Sigh. Another argument by assertion, with no actual reasoning to support it. To the libertarian purist I have a two word counterexample: "greenhouse gases".
Strictly speaking, this single problem constitutes a refutation of the purist libertarian position; purist positions are like mathematical hypotheses, in that a single counterexample demolishes them. The purist must address this issue even if the evidence is (in my opinion, foolishly) interpreted to mean there is no serious greenhouse problem, and fails to support the position by finding a demonstration that there is no greenhouse problem.
The purist must demonstrate that even if there were such a global environmental issue, individuals optimizing for their own best interests would find a way to resolve it. No serious libertarian argument can proceed without considering
the tragedy of the commons.
I can think of numerous other ways in which the purist libertarian argument falls flat. Money, for instance, cannot exist without extensive and complex regulation, and money is core to the libertarian view. And what good are cars without public roads, and houses without public water and sewage? All these require some sort of "mutual coercion mutually agreed upon".
Where to draw the line between the collective and the private interest is a problem that is not going away. Pure anarchist libertarianism is as doomed to failure as pure communism. Competition without regulation is at least as incapable of producing a thriving, complex economy as regulation without competition. Calling this "injustice"
begs the question yet again.
The domains where libertarian prinicples suffice for social organization are quite obviously limited. Finding the appropriate limits shows no signs of being an easy problem. Trying to pretend that these alone are sufficient to design a society simply ignores some very basic evidence.
Perhaps if you stopped congratulating yourself for your naive good intentions for a moment, some sense might sink in to your immature brain.
This amounts to the conventional wisdom on corporate circles these days, but it is just begging the question. The question is what conditions maximize happiness.
The assertion that all else equal any individual is better off with more wealth is trivially true, though the effect is probably much weaker than may be supposed. Morfe to the point, it simply ignores the extent to which in a closed environment everyone is worse off to the extent that everyone else has more wealth, causing blights of various kinds. (In short, this is the environmental issue)
It also ignores a more complex issue. The society that is most growth-oriented may be (and seems to be) one which arbitrarily punishes the incompetent, the risk-averse, and the unlucky, thereby increasing stress for everyone. In practice, it does appear that America is not the happiest of societies, even though it is clearly the wealthiest. (This is the psychological well-being issue)
As has been well-argued in The Atlantic a few years back, a focus on economic growth shrinks the informal exchanges of value of kinship, neighborhoods, associations and friends. I have a great computer, but I don't have reliable companionship outside of the immediate family and the workplace. (This is the social capital issue)
"A rising tide" arguments beg the question. What is it that is rising? A rising tide of well-being would be wonderful, but what about a rising tide of economic activity? A rising tide of water eventually becomes a flood. If wealth is not like water, so be it, but make the case for it, don't just assert it!
The excess amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere over the preindustrial background levels is increasing exponentially. Do you suppose this might cause a problem some day?
On a more mundane level, the size of the average American home seems to be increasing exponentially, and the push for maximum growth encourages this. As some point, presuming a lack of servants or slaves, the size of the house reaches the point where the marginal extra square foot causes more inconvenience than benefit.
In between those scales, there's something about energy supplies that may cause the occasional, ahem, inconvenience.
A unifying feature of exponential growth in nature is that it eventually hits a hard limit of one sort or another that was pretty much negligible a couple of time constants previously. This has something to do with my skepticism about the whole optimize-for-growth thing, so thanks for mentioning it.
on the basis of my observations that the two tend to go together pretty consistently
This presumes a sort of linearity that may not apply. Just because growth times are better times doesn't mean growth is the right measure to optimize.
An alcoholic is happier when drunk, but that doesn't mean his drinking is making him happy. I think the possibility of an analogy to society's preference for periods of rapid growth is obvious enough that I needn't belabor it.
That said, you should understand that by definition, as Chair of the Federal Reserve, his objective is to maximize economic growth.
I understand that is what he thinks and what everyone around him thinks. I'm still incined to question whether that should be his job, and particularly whether that objective should be the sole basis for a discussion of intellectual property.
I'm not convinced that other constraints shouldn't be operative. For instance, suppose the conference decides that economic growth will be maximized if all public libraries are closed. Does that mean Greenspan should recommend such a policy? Shouldn't other objectives enter into his calculations?
