I think the kinds of people Google hires are less likely to run executables and install toolbars from seedy and irreputable niches of the internet. Other companies probably can't assume the same of their employees.
Even smart people can make errors of ignorance or naivetè with regards to their computers. It's nice that they've cordoned off the system to prevent them from torpedoing the whole network at once, but you still have a mess on the other side of the wall to clean up. Most of the important stuff is probably saved where they're regularly backed up(Google sure as hell isn't going to have problems with storage space) but there's definitely going to be downtime involved.
It's probably not worth the cost and risk for most companies. If someone wants or needs something on their system, just having them ask first is a reasonable approach.
No entity has inherent rights. Only the ability to assert his/her/its will.
Even something so basic as having the right to live is meaningless unless they can stop those that decide they don't have that right.
The reality is that moral arguments, the weight of public opinion, is founded on the threat that the public can pose. Some can choose to respect that power, but not everyone will, and clearly many governments do not.
It may not be necessary to implement this though. In developed nations where there is plenty of economic opportunity, people tend to take these opportunities instead of putting additional time and money into raising more kids. Some raise fewer kids, concentrating their money into an education to create a productive skilled worker. Some take all their education money and put it into just one so that 2 parents yield 1 child resulting in a reduction in total population.
Some take all that money and invest it in themselves so that they can take advantage of all the things they want that they wouldn't be able to afford if they had a kid.
Poor struggling economies don't have many opportunities or luxuries to aspire towards so they default to producing children.
Since not having children is a little lonely and unfulfilling, I'd be among those who want just one kid to focus my money and attention on. I'll get plenty of sentimental fulfillment and the family goes on.
The thread comments in a recent slashdot discussed the problems in financing long term space exploration/colonization/capital ventures. The cost is prohibitive, risk is high, and payoff is a long long way off. Possibly longer than the lifetime of the investor. It would need a pretty spectacular reward to outweigh investment opportunities at home.
Not an insurmountable problem if space travel tech becomes efficient enough, but it's certainly a big one.
New technology improves the situation to an unpredictable degree. We could be constrained by resource availability, but if new technology allows access to greater resources, "K" is raised. If new technology allows greater efficiency in using resources, "K" would be raised.
However, new technology isn't easy to predict, and is perhaps impossible to predict. But it happens and we don't know how to measure that. Its effect on "K" can be dramatic as the industrial revolution demonstrated, and yet we can't predict how slow or fast technology advances, this makes "K" similarly unpredictable. Technology advancement could continue forever, or it could run hard up against laws of physics and stop. We really don't know.
Fortunately as has been mentioned elsewhere in the thread, populations don't necessarily expand indefinitely.
In addition to the above, one theory of explanation looked at child-rearing from an economic perspective. The economic benefit of producing many chilren for farmwork and support during retirement starts to fall relative to the economic benefit of producing fewer children and investing in an education. When there's more economic opportunity the benefit of investing capital in a child's education gets higher and higher. The cost of the investment is prohibitive and there are positive economies of scale in the education, so more money ends up pumped into fewer children.
Taking into acconut the reasons in the parent post, this also applies to the women. Having a child brings some sentimental value, but it is also expensive in terms of time and money. This time and money is weighed against the woman's education and career opportunities. As economic opportunities expand for the mothers, they have incentive to have fewer or no children at all.
Both of you are correct. The population of countries as they become "developed" is that they start undeveloped with a high birth rate and high death rate, then an economic boom results in high birth rates and low death rates, then stablizes at low birth rates and low death rates.
Unfortunately, this is still just historic data and the global economy is not the same as it was during the industrial revolution. Whether or not this same trend is occuring/will occur/can occur is still undetermined and hotly debated.
1. I might be interested depending on the cost. 2. I don't really mind the ad-interruptions since they tend to go where the commercial breaks were anyway, and since right now they only show the one brief commercial it's short enough that starting to do something else during that time isn't worth it. I just watch the commercial and wait. 3. Yes PLEASE. I am sick to death of seeing the same damn ads over and over.
I agree with all of the above, and I find your example of countries surviving without a military force to be interesting.
I agree that the U.S really doesn't need to spend as much on the military as it currently does. However, if I had to guess, I'd say that these countries with weak/nonexistent militaries are sustained by the strong militaries of watchdog nations. The invaders would need to be sure they would be able to get away with keeping what they take and that the benefits outweigh the costs. The U.N members are likely to toss in sanctions, possibly direct intervention. These watchdog nations as a whole help discourage invasions from nations that are too small to brush off the political and economic repercussions.
