the reverse with an AM radio and wireless-mike-type FM transmitter. Either that or use the line-in jack.
Speaking as someone who installed Debian and then switched to Slack, what made me switch was Debian's monolithic package management. Debian systems are inextricably intertwined with the apt package system, which is fine for dedicated-pupose boxes (this is my workstation, or this is my laptop, or this is my webserver, etc.), or even multipurpose boxes, so long as every package you ever need is available as a *.deb. I however, wanted to do some oddball stuff (Amiga emulation & Neuros management, for example) that requires me to use tarballs, so Debian would have been unweildy. Slack's biggest drawbacks to me are its use of sendmail (gotta download Postfix if you don't trust sendmail to be secure) and it seems a bit thin on included software (lame and bittorrent are not included, for example).
Slack can take in RPM's & *.deb's if you need, but Slack-style *.tgz is actually more common for bleeding edge stuff, because they are so easy to make.
My suggestion: so long as the *.deb's are giving you everything you need, stick with Debian, and happy hacking. But when you start wanting stuff and finding that all you can get are tarballs, then you should start Slacking.
It may just be a matter of how they allocate the resources, rather than how much. Violent crime presumably spends more of its money on government-employed investigators, or possibly a larger number of informants per prosecution. A spamming case, however, can probably be cracked by a single insider informant; it's all a paper trail from there.
So what we really have is the gov't taking an "outsourcing" attitude to prosecuting spam.
Oh, that's easy. If they don't pay the fine then they sit in jail until they do. The busted spammer will find the offshore money for them. (Gotta bust them in the US or get an extradition though.)
Not quite. A state must recognize convictions and accept other states records (like birth records) as evidence. But the manner by which a state must accept exogenous licensure is defined by Congress. An example of this is the 1996 "Defense of Marriage" Act, which says that states need not recognize marriages of couples not elgible to marry in that state. There have been proposals for concealed-carry reciprocity legislation in Congress, that would require states to accept concealed carry permits from other states if concealed carry is legal within that state. This would help (help gun toters, that is) in places like L.A. where concealed carry is technically legal, but it is impossible to get a permit unless you are politically connected.
Art IV, Sec. 1
Full Faith and Credit shall be given in each State to the public Acts, Records, and judicial Proceedings of every other State. And the Congress may by general Laws prescribe the Manner in which such Acts, Records and Proceedings shall be proved, and the Effect thereof.
Homeowner has gun, criminal decides to not break in (the classic deterrence argument)
Homeowner might have gun, so criminal verifies home is unoccupied before beraking in, by ringng the doorbell for example (robberies of occupied houses are rare in the US).
Criminals might have guns, so homeowners respond by buying guns themselves. Criminals find new crime: they watch for rental car plates and go carjacking (this was the rationale for easing concealed-carry restrictions, and eliminating the separate class of plates for rental cars, in Florida).
Strict gun control prevents residents from having guns. Wealthy people retreat to gated communities.
Crime moves to sidewalk muggings and working class neighborhoods. Regular folk resort to carrying guns illegally. Large city whose Democrats outnumber Republicans 5:1 elects tough-on-crime Republican. Tough policing makes life difficult for counter-culture types (The name of this city is, of course, New York.)
And on and on. Murder is not a casual affair; those who murder do so as cunningly as they can. And murder itself is not that hard; getting away with it is hard. So the criminals of the world are not terribly co-operative with our policy-making thought models.
That's not to say that enablement arguments can't be made. The invasion of Iraq was based on an argument similar to gun control (WMD control). I don't know many people who advocate personal nukes; that would make mass destruction too easy, without much conter-balancing deterrence. (I have a broader theory that the smallest group permitted to control a weapon should be realated to the weapon's lethality, from guns under control of individuals, to artillery by groups of citizens no smaller than 100, to nukes controlled by nations of millions. I sometimes ponder how to build a game-theoretic model of such: large groups are more risk-averse, and therefore will be deterred from using high-power weapons aggressively. Would such a system be dynamically stable? But I digress...)
In the end, if enablement or deterrence were appriciably strong effects, someone would have succeeded in measuring it and the argument would have been settled by now. That makes me a gun control skeptic. Without real evidence or rational goals, we get poorly formulated restrictions as a reaction to sensational crimes, whose proponents often admit won't work, but justify them as a first step toward a "boil the ocean" total weapons ban. Of course the opposition is often as not based on some vague cowboy mythos and doesn't always prioritize effectively.
