It would be a mistake to assume that if we suddenly stopped interfering with other countries' business that China and Russia would immediately cease development of capabilities to match and exceed our own.
I think the point is that China and Russia would just pay someone thousands of dollars to get secrets on the ground than to build billion dollar spy systems. With an open society, its much easier to gain information by moles and informants that it was for the US to get info on closed nations like China and Russia. Even though they are still open, it is rather difficult to get into certain areas which the American spy systems do.
However, I'd also like point out that when you are dealing with nuclear powers, this is a moot point that it really doesn't matter what China or Russia is doing as long as we can retaliate with a nuclear strike in the end. So if indeed China and Russia knocked out the US spy satellite system, one could assume that the proverbial red button might get pushed in confusion and spy planes would be a moot point again because there is nothing to spy on other than smoldering nuclear fallout craters pocked over USA, Russia, and China.
...How many politicians are going to go after games continually when they gain the same status as movies in the public eye?
Eventually, they'll come a day in 20 to 50 years from now when the majority of politicians have played an Xbox/Playstation/Wii while in whatever University they went to.
So, when the United States' "empire" has fallen, when our military has pulled back to our shores, you'd best look to your own defense because we won't be there this time around.
Are you aware that pretty much everyone who was involved in the success and failures of WWII is dead? That blaming a country now is like blaming America for the genocide of the native Americans whereas the people involved with the war in Iraq and the Patriot Act is alive and well.
I mean can you really blame people for something that happened before they were born?
Because the context to which laws are applied changes, and because the social value judgements on which laws are inevitably based change, and because a growing divergence between social preferences and law is a recipe for disaster.
Ummm... That was what I said. Laws need to have an review or expiration date. Thomas Jefferson had once suggested that a 20 year national constitutional convention should happen to go with the new changes in social attitudes. The reason people aren't calling for revoking of laws because they are too complex to understand so most people ignore them.
But over all, laws simply do not need to be made when existing laws applied. Sure, in my example, there was no need to make killing people with ray guns illegal, but maybe you want to pass a law outlawing ray guns which is a different matter.
At the same time, laws outlawing muskets with bayonets over 9 inches may want to be reviewed since such a danger no longer applies to modern society.
The key issue we have today is lawmakers are simply are appeasing voters who themselves have no true understanding of law. A representative democracy in its ideal form would attempt to remove some of the complexity by having a built in process to remove unneeded laws.
I don't trust people to do this job, so why the hell would I trust a computer?
Computers handle nuclear power plants, life support systems, and trillions of dollars with financial transactions every day without human interaction.
Are you able to sleep at night?
Re:"ungodly" and "pirated" on Slashdot?
on
Ethics In IT
·
· Score: 1
Truth be told, I don't think God really cares if your a pirate something or not... Otherwise, Jesus would have mentioned to everyone to pay a royalty to winemakers every time he turned water into wine and to pay the fishermen and bakers every time you copied food through godly miracles.
You can't be nimble enough to get laws needed passed in time if you put even more bureaucracy in place.
Why do laws need to be constantly changed and updated in the first place? Are not the past 200 laws in place and if a new issue comes up then deal with it with existing framework of law.
The way people act its like someone invents an anti-matter ray gun, that if they build one and then zap a person to death with it that all of a sudden we need a law that makes using an anti-matter ray gun illegal.
NO WE DO NOT!
We simply prosecute the guy for murder as if he used his bar hands, knife, or any type of technology. How hard is that!
The problem with law makers is that by definition of their job they believe that everything can be solved with new laws. Simply making something illegal usually doesn't cause people to change their ways unless it was a big gray area.
To correct the "law bloat" we face would require a whole new body of government whose job is solely to revoke old laws who should no longer apply. The real problem is that laws have no expiration date and although many should not, if you keep on constantly making new laws eventually over a couple hundred of years almost everything will be illegal one way or another.
Either we need expiration and review dates on all new laws or we need a body of government reviewing and revoking laws as their sole job.
Thats neat. But wouldn't it be more efficient for us slashdotters if it was put on our arms... Depending on which one is using the mouse... Or... Umm... The one not holding the lotion bottle?