I really doubt that the U.S could get away with not having a military budget(I also recognize that the parent post never claimed this to be possible for the U.S). As we demonstrated in Iraq, if a military is powerful enough to brush off the global backlash, there is the still the chance for them to invade countries that aren't strong enough to stop them.
I can't imagine how to prepare an AI against a chatroom.
Hotstud42: ne 1 there? Hotstud42: SHO ME YR BOOBIES! Hotstud42: I dn't think she's there. Hotstud42: If ur ther ewave at the camera! Hotstud42: c'mon if yu show ur tits I'll pay 4 private.
Naturally should the turing test succeed, the first step is to automate webcam porn.
Well, interestingly enough... before I'd even gotten to your comment I had visualized my father in the GP's post.
He's a home-inspector and a caricature of this comment exchange. He's well aware of the details to take into account when inspecting a home, when he wanted renovation or construction done in the house he did it himself.
In front of the computer, where he communicates the results of his inspections I had to teach him how to left click, right click, and double click. How to manage windows(minimize/maximize/close). How to open files, save files. He originally hand-loaded the printer 5-10 pages at a time(It was an ancient and slightly broken printer, but this was as recent as 2002). He would then fax them to the customer, again, 5-10 pages at a time(also ancient). So I had to teach him how to send an e-mail, scan notes and diagrams into.pdfs and attach them.
Now the other home inspectors are using template documents to speed up their reports instead of starting with a blank form for every house. Now he needs to compete with other home inspectors who are taking pictures of homes with digital cameras and including them in the reports.
He taught himself home inspection through self-study until he could pass license exams. After which he was required to take classes to get 6 credits of inspection courses a year as part of the license requirement.
But I teach him everything he knows about computers. He doesn't want to explore. I taught him how to open a file in MS Word, but he doesn't know how to open a file in the.pdf program. I didn't know how either, but I did it anyway because I knew how to open files in MS Word and just took a shot at the same method in the.pdf program. File -> Open. However, my father had to call me up to teach him how. I'm not saying I'm better, I'm in the same situation reversed. I know jack-squat about homes and had to ask him for help when I do any work around the home. As a result of the informaion I got from him I was able to renovate the basement without paying for someone else to do it.
These unknown fields are scary, but there was valuable payoff for both of us in the end for exploring these things.
"I should also note, the regular nintendo we've been using is split in half and missing a large chunk"
On the other hand my nintendo even when new required about a half-hour of blowing ino the cartridge and slot until I turn purple, combined with slapping the box and reset button until the grey screen gave way to the start screen.
The trick isn't just getting a larger screen on the unit, it's doing it without putting additional drain on the battery and additional burden on the pricetag.
Like many other incremental steps to today's technology, it's certainly possibly, even feasible, but nontrivial to implement. It'll take engineering, expense, and a new fab process and business relationships to mass-produce an appliance such as this.
Per the summary "Some are trying to beat the Eee on price, some on specs," and this would be an example of beating it on specs while likely yielding on the price war.
I believe there's plenty of room in the market for such competition since the EEE falls into a very small niche of quick-reference usage and ultra-portability. More an appliance than a personal computer, and as individual needs vary, people will buy the device best suited to the expected usage.
Exactly, there's no pressing need to include high-cost features like this if it compromises what Wikipedia currently offers, there's room on the internet for other information sources. A one-stop-shop is convenient, but not a necessiy.
However, the conditions are not. Apple doesn't have a monopoly in the phone or smart phone market. Pretty much every phone on the market is closed in some form. The iphone in providing an sdk is considerably more open than it's competition.
I have never owned an Apple product.
If the demand for these apps is strong enough and the business model is profitable enough, perhaps a competing phone would like to offer what Apple isn't. (Android? It'd sure be nice, it'd cause me to buy my first phone.)
Parent is spot-on. Games are not somehow made worse because a newer game comes out. Play games 2-3 years behind the front edge and you save a great deal of money for largely the same experience. This applies to PC gaming, Linux gaming, and console gaming.
I interpret the above to say that you agree with most of these statements, including #3.
"3) a number of PC games are launched in a rather buggy state"
"more and more console games are being released with bugs to be patched later."
It doesn't follow that PC games are not launched in a rather buggy state.
Given that PCs have high variance in their gaming environment, plus internet capability, and consoles have standardized gaming environments, plus internet capability, another statement would be required to propose that consoles are equally buggy or more buggy.
When something works, that's the end of the story for most people. I am in the same camp of not having serious issues with Windows. I don't have a reason to broadcast this or a strong enough connection to the OS to defend it.
