Well, that they do. Also magical Star Trek transporters, which are about as likely.
Remember the SSC in the late 80s? That needed a mere 50 miles or so of evacuated 6-inch diameter tunnel, in a ring, with very little in the way of switching. Cost was estimated as $14 billion 1985 dollars ($25 billion 2007 dollars) before it was canceled.
Normal interstates cost about an average of $1 million per mile to build, and we have about 55,000 miles of them. Now imagine a mere 10,000 miles, say, of evacuated tunnel, enough to provide main lines from coast to coast, and north and south, more or less duplicating I-5, I-95, I-40, and I-80. Hard to imagine a cost of less than $200 million per mile, about half what the SSC estimated cost was, and a mere 200 times what it costs to just lay down a flat ribbon of concrete (plus the occasional bridge). At that rate, it would cost $20 trillion just to get the network of evacuated tubes built, roughly all of the Federal tax receipts (including Social Security) for the next 10 years.
Seems likely to me this suffers from several serious problems:
(1) I can't easily believe it's more efficient. Granted, you use a fair amount of energy raising a jetliner to 40,000 feet, but it can't be that much, compared to what you need to use to keep it levitated and push air out of the way at 600 knots for hours and hours -- and a maglev train needs to do that, too. Indeed, air resistance is surely much higher on the maglev train, which has to operate near sea level instead of at the significantly lower air pressures in the stratosphere.
(2) You've got an incredible infrastructure problem. Essentially, you've got to build the entire Interstate highway system over again -- only this time it can't be just smooth concrete, it's got to be ultrasmooth, ultrastraight rails kept in alignment to the nearest micrometer along thousands of miles, in rain or shine, snow or mud or hurricane or flood, and with marvelous superconducting magnet windings all along them that have to be kept in absolutely perfect working order all the time, because you can't afford one small booboo in your levitation when you're flying along near the speed of sound 1.5 inches off the ground. I can't even imagine how you're going to switch maglev trains from one track to another while they're blistering along at 600 MPH. Those are going to be some very, very expensive switches.
Thing is, with airplanes you only need to build airports, and that's really only just laying down a big long strip of concrete and installing radar. You don't need to build much stuff between destination cities. You also don't need to lay down power along the entire route of every route they fly, because the motor goes along with the carriage.
(3) You've got an amazing safety issue. In the stratosphere there's not much you can run into at jet speeds, fortunately. But on the ground? Say a 50 pound rock falls off a rock face and dings the marvelous superconducting track, so that when the maglev train comes along 20 minutes later it hits a "dry spot" and the carriage dips down 3 inches and hits the ground at 600 knots. BOOM. You'd have to identify the passengers by DNA analysis of tiny bone fragments.
(4) Noise? I live next to a major rail line, and those things are noisy enough at 60-80 MPH. If they came by at 600, it wouldn't be possible to live within half a mile of the track. How does that square with the fact that most of the travel would be to and through major urban areas? Thing about airplanes is, except for within a few miles of the airport, you can't hear them because they fly two miles or more above us.
However...it seems to me that when you leave the realm of noble ideals and get down to grubby details, there's going to be trouble.
I mean, suppose a "Net Neutrality" law were passed that says an ISP can't discriminate against packets based on their source or destination IP addresses, but can do so based on the port number (25 = email, 80 = web, et cetera). The problem I'd see is, first, that port number is a pretty crude and arbitrary classification of type of traffic. Plenty of folks distribute files via either http (port 80) or ftp (ports 20/21). Other people use tunnels to send all kinds of stuff over SSH (port 22). Gigantic amounts of stuff goes over port 80 (http) and 25 (email), and surely it's unreasonable to classify all of it as "like" traffic. Should an ISP not be legally allowed to discriminate against spam from a known spammer, just because it uses the same port (25) as real personal e-mail? That seems silly.
Now, I understand that clever network engineers can do more subtle analysis of packets than just looking at the port number, and take a crack at figuring out what application sent them, et cetera.
But I figure the fathead doddering lawyers in Congress are just barely smart enough to understand a law forcing ISPs to treat all traffic with the same port number the same way. You think they are capable of drafting a law that works for any and all more subtle and complex methods of traffic analysis, both those now extant and any anyone dreams up in the future, and neatly forbids that which is "evil, unfair" discrimination (e.g. against Democratic activists) while allowing "good" discrimination (e.g. against spammers)? And then your local prosecutor and judge are also going to be able to interpret that law correctly, every time, so that they burn the people they should and spare those they should?