While a fast-growing economy may not guarantee a "best society", the converse is not true either. A pragmatic approach might come to the conclusion that a fast growing economy in general leads to a better society, and is thus a worthy goal.
A pragmatic approach "might" come to such a conclusion, but I haven't been shown such an approach. I concede the point that it "might".
What I'm saying is that I've yet to see coherent, never mind convincing, arguments for this, as applied to already wealthy societies. Let me know if you come across any.
Well, to an economist, the "economy" is a pretty broad topic. In the case at hand, he is discussing IP policy, which has implications for creativity and liberty as well as economics. Neglecting those factors skews the argument, probably as usual in favor of publicly traded private corporations and away from either the public interest or the interests of creative individuals and small companies.
Now maximizing growth, all else equal, surely lowers the unemployment rate, but that doesn't mean it does so optimally. "If our objective is to minimize the unemplyment rate" is an objective which is not obviously identical to either the utilitarian objective nor the "growth first" one. Each of these, at least with perfect information, would presumably lead to a different optimal strategy, both in general and specifically as regards intellectual property.
I don't think it's a chip on my shoulder to ask what the real objective function is. It's just the first step to sound engineering. Greenspan's presumption (pun intended) is telling. I think the powers that be are optimizing the wrong thing.
You simply assert that Greenspan et al are optimizing for something else (maximum employment) and that this turns out to be identical to maximum growth. In fact, I'm confident that Greenspan would frown on maximum employment as "inflationary", so he would not accept your analysis.
Logically, though, you have replaced one unsupported assertion (maximum utility is identical to maximum growth) with two (subject to some domain constraints called "the economy", maximum utility is identical to maximum employment , and maximum employment is identical to maximum growth, QED).
Now you need to support both assertions, one of which Greenspan demonstrably disagrees with.
If our objective is to maximize economic growth, are we striking the right balance...
Sigh. He lost me right there. I thought our objective was to maximize joy and minimize suffering. (I guess I'm either a utilitarian or a Buddhist.) Almost everyone seems to believe that the society with the fastest-growing economy is the best society for its members, but I've never seen a coherent argument to that effect. In fact, until I see something of the sort, I'm inclined not to believe it.
OK, if you're done being apoplectic about me challenging this particular sacred cow, how about explaining this belief to me slowly and calmly, in a manner suitable for a weak-mided fool like myself who somehow misses the point.
I think if the music industry weren't panicked into stupidity they would agree.
Give away MP3s. Sell CDs. Also sell posters, T-shirts and concert tickets.
The internet is your friend. MP3 trades are your friend.
(I'm not sure where this leaves Hollywood, but the music industry is on the wrong side of the fence for their own best interests.)
This war, including the postwar reconstruction, is probably going to cost us around 200 billion dollars, and that doesn't count the cost of the munitions we're using.... Two hundred billion dollars plus would have bought us practically all the Iraqi oil we could have hauled off. Why didn't we just buy it, and save everybody a lot of time, money, and trouble?
Hmm, well, that's about $700 per capita per American, so it adds up to a couple of months of energy supply. Iraq has, what 15 % of the world's proven oil reserves? (I heard it was second only to Saudi.) Just because $200 Bn is a big number doesn't prove it is a bigger number than the value of the oil reserves. Which it clearly isn't.
If you want more evidence, consder that the charming optimists running this fiasco are claiming that everything after the first $75 billion are going to be paid for by the oil.
Let's not dwell on the fact that the first $75 billion comes out of the US taxpayer's pocket, into Hughes', Raytheon's, etc. The point is that Rumsfeld just said that the intention is to sell as much of the oil as needed to pay for the reconstruction.
Let me repeat this for emphasis. The publicly stated plan is that once Iraq is invaded and successfully captured, er, liberated, its oil is to be extracted and sold with the profits used to pay for large-scale industrial projects that, apparently, US firms will be contracting for almost exclusively.
Essentially, this is like if you owned, say, a grocery, and you bonked a rich guy on the head with a baseball bat, rendered him incompetent, obtained legal guardianship of him, and used that guardianship to spend his entire wealth on your grocery's surplus cabbage. Oh yeah, while you're at it he might as well pay for the baseball bat too.
The administration is probably capable of convincing itself, and through its tame press convincing much of the public, that this amounts to a clever way to fund a genuinely benign act of liberation.
There sure are a lot of convenient side effects if it all goes according to plan, though. These side effects which notably don't apply to North Korea, another place with a cruel dictator, an actual, verified ongoing WMD program, and violations of treaties. So if the difference isn't oil, what high moral principle do you suppose is at work?
While I do read the CBC regularly and recommend it, not only does your logic escape me (Syria is not participating in the attack either, but that hardly proves it is unbiased) but also your assumption is not precisely correct. It appears that there are a few Canadian troops "embedded" with the US/UK forces.
Also it ran in 48K on an 8 bit machine. You could run a thousand copies of it on the box you are running now, operating system (CP/M) and all. I think it was the first modern word processor (keys for text, metakeys for control, like emacs) and I'm sure it was the first one to gain wide currency.
Wordstar didn't survive the migration to Windows, releasing a dreadful piece of bloatware called Wordstar 2000 (this would be around 1990) which could not keep a decent typist's display updated on typical hardware of the time.
Blimey, I have to metamod a mod on this comment that says it is "interesting". And it is interesting, but "interesting" is taken as a positive mod. The problem is that this comment is interesting because of the way in which it is so very, very wrong. I guess I'll abstain.
All we need is several million students, the intellectual future and security of a nation, all turning up on his doorstep turning themselves in for 3 years jailtime. A great way to point out the stupidity of his words, and secure free accomodation until the end of your education.
I presume this was intended as a joke, but it's a sad one.
This isn't a culture that values altruism highly above individual interests, which makes collective action almost impossible, which is the main reason democracy is broken and legislation on any given matter is controlled by the most financially motivated special interest.
Resistance is not futile, in fact, but nobody wants to be the be the first to step out of line, so there is no resistance whatsoever in the historical sense.
Everyone will copy files, but probably no significant popular movement will emerge to challenge the excesses of intellectual property law, because genuine grassroots collective action has become so unfamiliar as to be almost inconceivable.
I didn't say HP supporting Linux wasn't news, I said it was hardly news. The sorry remnants of what was once the mind-boggling glory of HP (who, let's face it, is basically in the same business as Lexmark and Epson now) plus IBM aren't that much more convincing than IBM alone, for instance.
Server side Linux isn't going away any time soon, and that's good, but it isn't news anymore. Linux is still invisible to end users, including home users and very small businesses.
End users, after all, is almost everybody, and almost everybody is now spending hours a day in a frustrating, insulting and aesthetically unpleasant environment.
The Linux desktop is or will soon be mature enough that any retailer with the nerve to cut the cord to MS and promote an open source machine will have a significant cost advantage. It needs a big enough retailer, though, to support writing the drivers for a wide range of peripherals.
I hope that someone takes the plunge, and I think there's a case to be made for it simply on price point, never mind serving the vast audience of people who are fed up with MS and would happily support open source but aren't comfortable installing their own system.
It's possible that the way to the enterprise desktop is through the commodity market, not the other way around. Your PHB is not going to be foisting something he sees as geek territory on his clerical worker. The hit product at Target or someplace, though, that's another matter.
this post was moderated Insightful... it screams racism and ignorance
I'd mod him back down but somebody beat me to it.
However, you should understand that Slashdot moderation is stochastic. The best you can do without paid and prejudiced editors is to distribute the editorial load and the editorial power. Not every moderator is a positive contributor, but in the long run the metamoderation process is intended to weed them out. On balance Slashdot still does a surprisingly good job of identifying the good stuff.
See that "faq" link over there at the top left? Click it.
(yeah, offtopic, I know... let it slide this time, huh? Once in a while these high ID numbers (eek 657,000) need a gentle clue.)
When will I be able to walk into Best Buy or Circuit City or a bricks n mortar Wal-Mart and see laptops and consumer desktops that don't make me want to scream in agony?
Fortunately, we can still see what you actually said:
Classic example is the 'greenhouse cliff', which ignores the fact that average temperatures on earth were roughly 5 degrees higher 1000 years ago, without a disastrous icecap melt.