-$12 commission. You can do the same thing in Vegas with a $1000. IE you bet $50 a day, and double down until you hit once. Even with $1600 it would be on average 1 month until you lost your initial $1600, by then you would have won $1550, so if you reinvested that you would likely make a year until you lost everything.
The $1,000 I mentioned was just an arbitrary number, I'm more or less talking about the larger investors who simply buy and sell at marginal price changes in the stock at somewhere less than 5%. Sometimes its just a matter of waiting for a stock to start to rise, buy on the rise and then sell short before it caps for the day. Most of these transactions happen same day without regard for who or what the company is doing or even if that company is making money at all.
Take China Shen Zhou Mining & Resources Inc. (Public, AMEX:SHZ) which went public last month that was OTC for around $3.00 and went public and instantly went to $5. The momentum got notice and people starting buying but people riding the movement bailed around 7 or so with it peaking at $7.90 and now its back down at $4.50 and $5.00 range and this happened all in one day.
Apparently, there was a good set of people that invested that didn't really give a damn if the company made a profit or even survived the next day because they got their money and ran on the first day it went public.
That's a crappy explanation, why did East Germany and all the rest of the states with planned economy failed?
They failed mostly because the Soviet Union lacked the will to use extreme measures anymore. Had Beria succeeded Stalin, we'd probaly still see a Soviet Union today with all its might and millions of slave laborers making the economy run. During Stalin's time, people were sent to a Gulag for being 5 minutes late to work and people had no choice but to make the system work.
I'm not saying its a good thing, but once more moderate Soviet leaders came to power they lost the will to simply crush dissent with tanks and bullets and no one bothered anymore because the Soviet Military had lost its power in the mountains of Afghanistan so they simply didn't have the will or the logistics to be rolling tanks on protesters in East Berlin and Warsaw.
Had they been shooting people for being late to work in 1989, I doubt we would see the Soviet Union fail like it did.
The dollar has only started to drop in very recent history, and we have held a high amount of debt for a long time. It has much more international implications than just the national debt.
Well here is the deal. We had a higher debt to government budget income back in 1945 at the end of WWII. However, we were fine back then because of several things:
1. Most other nations owed us money 2. Oil and various other energy sources were really really cheap and majority of it was produced domestically 3. There was no other super industrialized nation to compete with other than the Soviet Union (who really wasn't interested in economics as we would know it here)
Now today is quite different:
1. We owe more money to other nations than we have owed to us. 2. Oil is primarily imported from outside the US at record prices so that the wealth is no longer kept in the US. 3. We are now competing with existing and emerging industrial superpowers such as China, Japan, Korea, and India.
Therefore inflation is quite dangerous to the economy much more so than it was 60 years ago since. Economies are not always cylindrical in patterns if major conditions change.
So yes... You'll make a great deal of more money by holding on to that mortgage but it will be worth less due to the fact other currencies are more valuable and imports are more expensive. Now, if we didn't have to import oil or didn't rely on cars, trucks, planes, and various other high fuel consumption vehicles for our economy we'd most likley not have a problem dealing with this.
However, since I don't think we are going to build a new super transportation network by rail anytime soon, the price of fuel will simply make the cost of everything else skyrocket leaving the economy in the can.
Personally, it would make much more sense at this point to sell that house at 15 and buy Chinese mining stock and oil futures than it would to sit it out.
Now when we have a moderate political system it takes the worst of both.
Umm... I thought that was the whole point of Democracy and Representative governments. Otherwise, Communism and Fascism would have panned out fine back in the 1930s. Yeah it sucks, but I'd rather have a government that has mixed views rather than an extreme one way or another.
f you have to pass through our state,the lives of you and your family are dependent on 50+ year old bridges.Do you really want to bet yours and your families lives on those bridges?
Why not do what New Jersey does and charge a toll on the interstate roads and drop taxes on gas and diesel? If I drive on NJ's roads from PA to NY, I will roughly pay about $4 to $20 depending on where I go. I usually take advantage of the really low gas prices during these trips so I don't particularly mind and I usually break even.