As for wealth disparity being a source of crime, the evidence simply does not support it. Crime has both fallen and risen in the US while income disparity widened and narrowed without any obvious correlation. I will grant that persistent wealth disparity can bring politcal unrest and revolution, but that is not quite the same thing. And I am far from sold that socialism, by itself, levels wealth. (If rigorously enforced, it can de-monetize wealth, but that is a whole new topic.)
Arrgh...
Even given all that, you can still make a deterrence argument. There aren't very many penalties the Swiss army can levy that will deter a gun owner from (illegally) grabbing the gun and using it when an axe murderer is immenently breaking down the door. You can also attack the "enablement" argument used by gun control advocates; we don't see the Swiss gunning each other down just because they all have weapons.
Now having said all that, the deterrence argument is weak (criminals find ways to avoid getting shot). Of course, the enablement argument used by gun control advocates is also weak (criminals find ways either get or avoid needing a gun), so I reach the same conclusion as you, that gun control has no effect on general homicide rates. That's not to say that specifcally targeted gun control (to the mentally ill for example) can't be helpful, or that specific sorts of crime (robbing elderly convenience store owners for example) aren't deterred. I would, however, ascribe Europe's lower crime rate to factors other than its socialism.
For sufficiently small values of "never". I believe English gun control took its current form in 1898, after a spate of homicides in London (too lazy to verify). NYC initiated gun control around the same time, in 1911.
I think you are right about the effect of easy importation. NYC's gun control is obviously ineffective when places as nearby as Vermont have unlicensed concealed carry, but Britain, as an island nation, seems to have resisted wholesale inward smuggling of guns and inward diffusion of gun-friendly culture until recently. The UK success appears to have been the result of banning guns early, and being an island. Globalization does not bode well for it.
Oh, and by the way.... Over $8000 bounty for an Amiga port of Mozilla. And that's just porting existing code to a documented API that can be emulated on standard PC hardware.
It seems to me that, for Transmeta to survive as an independent player, they need native (or nearly native) VLIW code for computationally intensive tasks like MPEG (de)coding, and/or the OS and drivers re-compiled to native VLIW. That way they can get improved MIPS/watt on at least some of the code, but x86 compatibility at no worse MIPS/watt than a native processor.
But then again Intel/AMD can do the same thing and make the micro-ops visible.
Slashdot Mirror
A commercial software company, if they want to charge actual money for a product, has to offer something more, or at least different, from what can be had for free. So they specialize in pretty GUI's (even if that may compromise usability on the expert level) and/or timely features (even if they are faddish).
Free software is ususally written by experts, for experts. I would guess the main reason it has what usability it does is because rolling out free software soultions to regular users makes life easier for the experts who have to fix problems for the regular users. When we make Linux easy enough for grandma, it makes life easier for us.
Too lazy to google for it, but there was an incident in Taiwan where a guy got locked inside his BMW 7-series due to a WinCE lock-up. He had to call for help on his cellphone.
That depends on how many times the code is executed vs. how many higher-level programmers will be inconveninced. If you are writing library code used in a simulation of the Big Bang on a supercomputer, it may be more cost-effective to leave consistency checks out. Or real time applications: When you have to decide to kick a defective jar off the conveyor before it moves past the kick-out mechanism, too-slow software won't work at all (unless you slow the whole factory down), but unsafe software may only require an attendant to re-start the system once every few hours.
If RIP were open source, terminal emulators could have folded the code in and added that feature with much less effort. Or RIP could have taken the form of a plug-in. For example, most Amiga terminal programs supported XPR (external protocol) and could add kermit, zmodem, qwk, or whatever just by dropping the needed xpr*.library in your library directory (though most supported zmodem natively anyway).
as a SysOp it was near impossible to get people to download the graphical client
Heh, a sysop once mailed me, unsolicited, a floppy with the RIP client. The 5" floppy with the MSDOS client didn't work in my Amiga though...Which brings up the point: I don't think RIP was cross-platform at all. If it had been open source it might have had a run in the Gopher/Archie/WWW playoffs and--who knows--a suitably evolved form might have won out over WWW.
It was amazing, though, what could be done with ANSI. Much like how amazing what is being done with WWW/HTML is today. And we have the parallel of Windows' broken ANSI support in the terminal emulator with broken HTML support in IE. Hmmmm....
Also, income tax taxes...well...income...not wealth. This is why ther uber-rich are often supporters of steep income taxes; their income is in the past (which makes them rich now), so taxing future income closes out competitors who might bid against them for oceanfront property in the Hamptons.
