Parenting education should cover things like why hitting children is counterproductive, teaching them skills at a young age is a good idea, the basics of nutrition, that it's vital children have the opportunity to learn to be independent.
All of these things are well-understood and well-researched. They're not matters of politics; you go and read the research, see how it was conducted, and come to an opinion.
Education isn't about telling people what to think. It's about teaching them current best theory and the basis for that theory. Stick to science and things have a good chance of working out; but get politics or religion involved, neither of which are based on scientific theory, and it's disaster time.
Star Trek is a science-fiction entertainment series.
Plots are chosen based on popularity and entertainment value.
If a Star Trek plot posits a conflict between generically improved and stock humans, it is perhaps imprudent to treat it as an accurate predictor of human behaviour.
No fear - I only wrote in the way I did to illustrate the point that I, as the parent, have an enorumous amount of control and responsibility over the *life* of the child, after it is born, and therefore, by extension, what interjection could be raised on the basis of excercising a similar level of control *before* birth?
> In a Developing Society (like China), having a > wife and many children is very important.
Sort of...it's true, but in different ways, depending on whether you're rural or urban.
> What do > you do with the thousands of Chinese men that will > not have wives and children? Those men feel > cultural pressure to get a wife, at any cost.
What do you do? you watch the social pressure change their society. If the Chinese stopped thinking "you must marry because it's socially expected of you" they'd be better off.
> Because sex-selection of embryos is notoriously > unreliable, and thus a significant number of > children born thanks to this kind of procedure > will be of the 'wrong' sex.
In n years time, sex-selection will have improved to the point of being completely reliable.
I rather suspect people have a idealised view of the male-female mating issue...
There are a certain number of males. There are a certain number of females. Each male and each female has a certain value in the dating game, based on looks, intelligence, socio-economic status, etc.
There are also different classes of relationships.
Some people are succesfully married, some are married but have extra-marital relationships, some are in long-term partnerships, some are in short-term relationships, some aren't looking for a relationship and some aren't capable of a relationship.
An imbalance in the number of men to women (or women to men) doesn't means the extra men "don't get a relationship".
> Would the inevitable imbalance in the male/female > ratio and the resulting (possibly society-killing) > problems it creates invoke the defense clause that > you bring up?
I rather suspect there will be a pendulum effect. Right now probably more boys would be chosen than girls. Girls would then be in short supply - making them more desireable.
Philosophically speaking, what right does one individual (the State) have to *force* another individual (me) never to choose the gender of my child?
The only justification for forced intervention in others life is self-defence. This would include the defence of the unborn child (so for example if I *wished* my child to be born without arms, the State most certainly should intervene) but the *gender* of the child? I cannot see how this can be thought of as harming the child.
If I had a child, I would, once it were born, be fully responsible for its life; I would choose whether it learned French while young, or the piano, or karate, the flute...
If it's entirely up to me what my child is given to learn while it's young, why would it be wrong then also to choose the gender of my child? especially if I were having a larger family and might, for example, want a balanced number of boys and girls?
Certainly, on a practical note, the awful harm a lot of parents inflict on their children by their incompetence as parents is a far more pressing issue. How can we be worried about gender when so many parents are so awful at parenting?
I'd much rather parents had to be qualified as parents (some sort of mandatory exam to be taken and passed) than be concerned about whether or not they could choose their child's gender.
If NASA offered a major prize, say one, five or ten million dollars, it'd be both a sizeable chunk of their budget and something which might just produce far more results for the money than NASA itself does.
It is therefore not a huge surprise to find the prize is paltry.
I know there are plenty of people at NASA who'd encourage this sort of prize based competition and would want a large prize, because they really want space travel to get going, but the behaviour of an *organisation* as a whole is *not* the same as the will of the majority of people who comprise the organisation - NASA is not a democracy.
On a slightly seperate note, the outcome we've seen here, this paltry, pointless prize, this situation could only arise from a State run organisation.
NASA is, as I've described, encouraged to offer these prizes, since it soaks up a lot of money from the State and is pressured by the State to behave in certain ways (and these prizes are very popular right now, because of the success of the X-Prize) but *at the same time* any actions NASA take which encourage non-State space activity of course threaten NASA itself!
So we get a paltry prize, because NASA is caught between Sylla and Charybdis.
"The sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others."
> Then we can agree that less transportation occurs > with import taxes than without, even if you > include the smuggling.
