They're doing the best that they can, given the circumstances, and should be encouraged, not squelched.
Encouraged to learn a different language, that is, before they develop the bad habits of a lifetime.
By the way, it kind of looks silly when you get all sanctimonious about people who rip on Perl, and then give us an ALL CAPS yell about "Visual Basic Weenies!" (at the same time, demonstrating a mean touch with the HTML bold tag). What is this, a schoolyard bullying chain -- the C jocks beat on the Perl geeks who beat on the VB handicapped kids?
Visual Basic is another language which is dead easy for non-programmers to write horrendous code in -- why the hell should these hypothetical people who care enough to write a program, but not enough to learn how need to hack Perl before they get respect from you? Like it or not (and I don't), Microsoft ASP is showing up in a lot of places where you'd expect.pl.
People will always use the tools they can use to get the job done. And, hopefully, there will be gifted people like Larry Wall who care enough about them to help. But you needn't convince yourself that you're ever going to see Donald Knuth handing out one of his famous cheques for a really snappily written Perl script. If you care about that sort of thing.
And this is the company that has registered the stock symbol LINX
No it ain't. According to the S-1, it's applied to NASD to be quoted on the Nasdaq with stock ticker LINX. Stock tickers aren't like domain names, and stock quotes aren't like websites.
For a start, even volatile markets like NASDAQ have standards. The NASD has no interest in having grotty pump-n-dump companies quoted on it. For this reason, it withholds the privilege of a quote from companies who don't go through a hell of a lot of hoops.
Then, assuming it gets a quote, NASD has to authorise the ticker. If someone else deserves LINX more, there is an appeals process. It's unusual for someone to be thrown off a ticker if they have first rights, but the market reserves the rights. Since, IIRC, "Linux" is a [tm] owned by Linus, he may have some ability to intercede (try asking the NASD for ticker COKE and see how far you get).
In general, I think that LinuxOne will have difficulty shifting 3,000,000 shares to the public without the help of a broker or investment bank, and may find difficulty in getting one to help. But on the other hand IANAAS (I am not an American stockbroker), so I may be wrong.
I'd gently inform the NASD that all may not be rosy in the garden if you want to -- but it may be taken better coming from a disinterested party than a competitor. If that fails (and this is a last resort which I would not recommend in any normal circs), you might try talking to some of the short sellers like Anthony Elgindy, who might work miracles -- if the stock price is too low, Nasdaq won't touch it because it doesn't like penny stocks. But I must point out that I have never done business with a short-seller (a fortiori not with Mr. Elgindy) and cannot vouch for them.
They left out "mp3z", "pirate" and "passwords" for starters!
I also am surprised to see no mention of Jennifer Love Hewitt, and if they think "Spice" is getting them search engine placings any time since 1997, they're sorely mistaken.
The real subsidy here is the cost of employers' liability insurance, which covers the employers in the event of workplace illness/injury. At the moment, telecommuting is subsidised so long as the employer can shed this risk -- the regulations simply aim to level the playing field.
Unless I'm badly wrong, Roblimo is Robin Miller, a computer journalist of God knows how much experience, and geek credentials at leasts as good as yours and better than mine.
Since he always used to write all over the specialist press, and now seems pretty much a one-company man, I'd guess that rather than being "spare" at andover.net, the andovers decided to prise him out of the freelance gig in order to be an experienced "safe pair of hands" at their new investment, to keep an eye on things, improve the journalistic quality, etc, etc.
How crucial are the two of you to Andover's vision of/.? Do you have a clause like Charles Schultz' that says that nobody else can edit slashdot? What happens if the whole thing stops being fun for you (as it very well might)? Do Andover suck in the loss, or do we get introduced to "Scrappy-Doo and SuperGeek, the ALL NEW slashdot crew"? Has Andover.net taken out critical person insurance on you in case something dreeadful happens? Could they, in principle, fire your asses, or force you to resign on matter of principle?
Geller gave the England team his "help" as an unsolicited gesture (I think that a newspaper publicity stunt was involved). The manager at the time (Glenn Hoddle) was a paranormal nut, but his thing was spiritual healing, and specifically, not picking players who refused to attend his favourite healer, hence his eventual loss of job.