However, those who have migrated Linux are likely to have also encountered the more popular OS at some point but still use Linux anyway. My theory is that this demographic is likely to have a higher percentage of people who have had a serious problem with Windows.
Just one possible explanation. I have also tried Linux out of curiousity by the way.
I'll just say this, I'd rather have an ad-supported wikipedia than no wikipedia at all.
If the video feature costs more than donations can support, I'm ok with no videos on wikpedia. Perhaps another seperate wikisite can have video with advertisements, while wikipedia itself could maintain its adfree status.
GMail's convenience and featureset caused all my friends to switch over to gmail addresses instead.
From there the webclient made GTalk popular with us as a one-stop communication hub, mail, calendar, and Gtalk. Available from work where not all of us can install programs.
So my group of friends joined Gtalk as a supplement to our existing AIM screennames. I suspect that others who are using AIM and GTALK will be able to jettison one or the other if they cooperate.
I am logged into 4 different services because my friends are seperated amongst them all(AIM, Yahoo, MSN, Jabber/GTalk).
I can imagine switching only when there is sufficient overlap since my friends are also using multiple services, which means I have friend entries repeated in Pidgin via different services.
I can't say what GP means by "greatest good" though.
As for arbitrary rules of unknown foundation, saying that the common good should not infringe upon individual rights and freedoms is an arbitrary rule of unknown foundation.
Many things are realistic rules of known foundation, they are based on "Because I said so, and if you don't like it, you'll have to go through me." No rights are guaranteed, they must be enforced through power. Freedom for one often means taking it from someone else, even having freedom to live means taking the freedom to kill from another. If one entity wishes to acquire freedom or take freedom, they'll need to go through their requisite opposition. In this case, it is volume weighted by power. The needs of the many against the few, or the powerful few against the many. It's simply the way things are, and the validity of moral arguments are proven through their effectiveness in enforcing themselves.
His assumption was that the reader would be familiar with the concept of the "tragedy of the commons" which would imply knowledge of the "tragedies" commonly used to convey the concept. It's not obscure, but it certainly isn't common knowledge.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the kinds of people Google hires are less likely to run executables and install toolbars from seedy and irreputable niches of the internet. Other companies probably can't assume the same of their employees.
Even smart people can make errors of ignorance or naivetè with regards to their computers. It's nice that they've cordoned off the system to prevent them from torpedoing the whole network at once, but you still have a mess on the other side of the wall to clean up. Most of the important stuff is probably saved where they're regularly backed up(Google sure as hell isn't going to have problems with storage space) but there's definitely going to be downtime involved.
It's probably not worth the cost and risk for most companies. If someone wants or needs something on their system, just having them ask first is a reasonable approach.
No entity has inherent rights. Only the ability to assert his/her/its will.
Even something so basic as having the right to live is meaningless unless they can stop those that decide they don't have that right.
The reality is that moral arguments, the weight of public opinion, is founded on the threat that the public can pose. Some can choose to respect that power, but not everyone will, and clearly many governments do not.
It may not be necessary to implement this though. In developed nations where there is plenty of economic opportunity, people tend to take these opportunities instead of putting additional time and money into raising more kids. Some raise fewer kids, concentrating their money into an education to create a productive skilled worker. Some take all their education money and put it into just one so that 2 parents yield 1 child resulting in a reduction in total population.
Some take all that money and invest it in themselves so that they can take advantage of all the things they want that they wouldn't be able to afford if they had a kid.
Poor struggling economies don't have many opportunities or luxuries to aspire towards so they default to producing children.
Since not having children is a little lonely and unfulfilling, I'd be among those who want just one kid to focus my money and attention on. I'll get plenty of sentimental fulfillment and the family goes on.
The thread comments in a recent slashdot discussed the problems in financing long term space exploration/colonization/capital ventures. The cost is prohibitive, risk is high, and payoff is a long long way off. Possibly longer than the lifetime of the investor. It would need a pretty spectacular reward to outweigh investment opportunities at home.
Not an insurmountable problem if space travel tech becomes efficient enough, but it's certainly a big one.
New technology improves the situation to an unpredictable degree. We could be constrained by resource availability, but if new technology allows access to greater resources, "K" is raised. If new technology allows greater efficiency in using resources, "K" would be raised.
However, new technology isn't easy to predict, and is perhaps impossible to predict. But it happens and we don't know how to measure that. Its effect on "K" can be dramatic as the industrial revolution demonstrated, and yet we can't predict how slow or fast technology advances, this makes "K" similarly unpredictable. Technology advancement could continue forever, or it could run hard up against laws of physics and stop. We really don't know.