Noooo...this isn't auxiomatic because it's an indirect connection and it is concieveable that circumstances could be such that the relationship you describe doesn't occur.
What import duties do is raise the price of a good and this in turn reduces consumption - but this is only true if there is competition in the market for the given good.
When there is competition in the market for a given good, the price of that good is the lowest the producers can bear. Any taxation falls properly upon the consumers, not the producers, since it must be passed on; if it were not, the producers would make less than the lowest they could bear and they would go out of business, one way or another.
If the given good is subject to a monopoly, the price will be the highest the richest buyers can bear (rather than the lowest the producers can bear) and import duty in that case will actually fall properly upon the home producer, rather than the consumer, since prices cannot rise any more.
> Then we can conclude that often (but not always) > import taxes work as intended for a > protectionist government.
As intended? what is the intention?
Import taxes are in fact completely counterproductive. By raising the price of a good, they increase the cost of producing all other goods which depend upon that good. Those people involved in the production of the protected good think they are richer - they sell their products for a higher price and so have more money in their pocket - but their *real* wealth is lower, because despite having more money, the cost of everything they buy has risen by an equal amount (or in fact a greater amount, as producers tend to over-increase prices when they have the opportunity to do so).
> Censorship and import tax aren't equal (jeez, > imagine I would ever have to make this point)
The point you are refuting is not the point I have made, which is why you rightly can't imagine ever having to refute.
I made an analogy between censorship of information and import tax; if you make something hard to get, you raise its price by restricting its supply.
In a market, import duties encourage smuggling, since the artificial State imposes cost makes it possible to provide a given good at a significantly cheaper rate simply by avoiding customs.
Censorship is an attempt by the State to prevent the import of information. In an exact parallel, this encourages the smuggling of information, since there is censorship by no means eliminates demand; it merely restricts supply and so drives up prices.
The article implies that Internet access is expensive in authoritarian countries because of the rates being charged by black access groups.
In fact, it is a testimoney to the power of supply and demand that it is *possible* to obtain access *despite* all attempts by the State to prevent this.
Is the airforce more important than say, nuclear power plant operators?
While it's concieveable there could sometimes be some advantage in releasing a beta version of a security fix, there is no advantage whatsoever in merely delaying the general release of a patch, so MS must have agreed to supply early versions of patches to the USAF.
This, I predict, will cause more problems than it will solve.
> Using the same logic, machines with two (or > more) CPUs wouldn't be useful, since the second > CPU is not going to be any faster in than the > first one.
This deduction is improper for two reasons.
First, for it to be relevent to the networking scenario described in the OP, the networking CPU would have to be equal in processing capability to the main CPU. This is not the case.
For example, if I had a dual processor machine where one CPU is a 3 GHz P4 and the other is a 66 MHz Pentium, is the second CPU really that useful or is it in fact a hinderance? particularly when you consider the networking scenario, when any tasks offloaded to the slow CPU *must* be completed before the fast CPU can continue with that task.
Secondly, it fails to take into account the inherently and unavoidably serial nature of network packet processing. You cannot usefully apply two CPUs to this task. If a machine was given tasks which were not subject to parallism, then having multiple CPUs does not speed up any given task; more tasks can be done concurrently, but each task takes the same time.
This is the problem which faces networking processing. Any given thread which performs network I/O will be executing on a single CPU.
To consider your analogy, if the manager has only one task to do, and needs the other person his secretary calls to respond before he can continue, there's very little point having a secretary make the call for him. He's going to be stuck waiting till the reply comes through anyway.
By and large, many people in this thread are failing to perceive that parallism is not a solution, since the issue is the performance of any single thread which is performing network I/O.
To take the problem to an illustrative extreme, we could in theory have a multitude of slow CPUs which the main zippy CPU offloads everything to; graphics, network, disk, etc.
Result? anything that requires operations which are offloaded performs weakly, since its critical path of execution spends most of the time on the slow CPUs - and we *paid* for all those slow CPUs, when we've already paid for our expensive main fast CPU!
It is true that if you offload network I/O, you free the CPU to perform other tasks.
This has the negative effect of making the thread which has had its network I/O offloaded slower, but the positive effect of freeing the CPU to perform other tasks.
However, I say to you, on a desktop system, which is where this Intel stuff is, the user is usually going to be the cause of the network traffic and he will want that thread to perform and will not care that he could be freeing up a few more percent CPU time to be spent in the idle task.
Intuitively, people think it won't hurt, but intuition is wrong.
Consider; you have a hundred users, all doing some sort of network based task - say, reading Usenet via an NNTP server.
You offload their network processing from the CPU to a slower CPU on the network card.
Every time a thread in your NNTP server blocks, waiting for a packet to arrive or be sent, the main CPU moves onto another thread...which also then needs a send/recv, and blocks, and so on.
In the meantime, the slow CPU gets around to dealing with the queue of send/recv requests that it has.
The main CPU spends its time zipping from blocking thread to blocking thread, or being idle, with each thread spending plenty of time waiting on the slow network CPU.
You'd be much better off letting the CPU zip through the network processing and then moving onto the next thread; the throughput for each thread would be much higher.
"But, " I hear you say, "why is my network CPU so slow?"
"Because, " I reply, "you don't spend 300 USD on a P4 CPU and then the same amount, or more, on your network card, when you ALREADY have a zippy P4 CPU to do all the work!"
Slashdot Mirror
This must surely be the fastest collision of non-atomic objects engineered by the human species?
--
Toby
Parenting education should cover things like why hitting children is counterproductive, teaching them skills at a young age is a good idea, the basics of nutrition, that it's vital children have the opportunity to learn to be independent.
All of these things are well-understood and well-researched. They're not matters of politics; you go and read the research, see how it was conducted, and come to an opinion.
Education isn't about telling people what to think. It's about teaching them current best theory and the basis for that theory. Stick to science and things have a good chance of working out; but get politics or religion involved, neither of which are based on scientific theory, and it's disaster time.
--
Toby
True.
But something that also happens is an expansion of supply.
--
Toby
Star Trek is a science-fiction entertainment series.
Plots are chosen based on popularity and entertainment value.
If a Star Trek plot posits a conflict between generically improved and stock humans, it is perhaps imprudent to treat it as an accurate predictor of human behaviour.
--
Toby
> In a male-dominated society, if someone gets the
> chance to choose between a male and a female child
> whom would you think they'd choose?
Male...until there are so many men than women become more valuable. Then I'd chose a woman.
The notion that people will just keep choosing men is remarkable only for its short-sightedness =)
> The world doesn't belong to just you or me - it
> belongs to all of us.
What does that mean, exactly?
Do you mean to say that there should be restrictions on our behaviour on the basis that our actions would harm others?
--
Toby
No fear - I only wrote in the way I did to illustrate the point that I, as the parent, have an enorumous amount of control and responsibility over the *life* of the child, after it is born, and therefore, by extension, what interjection could be raised on the basis of excercising a similar level of control *before* birth?
--
Toby
> In a Developing Society (like China), having a
> wife and many children is very important.
Sort of...it's true, but in different ways, depending on whether you're rural or urban.
> What do
> you do with the thousands of Chinese men that will
> not have wives and children? Those men feel
> cultural pressure to get a wife, at any cost.
What do you do? you watch the social pressure change their society. If the Chinese stopped thinking "you must marry because it's socially expected of you" they'd be better off.
--
Toby
> If you doubt this, watch China with their 120 men
e os /ch.html#People
> for every 100 women and see what problems they get
> from it.
http://www.odci.gov/cia/publications/factbook/g
Not bad, but no cigar, at birth, current ratio is 1:1.12.
As for the problems? I note a lot of people asserting a priori there will be "a lot of social unrest".
I'd like to see some reasoning before I accept that as true.
--
Toby
> Because sex-selection of embryos is notoriously
> unreliable, and thus a significant number of
> children born thanks to this kind of procedure
> will be of the 'wrong' sex.
In n years time, sex-selection will have improved to the point of being completely reliable.
--
Toby
I rather suspect people have a idealised view of the male-female mating issue...
There are a certain number of males. There are a certain number of females. Each male and each female has a certain value in the dating game, based on looks, intelligence, socio-economic status, etc.
There are also different classes of relationships.
Some people are succesfully married, some are married but have extra-marital relationships, some are in long-term partnerships, some are in short-term relationships, some aren't looking for a relationship and some aren't capable of a relationship.
An imbalance in the number of men to women (or women to men) doesn't means the extra men "don't get a relationship".
--
Toby
> Would the inevitable imbalance in the male/female
> ratio and the resulting (possibly society-killing)
> problems it creates invoke the defense clause that
> you bring up?