I am reminded of a letter to Viz magazine with this helpful suggestion:
"Next time Uri Geller comes on TV, and asks everyone to concentrate together on bending a spoon or starting a clock, let's all instead concentrate on Uri prolapsing, and see what happens".
I'd add that under current moderation practice, the first two comments are marked "(Redundant)", pretty much regardless of what they say. This happens so often that one begins to think it's actually automated, to discourage first posters. Third comment is prime real estate.
Although now that Karma is no longer visible, who cares? You can't show it off any more.
The project you would want to do would be something that sucked the algorithm out of an existing spreadsheet-based tax form, and then produced a Linux-compatible implementation of this same algorithm. This would allow any manufacturer to quickly and easily port their existing (proprietary) tax software to Linux.
Any attempt to have coders doing tax work, or to induce accountants and lawyers to write code, or for that matter to try to get tax advice on the cheap is probably doomed.
Intuit is not really a software company -- it only looks like one. It's a tax advice practice, which uses Windows software as a delivery channel. The role that the free software community could play would be to give them a way to use Linux as a delivery channel.
Are we witnessing the birth a new type of charity? One that yields slightly more direct returns than traditional charities?
If the companies never make a profit or pay a dividend, then the shareholders have unwittingly financed infrastructure creation for nothing, because they made an incorrect assessment of the potential rewards.
This isn't new -- lottery tickets have been used to fund schools for some time.
Both lotteries and non-profit IPOs cna be considered a tax on poor judgement -- the IPO lottery at least has the advantage that it is a progressive rather than regressive one (the incidence of the tax falls on people who can afford to pay it). However, it has the feature that in the interim period between IPO and winding-up, money is transferred back and forth between speculators (and to stockbrokers). Some might consider this a disadvantage -- I personally don't care.
I live in the West End and work in the City, and I have to say that I don't notice them myself and I like the idea that they're protecting my property. In principle, yaddayadda 1984, in practice, the Russians managed to run a totalitarian state without video cameras so I think they're irrelevant. If you're a government that's serious about surveillance, you employ police informers, and lots of 'em.
On the other hand, I must confess to being a little bit nostaligc for the days when I could urinate in the street with impunity.... whoosh
You'd actually be safe on this charge, although I daresay they'd try to bluff you. There's no law against acting like a dick, a technicality I have regularly had cause to be thankful for. The offence of "wasting police time" is usually used to prosecute people who make hoax alarm calls.
At a demo once, I kept on making bottle-throwing motions as we passed policemen. I got so good at it that one of them fell flat on the ground because he thought he'd been petrol-bombed. Policemen hate this shit. So he pulled me out of the crowd, searched me, couldn't really pin anything. So he tried to fake me:
"Wasting police time is a serious offence"
"Really? Is it? How fascinating! Tell me more...."
. If 1,000,000 pounds of copper could be made into gold... Then I would imagine it would have something of an effect on the price. We like paper currency because it means that the money supply doesn't depend on technological advances in dentistry. We can lower the interest rate when there's a recession, or raise it when there's inflation, by altering the money supply rather than trying to manipulate the price of gold. Paper currency not backed by gold is my tip for the greatest invention of the twentieth century. jsm
Sadly, the name of the enemy is "capitalism" and "corporatism" is a bit of a weasel phrase invented to try to give the implication that the terrible corporations who do such bad things are in some way different from the people who make the fantastic stuff. I don't like this because it obscures the Faustian bargain we've struck -- in order to get the economic system which delivers the most best goods cheapest, we have to put up with its habit of creating selfish, powerful entities of limited humanity. Call a spade a spade and admit that these are problems of capitalism per se.
Actually, I seem to remember "corporatism" being used in the past to describe a kind of three-way partnership between unions, companies and government. Kind of like the economic model of France and Germany. It produces fewer neato toys, but leaves you more time and space to enjoy them.
Like it or not, trade has always benefited human beings - even going back to when the settlers came over to what is now known the United States. There was trade with the Native American Indians.
