I don't OK the use of illegal force. I say that people using illegal force on you is a possibility that one has to factor in when one evaluates a course of action. If you make a conscious choice, are you prepared to potentially put yourself in the path of someone's righteous crusade against 'evil', regardless of how misguided or stupid that crusade is? I'm saying that this sort of risk has to be factored in, I'm not condoning the misguided attack.
Unless you have some sort of magic 'shield of reason and intelligence' that makes everyone you come across sane, moral and in complete agreement with whatever you are doing, you have to factor in the possibility that some people might get very angry with you for something that you otherwise consider fine and dandy.
Actually, you have a good point there. I honestly don't know, but Anonymous decided that what they do is evil and went all vigilante hacktivist on 'em. Maybe those guys are pure as snow but really just have very bad PR... Still, it's something I definitely would consider before accepting a job. What's the risk of a whole group of people -or even just some lone nut- deciding that I'm part of some nasty business and deserve some sort of retaliation? Every decision bears a level of risk that one must evaluate to the best of our ability, be it crossing a road or having sex or taking a job from some unpopular business.
I don't really blame anyone. I just think the freedom to do what one wishes should be met with the responsibility of considering its implications, on all sides. My point here is that everybody has that responsibility when they exercise their liberty. Anonymous is free to do hacktivism but also have a responsibility to consider the consequences. Stratfor is free to do whatever it is they do but they have a responsibility to evaluate the consequences. And to a smaller extent, the secretary or janitor or whoever is free to accept the job offer but has the responsibility to consider just who they're working for. If I worked for a seal hunting company, I'd definitely consider the risk of getting randomly assaulted by people who get very angry at that sort of thing. If I worked as a soldier, I'd consider the risk of being insulted and blamed for fighting wars I really had no say in going to, etc.
If Stratfor is evil enough to have an angry mob want to punish all the members on that list, I'd still blame Stratfor for endangering the employees that had nothing to do with their evil. It's pretty easy to shove the blame all one way or the other, but really, I think some falls onto each hand. Anonymous should be careful of what they release, the secretary should be careful of who she works for and Stratfor should... well, just not exist.
I'll grant you the last two... But government jobs do nothing for the economy. They merely have different people spend the same money. Unless you figure out a sector where the government actually produces something that people are willing to pay for and generates a profit doing so (most candidates for that operate at a loss).
I can see how the military would be quite interested in this. If this helps them develop a drug that turns off empathy, they'll finally have soldiers that are willing to shoot on their own population when the shit really hits the fan.
I mostly agree with you but I think a fair bit has to do with code fragmentation and efforts made to make it more manageable. A good thing of open source is that you usually have about 10 libraries that will do roughly the same job. If each piece of software you use links to a different one, your system is not making very efficient use of its resources.
Things like busybox are sort of the other extreme, they'll maximize code re-use but that's part of their core mission.
What would give Linux a big boost is this sort of unification pressure/goal. It would take away some freedom from developers to use whichever lib they want, but well managed, they could add features they need to libs that already exist. Sure it would add a bit of bloat but nowhere near as much as duplicating functionality several times.
For something like this to work, I think one would need to come up with a very successful *light* distro which sets rules as to which libs are part of the core system and put real effort to port software to that chosen set of libs. That is keep a close eye on feature duplication. You only need one lib to put id3 tags on music files, regardless of what player you use.
I would have no problem with software patents if they were limited to the scope that the patent office claims: novel, non-obvious, useful. If this happened, I doubt even 1% of current patents would stand up.
That sort of works for me, but then why stop at 1% ? The basic idea behind patents was supposed to serve the population at large and rewarded the owner with a limited time monopoly for such service. Right now, the service is irrelevant with regards to the enforced rewards of such monopoly. Come to think of it, it's a lot like most government initiatives: good intentions, a brief moment of okay results, terrible long term consequences. A good example of this is education: The intention is to have more educated people, there is a brief moment where providing loans achieves that... until the education business jacks up the prices.
Though if you don't like McDonalds... You still have a choice of eating at a good burger restaurant. McDonalds isn't yet pushing for regulations that force patties to be exactly 1/4" thick, etc. That's what you get in the insurance business.
In Canadian healthcare: Monopoly -> Prince Increase Price Increase -> Rationing Rationing -> Shortages Shortage -> Price increase
In short, all profits go to private producers sucking out as much money out of the government system as they can. Drug companies, medical equipment companies, etc. For a little while, doctors too, but since government cares about their corporate buddies first, they're getting rationed as well (in quantity, not salary which I'm sure is not a situation they entirely mind if even aware of it).