Fortunately as has been mentioned elsewhere in the thread, populations don't necessarily expand indefinitely.
In addition to the above, one theory of explanation looked at child-rearing from an economic perspective. The economic benefit of producing many chilren for farmwork and support during retirement starts to fall relative to the economic benefit of producing fewer children and investing in an education. When there's more economic opportunity the benefit of investing capital in a child's education gets higher and higher. The cost of the investment is prohibitive and there are positive economies of scale in the education, so more money ends up pumped into fewer children.
Taking into acconut the reasons in the parent post, this also applies to the women. Having a child brings some sentimental value, but it is also expensive in terms of time and money. This time and money is weighed against the woman's education and career opportunities. As economic opportunities expand for the mothers, they have incentive to have fewer or no children at all.
Both of you are correct. The population of countries as they become "developed" is that they start undeveloped with a high birth rate and high death rate, then an economic boom results in high birth rates and low death rates, then stablizes at low birth rates and low death rates.
Unfortunately, this is still just historic data and the global economy is not the same as it was during the industrial revolution. Whether or not this same trend is occuring/will occur/can occur is still undetermined and hotly debated.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition
1. I might be interested depending on the cost.
2. I don't really mind the ad-interruptions since they tend to go where the commercial breaks were anyway, and since right now they only show the one brief commercial it's short enough that starting to do something else during that time isn't worth it. I just watch the commercial and wait.
3. Yes PLEASE. I am sick to death of seeing the same damn ads over and over.
Send attractive women instead and the massive resources of the porn industry will fund humanity's ventures into space.
I agree with all of the above, and I find your example of countries surviving without a military force to be interesting.
I agree that the U.S really doesn't need to spend as much on the military as it currently does. However, if I had to guess, I'd say that these countries with weak/nonexistent militaries are sustained by the strong militaries of watchdog nations. The invaders would need to be sure they would be able to get away with keeping what they take and that the benefits outweigh the costs. The U.N members are likely to toss in sanctions, possibly direct intervention. These watchdog nations as a whole help discourage invasions from nations that are too small to brush off the political and economic repercussions.
I really doubt that the U.S could get away with not having a military budget(I also recognize that the parent post never claimed this to be possible for the U.S). As we demonstrated in Iraq, if a military is powerful enough to brush off the global backlash, there is the still the chance for them to invade countries that aren't strong enough to stop them.
I can't imagine how to prepare an AI against a chatroom.
Hotstud42: ne 1 there?
Hotstud42: SHO ME YR BOOBIES!
Hotstud42: I dn't think she's there.
Hotstud42: If ur ther ewave at the camera!
Hotstud42: c'mon if yu show ur tits I'll pay 4 private.
Naturally should the turing test succeed, the first step is to automate webcam porn.
I know I shouldn't respond to an anonymous coward but...
Clearly this coward has not used a nintendo.
http://www.joystiq.com/2006/10/28/how-did-you-blow-your-nes-cartridge/
Well, interestingly enough... before I'd even gotten to your comment I had visualized my father in the GP's post.
.pdfs and attach them.
.pdf program. I didn't know how either, but I did it anyway because I knew how to open files in MS Word and just took a shot at the same method in the .pdf program. File -> Open. However, my father had to call me up to teach him how. I'm not saying I'm better, I'm in the same situation reversed. I know jack-squat about homes and had to ask him for help when I do any work around the home. As a result of the informaion I got from him I was able to renovate the basement without paying for someone else to do it.
He's a home-inspector and a caricature of this comment exchange. He's well aware of the details to take into account when inspecting a home, when he wanted renovation or construction done in the house he did it himself.
In front of the computer, where he communicates the results of his inspections I had to teach him how to left click, right click, and double click. How to manage windows(minimize/maximize/close). How to open files, save files. He originally hand-loaded the printer 5-10 pages at a time(It was an ancient and slightly broken printer, but this was as recent as 2002). He would then fax them to the customer, again, 5-10 pages at a time(also ancient). So I had to teach him how to send an e-mail, scan notes and diagrams into
Now the other home inspectors are using template documents to speed up their reports instead of starting with a blank form for every house. Now he needs to compete with other home inspectors who are taking pictures of homes with digital cameras and including them in the reports.
He taught himself home inspection through self-study until he could pass license exams. After which he was required to take classes to get 6 credits of inspection courses a year as part of the license requirement.
But I teach him everything he knows about computers. He doesn't want to explore. I taught him how to open a file in MS Word, but he doesn't know how to open a file in the
These unknown fields are scary, but there was valuable payoff for both of us in the end for exploring these things.