(Score: 2, Funny)
This concept still holds true today, with nations. Nations as a goal will better from free trade.
Diminishing returns sets in, however. The marginal benefits from an extension of free trade from the current regime would most likely be small. And this whole analysis only works if what you want is the kind of goods that free trade will provide. It's great for toasters and automobiles -- less wonderful if what you need is clean air and a sea that stays below sea level.
Our self preservation instinct should be kicking in right about now and realizing that free trade is the way to go.
Self-preservation? WTO rules have made it more difficult for the EU to ban animal hormones in human food, for the USA to regulate asbestos, etc, etc. You may think that this is a Good Thing, but shouldn't it be at least relevant that the democratically elected governments of these countries disagree? The WTO is an unaccountable technocratic body.
I am unsure that the Seatlle rioters realize this.
Comments?
I'm pretty sure they realise it. I actually agree with your ecoonomic reasoning, but it's not an economic problem. It's a political problem about how important the benefits of trade are to countries compared to the benefits of keeping their own sovereignty and democracy.
If you really give a f**k about security (which is not something I necessarily recommend -- most systems contain "proprietary information" which your competitors wouldn't bother reading if you sent it to them FedEx with a sticker marked "URGENT"), then you shouldn't be messing around with passwords anyway. Long experience of this sort of thing has convinced me that you will never, ever, convince yer average user to follow good password practice, because it breaks the first law of IT -- it is inconvenient for the user. Only the fact that very few systems in the world are worth breaking into stops cracking from becoming endemic.
Smart-card key systems are reasonably cheap and should be used for anything worth protecting (clue: most corporate networks are not worth protecting). If your data is important to you (clue: five terabytes of Powerpoint presentations are not important) then you should be prepared to pay up for a system that can be kept physically secure.
For everything else, you can afford to be lax. Occasionally come down hard on someone for installing a virus, have a compulsory passworded screensaver to protect your system from the cleaners, but don't turn the IT department into laughable NSA wannabes.
The way I look at it is this -- if you get a serious compromise on an average network, you could lose a day's work. Draconian password practices will cost you that every six months in forgotten passwords, etc.
This is why those legislators and officials should keep their hands off the internet. Any attempt to "rigorize" something as organic as this would only result in hampering the Internet's development and growth.
ahem [cough] agriculture.
Planting Kansas with one kind of wheat would be a bad move, but as a survival strategy, hanging around in the "ecosystem", hoping that the bushes around you will sprout something edible has been known to be dominated for a fair few years.
Way back when yahoo was a couple pages with lots of cool links, it was survival of the fittest. Now it's survival of the richest, or those that can spam the most, or target the best ads, or plant the most (irrelevant) keywords getting so much of the attention
Well, this is the trouble with Darwinian theory. It lures you in with "survival of the fittest" and then belatedly informs you that "fittest" just means "whatever survives".
In general, I think that biology is being used here because genetics is sexy, and that what we're actually seeing is the economic geography of the Web. Economic geography has some points of tangency with evolutionary biology, but fewer than you'd think (basically, in biology, change is random; in economic geog. it is assumed that individuals are rational). Thinking about the Web as a "Darwinian environment" and talking about "rich environments for scavengers" is likely to lead to fewer useful insights than an analysis based on switching costs, path-dependency and agglomeration.
And of course, the biological model doesn't model regulation very well, which IMO makes it pretty inappropriate for any long-term forecasting of web trends.
For example, their use of the term "spoofing" does not match my understanding of the word.
I think I'm going to have to take my lumps on this one. I was using a generalised concept of spoofing as meaning any attempt to create false messages to a system, and it got lifted without noting that it wasn't the generally used sense of the word.
Piero Sraffa did a fair amount of hard time in the 1940s making sure that ill-informed critiques like yours fell apart.
BY the way, the claim that:
Price setting (you can also say priority setting) is a basic function of economics
is a fairly extreme one and not one that many neoclassicla economists would make. And furthermore, Marxist econ. is entirely compatiable with laissez-faire goods markets.