Insurance is such an enormous business that they don't bother to check claims under $50k. You needed a toothbrush? Let's charge 300$ to your insurance for it. 50$ rubber gloves, etc. There's a similar situation in the US, which is part of what makes health insurance so expensive. More importantly, it makes costs too high to avoid having one. Incidentally (and this could be a coincidence), care that is not covered goes down significantly in costs and seems to improve in quality (at least as far as elective eye surgery is concerned). But I'm guessing that it's a healthy market since you don't die if you don't take it, and there are cheaper alternatives (glasses, contacts).
Having the government pay for care all will only work on the short to mid term because even it goes broke after a while. In Quebec, it's around 50% of the budget already and like any bureaucratic monster, a significant portion of that is soaked up by an impressive bureaucracy instead of actual care.
It's a bit of a death trap: the only people who would really need to say "too expensive" simply can't because it's not in their best interest. Manufacturers are not going to lower prices, too few of them and regulation makes sure it's too expensive to compete with existing players. It's cheaper for insurance to charge more than to lower costs since it's services are mandatory (through regulation or merely because of the fact that it's more expensive to go without insurance), and the people who need care... Well they *need* the care, they'll pay. Pay or suffer/die.
I don't think the problem is so much a matter of private/public health care. It's merely the fact that lack of competition makes it grossly inefficient. I'd love a situation where states compete for the best run system. It's just the enforcement of a one-size-fits-all monster that I think is killing us.
You're being incredibly divisive for someone who seems to imply that they're the better man. You weren't content just calling an idiot an idiot, you figured you'd take a whole group of people and reel them into the same camp. For me, that makes you no better than him.
And no, pointing and saying 'he/they started it' isn't any less childish. If you want any chance for the load of crap we're in to get fixed, you better stop the divisive crap and start leading by example.
If there's no profit in it, then there's no market for it. If there's no market for it, then there's nobody wanting it badly enough to pay for it. And if nobody wants it badly enough to pay for it, why would we do it?
Apparently, the 'hotness' in chilis is oil based so water doesn't do all that much but spread it around your mouth and throat more. You're better off with things like milk or bread. Some say beer and tequila help too, but I wouldn't know why that is.
How many watts of electricity do you have to put into it in relation to how much energy is stored? Electrolysis + compression is pretty hard to make efficient. If it takes you 1.2kW/h to charge a 1kW/h capacity battery but it takes you 8kW/h to generate and then compress (store) 1kW/h worth of H2, you're not going to feel as warm and fuzzy about saving the earth... Oh and btw, that water vapour you'd be relasing, bad bad bad greenhouse gas. Much more potent than CO2.
Then there's factoring the amount of energy other pollution that went into building the battery vs its useful life... But marketing doesn't want you thinking about these things. There's a cost to all technologies... Even by Al Gore standards, it's pretty hard to come up with tech that do all that much better than plain combustion when you factor everything in. Not that we shouldn't keep trying... Just not be stupid and switch to something worse before we've actually managed to make it better.
I'll wait until batteries aren't so easily worn out (as in limited charge cycles) before I'll subscribe to that idea. In some cases with some sort of super-capacitor storage, maybe but we definitely aren't there yet.
Heh, we've managed to convince the world that CO2 is a pollutant. H2O shouldn't be too much of a stretch, after all, it's an even stronger greenhouse gas.
How about the position that nobody (rich or poor) should pay tax on their income? I know, I know, you couldn't run a police state and worldwide military empire without income tax... But would it be such a terrible sacrifice?
I know that the rich are supposed to be the evil villain bad guys, we learned that in the 80s movies where the poor working class boy gets the girl in the end. But wanting to keep what you earned isn't what I'd call greed. I think it's greedier to want to take what someone else has because you feel entitled to it. Which is precisely what all the failed wealth-redistribution experiments of our times are about. Governments might use charity and social justice excuse to take your money but let me assure you, for them the important bit is 'take your money', not 'and give it to the needy'.
There's a point where one has to be honest with themselves and recognize that not all of it is in the 'unfair' category, there's a fair bit of envy too. It's entirely natural to feel it, but it's not a good basis for government policy.
I'll grant you this though. Lately, the rich (and their corporations) have been getting a lot more welfare than the poor... But that's what happens when the government is in the wealth redistribution business, it eventually ends up in their friends pockets. And that my friend is what I think is most unfair.
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I don't OK the use of illegal force. I say that people using illegal force on you is a possibility that one has to factor in when one evaluates a course of action. If you make a conscious choice, are you prepared to potentially put yourself in the path of someone's righteous crusade against 'evil', regardless of how misguided or stupid that crusade is? I'm saying that this sort of risk has to be factored in, I'm not condoning the misguided attack.