I rather suspect there will be a pendulum effect. Right now probably more boys would be chosen than girls. Girls would then be in short supply - making them more desireable.
--
Toby
Philosophically speaking, what right does one individual (the State) have to *force* another individual (me) never to choose the gender of my child?
The only justification for forced intervention in others life is self-defence. This would include the defence of the unborn child (so for example if I *wished* my child to be born without arms, the State most certainly should intervene) but the *gender* of the child? I cannot see how this can be thought of as harming the child.
If I had a child, I would, once it were born, be fully responsible for its life; I would choose whether it learned French while young, or the piano, or karate, the flute...
If it's entirely up to me what my child is given to learn while it's young, why would it be wrong then also to choose the gender of my child? especially if I were having a larger family and might, for example, want a balanced number of boys and girls?
Certainly, on a practical note, the awful harm a lot of parents inflict on their children by their incompetence as parents is a far more pressing issue. How can we be worried about gender when so many parents are so awful at parenting?
I'd much rather parents had to be qualified as parents (some sort of mandatory exam to be taken and passed) than be concerned about whether or not they could choose their child's gender.
--
Toby
The HTML browser is part of the OS.
This means when you get the OS, you get the HTML browser.
Given the average user's minimal computer expertese, this leads to the provided HTML browser dominating the market.
This is the issue, not whether or not IE uses hidden APIs.
--
Toby
If NASA offered a major prize, say one, five or ten million dollars, it'd be both a sizeable chunk of their budget and something which might just produce far more results for the money than NASA itself does.
It is therefore not a huge surprise to find the prize is paltry.
I know there are plenty of people at NASA who'd encourage this sort of prize based competition and would want a large prize, because they really want space travel to get going, but the behaviour of an *organisation* as a whole is *not* the same as the will of the majority of people who comprise the organisation - NASA is not a democracy.
On a slightly seperate note, the outcome we've seen here, this paltry, pointless prize, this situation could only arise from a State run organisation.
NASA is, as I've described, encouraged to offer these prizes, since it soaks up a lot of money from the State and is pressured by the State to behave in certain ways (and these prizes are very popular right now, because of the success of the X-Prize) but *at the same time* any actions NASA take which encourage non-State space activity of course threaten NASA itself!
So we get a paltry prize, because NASA is caught between Sylla and Charybdis.
--
Toby
John Stuart Mill;
"The sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others."
--
Toby
> Then we can agree that less transportation occurs
> with import taxes than without, even if you
> include the smuggling.
Noooo...this isn't auxiomatic because it's an indirect connection and it is concieveable that circumstances could be such that the relationship you describe doesn't occur.
What import duties do is raise the price of a good and this in turn reduces consumption - but this is only true if there is competition in the market for the given good.
When there is competition in the market for a given good, the price of that good is the lowest the producers can bear. Any taxation falls properly upon the consumers, not the producers, since it must be passed on; if it were not, the producers would make less than the lowest they could bear and they would go out of business, one way or another.
If the given good is subject to a monopoly, the price will be the highest the richest buyers can bear (rather than the lowest the producers can bear) and import duty in that case will actually fall properly upon the home producer, rather than the consumer, since prices cannot rise any more.
> Then we can conclude that often (but not always)
> import taxes work as intended for a
> protectionist government.
As intended? what is the intention?
Import taxes are in fact completely counterproductive. By raising the price of a good, they increase the cost of producing all other goods which depend upon that good. Those people involved in the production of the protected good think they are richer - they sell their products for a higher price and so have more money in their pocket - but their *real* wealth is lower, because despite having more money, the cost of everything they buy has risen by an equal amount (or in fact a greater amount, as producers tend to over-increase prices when they have the opportunity to do so).
> Censorship and import tax aren't equal (jeez,
> imagine I would ever have to make this point)
The point you are refuting is not the point I have made, which is why you rightly can't imagine ever having to refute.
I made an analogy between censorship of information and import tax; if you make something hard to get, you raise its price by restricting its supply.
> Without any income taxes
Did you mean import taxes?
--
Toby
In a market, import duties encourage smuggling, since the artificial State imposes cost makes it possible to provide a given good at a significantly cheaper rate simply by avoiding customs.
Censorship is an attempt by the State to prevent the import of information. In an exact parallel, this encourages the smuggling of information, since there is censorship by no means eliminates demand; it merely restricts supply and so drives up prices.