Before you spout off in future, do feel free to RTFFAQ
If Karl Marx, the author of Capital advocated taking all the rewards of labour (as opposed to Capital) and giving it to somebody else (presumably not the Capital owners), then he certainly wrote about it somewhere other than in his famous book, "Capital".
Then you would not fare well in European warfare. The Mongolian composite bow is a perfectly fine weapon for hunting, or to carry on the move, but it cannot be compared for military effectiveness to the English (actually Welsh, but who's counting longbow). The longbow was more in the nature of a portable siege engine than a hand weapon. Massed ranks of longbows would have a far better effective range (effective in puncturing breastplates, that is) than the composite bow.
A worker with a lathe can shape metal many times faster. The owner of the lathe, the "capitalist" who invested in it, is responsible for some fraction of the increased production; it is not "stolen", it is rightfully the owner's.
Capital is productive, but "ownership" is not a productive activity. The owner has not produced anything. "Stolen" is obviously a word which only makes sense in the context of a system of laws, but it seems clear to me that some of the value produced by the interaction of labour and capital has been legally expropriated by someone not involved in the production process.
It so happens that this is the best and fairest way to get goods produced, but we shouldn't let that trick us into saying things about production that aren't true.
A lot of people make this same mistake when they claim that the GPL is restrictive because "It restricts what you can do with your code". This only makes sense if you consider "declaring this code to be proprietary" to be "doing something with the code", which it isn't, not if you stop to think about it.
Marx's politics were full of holes. His economics is susceptible of full axiomatisation, and stands up mathematically. Which is certainly more than you can say for Austrian economics.
Slashdot Mirror
They're doing the best that they can, given the circumstances, and should be encouraged, not squelched.
.pl.
Encouraged to learn a different language, that is, before they develop the bad habits of a lifetime.
By the way, it kind of looks silly when you get all sanctimonious about people who rip on Perl, and then give us an ALL CAPS yell about "Visual Basic Weenies!" (at the same time, demonstrating a mean touch with the HTML bold tag). What is this, a schoolyard bullying chain -- the C jocks beat on the Perl geeks who beat on the VB handicapped kids?
Visual Basic is another language which is dead easy for non-programmers to write horrendous code in -- why the hell should these hypothetical people who care enough to write a program, but not enough to learn how need to hack Perl before they get respect from you? Like it or not (and I don't), Microsoft ASP is showing up in a lot of places where you'd expect
People will always use the tools they can use to get the job done. And, hopefully, there will be gifted people like Larry Wall who care enough about them to help. But you needn't convince yourself that you're ever going to see Donald Knuth handing out one of his famous cheques for a really snappily written Perl script. If you care about that sort of thing.
jsm
And this is the company that has registered the stock symbol LINX
No it ain't. According to the S-1, it's applied to NASD to be quoted on the Nasdaq with stock ticker LINX. Stock tickers aren't like domain names, and stock quotes aren't like websites.
For a start, even volatile markets like NASDAQ have standards. The NASD has no interest in having grotty pump-n-dump companies quoted on it. For this reason, it withholds the privilege of a quote from companies who don't go through a hell of a lot of hoops.
Then, assuming it gets a quote, NASD has to authorise the ticker. If someone else deserves LINX more, there is an appeals process. It's unusual for someone to be thrown off a ticker if they have first rights, but the market reserves the rights. Since, IIRC, "Linux" is a [tm] owned by Linus, he may have some ability to intercede (try asking the NASD for ticker COKE and see how far you get).
In general, I think that LinuxOne will have difficulty shifting 3,000,000 shares to the public without the help of a broker or investment bank, and may find difficulty in getting one to help. But on the other hand IANAAS (I am not an American stockbroker), so I may be wrong.
I'd gently inform the NASD that all may not be rosy in the garden if you want to -- but it may be taken better coming from a disinterested party than a competitor. If that fails (and this is a last resort which I would not recommend in any normal circs), you might try talking to some of the short sellers like Anthony Elgindy, who might work miracles -- if the stock price is too low, Nasdaq won't touch it because it doesn't like penny stocks. But I must point out that I have never done business with a short-seller (a fortiori not with Mr. Elgindy) and cannot vouch for them.
jsm
Call that spamdex?!!!