Now AR might be a large enough state to have people passing through unable to avoid filling up on gas, but it makes more sense to me to have a toll to pay for the roads when you have that much interstate travel that you guarantee that people outside the state who use the roads also pay taxes rather than forcing the residents to have higher gas prices.
Now a toll might be very unpopular, but I believe a state can find a way to pay for its roads rather than relying on federal money.
We did not contribute for his reelection to congress!
I donated and I wouldn't mind if that money went for his re-election in Congress mostly since at least that means a libertarian viewpoint is still heard in congress. (Gotta love those times with Fed Chairman Berneke)
It is basis of capitalism, so we have to live with that. If you don't, try other system and see how savage actually people are.
Wouldn't it make more sense to sell long term bonds? Or heck... Why not just sell non-voting stock so you don't have to give a damn what the investors say? I'm just saying you can get capital some other way than the stock market.
Obviously, the shareholders at MSFT are basically the people that run the company so (Balmer and friends) so its not like if they make a bad decision that Balmer would vote himself out (well there is Gates and he doesn't' work their anymore, but I doubt he'd vote Balmer out even if they did poorly).
what you describe would be a working open market. IE where if a business is not getting good consistent return on capital/assets then it needs changes.
Its not that hard to be a stock vampire. If you had $1,000 and bought 1,000 shares at $1.00 and then just waited for an invariable 5% change price to $1.05 then have a limit sell then you just made 50 some odd bucks. This may seem small but if you do it at larger scale and of course higher returns you can scale it up to higher returns. Your not even waiting for a quarterly return nor news but rather brute forcing money out the company and other investors over and over again as your ride the price changes.
Of course if the whole market collapses like it did in January that one day, you might be out of a lot of money if you were trying something like this.
I'm not saying its good or bad, but the current system leaves open a few loopholes so that a company can be exploited by investors bleed it dry of money. However, generally companies that give dividends tend to keep those kind of investors at bay by simply having enough long term investors soaking up the dividend returns over several years.
Teenagers were found to be using them as 'pep' pills and 'smart' pills (because pseudoephedrine is a stimulate that's quite a bit stronger than caffeine) and so the purpose was really to keep people from buying them and using them for that purpose.
Thats all good and dandy, but why is DHS involved in whether or not teens get high with OTC drugs? Shouldn't that be something the DEA or FDA handles?
I mean... Does Homeland Security think that kids popping pills will somehow turn them into into Fundamentalist Terrorists?
Even if there no evil intentions by DHS, this is at least very poor use of their resources.
It is widely believed that the human mind is turing equivalent [wikipedia.org] (and hence can be replaced by a machine)... did making that post bore you?
On the flipside, photography did not make portrait painting go extinct nor did wielding cause all the anvil blacksmiths in the world stop their trade. They are of course rare, but I feel there will always be a niche for things that a machine could do better.
Even if a machine could make music, paint, speak, and write better literature than any human that was ever alive... I would bet humans will still do those things if nothing more than to entertain themselves. Of course, I have my doubts that the world would transition into 6 billion artists if a technological singularity happened, though.
OR the convenience of having a robot pump it for them
I've always thought Belgium's and Holland's climate was mild, but there has been days in the NE USA when it was -20 in wind chill factor in which I would have gladly choose a gas station with a robot over one that did not. I remember seeing this way back for development for some Scandinavian country so that people didn't have stand around in sub zero temperatures pumping gas.
Also... In strange places like New Jersey, the state government has made it illegal for a person to pump their own gas so it might take off there.
What will gas station attendants do when this replaces them? Go work at a fast food place? great, but in 5 years when they 'iBurgerFlipper' replaces them then what?
I dunno... I suppose they will do the same thing as the textile loomers did after the industrial revolution in the 1800s.
IMO if your job can be replaced by a machine, it probaly was boring.
Slashdot Mirror
It would be a mistake to assume that if we suddenly stopped interfering with other countries' business that China and Russia would immediately cease development of capabilities to match and exceed our own.
I think the point is that China and Russia would just pay someone thousands of dollars to get secrets on the ground than to build billion dollar spy systems. With an open society, its much easier to gain information by moles and informants that it was for the US to get info on closed nations like China and Russia. Even though they are still open, it is rather difficult to get into certain areas which the American spy systems do.