The article implies that Internet access is expensive in authoritarian countries because of the rates being charged by black access groups.
In fact, it is a testimoney to the power of supply and demand that it is *possible* to obtain access *despite* all attempts by the State to prevent this.
--
Toby
A number of other major manufacturers (Honda for sure) have built fuel-cell motorcycles/scooters.
--
Toby
> Nuclear power plants are regulated by the Dept. of
> Energy so utility company or not, I'm sure they'll
> get pataches early
This makes no sense to me.
If a patch is ready, what possible advantage is there in delaying the release of the patch to some of the userbase?
--
Toby
> Why do you think nuclear power plants modern
> enough to be running Windows are unsafe?
I don't mean this to be rude, I mean this as a serious honest question; do you really mean that question, or are you being ironic?
--
Toby
This seems crazy on a number of levels.
Is the airforce more important than say, nuclear power plant operators?
While it's concieveable there could sometimes be some advantage in releasing a beta version of a security fix, there is no advantage whatsoever in merely delaying the general release of a patch, so MS must have agreed to supply early versions of patches to the USAF.
This, I predict, will cause more problems than it will solve.
--
Toby
> Using the same logic, machines with two (or
> more) CPUs wouldn't be useful, since the second
> CPU is not going to be any faster in than the
> first one.
This deduction is improper for two reasons.
First, for it to be relevent to the networking scenario described in the OP, the networking CPU would have to be equal in processing capability to the main CPU. This is not the case.
For example, if I had a dual processor machine where one CPU is a 3 GHz P4 and the other is a 66 MHz Pentium, is the second CPU really that useful or is it in fact a hinderance? particularly when you consider the networking scenario, when any tasks offloaded to the slow CPU *must* be completed before the fast CPU can continue with that task.
Secondly, it fails to take into account the inherently and unavoidably serial nature of network packet processing. You cannot usefully apply two CPUs to this task. If a machine was given tasks which were not subject to parallism, then having multiple CPUs does not speed up any given task; more tasks can be done concurrently, but each task takes the same time.
This is the problem which faces networking processing. Any given thread which performs network I/O will be executing on a single CPU.
To consider your analogy, if the manager has only one task to do, and needs the other person his secretary calls to respond before he can continue, there's very little point having a secretary make the call for him. He's going to be stuck waiting till the reply comes through anyway.
By and large, many people in this thread are failing to perceive that parallism is not a solution, since the issue is the performance of any single thread which is performing network I/O.
To take the problem to an illustrative extreme, we could in theory have a multitude of slow CPUs which the main zippy CPU offloads everything to; graphics, network, disk, etc.
Result? anything that requires operations which are offloaded performs weakly, since its critical path of execution spends most of the time on the slow CPUs - and we *paid* for all those slow CPUs, when we've already paid for our expensive main fast CPU!
--
Toby
It is true that if you offload network I/O, you free the CPU to perform other tasks.
This has the negative effect of making the thread which has had its network I/O offloaded slower, but the positive effect of freeing the CPU to perform other tasks.
However, I say to you, on a desktop system, which is where this Intel stuff is, the user is usually going to be the cause of the network traffic and he will want that thread to perform and will not care that he could be freeing up a few more percent CPU time to be spent in the idle task.
--
Toby
Intuitively, people think it won't hurt, but intuition is wrong.
Consider; you have a hundred users, all doing some sort of network based task - say, reading Usenet via an NNTP server.
You offload their network processing from the CPU to a slower CPU on the network card.
Every time a thread in your NNTP server blocks, waiting for a packet to arrive or be sent, the main CPU moves onto another thread...which also then needs a send/recv, and blocks, and so on.
In the meantime, the slow CPU gets around to dealing with the queue of send/recv requests that it has.
The main CPU spends its time zipping from blocking thread to blocking thread, or being idle, with each thread spending plenty of time waiting on the slow network CPU.
You'd be much better off letting the CPU zip through the network processing and then moving onto the next thread; the throughput for each thread would be much higher.
"But, " I hear you say, "why is my network CPU so slow?"
"Because, " I reply, "you don't spend 300 USD on a P4 CPU and then the same amount, or more, on your network card, when you ALREADY have a zippy P4 CPU to do all the work!"
--
Toby
Monolithic kernels are obsolete; Tannenbaum is correct.
Linux still works, though, and filled an important and well-supported part of the OS worldspace, and became successful.
These two facts are not mutually incompatable.
--
Toby