They left out "mp3z", "pirate" and "passwords" for starters!
I also am surprised to see no mention of Jennifer Love Hewitt, and if they think "Spice" is getting them search engine placings any time since 1997, they're sorely mistaken.
jsm
(who remembers when it was all "Winona")
The real subsidy here is the cost of employers' liability insurance, which covers the employers in the event of workplace illness/injury. At the moment, telecommuting is subsidised so long as the employer can shed this risk -- the regulations simply aim to level the playing field.
jsm
Unless I'm badly wrong, Roblimo is Robin Miller, a computer journalist of God knows how much experience, and geek credentials at leasts as good as yours and better than mine.
Since he always used to write all over the specialist press, and now seems pretty much a one-company man, I'd guess that rather than being "spare" at andover.net, the andovers decided to prise him out of the freelance gig in order to be an experienced "safe pair of hands" at their new investment, to keep an eye on things, improve the journalistic quality, etc, etc.
jsm
How crucial are the two of you to Andover's vision of /.? Do you have a clause like Charles Schultz' that says that nobody else can edit slashdot? What happens if the whole thing stops being fun for you (as it very well might)? Do Andover suck in the loss, or do we get introduced to "Scrappy-Doo and SuperGeek, the ALL NEW slashdot crew"? Has Andover.net taken out critical person insurance on you in case something dreeadful happens? Could they, in principle, fire your asses, or force you to resign on matter of principle?
etc, etc, (thud)
jsm
Geller gave the England team his "help" as an unsolicited gesture (I think that a newspaper publicity stunt was involved). The manager at the time (Glenn Hoddle) was a paranormal nut, but his thing was spiritual healing, and specifically, not picking players who refused to attend his favourite healer, hence his eventual loss of job.
I am reminded of a letter to Viz magazine with this helpful suggestion:
"Next time Uri Geller comes on TV, and asks everyone to concentrate together on bending a spoon or starting a clock, let's all instead concentrate on Uri prolapsing, and see what happens".
jsm
I'd add that under current moderation practice, the first two comments are marked "(Redundant)", pretty much regardless of what they say. This happens so often that one begins to think it's actually automated, to discourage first posters. Third comment is prime real estate.
Although now that Karma is no longer visible, who cares? You can't show it off any more.
The project you would want to do would be something that sucked the algorithm out of an existing spreadsheet-based tax form, and then produced a Linux-compatible implementation of this same algorithm. This would allow any manufacturer to quickly and easily port their existing (proprietary) tax software to Linux.
Any attempt to have coders doing tax work, or to induce accountants and lawyers to write code, or for that matter to try to get tax advice on the cheap is probably doomed.
Intuit is not really a software company -- it only looks like one. It's a tax advice practice, which uses Windows software as a delivery channel. The role that the free software community could play would be to give them a way to use Linux as a delivery channel.
jsm
Are we witnessing the birth a new type of charity? One that yields slightly more direct returns than traditional charities?
If the companies never make a profit or pay a dividend, then the shareholders have unwittingly financed infrastructure creation for nothing, because they made an incorrect assessment of the potential rewards.
This isn't new -- lottery tickets have been used to fund schools for some time.
Both lotteries and non-profit IPOs cna be considered a tax on poor judgement -- the IPO lottery at least has the advantage that it is a progressive rather than regressive one (the incidence of the tax falls on people who can afford to pay it). However, it has the feature that in the interim period between IPO and winding-up, money is transferred back and forth between speculators (and to stockbrokers). Some might consider this a disadvantage -- I personally don't care.
jsm
(Altogether now ....)
"I'm not entirely sure that I want my computer knowing where my fingers are at all times"
Yes yes yes, sorry, and all that. I resisted the temptation to say that for at least a minute. Hate me.
jsm
I live in the West End and work in the City, and I have to say that I don't notice them myself and I like the idea that they're protecting my property. In principle, yaddayadda 1984, in practice, the Russians managed to run a totalitarian state without video cameras so I think they're irrelevant. If you're a government that's serious about surveillance, you employ police informers, and lots of 'em.