However, I'd also like point out that when you are dealing with nuclear powers, this is a moot point that it really doesn't matter what China or Russia is doing as long as we can retaliate with a nuclear strike in the end. So if indeed China and Russia knocked out the US spy satellite system, one could assume that the proverbial red button might get pushed in confusion and spy planes would be a moot point again because there is nothing to spy on other than smoldering nuclear fallout craters pocked over USA, Russia, and China.
...How many politicians are going to go after games continually when they gain the same status as movies in the public eye?
Eventually, they'll come a day in 20 to 50 years from now when the majority of politicians have played an Xbox/Playstation/Wii while in whatever University they went to.
I wonder what would constitute activity suspicious enough to trigger a strike.
Probably just using BitTorrent to download a Linux distro.
So, when the United States' "empire" has fallen, when our military has pulled back to our shores, you'd best look to your own defense because we won't be there this time around.
Are you aware that pretty much everyone who was involved in the success and failures of WWII is dead? That blaming a country now is like blaming America for the genocide of the native Americans whereas the people involved with the war in Iraq and the Patriot Act is alive and well.
I mean can you really blame people for something that happened before they were born?
Translation: we want Americans to know what it feels like when we try and enter their country.
Which begs the question... What voltage do EU tasers run at?
Because the context to which laws are applied changes, and because the social value judgements on which laws are inevitably based change, and because a growing divergence between social preferences and law is a recipe for disaster.
Ummm... That was what I said. Laws need to have an review or expiration date. Thomas Jefferson had once suggested that a 20 year national constitutional convention should happen to go with the new changes in social attitudes. The reason people aren't calling for revoking of laws because they are too complex to understand so most people ignore them.
But over all, laws simply do not need to be made when existing laws applied. Sure, in my example, there was no need to make killing people with ray guns illegal, but maybe you want to pass a law outlawing ray guns which is a different matter.
At the same time, laws outlawing muskets with bayonets over 9 inches may want to be reviewed since such a danger no longer applies to modern society.
The key issue we have today is lawmakers are simply are appeasing voters who themselves have no true understanding of law. A representative democracy in its ideal form would attempt to remove some of the complexity by having a built in process to remove unneeded laws.
I don't trust people to do this job, so why the hell would I trust a computer?
Computers handle nuclear power plants, life support systems, and trillions of dollars with financial transactions every day without human interaction.
Are you able to sleep at night?
Truth be told, I don't think God really cares if your a pirate something or not... Otherwise, Jesus would have mentioned to everyone to pay a royalty to winemakers every time he turned water into wine and to pay the fishermen and bakers every time you copied food through godly miracles.
What I meant was the "past 200 years worth of laws not enough".
You can't be nimble enough to get laws needed passed in time if you put even more bureaucracy in place.
Why do laws need to be constantly changed and updated in the first place? Are not the past 200 laws in place and if a new issue comes up then deal with it with existing framework of law.
The way people act its like someone invents an anti-matter ray gun, that if they build one and then zap a person to death with it that all of a sudden we need a law that makes using an anti-matter ray gun illegal.
NO WE DO NOT!
We simply prosecute the guy for murder as if he used his bar hands, knife, or any type of technology. How hard is that!
The problem with law makers is that by definition of their job they believe that everything can be solved with new laws. Simply making something illegal usually doesn't cause people to change their ways unless it was a big gray area.
To correct the "law bloat" we face would require a whole new body of government whose job is solely to revoke old laws who should no longer apply. The real problem is that laws have no expiration date and although many should not, if you keep on constantly making new laws eventually over a couple hundred of years almost everything will be illegal one way or another.
Either we need expiration and review dates on all new laws or we need a body of government reviewing and revoking laws as their sole job.
Gravity.
.75 watt of metabolism to lift foot up met by .75 created by gravity where .5 is wasted due to heat and other forces leaving 1 watt left over?
Walking and running is a controlled form of falling forwards.
Maybe
Of course someone might be calculating a metabolic watt different from a plain old electrical watt for some reason.