"I should also note, the regular nintendo we've been using is split in half and missing a large chunk"
On the other hand my nintendo even when new required about a half-hour of blowing ino the cartridge and slot until I turn purple, combined with slapping the box and reset button until the grey screen gave way to the start screen.
The trick isn't just getting a larger screen on the unit, it's doing it without putting additional drain on the battery and additional burden on the pricetag.
Like many other incremental steps to today's technology, it's certainly possibly, even feasible, but nontrivial to implement. It'll take engineering, expense, and a new fab process and business relationships to mass-produce an appliance such as this.
Per the summary "Some are trying to beat the Eee on price, some on specs," and this would be an example of beating it on specs while likely yielding on the price war.
I believe there's plenty of room in the market for such competition since the EEE falls into a very small niche of quick-reference usage and ultra-portability. More an appliance than a personal computer, and as individual needs vary, people will buy the device best suited to the expected usage.
Exactly, there's no pressing need to include high-cost features like this if it compromises what Wikipedia currently offers, there's room on the internet for other information sources. A one-stop-shop is convenient, but not a necessiy.
The action is exactly the same.
However, the conditions are not. Apple doesn't have a monopoly in the phone or smart phone market. Pretty much every phone on the market is closed in some form. The iphone in providing an sdk is considerably more open than it's competition.
I have never owned an Apple product.
If the demand for these apps is strong enough and the business model is profitable enough, perhaps a competing phone would like to offer what Apple isn't. (Android? It'd sure be nice, it'd cause me to buy my first phone.)
Parent is spot-on. Games are not somehow made worse because a newer game comes out. Play games 2-3 years behind the front edge and you save a great deal of money for largely the same experience. This applies to PC gaming, Linux gaming, and console gaming.
I interpret the above to say that you agree with most of these statements, including #3.
"3) a number of PC games are launched in a rather buggy state"
"more and more console games are being released with bugs to be patched later."
It doesn't follow that PC games are not launched in a rather buggy state.
Given that PCs have high variance in their gaming environment, plus internet capability, and consoles have standardized gaming environments, plus internet capability, another statement would be required to propose that consoles are equally buggy or more buggy.
For what it's worth...
When something works, that's the end of the story for most people. I am in the same camp of not having serious issues with Windows. I don't have a reason to broadcast this or a strong enough connection to the OS to defend it.
However, those who have migrated Linux are likely to have also encountered the more popular OS at some point but still use Linux anyway. My theory is that this demographic is likely to have a higher percentage of people who have had a serious problem with Windows.
Just one possible explanation. I have also tried Linux out of curiousity by the way.
I'll just say this, I'd rather have an ad-supported wikipedia than no wikipedia at all.
If the video feature costs more than donations can support, I'm ok with no videos on wikpedia. Perhaps another seperate wikisite can have video with advertisements, while wikipedia itself could maintain its adfree status.
GMail's convenience and featureset caused all my friends to switch over to gmail addresses instead.
From there the webclient made GTalk popular with us as a one-stop communication hub, mail, calendar, and Gtalk. Available from work where not all of us can install programs.
So my group of friends joined Gtalk as a supplement to our existing AIM screennames. I suspect that others who are using AIM and GTALK will be able to jettison one or the other if they cooperate.
I am logged into 4 different services because my friends are seperated amongst them all(AIM, Yahoo, MSN, Jabber/GTalk).
I can imagine switching only when there is sufficient overlap since my friends are also using multiple services, which means I have friend entries repeated in Pidgin via different services.
The "common good" instance you are referring to was already a hyperlink to a wikipedia page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_good
I can't say what GP means by "greatest good" though.
As for arbitrary rules of unknown foundation, saying that the common good should not infringe upon individual rights and freedoms is an arbitrary rule of unknown foundation.
Many things are realistic rules of known foundation, they are based on "Because I said so, and if you don't like it, you'll have to go through me." No rights are guaranteed, they must be enforced through power. Freedom for one often means taking it from someone else, even having freedom to live means taking the freedom to kill from another. If one entity wishes to acquire freedom or take freedom, they'll need to go through their requisite opposition. In this case, it is volume weighted by power. The needs of the many against the few, or the powerful few against the many. It's simply the way things are, and the validity of moral arguments are proven through their effectiveness in enforcing themselves.
His reference was not nebulous, but merely succint.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
See "Modern commons".
His assumption was that the reader would be familiar with the concept of the "tragedy of the commons" which would imply knowledge of the "tragedies" commonly used to convey the concept. It's not obscure, but it certainly isn't common knowledge.
Natural Monopolies are somewhat related: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly