If that's all it was, then why has no one else been able to create an equivalent tool to Joerg's?
You've heard the phrase, "The enemy of perfect is good enough?"
In this case it applies, just a little differently -- his tool filled the need "good enough" that the people who could do better didn't feel that the effort was worthwhile.
Nope, I comprehend very well. You have no sense of humor and are just looking for a reason to spread the misery you wallow in. You will have to try harder because at this point you might as well be pissing in the wind.
So don't try your reverse psychology bullshit on me. Get out of your mother's basement and stop humping your dog, and realise what a loss this is, instead of making stupid fucking comments.
Your sentence does not parse. I suggest you stop frothing.
I'd like to go up to you now and stab a fucking stingray barb through your heart! THEN find it funny!
Actually, the irony of your statement is very funny. Here you are going on and on about how terrible it is to joke at death, and now you have gone waaaay beyond that and are making death threats. You are clearly unbalanced if you think you've got any moral high ground any more.
It is damn funny. Irwin himself has probably play-acted a death like that a hundred times for the comedic effect.
Besides, all humor originates from the misfortune of others. Try to come up with something funnier than a knock-knock joke that isn't at the expense of someone - you'll be at it for quite a while.
And the amazing thing is that you can do all that with security looking on.
If you have to hire a guard to stand there and watch each biometric scanner to make sure no one is trying to game it, then why even buy a system in the first place?
Don't think you can get away with centralized monitoring either, a guard on the other end of a camera and a little monitor will never even notice either of the two spoofs I mentioned, nor a host of others.
Don't let any salesmen convince you to go with some fancy-dancy biometric system. Most of the affordable ones don't work for shit. Like you can spoof some finger-scanners by using a gelatin mold based on fingerprint left behind by the last guy to go through. Or spoof retinal scanners simply by taking a picture of the real person's eye, poking a hole through the iris part and then holding it up in front of your eye. The list is quite long and really kinda absurd how easily so many systems can be defeated.
Lots of vendors will give you the BS offer to try it out for a month or two and conduct any tests you want. The thing is, hardly anyone has the expertise or time and money to test these, most of the published cracks have come from academia where some grad students spent a whole semester or two on it.
I think of a blog as essentailly the thoughts of the owner(s), comments are secondary.
Slashdot is the thoughts of its owner - as written by others. Nothing makes it to the front page without the "owner" choosing it. You might argue that they don't put all that much thought into the decision to post, but neither do the majority of blogs.
So it's ok to treat people with no control over things like shit because you have a self-esteem problem.
You are one amazing corporate apologist. You've been able to turn "arbitrarily fucked with" into "a self-esteem problem" in one sentence and not even one of the other responders has questioned it. Bravo! I think you have excellent potential for a job in Washington as a lobbyist.
But were the 2048 way systems running at different clock speeds?
Different clock speeds should not present much of a problem. In terms of performance it should be a non-issue - right now you can get variable performance out of the same code depending on other factors like memory contention, cache pollution by other processes, etc so if a cycle takes 1.00ns or 0.50ns isn't going to be anything new.
Only the scheduler is going to care about frequency differences, and considering that we already have the ability to dynamically vary frequency on current systems (intel speedstep, amd's cool-and-quiet) presumably the scheduler already knows how to handle variations in clock frequency - it probably uses a counter/interrupt-generator that is not affected by varying the clock.
Last time I saw someone on linux-kernel mismatch processors it brought all sorts of interesting issues out.
I'm going to guess that by "mismatch processors" there was more to it than just clock frequency. Probably at least cache size and type, maybe TLB size, and probably a bunch of similar minutae too. It's likely the kernel makes some assumptions about those kinds of characteristics, but they aren't likely to vary on the new AMD chips in the way they could with different models of chips in the same system.
The cyberlibertarian approach is strange because it says: We don't want money at all.
No. This "cyberlibertarian" approach says: "We don't want regulation and control at all."
You make the key error of assuming that small amounts of money mean little or no attempt to regulate and control. Again, the best example we have - public libraries, which receive tiny amounts of government funding - indicates that to be false.
As long as you believe that you can take money without strings - especially small amounts of money without regulation in lieu of large amounts with regulation - you are doomed to failure. The people who use government to impose their views via regulation and control don't particularly care about the amount of the money, they care about the regulation and control.
From your grammar and syntax, I suspect English is not your first language. Perhaps you have more experience with european style government which is not (yet) quite so mercenary as much of american government.