Thats neat. But wouldn't it be more efficient for us slashdotters if it was put on our arms... Depending on which one is using the mouse... Or... Umm... The one not holding the lotion bottle?
-$12 commission. You can do the same thing in Vegas with a $1000. IE you bet $50 a day, and double down until you hit once. Even with $1600 it would be on average 1 month until you lost your initial $1600, by then you would have won $1550, so if you reinvested that you would likely make a year until you lost everything.
The $1,000 I mentioned was just an arbitrary number, I'm more or less talking about the larger investors who simply buy and sell at marginal price changes in the stock at somewhere less than 5%. Sometimes its just a matter of waiting for a stock to start to rise, buy on the rise and then sell short before it caps for the day. Most of these transactions happen same day without regard for who or what the company is doing or even if that company is making money at all.
Take China Shen Zhou Mining & Resources Inc. (Public, AMEX:SHZ) which went public last month that was OTC for around $3.00 and went public and instantly went to $5. The momentum got notice and people starting buying but people riding the movement bailed around 7 or so with it peaking at $7.90 and now its back down at $4.50 and $5.00 range and this happened all in one day.
Apparently, there was a good set of people that invested that didn't really give a damn if the company made a profit or even survived the next day because they got their money and ran on the first day it went public.
That's a crappy explanation, why did East Germany and all the rest of the states with planned economy failed?
They failed mostly because the Soviet Union lacked the will to use extreme measures anymore. Had Beria succeeded Stalin, we'd probaly still see a Soviet Union today with all its might and millions of slave laborers making the economy run. During Stalin's time, people were sent to a Gulag for being 5 minutes late to work and people had no choice but to make the system work.
I'm not saying its a good thing, but once more moderate Soviet leaders came to power they lost the will to simply crush dissent with tanks and bullets and no one bothered anymore because the Soviet Military had lost its power in the mountains of Afghanistan so they simply didn't have the will or the logistics to be rolling tanks on protesters in East Berlin and Warsaw.
Had they been shooting people for being late to work in 1989, I doubt we would see the Soviet Union fail like it did.
The dollar has only started to drop in very recent history, and we have held a high amount of debt for a long time. It has much more international implications than just the national debt.
Well here is the deal. We had a higher debt to government budget income back in 1945 at the end of WWII. However, we were fine back then because of several things:
1. Most other nations owed us money
2. Oil and various other energy sources were really really cheap and majority of it was produced domestically
3. There was no other super industrialized nation to compete with other than the Soviet Union (who really wasn't interested in economics as we would know it here)
Now today is quite different:
1. We owe more money to other nations than we have owed to us.
2. Oil is primarily imported from outside the US at record prices so that the wealth is no longer kept in the US.
3. We are now competing with existing and emerging industrial superpowers such as China, Japan, Korea, and India.
Therefore inflation is quite dangerous to the economy much more so than it was 60 years ago since. Economies are not always cylindrical in patterns if major conditions change.
So yes... You'll make a great deal of more money by holding on to that mortgage but it will be worth less due to the fact other currencies are more valuable and imports are more expensive. Now, if we didn't have to import oil or didn't rely on cars, trucks, planes, and various other high fuel consumption vehicles for our economy we'd most likley not have a problem dealing with this.
However, since I don't think we are going to build a new super transportation network by rail anytime soon, the price of fuel will simply make the cost of everything else skyrocket leaving the economy in the can.
Personally, it would make much more sense at this point to sell that house at 15 and buy Chinese mining stock and oil futures than it would to sit it out.
Now when we have a moderate political system it takes the worst of both.
Umm... I thought that was the whole point of Democracy and Representative governments. Otherwise, Communism and Fascism would have panned out fine back in the 1930s. Yeah it sucks, but I'd rather have a government that has mixed views rather than an extreme one way or another.
f you have to pass through our state,the lives of you and your family are dependent on 50+ year old bridges.Do you really want to bet yours and your families lives on those bridges?
Why not do what New Jersey does and charge a toll on the interstate roads and drop taxes on gas and diesel? If I drive on NJ's roads from PA to NY, I will roughly pay about $4 to $20 depending on where I go. I usually take advantage of the really low gas prices during these trips so I don't particularly mind and I usually break even.