The iceage cliff in Fallen Angels matches up pretty well with current understanding of how fast iceages begin, and what prevented the 'Little Ice Age' of the last 700 years from becoming a true ice age.
Please get a clue before knocking the science in 'Fallen Angels'.
The quoted URLs, not all peer reviewed science either, assert that there was a 'Little Ice Age' causing cold winters in parts of Europe, and possibly elsewhere. I never questioned that assertion, not because it's true and because you never made it.
You have presented evidence that parts of Europe were as much as 4 degrees C (more than 5 F) colder in winter at certain times tha now. Nowhere do you support the idea, in your hastily Googled references, that in the past 1000 years the world, or even any part of it, was 5 degrees warmer than now, but that was what you said.
So, regarding global temperatures being 5 degrees warmer than now in AD 1000, you weren't "highballing", you were at best confused, if that's supposed to be your evidence.
The "evidence" you've shown is totally irrelevant to your assertions. Your frantic efforts to save face are leading you to a classic junk science ploy. Please think twice about what you are doing.
As for the sudden onset of ice ages, (your other claim) Niven and Pournelle rely heavily on this fairly common belief, but it's mythology. It was commonly reported in the media in the 1970s, true. (North America had a bit of a cold snap then.)
As far as I know (and I did look extensively once - I think I may still be quoted in the sci.environment FAQ on this subject) it was a serious speculation in the proto-climatology community in the early years, and it made it onto sensationalist TV and into magazines, but never passed peer review as far as I could tell after a serious search. Ever.
In other words, no, sorry, you still haven't presented the slightest evidence that the two things you claimed have anything to do with what science has to say.
A little humility is not a bad idea in discussing a science which you do not know. Try "I had heard that" or "I was under the impression that", or "I read in the afterword to a light SF novel that"... You might have more of a chance to learn something if you let go of your misplaced confidence. You don't have to defend yourself. You overreached. Let go.
Now take a deep breath, say "oops...", and you'll feel much better. Try to remember there is probably no subject on Earth that someone on Slashdot doesn't know a great deal about, so it doesn't pay to be too brashly confident about third-hand information around these parts.
heh, that's not how it works. You're the one who made the claim, so you're the one with the burden of providing evidence.
As far as I know, the consensus opinion about the last 1000 years' global temperature time series looks
like this for what it's worth. Let us know your basis for disagreeing so dramatically.
On the contrary. While a PhD doesn't prove all that much anymore, it actually does prove that I know "the first thing" about the discipline in question. I passed a comprehensive exam, for instance.
I did not "argue from authority" in the sense of subverting a logical argument. I certainly uttered no fallacy. Here is why I believe my credentials are relevant.
The poster made two statements about a science with which I am familiar. On the grounds of this familiarity, I am confident that neither he nor any reader will find any actual peer-reviewed scientific evidence that supports those statements.
Like any honest thinking person, I welcome serious evidence to correct me if I'm wrong. Saying "you just lost" won't do, though. If you say "science shows thus" you need to be able to back it up.
(On the one hand, the above comment demonstrates my point nicely. On the other... well... I usually resist credentialism, but there's a time and a place for everything. So... ahem...)
I got my doctorate in atmospheric and oceanic sciences from the University of Wisconsin - Madison in 1996. I get my clues from J. Clim., J. Phys. Oceanog., and J. Fluid Mech. Where do you get yours from? Jerry Pournelle?
Please feel free to provide substantive evidence for your two assertions above. Amaze and demystify us all and provide references in peer-reviewed scientific literature, if you can.
Junk science cuts both ways. Niven's "Fallen Angels" strikes me as malign, irresponsible propaganda.
It's fine for people to advance their point of view, but putting bogus science in the mix is a stunt that I would wish, to put it mildly, Niven would avoid. Some of the readership might think the scientifically literate characters in this story were describing the way the actual real universe works.
I'm all for progress, mind you, and I'm as tired as the next geek of people who don't believe in it. I'm just not for pretending that unconstrained pollution is the cure for an imminent ice age in the actual real world. The way "evidence" was mustered for this conclusion in this book is classic junk science.
This book is entertaining as light fiction, but in a way that is divisive, contemptuous, ignorant and destructive. It irresponsibly damages serious discourse. I'm sure it's done considerable harm to some of its adolescent readership. It ruined any respect I had for Niven.
I also loved this book, but I have to disagree with those who found the beginning slow going.
Maybe it's because it touches on me directly (my parents were Czechoslovak Jews who have pretty amazing stories of their own of surviving the same time and place), and maybe it's because I'm fascinated (as Norbert Weiner was) with Golem stories as precursors of robot stories, but I thought the first part was by far the best, and was waiting in vain for the book's reality to blur again into magical fantasy later in the book.
The first part was oddly different from the rest, but I thought it was utterly wonderful.
It also raises the question of whether the Golem stories are the mystical Judaism precursors of the Superman-type stories, too. If you find superhero comics worth thinking about, this is hardly beside the point.
Talk about jumping to conclusions based on limited information. Maybe the Mac Palm desktop is pretty dubious (it's, actually, oddly overcomplicated for a Palm product) because the Palm people got wind of Apple's sync application and didn't bother trying to fix their own .
Apple is producing interesting hardware package designs, but more to the point, they and various third parties are producing software that I would once have called "great". The word "great" applied to software gates on me somehow... er...
Slashdot Mirror
Strictly speaking, this single problem constitutes a refutation of the purist libertarian position; purist positions are like mathematical hypotheses, in that a single counterexample demolishes them. The purist must address this issue even if the evidence is (in my opinion, foolishly) interpreted to mean there is no serious greenhouse problem, and fails to support the position by finding a demonstration that there is no greenhouse problem.
The purist must demonstrate that even if there were such a global environmental issue, individuals optimizing for their own best interests would find a way to resolve it. No serious libertarian argument can proceed without considering the tragedy of the commons.
I can think of numerous other ways in which the purist libertarian argument falls flat. Money, for instance, cannot exist without extensive and complex regulation, and money is core to the libertarian view. And what good are cars without public roads, and houses without public water and sewage? All these require some sort of "mutual coercion mutually agreed upon".
Where to draw the line between the collective and the private interest is a problem that is not going away. Pure anarchist libertarianism is as doomed to failure as pure communism. Competition without regulation is at least as incapable of producing a thriving, complex economy as regulation without competition. Calling this "injustice" begs the question yet again.
The domains where libertarian prinicples suffice for social organization are quite obviously limited. Finding the appropriate limits shows no signs of being an easy problem. Trying to pretend that these alone are sufficient to design a society simply ignores some very basic evidence.
Perhaps if you stopped congratulating yourself for your naive good intentions for a moment, some sense might sink in to your immature brain.
Indeed.
The assertion that all else equal any individual is better off with more wealth is trivially true, though the effect is probably much weaker than may be supposed. Morfe to the point, it simply ignores the extent to which in a closed environment everyone is worse off to the extent that everyone else has more wealth, causing blights of various kinds. (In short, this is the environmental issue)
It also ignores a more complex issue. The society that is most growth-oriented may be (and seems to be) one which arbitrarily punishes the incompetent, the risk-averse, and the unlucky, thereby increasing stress for everyone. In practice, it does appear that America is not the happiest of societies, even though it is clearly the wealthiest. (This is the psychological well-being issue)
As has been well-argued in The Atlantic a few years back, a focus on economic growth shrinks the informal exchanges of value of kinship, neighborhoods, associations and friends. I have a great computer, but I don't have reliable companionship outside of the immediate family and the workplace. (This is the social capital issue)
"A rising tide" arguments beg the question. What is it that is rising? A rising tide of well-being would be wonderful, but what about a rising tide of economic activity? A rising tide of water eventually becomes a flood. If wealth is not like water, so be it, but make the case for it, don't just assert it!
The excess amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere over the preindustrial background levels is increasing exponentially. Do you suppose this might cause a problem some day?
On a more mundane level, the size of the average American home seems to be increasing exponentially, and the push for maximum growth encourages this. As some point, presuming a lack of servants or slaves, the size of the house reaches the point where the marginal extra square foot causes more inconvenience than benefit.
In between those scales, there's something about energy supplies that may cause the occasional, ahem, inconvenience.
A unifying feature of exponential growth in nature is that it eventually hits a hard limit of one sort or another that was pretty much negligible a couple of time constants previously. This has something to do with my skepticism about the whole optimize-for-growth thing, so thanks for mentioning it.