Unless you have some sort of magic 'shield of reason and intelligence' that makes everyone you come across sane, moral and in complete agreement with whatever you are doing, you have to factor in the possibility that some people might get very angry with you for something that you otherwise consider fine and dandy.
Most people in that region are semites, not just the Israelis. I'm not entirely sure, but Iranians would be probably be semites as well.
Actually, you have a good point there. I honestly don't know, but Anonymous decided that what they do is evil and went all vigilante hacktivist on 'em. Maybe those guys are pure as snow but really just have very bad PR... Still, it's something I definitely would consider before accepting a job. What's the risk of a whole group of people -or even just some lone nut- deciding that I'm part of some nasty business and deserve some sort of retaliation? Every decision bears a level of risk that one must evaluate to the best of our ability, be it crossing a road or having sex or taking a job from some unpopular business.
I don't really blame anyone. I just think the freedom to do what one wishes should be met with the responsibility of considering its implications, on all sides. My point here is that everybody has that responsibility when they exercise their liberty. Anonymous is free to do hacktivism but also have a responsibility to consider the consequences. Stratfor is free to do whatever it is they do but they have a responsibility to evaluate the consequences. And to a smaller extent, the secretary or janitor or whoever is free to accept the job offer but has the responsibility to consider just who they're working for. If I worked for a seal hunting company, I'd definitely consider the risk of getting randomly assaulted by people who get very angry at that sort of thing. If I worked as a soldier, I'd consider the risk of being insulted and blamed for fighting wars I really had no say in going to, etc.
If Stratfor is evil enough to have an angry mob want to punish all the members on that list, I'd still blame Stratfor for endangering the employees that had nothing to do with their evil. It's pretty easy to shove the blame all one way or the other, but really, I think some falls onto each hand. Anonymous should be careful of what they release, the secretary should be careful of who she works for and Stratfor should... well, just not exist.
I'll grant you the last two... But government jobs do nothing for the economy. They merely have different people spend the same money. Unless you figure out a sector where the government actually produces something that people are willing to pay for and generates a profit doing so (most candidates for that operate at a loss).
Give work to someone who needs it. It's probably the most efficient use of your money that I can think of.
I can see how the military would be quite interested in this. If this helps them develop a drug that turns off empathy, they'll finally have soldiers that are willing to shoot on their own population when the shit really hits the fan.
I know of some lead objects that move really fast, they come out the business end of a gun ;) We could call it the 560 Bullet when we get to that.
I mostly agree with you but I think a fair bit has to do with code fragmentation and efforts made to make it more manageable. A good thing of open source is that you usually have about 10 libraries that will do roughly the same job. If each piece of software you use links to a different one, your system is not making very efficient use of its resources.
Things like busybox are sort of the other extreme, they'll maximize code re-use but that's part of their core mission.
What would give Linux a big boost is this sort of unification pressure/goal. It would take away some freedom from developers to use whichever lib they want, but well managed, they could add features they need to libs that already exist. Sure it would add a bit of bloat but nowhere near as much as duplicating functionality several times.
For something like this to work, I think one would need to come up with a very successful *light* distro which sets rules as to which libs are part of the core system and put real effort to port software to that chosen set of libs. That is keep a close eye on feature duplication. You only need one lib to put id3 tags on music files, regardless of what player you use.
I would have no problem with software patents if they were limited to the scope that the patent office claims: novel, non-obvious, useful. If this happened, I doubt even 1% of current patents would stand up.
That sort of works for me, but then why stop at 1% ? The basic idea behind patents was supposed to serve the population at large and rewarded the owner with a limited time monopoly for such service. Right now, the service is irrelevant with regards to the enforced rewards of such monopoly. Come to think of it, it's a lot like most government initiatives: good intentions, a brief moment of okay results, terrible long term consequences. A good example of this is education: The intention is to have more educated people, there is a brief moment where providing loans achieves that... until the education business jacks up the prices.
... until I started factoring in the potential for volunteer head wounds (to put it mildly).
They asked for 'e' but all that was left was a couple stupid 'i'.
Though if you don't like McDonalds... You still have a choice of eating at a good burger restaurant. McDonalds isn't yet pushing for regulations that force patties to be exactly 1/4" thick, etc. That's what you get in the insurance business.
In Canadian healthcare:
Monopoly -> Prince Increase
Price Increase -> Rationing
Rationing -> Shortages
Shortage -> Price increase
In short, all profits go to private producers sucking out as much money out of the government system as they can. Drug companies, medical equipment companies, etc. For a little while, doctors too, but since government cares about their corporate buddies first, they're getting rationed as well (in quantity, not salary which I'm sure is not a situation they entirely mind if even aware of it).
Insurance is such an enormous business that they don't bother to check claims under $50k. You needed a toothbrush? Let's charge 300$ to your insurance for it. 50$ rubber gloves, etc. There's a similar situation in the US, which is part of what makes health insurance so expensive. More importantly, it makes costs too high to avoid having one. Incidentally (and this could be a coincidence), care that is not covered goes down significantly in costs and seems to improve in quality (at least as far as elective eye surgery is concerned). But I'm guessing that it's a healthy market since you don't die if you don't take it, and there are cheaper alternatives (glasses, contacts).
Having the government pay for care all will only work on the short to mid term because even it goes broke after a while. In Quebec, it's around 50% of the budget already and like any bureaucratic monster, a significant portion of that is soaked up by an impressive bureaucracy instead of actual care.
It's a bit of a death trap: the only people who would really need to say "too expensive" simply can't because it's not in their best interest. Manufacturers are not going to lower prices, too few of them and regulation makes sure it's too expensive to compete with existing players. It's cheaper for insurance to charge more than to lower costs since it's services are mandatory (through regulation or merely because of the fact that it's more expensive to go without insurance), and the people who need care... Well they *need* the care, they'll pay. Pay or suffer/die.
I don't think the problem is so much a matter of private/public health care. It's merely the fact that lack of competition makes it grossly inefficient. I'd love a situation where states compete for the best run system. It's just the enforcement of a one-size-fits-all monster that I think is killing us.
You're being incredibly divisive for someone who seems to imply that they're the better man. You weren't content just calling an idiot an idiot, you figured you'd take a whole group of people and reel them into the same camp. For me, that makes you no better than him.
And no, pointing and saying 'he/they started it' isn't any less childish. If you want any chance for the load of crap we're in to get fixed, you better stop the divisive crap and start leading by example.
If there's no profit in it, then there's no market for it. If there's no market for it, then there's nobody wanting it badly enough to pay for it. And if nobody wants it badly enough to pay for it, why would we do it?
Apparently, the 'hotness' in chilis is oil based so water doesn't do all that much but spread it around your mouth and throat more. You're better off with things like milk or bread. Some say beer and tequila help too, but I wouldn't know why that is.
It'll be done compiling any moment now... Just making sure the funny is fully optimized.
Shut up Donny!
How many watts of electricity do you have to put into it in relation to how much energy is stored? Electrolysis + compression is pretty hard to make efficient. If it takes you 1.2kW/h to charge a 1kW/h capacity battery but it takes you 8kW/h to generate and then compress (store) 1kW/h worth of H2, you're not going to feel as warm and fuzzy about saving the earth... Oh and btw, that water vapour you'd be relasing, bad bad bad greenhouse gas. Much more potent than CO2.
Then there's factoring the amount of energy other pollution that went into building the battery vs its useful life... But marketing doesn't want you thinking about these things. There's a cost to all technologies... Even by Al Gore standards, it's pretty hard to come up with tech that do all that much better than plain combustion when you factor everything in. Not that we shouldn't keep trying... Just not be stupid and switch to something worse before we've actually managed to make it better.
I'll wait until batteries aren't so easily worn out (as in limited charge cycles) before I'll subscribe to that idea. In some cases with some sort of super-capacitor storage, maybe but we definitely aren't there yet.
The question is... Where did he start?
Heh, we've managed to convince the world that CO2 is a pollutant. H2O shouldn't be too much of a stretch, after all, it's an even stronger greenhouse gas.
How about the position that nobody (rich or poor) should pay tax on their income? I know, I know, you couldn't run a police state and worldwide military empire without income tax... But would it be such a terrible sacrifice?
I know that the rich are supposed to be the evil villain bad guys, we learned that in the 80s movies where the poor working class boy gets the girl in the end. But wanting to keep what you earned isn't what I'd call greed. I think it's greedier to want to take what someone else has because you feel entitled to it. Which is precisely what all the failed wealth-redistribution experiments of our times are about. Governments might use charity and social justice excuse to take your money but let me assure you, for them the important bit is 'take your money', not 'and give it to the needy'.
There's a point where one has to be honest with themselves and recognize that not all of it is in the 'unfair' category, there's a fair bit of envy too. It's entirely natural to feel it, but it's not a good basis for government policy.
I'll grant you this though. Lately, the rich (and their corporations) have been getting a lot more welfare than the poor... But that's what happens when the government is in the wealth redistribution business, it eventually ends up in their friends pockets. And that my friend is what I think is most unfair.