In the end, everyone lost because of the drag on the economy. The tax cuts of the 80's made the rich richer, but they also made the the poor richer. The principal losers were the politically-connected elite and spoiled-brat heirs & heiresses.
A Neuros is a cheaper, but not as cool-looking, alternative to an iPod. For $250 you get 20 GB and an FM transmitter. And it plays .ogg. Hide it under the seat and blindly hit the pause button whenever you get out.
A belt clip on an iPod/iRiver/Dell DJ will let you walk out without stashing it. But those require a separate FM transmitter thingy (and a budget for AAA cells).
Another reason is security. How do you chroot KDE?
I did follow the link to your blog, and concur that battery-powered vehicles are feasable when their role is limited to city commuting. Your proposal in that Blade Runner discussion, however, is an efficiency play (in my previous efficiency/substitution taxonomy) whereas mine is more like a substitution.
I would dispute that, because passenger vehicles consume most of the oil, that we should attack their consumption first. By that reasoning, word processors should have preceded mainframes, because typewriters vastly outnumbered corporate accounting offices in 1950. Today, office workstations probably total much more computing power than mainframes, but mainframes had to come first because they had a more immediate payoff.
I say a more appropriate figure of merit is how much oil we save per dollar of capital cost. A cargo truck will, over its lifetime (a million miles at 8 mpg), have fuel costs roughly twice the vehicle cost, while a passenger car's fuel costs are about equal to the vehicle cost (200,000 mi at 20 mpg). So for $X billion, we save more oil with electric trucks than with electric cars. The cars can electrify later, when (and if) existing infrastructure makes that economic.
Hydrogen is a pure play on efficiency. But thermodynamic efficiency is one of those things where the early gains are easy, but super-efficiency is tough to maintain. Watch for how Iceland fares with hydrogen vehicles. We have there a modern society sparsely populating a volcanic island that has nary a drop of oil nor lump of coal. But geothermal energy is all over the place. If hydrogen can't work there then it can't work anywhere. Battery-powered cars are another pure efficency play.
The most direct substitution strategy is Canadian tar sands. We also have methanol derived from natural gas or gasoline synthesized from coal. Biodiesel is in there too but I have doubts that that can scale up to replace oil.
Methanol fuel cells mix the two stratgies, a liquid fuel not as cheap as current gas or diesel, with fuel cells that are not as efficient as hydrogen.
But there is another way...
When we look at the capital costs changing infrastructure, the prospect of electrifying the transportation network doesn't look so bad. We can start with the railroads. (Europe and the northeast corridor are already there). Standardizing voltages and catenary dimensions for highways would be a proper role for gov't, better than sponsoring random research projects, anyhow. The busiest superhighways and largest cargo trucks will electrify first, and then the process can move incrementally from there. Incrementalism is important; it gives feedback on what is and is not economic. The more wires we string, the less oil we use. By the end of the process, if it goes this far, city traffic will run on batteries, long-distance travel will run off catenary, and liquid fuels will be used only by country folk. That leaves out aircraft of course; the only way out there is to substitute high-speed rail for air travel.
Very few things were made by the human hand more than 10,000 years ago (even fewer that were intended to last this long), so of course few things have lasted till now.
But there are some things: Neandertal stone tools, prehistoric cave paintings.
Can Congress extend copyright laws to say, 1000 years? 1000000 years? These are still technically limited.
I can't remember if it got into the majority opinion, but that issue did come up. There is precedent for laws against perpetuities, avoiding real estate regulations by not selling a property, but leasing it for a zillion years, and so on. Most of these laws have time limits comparable to the current length of copyrights.
The Brits, however, don't seem to have a problem with thousand-year (or more) leases. Look at the real estate market in Chelsea and everyone is selling (or re-assigning, I guess) 999 year leases. Don't know what purpose that serves; maybe someone has to technically own the whole lot of 'em to claim some title of nobility (Earl of Chelsea?). But then I don't know what purpose a title of nobility serves, either.
Remember the days when you bought FM converters to hear FM on your car's AM radio? You can do the reverse with an AM radio and wireless-mike-type FM transmitter. Either that or use the line-in jack.
Sorry, that's Neuros.
Slack can take in RPM's & *.deb's if you need, but Slack-style *.tgz is actually more common for bleeding edge stuff, because they are so easy to make.
My suggestion: so long as the *.deb's are giving you everything you need, stick with Debian, and happy hacking. But when you start wanting stuff and finding that all you can get are tarballs, then you should start Slacking.
There are too many "Dupe"'s there, but that makes them dupes, right?
So what we really have is the gov't taking an "outsourcing" attitude to prosecuting spam.
Oh, that's easy. If they don't pay the fine then they sit in jail until they do. The busted spammer will find the offshore money for them. (Gotta bust them in the US or get an extradition though.)
Art IV, Sec. 1
Full Faith and Credit shall be given in each State to the public Acts, Records, and judicial Proceedings of every other State. And the Congress may by general Laws prescribe the Manner in which such Acts, Records and Proceedings shall be proved, and the Effect thereof.
- Homeowner has gun, criminal decides to not break in (the classic deterrence argument)
- Homeowner might have gun, so criminal verifies home is unoccupied before beraking in, by ringng the doorbell for example (robberies of occupied houses are rare in the US).
- Criminals might have guns, so homeowners respond by buying guns themselves. Criminals find new crime: they watch for rental car plates and go carjacking (this was the rationale for easing concealed-carry restrictions, and eliminating the separate class of plates for rental cars, in Florida).
- Strict gun control prevents residents from having guns. Wealthy people retreat to gated communities.
Crime moves to sidewalk muggings and working class neighborhoods. Regular folk resort to carrying guns illegally. Large city whose Democrats outnumber Republicans 5:1 elects tough-on-crime Republican. Tough policing makes life difficult for counter-culture types (The name of this city is, of course, New York.)
And on and on. Murder is not a casual affair; those who murder do so as cunningly as they can. And murder itself is not that hard; getting away with it is hard. So the criminals of the world are not terribly co-operative with our policy-making thought models.That's not to say that enablement arguments can't be made. The invasion of Iraq was based on an argument similar to gun control (WMD control). I don't know many people who advocate personal nukes; that would make mass destruction too easy, without much conter-balancing deterrence. (I have a broader theory that the smallest group permitted to control a weapon should be realated to the weapon's lethality, from guns under control of individuals, to artillery by groups of citizens no smaller than 100, to nukes controlled by nations of millions. I sometimes ponder how to build a game-theoretic model of such: large groups are more risk-averse, and therefore will be deterred from using high-power weapons aggressively. Would such a system be dynamically stable? But I digress...)
In the end, if enablement or deterrence were appriciably strong effects, someone would have succeeded in measuring it and the argument would have been settled by now. That makes me a gun control skeptic. Without real evidence or rational goals, we get poorly formulated restrictions as a reaction to sensational crimes, whose proponents often admit won't work, but justify them as a first step toward a "boil the ocean" total weapons ban. Of course the opposition is often as not based on some vague cowboy mythos and doesn't always prioritize effectively.
As for wealth disparity being a source of crime, the evidence simply does not support it. Crime has both fallen and risen in the US while income disparity widened and narrowed without any obvious correlation. I will grant that persistent wealth disparity can bring politcal unrest and revolution, but that is not quite the same thing. And I am far from sold that socialism, by itself, levels wealth. (If rigorously enforced, it can de-monetize wealth, but that is a whole new topic.)
Even given all that, you can still make a deterrence argument. There aren't very many penalties the Swiss army can levy that will deter a gun owner from (illegally) grabbing the gun and using it when an axe murderer is immenently breaking down the door. You can also attack the "enablement" argument used by gun control advocates; we don't see the Swiss gunning each other down just because they all have weapons.
Now having said all that, the deterrence argument is weak (criminals find ways to avoid getting shot). Of course, the enablement argument used by gun control advocates is also weak (criminals find ways either get or avoid needing a gun), so I reach the same conclusion as you, that gun control has no effect on general homicide rates. That's not to say that specifcally targeted gun control (to the mentally ill for example) can't be helpful, or that specific sorts of crime (robbing elderly convenience store owners for example) aren't deterred. I would, however, ascribe Europe's lower crime rate to factors other than its socialism.
I think you are right about the effect of easy importation. NYC's gun control is obviously ineffective when places as nearby as Vermont have unlicensed concealed carry, but Britain, as an island nation, seems to have resisted wholesale inward smuggling of guns and inward diffusion of gun-friendly culture until recently. The UK success appears to have been the result of banning guns early, and being an island. Globalization does not bode well for it.
Oh, and by the way....
Over $8000 bounty for an Amiga port of Mozilla. And that's just porting existing code to a documented API that can be emulated on standard PC hardware.
Hey, we Amigans are glad when anyone notices we exist.. Trash us, please!
But then again Intel/AMD can do the same thing and make the micro-ops visible.