.... whoosh
On the other hand, I must confess to being a little bit nostaligc for the days when I could urinate in the street with impunity
jsm
You'd actually be safe on this charge, although I daresay they'd try to bluff you. There's no law against acting like a dick, a technicality I have regularly had cause to be thankful for. The offence of "wasting police time" is usually used to prosecute people who make hoax alarm calls.
...."
At a demo once, I kept on making bottle-throwing motions as we passed policemen. I got so good at it that one of them fell flat on the ground because he thought he'd been petrol-bombed. Policemen hate this shit. So he pulled me out of the crowd, searched me, couldn't really pin anything. So he tried to fake me:
"Wasting police time is a serious offence"
"Really? Is it? How fascinating! Tell me more
He didn't get that joke either.
jsm
. If 1,000,000 pounds of copper could be made into gold... Then I would imagine it would have something of an effect on the price. We like paper currency because it means that the money supply doesn't depend on technological advances in dentistry. We can lower the interest rate when there's a recession, or raise it when there's inflation, by altering the money supply rather than trying to manipulate the price of gold. Paper currency not backed by gold is my tip for the greatest invention of the twentieth century. jsm
I'm glad to see the enemy has a name.
Sadly, the name of the enemy is "capitalism" and "corporatism" is a bit of a weasel phrase invented to try to give the implication that the terrible corporations who do such bad things are in some way different from the people who make the fantastic stuff. I don't like this because it obscures the Faustian bargain we've struck -- in order to get the economic system which delivers the most best goods cheapest, we have to put up with its habit of creating selfish, powerful entities of limited humanity. Call a spade a spade and admit that these are problems of capitalism per se.
Actually, I seem to remember "corporatism" being used in the past to describe a kind of three-way partnership between unions, companies and government. Kind of like the economic model of France and Germany. It produces fewer neato toys, but leaves you more time and space to enjoy them.
jsm
Like it or not, trade has always benefited human beings - even going back to when the settlers came over to what is now known the United States. There was trade with the Native American Indians.
(Score: 2, Funny)
This concept still holds true today, with nations. Nations as a goal will better from free trade.
Diminishing returns sets in, however. The marginal benefits from an extension of free trade from the current regime would most likely be small. And this whole analysis only works if what you want is the kind of goods that free trade will provide. It's great for toasters and automobiles -- less wonderful if what you need is clean air and a sea that stays below sea level.
Our self preservation instinct should be kicking in right about now and realizing that free trade is the way to go.
Self-preservation? WTO rules have made it more difficult for the EU to ban animal hormones in human food, for the USA to regulate asbestos, etc, etc. You may think that this is a Good Thing, but shouldn't it be at least relevant that the democratically elected governments of these countries disagree? The WTO is an unaccountable technocratic body.
I am unsure that the Seatlle rioters realize this.
Comments?
I'm pretty sure they realise it. I actually agree with your ecoonomic reasoning, but it's not an economic problem. It's a political problem about how important the benefits of trade are to countries compared to the benefits of keeping their own sovereignty and democracy.
jsm
If you really give a f**k about security (which is not something I necessarily recommend -- most systems contain "proprietary information" which your competitors wouldn't bother reading if you sent it to them FedEx with a sticker marked "URGENT"), then you shouldn't be messing around with passwords anyway. Long experience of this sort of thing has convinced me that you will never, ever, convince yer average user to follow good password practice, because it breaks the first law of IT -- it is inconvenient for the user. Only the fact that very few systems in the world are worth breaking into stops cracking from becoming endemic.
Smart-card key systems are reasonably cheap and should be used for anything worth protecting (clue: most corporate networks are not worth protecting). If your data is important to you (clue: five terabytes of Powerpoint presentations are not important) then you should be prepared to pay up for a system that can be kept physically secure.
For everything else, you can afford to be lax. Occasionally come down hard on someone for installing a virus, have a compulsory passworded screensaver to protect your system from the cleaners, but don't turn the IT department into laughable NSA wannabes.