They didn't really CREATE them... that's why it's called a "natural" monopoly. You can't have 500 phone companies getting permission to install telephone poles in your yard, digging up the roads, etc.
Maybe not 500, but even just the small poles that are around my neighborhood look like they could carry more than 10 different sets of data cables, especially since it would be unlikely for any one house to have more than 2 or so drops.
Is any of this fancy pants video processing capability usuable under linux? It had better be, after all the PR about how nvidia's drivers share around 98% of their code between the windows and linux versions.
I've had enough problems with bugs in their linux drivers (demonstrably broken dual-channel dvi configuration), that I could have fixed with access to source code, that I expect something for having to put up with their BS. If they can't even make the video processing available under linux, I might as well stick with the old ATI cards which do have fully open driver source.
Traditionally, i'm against government stepping in. I'm a firm believer that the market should (and will) regulate itself, only requiring laws breaking monopolies on limited necessities.
Hello? The government already stepped in and created the monopolies that the telcos enjoy. If it weren't for their so-called "natural" monopoly on the cable plant, they would not be able to get away with 94.32% of the bullshit they do today.
Anyone who talks about the local telecommunications markets as if they were anything even remotely resembling free markets has their head up some lobbyist's ass. At least the members of congress have the sense to get paid for sticking their heads up there, I'm not sure why anyone else does it.
The cyberlibertarian approach leads to a situation where public authorities spent millions on their commercial counterparts and useful projects run with almost no fuel.
Huh? How do you go from "don't spend public money on non-goverment projects like wikipedia" to "leads to... public authorities spend[ing] millions on [non-government projects]?"
I don't say decision. I say funding for what is succesful.
You can say what you want. But the only example we have to indicate what will happen indicates bad will happen. Freedom is not free.
The iTunes Music Store (NOT iTunes... it won't DRM tracks that you rip) uses a DRM wrapper around an AAC file... but these tracks aren't standard AAC files.
A public library gets more public funding than wikipedia.
And, in the US, a public library gets twisted by the government and its agendas far more than wikipedia ever has. Look at all the censorship laws directed at library internet access and justified, or excused by the apologists, because of their public funding.
Government(s) already have too much power to censor the net, we don't need to give them any more.
honest people are more likely to leave their car doors unlocked.
Lol. You are confusing honest with stupid. I have never stolen a car, yet I never leave my car unlocked.
Maybe most people ARE dishonest, but I don't think so.
Gee, when I said it has nothing to do with honesty or dishonesty you insist in framing the issue in that fashion. I like what Steven Levitt, author of Freakanomics, had to say about people like you: "Morality, represents the way that people would like the world to work - whereas economics represents how it actually does work."
Well since you asked so nicely i will tell you. Bittorrent works this way. As long as you have a decent client that keeps some kind of ratios, honesty would be uploading to others as much as your downloading. Last time i checked, the bittorrent market was doing just fine sustaining itself this way.
The bittorrent market is not based on honesty. It is not the clients that keep ratios, it's the tracker. Plus, private trackers routinely ban "clients" who try to spoof them too.
I am not even going to touch the inherent problem that all the bits in the "bittorrent market" were paid for outside of the market, making it all a false economy.
I can't give you an example where 'honesty' trumps economic principles, mainly because honesty IS an economic principle.
Only in niche markets where there is a direct cost associated with being 'dishonest.'
Your example from Freakonimcs is a case of the iterated prisoner's dilemma because each day is a new iteration and thus is only 'scalable' in that you have a group of niche markets (each office) that are effectively independent of each other.
That model may possibly scale to large numbers of individual offices, but Levitt's own reporting on Feldman's bagel business indicated that the larger the individual office, the less 'honest' people were.
Essentialy, you have just proved my point with your own example.
I truly feel sorry for you. If no-one helps anyone else in your world just because it seems like the right thing to do, then it must be a very sad place to live.
Actually, you should be feeling sorry for yourself. Poor reading comprehension is a terrible disability.
If everyone behaved like an economically-optimal robot, as in your model, then no charity would be able to do its work
Your whole post is predicated on this false belief. The people who give to charity, et al, believe they are receiving value from doing so. Tangible or not it doesn't matter, it is their belief based on all the information available to them. Perfectly rational behaviour.
Hell, I just paid $100 to an author of a GPL'd tool that I use regularly. I had no onus to do so, but I believe that in sending him the dough I am encouraging further and continued development. But, as his paypal transaction count showed - despite 10,000+ downloads over the years, I was only the 6th person to make a payment.