Mmmm....that doesn't pass the laugh test with me.
There are plenty of things in life -- good relations with the boss and wife, having parents who properly raise their children, picking the right career, having good health and good luck -- which are clearly desirable but for which, alas, the law is a hopelessly crude instrument with which to try to compel their existence. Perhaps "net neutrality" is one of them. Personally, I'd say the folks who want Congress to jump in and start setting rules left and right about IP traffic should sit down and think long and hard about what happens when lawyers start meddling in their affairs. I've never known the intervention of lawyers and PR people (i.e. politicians) to be something I welcomed. Frankly, I'd think a semi-anarchist community which hates being overseen by incompetent egoistic under-educated managers primarily interested in self-promotion (which aptly describes Congress) would recoil in horror from such a prospect.
Re:business and government are run by aliens?
on
GAO Report Slams FCC
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I'm sorry, this is just silly. A "corporation" is not a space alien from Mars, either.
I mean, are you self-employed, unemployed, or what? Don't you work for a "corporation"? If so, then like me, you know that a "corporation" is a collection of workers and managers plus a base of satisfied investors and customers. (Please note you can't be a successful corporation without the latter.)
In other words, a corporation represents quite a large group of citizens, and they're all tied together by some significant common interest that has them exchanging money with each other all the time. If I work for LEGO, then I have skills that LEGO needs (designing toys). I have common interests with my managers (like them, I want the world to buy more LEGOs at higher prices, so my salary goes up). I have common interests also with my customers (like them, I want the component of the cost of LEGOs other than my salary to be as low as possible, so the price of LEGOs is as little more than my salary as possible, so folks buy plenty of them). I have common interests with our shareholders, too, of course, for obvious reasons.
Of course, I also have interests that conflict with the interests of my bosses, the shareholders, and the customers. That's human nature. That's why I belong to more than one interest group. I'm a LEGO employee but also (say) a member of the LEGO workers union, and a member of the Save Our Planet From Plastic Garbage pressure group that agitates for less plastic packaging around LEGO toys, et cetera and so forth. I'm in the middle of several groups, some of which sometimes come into conflict, which presents me with painful choices sometimes. (That's life, too.)
Nevertheless, clearly one of the most important of the organizations to which I, a citizen, belong, is the corporation that employs me. So actually, of all the social organizations to which citizens belong, corporations are one of the most important, if not the most important.
Perhaps you're confused by thinking that your most important interests are as a shopper, a consumer, someone at leisure. So you focus on those organizations that are oriented around your shopping, consuming, and leisure-time activities. But that's dumb. Most of your waking life you spend working, not on vacation, being a producer, not a consumer. And most of life's nastiest surprises come as threats to your role as producer, not consumer. It's far more traumatic to lose your job, or become disabled and unable to work, than to have to pay higher prices at the gas pump or be unable to buy a non-DRM copy of Bladerunner. If you're rational, you'll pay somewhat more attention to the organizations that allow you to be a producer in the way you want, that allow you to have a satisfying, well-paying job.
Without "corporations," we're all just Neanderthals scratching in the dirt, individually. It's banding together voluntarily to tackle jobs too big for any one of us that gives us this nice modern lifestyle. Decrying the fact that when we do band together the bands have a lot of influence is sort of goofy. Like complaining that when you get rich you have to suddenly start making all these difficult decisions of where to invest your money.
Re:business and government are run by aliens?
on
GAO Report Slams FCC
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· Score: 1
The most powerful lobbies are, pretty much by definition, those that represent the largest number of citizens from the broadest possible coalition of interests groups. Why do you suppose government is very solicitous of organizations like the AARP? Because they represent a very large group of people (folks over 55) who have more than the ordinary amount of money to spend, who represent lots of various political persuasions (so every politician, of any party, wants to be on their good side), and because they vote in high percentages.
Lobbies that represent a handful of wealthy individuals tend to be less influential, the ravings of assorted crypto-Marxists notwithstanding. Why would they be? How much influence can George Soros or Bill Gates really wield? They can't give more than a measly few grand to any one political candidate, and they've only got one vote each. That doesn't mean they have the same influence as Joe Sixpack. Clearly they have much more. But one millionaire has far less political influence than a million Joe Sixpacks, each with a dollar and a vote to give away to the right politician.