The way I look at it is this -- if you get a serious compromise on an average network, you could lose a day's work. Draconian password practices will cost you that every six months in forgotten passwords, etc.
jsm
This is why those legislators and officials should keep their hands off the internet. Any attempt to "rigorize" something as organic as this would only result in hampering the Internet's development and growth.
ahem [cough] agriculture.
Planting Kansas with one kind of wheat would be a bad move, but as a survival strategy, hanging around in the "ecosystem", hoping that the bushes around you will sprout something edible has been known to be dominated for a fair few years.
jsm
Way back when yahoo was a couple pages with lots of cool links, it was survival of the fittest. Now it's survival of the richest, or those that can spam the most, or target the best ads, or plant the most (irrelevant) keywords getting so much of the attention
Well, this is the trouble with Darwinian theory. It lures you in with "survival of the fittest" and then belatedly informs you that "fittest" just means "whatever survives".
In general, I think that biology is being used here because genetics is sexy, and that what we're actually seeing is the economic geography of the Web. Economic geography has some points of tangency with evolutionary biology, but fewer than you'd think (basically, in biology, change is random; in economic geog. it is assumed that individuals are rational). Thinking about the Web as a "Darwinian environment" and talking about "rich environments for scavengers" is likely to lead to fewer useful insights than an analysis based on switching costs, path-dependency and agglomeration.
And of course, the biological model doesn't model regulation very well, which IMO makes it pretty inappropriate for any long-term forecasting of web trends.
jsm
For example, their use of the term "spoofing" does not match my understanding of the word.
I think I'm going to have to take my lumps on this one. I was using a generalised concept of spoofing as meaning any attempt to create false messages to a system, and it got lifted without noting that it wasn't the generally used sense of the word.
Oh well.
jsm
Were a lot of these Slashdot quotes simply paraphrased?
I think so. I got a kind of sense of deja vu reading the text outside quote marks.
jsm
OK, my dear chap, chuckle away:
Piero Sraffa did a fair amount of hard time in the 1940s making sure that ill-informed critiques like yours fell apart.
BY the way, the claim that:
Price setting (you can also say priority setting) is a basic function of economics
is a fairly extreme one and not one that many neoclassicla economists would make. And furthermore, Marxist econ. is entirely compatiable with laissez-faire goods markets.
Before you spout off in future, do feel free to RTFFAQ
toodle pip
jsm
As Karl Marx pointed out.
...and then advocated taking all of it instead.
If Karl Marx, the author of Capital advocated taking all the rewards of labour (as opposed to Capital) and giving it to somebody else (presumably not the Capital owners), then he certainly wrote about it somewhere other than in his famous book, "Capital".
jsm
Then you would not fare well in European warfare. The Mongolian composite bow is a perfectly fine weapon for hunting, or to carry on the move, but it cannot be compared for military effectiveness to the English (actually Welsh, but who's counting longbow). The longbow was more in the nature of a portable siege engine than a hand weapon. Massed ranks of longbows would have a far better effective range (effective in puncturing breastplates, that is) than the composite bow.
jsm
A worker with a lathe can shape metal many times faster. The owner of the lathe, the "capitalist" who invested in it, is responsible for some fraction of the increased production; it is not "stolen", it is rightfully the owner's.
Capital is productive, but "ownership" is not a productive activity. The owner has not produced anything. "Stolen" is obviously a word which only makes sense in the context of a system of laws, but it seems clear to me that some of the value produced by the interaction of labour and capital has been legally expropriated by someone not involved in the production process.
It so happens that this is the best and fairest way to get goods produced, but we shouldn't let that trick us into saying things about production that aren't true.
A lot of people make this same mistake when they claim that the GPL is restrictive because "It restricts what you can do with your code". This only makes sense if you consider "declaring this code to be proprietary" to be "doing something with the code", which it isn't, not if you stop to think about it.
Marx's politics were full of holes. His economics is susceptible of full axiomatisation, and stands up mathematically. Which is certainly more than you can say for Austrian economics.
jsm