If it wasn't for the use of precedents, we'd have to live with laws Congress as wrote them. I'm not sure that's any better than relying on courtroom precedents.
Everybody is complaining about the "Jello scene". Don't you see, this is the most brilliant part of the pilot? Perhaps you don't realize it now but soon you'll be saying to yourself, at least subconciously, "maybe if I watch a few more episodes, there will be another Jello scene..."
"it was used in precisely the job for which it was intended."
I'd like to ask you to think a little more before writing this sort of thing. I don't believe that "supporting private conversations among terrorists" was precisely the job Phil Zimmerman intended for PGP. I'm picking at semantics here, because I'd like to show some sympathy for a guy to whom we owe so much.
What's less expensive than both? Tackling the "learning curve" and running Apache. This is oversimplified, but I think the answer comes out the same in the complicated version.
Seems to me that "love" and "hate" would be better words than "good" and "evil" -- these also remove the relativism. I can't define good and evil, but I can define love and hate. Well, at least I can defined them better than good and evil.
I've never heard of a civilization having definitions for love and hate which differed from any other by more than epsilon (er, by some tiny amount).
Once you have platform independence, you can run games on the latest, greatest hardware with less or even no rewriting. Don't think of the cards supported at one time slice, think of the hardware coming out in the next half year. Using history as an example, wouldn't it have been nice to be able to run all those old (Voodoo days) Glide-based games on your NVidia TNT(2)(ULTRA) or GeForce[23][MX|ULTRA|GTS] or ATI Radeon?
So you might lose 5% performance by targeting multiple platforms now, but you gain 200% performance when new hardware comes out.
At one time, 3DFX was threatening or suing people that wrote Glide-like wrappers around DirectX. These wrappers allowed NVidia cards to run Glide-based games. That was when NVidia was starting to threaten 3DFX's revenues, but 3DFX was still the leader in the 3D gaming market.
NVidia has already badmouthed the Kyro, telling computer salespeople that selling the Kyro is begging for irate customers -- what with all the incompatibilities that it might have, and the fact that it is an "unproven" platform. Through extensions to DirectX, it will be easier for NVidia to generate deliberate "incompatibilities", and NVidia has the money to push game makers into utilizing the features, and the marketing force to change the market into believing these features are important.
That scenario plays out much differently if we reduce or disallow vendor extensions. I think it is worth the 5% performance penalty. As usual, peace and harmony are in our interests, but not in the interest of any business that wants to control the market.
(all percentages above are made-up; any similarity to real percentages is strictly coincidental, not to mention lucky)
Not to pick on the questioner (too much;-), but if you want to play with Nerf toys at work, see if Nerf has any openings. Me, I'd head for LEGO if I wanted to work in the toy industry.
This post is in response to many posts, and I didn't know what to attach it to. So I've made it a new post.
While I'm inclined to agree with many people that the Taliban isn't the greatest group of guys to be running a country, removing folks from power isn't easy. Therefore, I find it difficult to support such an action. Consider our stellar record of using stuff that comes to mind:
You might argue that we were successful in #4. However, it was the civilian population that forced his removal -- a civilian population that had something to lose if he stayed in power.
It's not clear to me that the million-or-so internally-displaced Afghans care at all what happens to the Taliban. It's not clear that they want prosperity, or that they care much about military conflict.
If you want to find a sympathetic ear in Afghanistan, maybe we should quit terrorizing them with threats of attack, get the aid agencies *back* into the country they were forced to evacuate because of our threats, and make some *friends* in Afghanistan. We have a chance to show them that we are *civilized*, by *helping* them do things like *eat* and *stay warm*. And be sure to leave your bible at home, and hope the Taliban doesn't find any new excuses to jail aid workers.
Once the people like us, we have a chance of the population telling the Taliban to get out of their lives. A government is nothing without a people to govern, and if those people turn against the Taliban, they'll be effective. They don't need guns, they just need a better alternative (which of course means we need to understand their priorities -- I doubt that getting bombed or invaded by special forces is high on their list of priorities).
It has been estimated that half of Afghanistan's population may be internally-displaced at the end of winter if we don't get the aid agencies back into Afghanistan. Think of this as an opportunity to befriend half of Afghanistan's population. A different slicing of their population: It shouldn't be hard to win some friends among the females in Afghanistan, either. The hard part will being doing something to help the females in Afghanistan without being sent to jail.
cato.org, huh? Same guys that tried to suggest Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly in the operating systems market? One of their point-men was an expert witness in the DoJ v. MS trial. Turns out his expertise was in breakfast cereals. He also admitted, under oath, that Microsoft would not give him breakdowns of revenues from sales of Windows, because (they claimed) they didn't keep track of that sort of thing. He testified that Microsoft seemed to keep track of sales on little scraps of paper. I'm not saying he was right or wrong -- I'm saying this was his testimony, under oath. Sure wish I could remember his name, but I'm not going to go back to the trial documents tonight. He's the Dean of MIT's business school, or some such.
I haven't been impressed with the Cato group. Their reports seem to say exactly what you'd think a well-funded group of politically-conservative economists would say -- that the actions of political conservatives are the right actions.
It was during the Reagan years and "trickle-down" economics that my family fell below the poverty line. Maybe it was coincidence, but my family sure didn't feel that way at the time. It's very difficult to analyze, of course, but impossible to refute my personal experience (without telling me I'm lying). I think business owners were better off during the Reagan years. It was just us workers that were in the gutter.
I really wish I could remember my source for this, but for now just think of it as an anecdote. If I recall correctly, the Canadian economist who created or advised Reagan in economic policy was once quoted (about the "trickle-down" theory) as saying, "I guess that didn't work afterall."
1) Why are you so hostile? Looks like antisocial behavior to me.;-)
2) I'm not an engineer.
3) Was economics ever required for engineering students? (in general)
4) I didn't say a private association couldn't do the right thing. I'm suggesting that a private associations usually do the right thing only when it is profitable. "Why else would you go into business?" is the mantra I usually hear. This is doubly true for "publicly held" companies (a phrase which confuses most of the Europeans I've used it with), because they have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders.
5) I'm only somewhat familiar with economics, mostly from a mathematical modeling point of view (I'm a mathematician). However, I think your Wal*Mart example is spurious -- they've lowered the cost for everyone, not just the poor; and they sure didn't take this action because it would help the poor. It's not hard to imagine that they lowered their prices to improve their market share, turning a bigger profit due to volume.
As far as market forces go, I believe the idea is to "fairly" distribute scarce resources (for some definition of "fair"). If I understand correctly, the idea of capitalism is to make the distribution (well, market is a better word than distribution) more efficient by introducing competition in various aspects of the distribution (market). This says nothing about helping the poor, unless you put it in the definition of "fair". However, I don't believe anyone has suggested that being kind to the poor is part of market "fairness".
More conspiratorially-minded (okay, that's a made-up word) folks might suggest that nobody, not even the government, does the right thing any more than is necessary to keep the lower classes from revolting. These aren't my words, these come from a political science class.
Russ Nelson writes "...everyone pays for it, even the people who don't want it. That's wrong...". I don't agree. I think you're ignoring *society* and *social living*. Roughly speaking, if you want to live in this society, you need to support the society's goals (not agree, but *support*). That's what social living is about. I'm not talking about that evil socialism that infects some European countries (-sarcasm), I mean building cities together, agreeing to the creation of a government, etc.
If the society decides to build a light rail system, it doesn't matter whether you'll use it personally. You still need to support the project financially. Same goes for municpal networks, postal service, etc. I don't use rural mail delivery, but I need to help pay for it *because it is the right thing to do*. We need to carefully consider if municpal networks are also "the right thing to do". I think they are, because I don't want our communications infrastructure's fate to depend on "shareholder interests". I think communications infrastructure is too important to leave to "market forces" (i.e. the rich win, the poor lose).
You have to specify what you mean by "effectively". I hear people bitch and moan about the USPS, but I sure can't get a letter to from Pennsylvania to California cost-effectively without their service. Sure I can ask FedEx to do it for me, but I'll pay a lot more for speed I don't need.
If by effectively you mean "at the lowest rate possible given their infrastructure, guaranteed -- with no shareholder pressures to act antisocially", then I can't imagine anyone moving mail more effectively in the US than the USPS.
Take a look at the power market. In the Northwest, power is distributed by a federal agency, the Bonneville Power Administration. The Northwest has the least expensive power in the nation. This is a result of more than hydropower. As we all know, private or publicly held companies charge what the market will pay, which is obviously more than what people in the Pacific Northwest pay for power. Their rates are low because part of BPA's mission is to sell power at the lowest possible price, given their expenses. I expect the Postal Service has a similar clause in their mission. But just as the private power companies do not have such a clause, you can bet that FedEx, and more to point Verizon, don't have such a clause guiding their pricing decisions.
If we ever lose BPA, it will be interesting to watch what happens to power prices in the Northwest. Imagine if Verizon had a monoply on electricity distribution; what do you think they would charge? The lowest possible price given their infrastructure, or the highest price the market would pay?
I expect that municipal networks can be effective at providing bandwidth to everyone, and have the lowest price going. Among many positive benefits to such a system would be public access to the physical infrastructure, just like with the road. If you have the right credentials, you can fix existing roads or build new roads. You don't have to wait for the city to do it for you -- just hire a contractor. Specifications for a public network would (I really hope) necessarily be public.
-Paul Komarek
Re:Why is a civilian spouting off about war?
on
A New Kind of War
·
· Score: 2
You don't need to have military experience to know about war. There are plenty of civilians in the war business, including strategy. Considering that GW Bush appears to have spent most of his National Guard days doing political (not military) stuff, you could argue that our Commander in Chief has no military experience -- but then I guess I should admit I don't think he knows anything about war. Dang, there goes my point.
Given what you've stated, why would you recommend avoiding it? You've made it sound interesting, and say nothing about it being a bad book. Do you have more to say about this book?
Almost correct, but you messed up the conclusion. Falwell and Robertson want the populace to pay them money.
I don't believe they much care about love, or else they wouldn't hate so often. Since God==Love (according to *their* *own* sources), they must not care about God. I doubt they care at all about the populace repenting or doing anything regarding God at all. Even if you switch to God~=Love or God iff Love, I don't think this argument changes in any substantial manner. If they want to prove me wrong, they should quit hating.
Of course, I doubt *they'd* agree with my analysis...
Go north. I saw several of the ads while in the Bay Area on vacation recently. Maybe the #2 size city in the nation doesn't have the right demographics.
I try to keep others from experiencing the same computer pain I've gone through. This means I produce more phone calls and less code, but I can live with it.
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If it wasn't for the use of precedents, we'd have to live with laws Congress as wrote them. I'm not sure that's any better than relying on courtroom precedents.
-Paul
Aren't pretty much all consumer LCD screens produced by the same company, and remarked by Apple, NEC, etc?
-Paul Komarek
Everybody is complaining about the "Jello scene". Don't you see, this is the most brilliant part of the pilot? Perhaps you don't realize it now but soon you'll be saying to yourself, at least subconciously, "maybe if I watch a few more episodes, there will be another Jello scene..."
;-)
-Paul Komarek
IIRC, many generic ketchups are, in fact, Heinz ketchup. Try to imagine Microsoft or Apple doing *that*!
-Paul Komarek
What do you think the effect would be of having a token-dispensing machine instead of an ATM, like in many arcades?
-Paul Komarek
So, can you buy cocaine (an upper class vice) with a credit card?
-Paul Komarek
"it was used in precisely the job for which it was intended."
I'd like to ask you to think a little more before writing this sort of thing. I don't believe that "supporting private conversations among terrorists" was precisely the job Phil Zimmerman intended for PGP. I'm picking at semantics here, because I'd like to show some sympathy for a guy to whom we owe so much.
What's less expensive than both? Tackling the "learning curve" and running Apache. This is oversimplified, but I think the answer comes out the same in the complicated version.
-Paul Komarek
I'd like to say a personal thank-you to Bruce for not talking more about firearms here.
-Paul Komarek
Seems to me that "love" and "hate" would be better words than "good" and "evil" -- these also remove the relativism. I can't define good and evil, but I can define love and hate. Well, at least I can defined them better than good and evil.
I've never heard of a civilization having definitions for love and hate which differed from any other by more than epsilon (er, by some tiny amount).
-Paul Komarek
What happens when the Windows Update server is infected? Don't laugh, it's happened. Okay, laugh. I am.
-Paul Komarek
Once you have platform independence, you can run games on the latest, greatest hardware with less or even no rewriting. Don't think of the cards supported at one time slice, think of the hardware coming out in the next half year. Using history as an example, wouldn't it have been nice to be able to run all those old (Voodoo days) Glide-based games on your NVidia TNT(2)(ULTRA) or GeForce[23][MX|ULTRA|GTS] or ATI Radeon?
So you might lose 5% performance by targeting multiple platforms now, but you gain 200% performance when new hardware comes out.
At one time, 3DFX was threatening or suing people that wrote Glide-like wrappers around DirectX. These wrappers allowed NVidia cards to run Glide-based games. That was when NVidia was starting to threaten 3DFX's revenues, but 3DFX was still the leader in the 3D gaming market.
NVidia has already badmouthed the Kyro, telling computer salespeople that selling the Kyro is begging for irate customers -- what with all the incompatibilities that it might have, and the fact that it is an "unproven" platform. Through extensions to DirectX, it will be easier for NVidia to generate deliberate "incompatibilities", and NVidia has the money to push game makers into utilizing the features, and the marketing force to change the market into believing these features are important.
That scenario plays out much differently if we reduce or disallow vendor extensions. I think it is worth the 5% performance penalty. As usual, peace and harmony are in our interests, but not in the interest of any business that wants to control the market.
(all percentages above are made-up; any similarity to real percentages is strictly coincidental, not to mention lucky)
-Paul Komarek
I've wondered for a long time what S/PDIF stood for. Obviously I never cared enough to look for an answer. But today one jumped out at me! Thanks!
-Paul Komarek
Not to pick on the questioner (too much ;-), but if you want to play with Nerf toys at work, see if Nerf has any openings. Me, I'd head for LEGO if I wanted to work in the toy industry.
-Paul Komarek
This post is in response to many posts, and I didn't know what to attach it to. So I've made it a new post.
While I'm inclined to agree with many people that the Taliban isn't the greatest group of guys to be running a country, removing folks from power isn't easy. Therefore, I find it difficult to support such an action. Consider our stellar record of using stuff that comes to mind:
1) Fidel Castro
2) Muammar al-Qaddafi
3) Saddam Husein
4) Slobodan Milosevic
You might argue that we were successful in #4. However, it was the civilian population that forced his removal -- a civilian population that had something to lose if he stayed in power.
It's not clear to me that the million-or-so internally-displaced Afghans care at all what happens to the Taliban. It's not clear that they want prosperity, or that they care much about military conflict.
If you want to find a sympathetic ear in Afghanistan, maybe we should quit terrorizing them with threats of attack, get the aid agencies *back* into the country they were forced to evacuate because of our threats, and make some *friends* in Afghanistan. We have a chance to show them that we are *civilized*, by *helping* them do things like *eat* and *stay warm*. And be sure to leave your bible at home, and hope the Taliban doesn't find any new excuses to jail aid workers.
Once the people like us, we have a chance of the population telling the Taliban to get out of their lives. A government is nothing without a people to govern, and if those people turn against the Taliban, they'll be effective. They don't need guns, they just need a better alternative (which of course means we need to understand their priorities -- I doubt that getting bombed or invaded by special forces is high on their list of priorities).
It has been estimated that half of Afghanistan's population may be internally-displaced at the end of winter if we don't get the aid agencies back into Afghanistan. Think of this as an opportunity to befriend half of Afghanistan's population. A different slicing of their population: It shouldn't be hard to win some friends among the females in Afghanistan, either. The hard part will being doing something to help the females in Afghanistan without being sent to jail.
-Paul Komarek
cato.org, huh? Same guys that tried to suggest Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly in the operating systems market? One of their point-men was an expert witness in the DoJ v. MS trial. Turns out his expertise was in breakfast cereals. He also admitted, under oath, that Microsoft would not give him breakdowns of revenues from sales of Windows, because (they claimed) they didn't keep track of that sort of thing. He testified that Microsoft seemed to keep track of sales on little scraps of paper. I'm not saying he was right or wrong -- I'm saying this was his testimony, under oath. Sure wish I could remember his name, but I'm not going to go back to the trial documents tonight. He's the Dean of MIT's business school, or some such.
I haven't been impressed with the Cato group. Their reports seem to say exactly what you'd think a well-funded group of politically-conservative economists would say -- that the actions of political conservatives are the right actions.
It was during the Reagan years and "trickle-down" economics that my family fell below the poverty line. Maybe it was coincidence, but my family sure didn't feel that way at the time. It's very difficult to analyze, of course, but impossible to refute my personal experience (without telling me I'm lying). I think business owners were better off during the Reagan years. It was just us workers that were in the gutter.
I really wish I could remember my source for this, but for now just think of it as an anecdote. If I recall correctly, the Canadian economist who created or advised Reagan in economic policy was once quoted (about the "trickle-down" theory) as saying, "I guess that didn't work afterall."
-Paul Komarek
1) Why are you so hostile? Looks like antisocial behavior to me. ;-)
2) I'm not an engineer.
3) Was economics ever required for engineering students? (in general)
4) I didn't say a private association couldn't do the right thing. I'm suggesting that a private associations usually do the right thing only when it is profitable. "Why else would you go into business?" is the mantra I usually hear. This is doubly true for "publicly held" companies (a phrase which confuses most of the Europeans I've used it with), because they have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders.
5) I'm only somewhat familiar with economics, mostly from a mathematical modeling point of view (I'm a mathematician). However, I think your Wal*Mart example is spurious -- they've lowered the cost for everyone, not just the poor; and they sure didn't take this action because it would help the poor. It's not hard to imagine that they lowered their prices to improve their market share, turning a bigger profit due to volume.
As far as market forces go, I believe the idea is to "fairly" distribute scarce resources (for some definition of "fair"). If I understand correctly, the idea of capitalism is to make the distribution (well, market is a better word than distribution) more efficient by introducing competition in various aspects of the distribution (market). This says nothing about helping the poor, unless you put it in the definition of "fair". However, I don't believe anyone has suggested that being kind to the poor is part of market "fairness".
More conspiratorially-minded (okay, that's a made-up word) folks might suggest that nobody, not even the government, does the right thing any more than is necessary to keep the lower classes from revolting. These aren't my words, these come from a political science class.
-Paul Komarek
Russ Nelson writes "...everyone pays for it, even the people who don't want it. That's wrong...". I don't agree. I think you're ignoring *society* and *social living*. Roughly speaking, if you want to live in this society, you need to support the society's goals (not agree, but *support*). That's what social living is about. I'm not talking about that evil socialism that infects some European countries (-sarcasm), I mean building cities together, agreeing to the creation of a government, etc.
If the society decides to build a light rail system, it doesn't matter whether you'll use it personally. You still need to support the project financially. Same goes for municpal networks, postal service, etc. I don't use rural mail delivery, but I need to help pay for it *because it is the right thing to do*. We need to carefully consider if municpal networks are also "the right thing to do". I think they are, because I don't want our communications infrastructure's fate to depend on "shareholder interests". I think communications infrastructure is too important to leave to "market forces" (i.e. the rich win, the poor lose).
-Paul Komarek
You have to specify what you mean by "effectively". I hear people bitch and moan about the USPS, but I sure can't get a letter to from Pennsylvania to California cost-effectively without their service. Sure I can ask FedEx to do it for me, but I'll pay a lot more for speed I don't need.
If by effectively you mean "at the lowest rate possible given their infrastructure, guaranteed -- with no shareholder pressures to act antisocially", then I can't imagine anyone moving mail more effectively in the US than the USPS.
Take a look at the power market. In the Northwest, power is distributed by a federal agency, the Bonneville Power Administration. The Northwest has the least expensive power in the nation. This is a result of more than hydropower. As we all know, private or publicly held companies charge what the market will pay, which is obviously more than what people in the Pacific Northwest pay for power. Their rates are low because part of BPA's mission is to sell power at the lowest possible price, given their expenses. I expect the Postal Service has a similar clause in their mission. But just as the private power companies do not have such a clause, you can bet that FedEx, and more to point Verizon, don't have such a clause guiding their pricing decisions.
If we ever lose BPA, it will be interesting to watch what happens to power prices in the Northwest. Imagine if Verizon had a monoply on electricity distribution; what do you think they would charge? The lowest possible price given their infrastructure, or the highest price the market would pay?
I expect that municipal networks can be effective at providing bandwidth to everyone, and have the lowest price going. Among many positive benefits to such a system would be public access to the physical infrastructure, just like with the road. If you have the right credentials, you can fix existing roads or build new roads. You don't have to wait for the city to do it for you -- just hire a contractor. Specifications for a public network would (I really hope) necessarily be public.
-Paul Komarek
You don't need to have military experience to know about war. There are plenty of civilians in the war business, including strategy. Considering that GW Bush appears to have spent most of his National Guard days doing political (not military) stuff, you could argue that our Commander in Chief has no military experience -- but then I guess I should admit I don't think he knows anything about war. Dang, there goes my point.
-Paul Komarek
Given what you've stated, why would you recommend avoiding it? You've made it sound interesting, and say nothing about it being a bad book. Do you have more to say about this book?
-Paul Komarek
Almost correct, but you messed up the conclusion. Falwell and Robertson want the populace to pay them money.
I don't believe they much care about love, or else they wouldn't hate so often. Since God==Love (according to *their* *own* sources), they must not care about God. I doubt they care at all about the populace repenting or doing anything regarding God at all. Even if you switch to God~=Love or God iff Love, I don't think this argument changes in any substantial manner. If they want to prove me wrong, they should quit hating.
Of course, I doubt *they'd* agree with my analysis...
-Paul Komarek
I don't believe that suicide was ever determined beyond reasonable doubt. Did I miss something?
-Paul Komarek
Go north. I saw several of the ads while in the Bay Area on vacation recently. Maybe the #2 size city in the nation doesn't have the right demographics.
-Paul Komarek
I try to keep others from experiencing the same computer pain I've gone through. This means I produce more phone calls and less code, but I can live with it.
-Paul Komarek