It's the government's job to balance special interests with the interests which are for the good of the people.
God forbid. First of all, you'd need to come up with a good operational difference between "special" interests and "the good of the people." Good luck with that. Philosophers have been working on how to measure "the good of the people" for, oh, a round four or five thousands years or so. Not much progress yet.
It's easy to know what any given person, or group of persons want. We can just ask them. Even better, in a democracy, they organize and tell us, vociferously. (That's lobbying.) But how do we interrogate The People? How do we know what is good for the people, including people who don't vote, people not yet born, and despite what actual persons think is good for them? (If a teacher asked a group of algebra students whether an algebra test tomorrow was "good for them," do you suppose the students would say 'yes'? Know any 12-year-olds who volunteer to go in for a measles booster shot? Why do people smoke when it says right on the package that it'll give them lung cancer, a frightful disease? Folks don't always know what's good for them, or act logically on the knowledge they do have.)
Secondly, you'll need to find a race of space aliens with much higher intelligence than mere humans to do the sorting you propose. Because there's just no way a handful of ordinary people are smart enough and disciplined enough to do this magnificant fine-grained sorting you want them to do, deciphering the difference between what all these random groups of shouting people say they want and what's ultimately good for all 300 million of us in the long run. Ordinary real men and women are only middling successful in deciding what's best for themselves and their immediate family over the long run. Asking a few men and women to decide delicate matters for 300 million souls is an exercise in incredibly wishful thinking.
So I have a better idea. Why not just let those groups of people yell out what they all want, and the commissioners make decisions according to (in order)...
(1) What the law says they have to do,
(2) What the loudest and most persistent voices representing the largest and most diverse groups of citizens are shouting,
(3) A determination to be cautious, and not undertake wild experimental deviations from past policy without good reason, and
(4) Common sense.
That sounds wiser. Not perfect, but maybe as good a machine as we can build out of imperfect building blocks (humans). Of course, that's what we have now. And those evil lobbyists are an essential part of the machine.
The difficulty is that you have two changes to weigh here: the HD and the DRM. Both are movements away from SD and non-DRM media. What you need to ask yourself is whether the positive (SD to HD) outweighs the negative (non-DRM to DRM).
But not positive in terms of your own dislikes. That doesn't matter. What matters is which step (SD to HD or DRM to non-DRM) is more difficulty for the industry to take, e.g. which costs more and requires more engineering and social cleverness, more motivation from the market, et cetera. Whichever is harder to get the market to do is the step you value higher, and should reward, even if the other step is negative. That's a basic principle in conditioning. That's why (for example) we reward a child for speaking incorrectly ("I eated the spaghetti!"). We realize it's best to reward the progress towards speaking, even incorrectly, because it's easier to reverse the mistake in verb tense than to get the child to start speaking in whole sentences in the first place.
So it's not really about our mutual personal likes and dislikes -- it's about the industry's barriers to change. Now, the argument is widely made (e.g. on Slashdot) that the transition from SD to HD is difficult. Expensive, requires much technological innovation, blah blah. And the transition from DRM to non-DRM is incredibly easy -- it's only "corporate greed" that prevents it anyway, so it could be done by just a few suits having a change of heart and getting with the program.
If that is true, then the logical thing to do is reward the big, difficult step (SD to HD), even though it's accompanied by a bad step (non-DRM to DRM) because correcting the mistaken transition to DRM is much easier than motivating the transition to HD in the first place. Just like it's easier to correct the verb tense in the young child than to get him to begin to frame whole sentences.
On the other hand, one should do just as you propose -- boycott DRM HD -- if you believe the contrary: that reversing a decision to build in DRM is much harder than going to HD. You should punish the {go to HD, go to DRM} combination, because you're better off if the combination is reversed (we go back to SD, non-DRM). In other words, you'd be saying this path:
{HD,DRM} to {SD,non-DRM} to {HD,non-DRM}
is easier (requires less market motivation) than this path:
{HD,DRM} to {HD,non-DRM}.
Which would be true if the industry costs for DRM to non-DRM are much higher than for SD to HD. That might well be true. Most/. denizens argue the other way, but then being (mostly) geeks they tend to mistakenly think that technological barriers are the most important capital costs of innovation. The fact that there might be very high socially-induced costs associated with moving to non-DRM in an era of broadband-connected digital file sharing tends to fall into their mental blind spot.
business and government are run by aliens?
on
GAO Report Slams FCC
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Who do you suppose "lobbyists" represent? Aliens from Mars?
"Lobbyist" is just a short way to say "a representative of a group of citizens who all have some common interest and pool their money to hire someone to let elected officials know how they feel (and will vote)." Business groups (like oil companies) have lobbyists, and so do unions (like the UAW, CWA, or AFL-CIO), and so do consumer groups, environmental groups, senior citizens' groups, animal breeder groups, Jewish groups, Muslim and evangelist groups, pro- and anti-immigration groups, pro- and anti-gun control groups, PETA and cattle ranchers, et cetera and so forth.
Or are you thinking "citizens" means only those folks who have no "business" interests at all? Folks without a job, who own nothing? Teenagers living in mom's basement?
In the real adult world, we all have economic interests. If we're employed in the radio industry -- making radios, selling radios, selling products on radio shows, hosting radio shows, reporting on the news, et cetera and so forth -- or if we make use of the radio industry -- we listen to radio shows and watch TV, or we use cell phones -- then we have opinions about how the FCC should regulate use of the airwaves. Almost certainly conflicting opinions.
Do you feel those opinions should not be presented forcefully to the government bureaucrats who make decisions affecting our interests? Should we just wait around, silent and respectful, while our betters on the FCC tell us what's good for us? Should every one of us who wants to be heard be forced to take time off from work to fly out to Washington to testify every time the FCC holds hearings (every four weeks, maybe)? Or does it sound kinda' reasonable and economical if a bunch of us with similar interests and opinions might hire some good talker to go to Washington and make our case for us on a regular basis? Which is what lobbying is.
Maybe what you're doing, in the hysterical spirit of the times, is confusing lobbying ("speaking up about what you want to your elected officials") with corruption (bribing elected officials). They're not the same. For one thing, the latter is a crime. For another, it's inherently anti-democratic, whereas there's very little more democratic than groups of citizens vying for influence through their freely chosen representatives (i.e. those evil lobbyists).
I'm not disagreeing about the detail of the path towards a new market. That's pretty arcane stuff. Usually it's only (barely) possible to understand why a market shifted the way it did long after the fact, with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight.
All I'm really saying is that, generally speaking, buying has a greater influence on the market than not buying. That's because cash actually in the bank has a greater psychological influence on people than theoretical cash that could be in the bank if X instead of Y were done. After all, the theoretical cash might not materialize after all. You never know.
So, for example, if someone were to form an organization with the purpose of effectively killing off DRM, the way to do it would certainly not be to tell their members to boycott everyone who had even a hint of DRM in their plans. That would make you as "effective" as --- flamebait comin' up -- Cory Doctorow and the EFF and other such academic-minded purists, i.e. not at all. What such an organization should do is encourage its members to buy stuff, e.g. music, from whomever has the most DRM-hostile tendencies no matter how slight those tendencies are. That will drive the market in that direction far more effectively.
This is just Skinnerian operant conditioning used on humans. When BF Skinner wanted to make a bird hop on one foot, he didn't start off waiting until the bird hopped on one foot, then reward it. It never would. What he did was watch for the bird to do anything that was even a little bit in the direction he wanted -- say, shifting its weight more onto one foot, even the wrong foot, and then reward this tiny bit of progress. Then he'd wait for another small step towards the final goal. Surprisingly fast, he could get the bird to do what he wanted. The principle is general: a sequence of real, small, repeated rewards starting right now have much more effective impact than a theoretical, large reward that may occur long in the future.
It's Verizon's copper. They can do anything they damn well please with the stuff. They're not "preventing" competitors from competing -- said competitors can always make the same capital investment Verizon (or rather its predecessor telcos) did and lay copper down the street.
The only "competition" they're preventing is from assorted freeloaders who'd like to compete using someone else's capital investment. Hell, I'd like to "compete" that way, too. So I think the government should force all you yokels out there to send me part of your home equity so that I can use the cash to start a company. Since society will ultimately be better for it (you can just trust me on that) y'all should have no cause to complain.
Well, sure, but your numbers are whacked, pretty much by definition, if you think some "clever" plan can outwit everyone else and give you a better return for not much more risk. You might as well argue that some "clever" bit of machinery can outwit the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
Trust me, the free market in capital guarantees that the payoff is always exactly inversely proportional to the risk -- with the (arguably important) exception of those capital markets into which government sticks its almighty stupid if supposedly well-meaning fingers.