This presumes a sort of linearity that may not apply. Just because growth times are better times doesn't mean growth is the right measure to optimize.
An alcoholic is happier when drunk, but that doesn't mean his drinking is making him happy. I think the possibility of an analogy to society's preference for periods of rapid growth is obvious enough that I needn't belabor it.
That said, you should understand that by definition, as Chair of the Federal Reserve, his objective is to maximize economic growth.
I understand that is what he thinks and what everyone around him thinks. I'm still incined to question whether that should be his job, and particularly whether that objective should be the sole basis for a discussion of intellectual property.
I'm not convinced that other constraints shouldn't be operative. For instance, suppose the conference decides that economic growth will be maximized if all public libraries are closed. Does that mean Greenspan should recommend such a policy? Shouldn't other objectives enter into his calculations?
A pragmatic approach "might" come to such a conclusion, but I haven't been shown such an approach. I concede the point that it "might".
What I'm saying is that I've yet to see coherent, never mind convincing, arguments for this, as applied to already wealthy societies. Let me know if you come across any.
Now maximizing growth, all else equal, surely lowers the unemployment rate, but that doesn't mean it does so optimally. "If our objective is to minimize the unemplyment rate" is an objective which is not obviously identical to either the utilitarian objective nor the "growth first" one. Each of these, at least with perfect information, would presumably lead to a different optimal strategy, both in general and specifically as regards intellectual property.
I don't think it's a chip on my shoulder to ask what the real objective function is. It's just the first step to sound engineering. Greenspan's presumption (pun intended) is telling. I think the powers that be are optimizing the wrong thing.
You simply assert that Greenspan et al are optimizing for something else (maximum employment) and that this turns out to be identical to maximum growth. In fact, I'm confident that Greenspan would frown on maximum employment as "inflationary", so he would not accept your analysis.
Logically, though, you have replaced one unsupported assertion (maximum utility is identical to maximum growth) with two (subject to some domain constraints called "the economy", maximum utility is identical to maximum employment , and maximum employment is identical to maximum growth, QED).
Now you need to support both assertions, one of which Greenspan demonstrably disagrees with.
Sigh. He lost me right there. I thought our objective was to maximize joy and minimize suffering. (I guess I'm either a utilitarian or a Buddhist.) Almost everyone seems to believe that the society with the fastest-growing economy is the best society for its members, but I've never seen a coherent argument to that effect. In fact, until I see something of the sort, I'm inclined not to believe it.
OK, if you're done being apoplectic about me challenging this particular sacred cow, how about explaining this belief to me slowly and calmly, in a manner suitable for a weak-mided fool like myself who somehow misses the point.
I think if the music industry weren't panicked into stupidity they would agree. Give away MP3s. Sell CDs. Also sell posters, T-shirts and concert tickets. The internet is your friend. MP3 trades are your friend. (I'm not sure where this leaves Hollywood, but the music industry is on the wrong side of the fence for their own best interests.)
Sorry to be pedantic, but a square law is not an exponential law. Otherwise the parent seems about right, though.
Hmm, well, that's about $700 per capita per American, so it adds up to a couple of months of energy supply. Iraq has, what 15 % of the world's proven oil reserves? (I heard it was second only to Saudi.) Just because $200 Bn is a big number doesn't prove it is a bigger number than the value of the oil reserves. Which it clearly isn't.
If you want more evidence, consder that the charming optimists running this fiasco are claiming that everything after the first $75 billion are going to be paid for by the oil. Let's not dwell on the fact that the first $75 billion comes out of the US taxpayer's pocket, into Hughes', Raytheon's, etc. The point is that Rumsfeld just said that the intention is to sell as much of the oil as needed to pay for the reconstruction.
Let me repeat this for emphasis. The publicly stated plan is that once Iraq is invaded and successfully captured, er, liberated, its oil is to be extracted and sold with the profits used to pay for large-scale industrial projects that, apparently, US firms will be contracting for almost exclusively.
Essentially, this is like if you owned, say, a grocery, and you bonked a rich guy on the head with a baseball bat, rendered him incompetent, obtained legal guardianship of him, and used that guardianship to spend his entire wealth on your grocery's surplus cabbage. Oh yeah, while you're at it he might as well pay for the baseball bat too.
The administration is probably capable of convincing itself, and through its tame press convincing much of the public, that this amounts to a clever way to fund a genuinely benign act of liberation.
There sure are a lot of convenient side effects if it all goes according to plan, though. These side effects which notably don't apply to North Korea, another place with a cruel dictator, an actual, verified ongoing WMD program, and violations of treaties. So if the difference isn't oil, what high moral principle do you suppose is at work?
While I do read the CBC regularly and recommend it, not only does your logic escape me (Syria is not participating in the attack either, but that hardly proves it is unbiased) but also your assumption is not precisely correct. It appears that there are a few Canadian troops "embedded" with the US/UK forces.
Wordstar didn't survive the migration to Windows, releasing a dreadful piece of bloatware called Wordstar 2000 (this would be around 1990) which could not keep a decent typist's display updated on typical hardware of the time.
Blimey, I have to metamod a mod on this comment that says it is "interesting". And it is interesting, but "interesting" is taken as a positive mod. The problem is that this comment is interesting because of the way in which it is so very, very wrong. I guess I'll abstain.
I presume this was intended as a joke, but it's a sad one.
This isn't a culture that values altruism highly above individual interests, which makes collective action almost impossible, which is the main reason democracy is broken and legislation on any given matter is controlled by the most financially motivated special interest.
Resistance is not futile, in fact, but nobody wants to be the be the first to step out of line, so there is no resistance whatsoever in the historical sense.
Everyone will copy files, but probably no significant popular movement will emerge to challenge the excesses of intellectual property law, because genuine grassroots collective action has become so unfamiliar as to be almost inconceivable.
Server side Linux isn't going away any time soon, and that's good, but it isn't news anymore. Linux is still invisible to end users, including home users and very small businesses.
End users, after all, is almost everybody, and almost everybody is now spending hours a day in a frustrating, insulting and aesthetically unpleasant environment.
The Linux desktop is or will soon be mature enough that any retailer with the nerve to cut the cord to MS and promote an open source machine will have a significant cost advantage. It needs a big enough retailer, though, to support writing the drivers for a wide range of peripherals.
I hope that someone takes the plunge, and I think there's a case to be made for it simply on price point, never mind serving the vast audience of people who are fed up with MS and would happily support open source but aren't comfortable installing their own system.
It's possible that the way to the enterprise desktop is through the commodity market, not the other way around. Your PHB is not going to be foisting something he sees as geek territory on his clerical worker. The hit product at Target or someplace, though, that's another matter.
this post was moderated Insightful... it screams racism and ignorance
I'd mod him back down but somebody beat me to it.
However, you should understand that Slashdot moderation is stochastic. The best you can do without paid and prejudiced editors is to distribute the editorial load and the editorial power. Not every moderator is a positive contributor, but in the long run the metamoderation process is intended to weed them out. On balance Slashdot still does a surprisingly good job of identifying the good stuff.
See that "faq" link over there at the top left? Click it.
(yeah, offtopic, I know... let it slide this time, huh? Once in a while these high ID numbers (eek 657,000) need a gentle clue.)
This is hardly news at all.
Lindows at Walmart.com was news.
When will I be able to walk into Best Buy or Circuit City or a bricks n mortar Wal-Mart and see laptops and consumer desktops that don't make me want to scream in agony?
That will be news.
Classic example is the 'greenhouse cliff', which ignores the fact that average temperatures on earth were roughly 5 degrees higher 1000 years ago, without a disastrous icecap melt. The iceage cliff in Fallen Angels matches up pretty well with current understanding of how fast iceages begin, and what prevented the 'Little Ice Age' of the last 700 years from becoming a true ice age. Please get a clue before knocking the science in 'Fallen Angels'.
The quoted URLs, not all peer reviewed science either, assert that there was a 'Little Ice Age' causing cold winters in parts of Europe, and possibly elsewhere. I never questioned that assertion, not because it's true and because you never made it.
You have presented evidence that parts of Europe were as much as 4 degrees C (more than 5 F) colder in winter at certain times tha now. Nowhere do you support the idea, in your hastily Googled references, that in the past 1000 years the world, or even any part of it, was 5 degrees warmer than now, but that was what you said.
So, regarding global temperatures being 5 degrees warmer than now in AD 1000, you weren't "highballing", you were at best confused, if that's supposed to be your evidence.
The "evidence" you've shown is totally irrelevant to your assertions. Your frantic efforts to save face are leading you to a classic junk science ploy. Please think twice about what you are doing.
As for the sudden onset of ice ages, (your other claim) Niven and Pournelle rely heavily on this fairly common belief, but it's mythology. It was commonly reported in the media in the 1970s, true. (North America had a bit of a cold snap then.)
As far as I know (and I did look extensively once - I think I may still be quoted in the sci.environment FAQ on this subject) it was a serious speculation in the proto-climatology community in the early years, and it made it onto sensationalist TV and into magazines, but never passed peer review as far as I could tell after a serious search. Ever.
In other words, no, sorry, you still haven't presented the slightest evidence that the two things you claimed have anything to do with what science has to say.
A little humility is not a bad idea in discussing a science which you do not know. Try "I had heard that" or "I was under the impression that", or "I read in the afterword to a light SF novel that"... You might have more of a chance to learn something if you let go of your misplaced confidence. You don't have to defend yourself. You overreached. Let go.
Now take a deep breath, say "oops...", and you'll feel much better. Try to remember there is probably no subject on Earth that someone on Slashdot doesn't know a great deal about, so it doesn't pay to be too brashly confident about third-hand information around these parts.
As far as I know, the consensus opinion about the last 1000 years' global temperature time series looks like this for what it's worth. Let us know your basis for disagreeing so dramatically.
I did not "argue from authority" in the sense of subverting a logical argument. I certainly uttered no fallacy. Here is why I believe my credentials are relevant.
The poster made two statements about a science with which I am familiar. On the grounds of this familiarity, I am confident that neither he nor any reader will find any actual peer-reviewed scientific evidence that supports those statements.
Like any honest thinking person, I welcome serious evidence to correct me if I'm wrong. Saying "you just lost" won't do, though. If you say "science shows thus" you need to be able to back it up.
I got my doctorate in atmospheric and oceanic sciences from the University of Wisconsin - Madison in 1996. I get my clues from J. Clim., J. Phys. Oceanog., and J. Fluid Mech. Where do you get yours from? Jerry Pournelle?
Please feel free to provide substantive evidence for your two assertions above. Amaze and demystify us all and provide references in peer-reviewed scientific literature, if you can.
It's fine for people to advance their point of view, but putting bogus science in the mix is a stunt that I would wish, to put it mildly, Niven would avoid. Some of the readership might think the scientifically literate characters in this story were describing the way the actual real universe works.
I'm all for progress, mind you, and I'm as tired as the next geek of people who don't believe in it. I'm just not for pretending that unconstrained pollution is the cure for an imminent ice age in the actual real world. The way "evidence" was mustered for this conclusion in this book is classic junk science.
This book is entertaining as light fiction, but in a way that is divisive, contemptuous, ignorant and destructive. It irresponsibly damages serious discourse. I'm sure it's done considerable harm to some of its adolescent readership. It ruined any respect I had for Niven.
I also loved this book, but I have to disagree with those who found the beginning slow going. Maybe it's because it touches on me directly (my parents were Czechoslovak Jews who have pretty amazing stories of their own of surviving the same time and place), and maybe it's because I'm fascinated (as Norbert Weiner was) with Golem stories as precursors of robot stories, but I thought the first part was by far the best, and was waiting in vain for the book's reality to blur again into magical fantasy later in the book. The first part was oddly different from the rest, but I thought it was utterly wonderful. It also raises the question of whether the Golem stories are the mystical Judaism precursors of the Superman-type stories, too. If you find superhero comics worth thinking about, this is hardly beside the point.
A creative, original, important open source project is here .
Talk about jumping to conclusions based on limited information. Maybe the Mac Palm desktop is pretty dubious (it's, actually, oddly overcomplicated for a Palm product) because the Palm people got wind of Apple's sync application and didn't bother trying to fix their own .
Apple is producing interesting hardware package designs, but more to the point, they and various third parties are producing software that I would once have called "great". The word "great" applied to software gates on me somehow... er...