The rational consumer is a defective myth, people regularly pay for things they can have for free, just ask Evian.
Indeed, the rational consumer is one of those things that only exists in the laboratory of the mind. Not because people are irrational - individuals may be irrational, but as a group they are rational - but because the environment is never so "clean" as in the economics text books. There are always real-world costs (and perceived costs due to bad information, like advertising, brand-loyalty, and bad risk evaluation (c.f. the lucrative market for extended warranties)) that the text books don't usually dwell on.
But, for the most part, if you could measure all of these additional costs and factor them in, then the model of the rational consumer should still hold. It is just that it is almost impossible to measure ALL of those costs, that measurement itself being a cost that may dwarf some of the actual costs, which means that a rational consumer will often just "wing-it" as a cost-savings approach.
The rational consumer argument breaks down quite quickly when you aren't dealing with super-huge commodities markets where the consumers and producers take great care to be dispassionate about the commodities they trade.
That is essentially the same point I made when I mentioned feasible scale.
However, I would argue that even niche markets are subject to the rational consumer model, its just that smaller markets allow for other cost factors - one of them being that if the niche is small enough, then people can feel comfortable that the risk of the "tragedy of the commons" kicking in and screwing up an "honesty" based approach is minimized, and so too the costs of "honesty" are reduced below the potential value of "honesty" - which really ought to be called cooperation at this level.
It seems you are not taking everything into account.
Actually, it's you who aren't taking everything into account. All of your examples involve additional cost factors - people who buy movies, music and games instead of downloading them are making a judgement that the cost of downloading is not only not free, but higher than the cost paying in the approved manner. That's in part because of the perception of the legal costs, in part because of the cost involved for getting plugged into the P2P networks (learning curve, perceived risk of virii, etc) and in part because of the cost of actually finding the desired product online.
None of these issues have a thing to do with honesty. Nada, zero, zip. It just basic economics.
If you would like to actually demonstrate a scalable example where a market works on "honesty" instead of basic economic principles, please be my guest.
Slashdot Mirror
If that's all it was, then why has no one else been able to create an equivalent tool to Joerg's?
You've heard the phrase, "The enemy of perfect is good enough?"
In this case it applies, just a little differently -- his tool filled the need "good enough" that the people who could do better didn't feel that the effort was worthwhile.
Your jokes are less than admirable.
What jokes?
Please indicate the particular jokes of mine which you find 'less than admirable.'
But the thing is, you obviously don't comprehend.
Nope, I comprehend very well. You have no sense of humor and are just looking for a reason to spread the misery you wallow in. You will have to try harder because at this point you might as well be pissing in the wind.
So don't try your reverse psychology bullshit on me. Get out of your mother's basement and stop humping your dog, and realise what a loss this is, instead of making stupid fucking comments.
Now I'm laughing even more, this time at you.
No, someone died who did more than you EVER will!
Your sentence does not parse. I suggest you stop frothing.
I'd like to go up to you now and stab a fucking stingray barb through your heart! THEN find it funny!
Actually, the irony of your statement is very funny. Here you are going on and on about how terrible it is to joke at death, and now you have gone waaaay beyond that and are making death threats. You are clearly unbalanced if you think you've got any moral high ground any more.
How the fuck is that funny? You pieces of shit.
It is damn funny. Irwin himself has probably play-acted a death like that a hundred times for the comedic effect.
Besides, all humor originates from the misfortune of others. Try to come up with something funnier than a knock-knock joke that isn't at the expense of someone - you'll be at it for quite a while.
And the amazing thing is that you can do all that with security looking on.
If you have to hire a guard to stand there and watch each biometric scanner to make sure no one is trying to game it, then why even buy a system in the first place?
Don't think you can get away with centralized monitoring either, a guard on the other end of a camera and a little monitor will never even notice either of the two spoofs I mentioned, nor a host of others.
Don't let any salesmen convince you to go with some fancy-dancy biometric system. Most of the affordable ones don't work for shit. Like you can spoof some finger-scanners by using a gelatin mold based on fingerprint left behind by the last guy to go through. Or spoof retinal scanners simply by taking a picture of the real person's eye, poking a hole through the iris part and then holding it up in front of your eye. The list is quite long and really kinda absurd how easily so many systems can be defeated.
Lots of vendors will give you the BS offer to try it out for a month or two and conduct any tests you want. The thing is, hardly anyone has the expertise or time and money to test these, most of the published cracks have come from academia where some grad students spent a whole semester or two on it.
I think of a blog as essentailly the thoughts of the owner(s), comments are secondary.
Slashdot is the thoughts of its owner - as written by others. Nothing makes it to the front page without the "owner" choosing it. You might argue that they don't put all that much thought into the decision to post, but neither do the majority of blogs.
So it's ok to treat people with no control over things like shit because you have a self-esteem problem.
You are one amazing corporate apologist. You've been able to turn "arbitrarily fucked with" into "a self-esteem problem" in one sentence and not even one of the other responders has questioned it. Bravo! I think you have excellent potential for a job in Washington as a lobbyist.
But were the 2048 way systems running at different clock speeds?
Different clock speeds should not present much of a problem. In terms of performance it should be a non-issue - right now you can get variable performance out of the same code depending on other factors like memory contention, cache pollution by other processes, etc so if a cycle takes 1.00ns or 0.50ns isn't going to be anything new.
Only the scheduler is going to care about frequency differences, and considering that we already have the ability to dynamically vary frequency on current systems (intel speedstep, amd's cool-and-quiet) presumably the scheduler already knows how to handle variations in clock frequency - it probably uses a counter/interrupt-generator that is not affected by varying the clock.
Last time I saw someone on linux-kernel mismatch processors it brought all sorts of interesting issues out.
I'm going to guess that by "mismatch processors" there was more to it than just clock frequency. Probably at least cache size and type, maybe TLB size, and probably a bunch of similar minutae too. It's likely the kernel makes some assumptions about those kinds of characteristics, but they aren't likely to vary on the new AMD chips in the way they could with different models of chips in the same system.
RISC is so passe nowadays.
The cyberlibertarian approach is strange because it says: We don't want money at all.
No. This "cyberlibertarian" approach says: "We don't want regulation and control at all."
You make the key error of assuming that small amounts of money mean little or no attempt to regulate and control. Again, the best example we have - public libraries, which receive tiny amounts of government funding - indicates that to be false.
As long as you believe that you can take money without strings - especially small amounts of money without regulation in lieu of large amounts with regulation - you are doomed to failure. The people who use government to impose their views via regulation and control don't particularly care about the amount of the money, they care about the regulation and control.
From your grammar and syntax, I suspect English is not your first language. Perhaps you have more experience with european style government which is not (yet) quite so mercenary as much of american government.
They didn't really CREATE them... that's why it's called a "natural" monopoly. You can't have 500 phone companies getting permission to install telephone poles in your yard, digging up the roads, etc.
Maybe not 500, but even just the small poles that are around my neighborhood look like they could carry more than 10 different sets of data cables, especially since it would be unlikely for any one house to have more than 2 or so drops.
Is any of this fancy pants video processing capability usuable under linux? It had better be, after all the PR about how nvidia's drivers share around 98% of their code between the windows and linux versions.
I've had enough problems with bugs in their linux drivers (demonstrably broken dual-channel dvi configuration), that I could have fixed with access to source code, that I expect something for having to put up with their BS. If they can't even make the video processing available under linux, I might as well stick with the old ATI cards which do have fully open driver source.
Traditionally, i'm against government stepping in. I'm a firm believer that the market should (and will) regulate itself, only requiring laws breaking monopolies on limited necessities.
Hello? The government already stepped in and created the monopolies that the telcos enjoy. If it weren't for their so-called "natural" monopoly on the cable plant, they would not be able to get away with 94.32% of the bullshit they do today.
Anyone who talks about the local telecommunications markets as if they were anything even remotely resembling free markets has their head up some lobbyist's ass. At least the members of congress have the sense to get paid for sticking their heads up there, I'm not sure why anyone else does it.
The cyberlibertarian approach leads to a situation where public authorities spent millions on their commercial counterparts and useful projects run with almost no fuel.
... public authorities spend[ing] millions on [non-government projects]?"
Huh? How do you go from "don't spend public money on non-goverment projects like wikipedia" to "leads to
I don't say decision. I say funding for what is succesful.
You can say what you want. But the only example we have to indicate what will happen indicates bad will happen. Freedom is not free.
The iTunes Music Store (NOT iTunes... it won't DRM tracks that you rip) uses a DRM wrapper around an AAC file... but these tracks aren't standard AAC files.
I like to call them Defective Recorded Music.
A public library gets more public funding than wikipedia.
And, in the US, a public library gets twisted by the government and its agendas far more than wikipedia ever has. Look at all the censorship laws directed at library internet access and justified, or excused by the apologists, because of their public funding.
Government(s) already have too much power to censor the net, we don't need to give them any more.
honest people are more likely to leave their car doors unlocked.
Lol. You are confusing honest with stupid. I have never stolen a car, yet I never leave my car unlocked.
Maybe most people ARE dishonest, but I don't think so.
Gee, when I said it has nothing to do with honesty or dishonesty you insist in framing the issue in that fashion. I like what Steven Levitt, author of Freakanomics, had to say about people like you: "Morality, represents the way that people would like the world to work - whereas economics represents how it actually does work."
Well since you asked so nicely i will tell you. Bittorrent works this way. As long as you have a decent client that keeps some kind of ratios, honesty would be uploading to others as much as your downloading. Last time i checked, the bittorrent market was doing just fine sustaining itself this way.
The bittorrent market is not based on honesty. It is not the clients that keep ratios, it's the tracker. Plus, private trackers routinely ban "clients" who try to spoof them too.
I am not even going to touch the inherent problem that all the bits in the "bittorrent market" were paid for outside of the market, making it all a false economy.
I can't give you an example where 'honesty' trumps economic principles, mainly because honesty IS an economic principle.
Only in niche markets where there is a direct cost associated with being 'dishonest.'
Your example from Freakonimcs is a case of the iterated prisoner's dilemma because each day is a new iteration and thus is only 'scalable' in that you have a group of niche markets (each office) that are effectively independent of each other.
That model may possibly scale to large numbers of individual offices, but Levitt's own reporting on Feldman's bagel business indicated that the larger the individual office, the less 'honest' people were.
Essentialy, you have just proved my point with your own example.
I truly feel sorry for you. If no-one helps anyone else in your world just because it seems like the right thing to do, then it must be a very sad place to live.
Actually, you should be feeling sorry for yourself. Poor reading comprehension is a terrible disability.
If everyone behaved like an economically-optimal robot, as in your model, then no charity would be able to do its work
Your whole post is predicated on this false belief. The people who give to charity, et al, believe they are receiving value from doing so. Tangible or not it doesn't matter, it is their belief based on all the information available to them. Perfectly rational behaviour.
Hell, I just paid $100 to an author of a GPL'd tool that I use regularly. I had no onus to do so, but I believe that in sending him the dough I am encouraging further and continued development. But, as his paypal transaction count showed - despite 10,000+ downloads over the years, I was only the 6th person to make a payment.
The rational consumer is a defective myth, people regularly pay for things they can have for free, just ask Evian.
Indeed, the rational consumer is one of those things that only exists in the laboratory of the mind. Not because people are irrational - individuals may be irrational, but as a group they are rational - but because the environment is never so "clean" as in the economics text books. There are always real-world costs (and perceived costs due to bad information, like advertising, brand-loyalty, and bad risk evaluation (c.f. the lucrative market for extended warranties)) that the text books don't usually dwell on.
But, for the most part, if you could measure all of these additional costs and factor them in, then the model of the rational consumer should still hold. It is just that it is almost impossible to measure ALL of those costs, that measurement itself being a cost that may dwarf some of the actual costs, which means that a rational consumer will often just "wing-it" as a cost-savings approach.
The rational consumer argument breaks down quite quickly when you aren't dealing with super-huge commodities markets where the consumers and producers take great care to be dispassionate about the commodities they trade.
That is essentially the same point I made when I mentioned feasible scale.
However, I would argue that even niche markets are subject to the rational consumer model, its just that smaller markets allow for other cost factors - one of them being that if the niche is small enough, then people can feel comfortable that the risk of the "tragedy of the commons" kicking in and screwing up an "honesty" based approach is minimized, and so too the costs of "honesty" are reduced below the potential value of "honesty" - which really ought to be called cooperation at this level.
It seems you are not taking everything into account.
Actually, it's you who aren't taking everything into account. All of your examples involve additional cost factors - people who buy movies, music and games instead of downloading them are making a judgement that the cost of downloading is not only not free, but higher than the cost paying in the approved manner. That's in part because of the perception of the legal costs, in part because of the cost involved for getting plugged into the P2P networks (learning curve, perceived risk of virii, etc) and in part because of the cost of actually finding the desired product online.
None of these issues have a thing to do with honesty. Nada, zero, zip. It just basic economics.
If you would like to actually demonstrate a scalable example where a market works on "honesty" instead of basic economic principles, please be my guest.