Now AR might be a large enough state to have people passing through unable to avoid filling up on gas, but it makes more sense to me to have a toll to pay for the roads when you have that much interstate travel that you guarantee that people outside the state who use the roads also pay taxes rather than forcing the residents to have higher gas prices.
Now a toll might be very unpopular, but I believe a state can find a way to pay for its roads rather than relying on federal money.
We did not contribute for his reelection to congress!
I donated and I wouldn't mind if that money went for his re-election in Congress mostly since at least that means a libertarian viewpoint is still heard in congress. (Gotta love those times with Fed Chairman Berneke)
It is basis of capitalism, so we have to live with that. If you don't, try other system and see how savage actually people are.
Wouldn't it make more sense to sell long term bonds? Or heck... Why not just sell non-voting stock so you don't have to give a damn what the investors say? I'm just saying you can get capital some other way than the stock market.
Obviously, the shareholders at MSFT are basically the people that run the company so (Balmer and friends) so its not like if they make a bad decision that Balmer would vote himself out (well there is Gates and he doesn't' work their anymore, but I doubt he'd vote Balmer out even if they did poorly).
what you describe would be a working open market. IE where if a business is not getting good consistent return on capital/assets then it needs changes.
Its not that hard to be a stock vampire. If you had $1,000 and bought 1,000 shares at $1.00 and then just waited for an invariable 5% change price to $1.05 then have a limit sell then you just made 50 some odd bucks. This may seem small but if you do it at larger scale and of course higher returns you can scale it up to higher returns. Your not even waiting for a quarterly return nor news but rather brute forcing money out the company and other investors over and over again as your ride the price changes.
Of course if the whole market collapses like it did in January that one day, you might be out of a lot of money if you were trying something like this.
I'm not saying its good or bad, but the current system leaves open a few loopholes so that a company can be exploited by investors bleed it dry of money. However, generally companies that give dividends tend to keep those kind of investors at bay by simply having enough long term investors soaking up the dividend returns over several years.
Teenagers were found to be using them as 'pep' pills and 'smart' pills (because pseudoephedrine is a stimulate that's quite a bit stronger than caffeine) and so the purpose was really to keep people from buying them and using them for that purpose.
Thats all good and dandy, but why is DHS involved in whether or not teens get high with OTC drugs? Shouldn't that be something the DEA or FDA handles?
I mean... Does Homeland Security think that kids popping pills will somehow turn them into into Fundamentalist Terrorists?
Even if there no evil intentions by DHS, this is at least very poor use of their resources.
It is widely believed that the human mind is turing equivalent [wikipedia.org] (and hence can be replaced by a machine)... did making that post bore you?
On the flipside, photography did not make portrait painting go extinct nor did wielding cause all the anvil blacksmiths in the world stop their trade. They are of course rare, but I feel there will always be a niche for things that a machine could do better.
Even if a machine could make music, paint, speak, and write better literature than any human that was ever alive... I would bet humans will still do those things if nothing more than to entertain themselves. Of course, I have my doubts that the world would transition into 6 billion artists if a technological singularity happened, though.
Probably... but not as boring as being broke and unemployed
;)
Imagine all the jobs we could create if we got rid of jackhammers, drills, and dynamite and had people go back to mining with pickaxes.
Heck... Imagine all the jobs we can create if we made the miners use their bare hands!
OR the convenience of having a robot pump it for them
I've always thought Belgium's and Holland's climate was mild, but there has been days in the NE USA when it was -20 in wind chill factor in which I would have gladly choose a gas station with a robot over one that did not. I remember seeing this way back for development for some Scandinavian country so that people didn't have stand around in sub zero temperatures pumping gas.
Also... In strange places like New Jersey, the state government has made it illegal for a person to pump their own gas so it might take off there.
What will gas station attendants do when this replaces them? Go work at a fast food place? great, but in 5 years when they 'iBurgerFlipper' replaces them then what?
I dunno... I suppose they will do the same thing as the textile loomers did after the industrial revolution in the 1800s.
IMO if your job can be replaced by a machine, it probaly was boring.