Now try this thought experiment: Amazon just started selling DRM-free MP3s over the Web. Would that have happened had Apple's iTunes store not made huge profits? Nope. The suits at Amazon, believe it or not, don't give a flying fsck about DRM and the consumer's "rights" or the RIAA's moral code or anything else under the Sun except making enough profit to get a fat raise this year so they can pay their kids' college tuition and still have enough left over to take a trip to Hawaii. They'll sell you anything that makes money, and nothing that doesn't.
Prior to iTunes, there was scant evidence that you could make money selling music tune by tune in a compressed (lossy) digital format. If anything, the evidence from the old-fashioned "hi-fi" music industry was that the money to be made was not in mass sales of cheap, low-quality bits of pop music, but in modest sales of increasingly higher quality music in bigger chunks. CDs were preferred by consumers over LPs and cassettes because the music sounded much better and because you could get more on a single chunk of media -- you didn't have to flip the record or cassette over, you could get "bonus tracks," and later even bonus video or what-have-you on the CD. Who would have thought the future lay in selling bits of songs in compressed format that doesn't compare to CD quality, where you get nothing physical to keep, no liner notes, no "bonuses" or Side Bs?
But of course Apple proved the prior assumptions completely wrong and iTunes made a pile of money for them. Now Amazon wants a piece of that action and wonders on what basis they can one-up iTunes. Enter the DRM issue. Assuming Amazon makes lots of money and even cuts into Apple's profits, then expect everyone, Apple included, to abandon the DRM bandwagon.
It's not folks holding out for perfection who drive market changes. It's the folks who pick the best (or least worst) option out of the existing market. I'm not suggesting anyone deliberately buy stuff they don't want to influence the market in some microscopic way. I'm just pointing out that perfectionists in any area have pretty much zero long-term influence. That's just the nature of perfectionism.
If I buy into the HD technology at all (I probably will not until DRM is busted)...
Thus ensuring that the market forces that shape the final outcome won't include you. Brilliant!
Reminds me of all the libertarians who swear they'll refuse to vote for anybody until a true libertarian appears on a major party's ticket, thus pretty much guaranteeing that one never will.
Yes...but how do you suppose you ever do make money on the Next Big Thing, if you never take what looks at the time like quite a risk?
The rate of return on an investment is always determined by its risk. That's because the rate of return is the "price" those who want the capital must pay for the right to borrow your money. Obviously if the investment is quite safe, borrowers can pay a low price for your money. That's why the US Treasury can pay a measly 4 to 5% interest on the money it borrows. It's a very safe investment.
On the other hand, people who think they have the Next Big Thing, technology-wise, and are rushing to bring it to market without a totally clear idea of how they'll monetize the whole shebang are clearly presenting you with a very risky investment, and hence must pay enormous rates of return to get your money. So that kind of investment pays hugely, when it pays at all. It's basically the only way ordinary people (people not gifted with superhuman looks or athletic ability) can get rich.
It's all well and good to inveigh against "foolish" risk with your (or your stockholders') money -- as long as everyone is willing to settle for a 1% real rate of return, so everyone can stay middle class, and no one's ever going to get rich. But if you have bigger ambitions -- if you insist on the chance to strike it big -- then there is no option other than taking 'foolish' risks, because only risks that look foolish to cooler heads will ever pay off big.
(And of course when they do pay off, the cooler heads will immediately fall all over themselves explaining how it was actually clear that this investment was clever and low-risk, and the fact that the cooler heads didn't invest in it themselves at the time was due to some curious accident, a conspiracy, a missed phone call, it all happened before they were born, or whatever.)
(1) Do you really think processes gain considerably in effectiveness merely by being formalized and having a nice office to meet in? If so, you belong in some big wealthy company's upper management. As Vice-President in Charge of Vice-Presidencies, something like that, where you can do minimal harm.
(2) Are you really under the impression that impassioned profanity-laced sloganeering is a plausible substitute for reasoned argument? Did this work real well for you in high school or something? There's not even any point in debating your "points" -- a collection of pathetically threadbare tropes from the heyday of multiculti socalism-lite, lovingly preserved in public education systems throughout the Western world for the past forty years. 21st century reality has moved way beyond you, Rip van Winkle. Only college students and other naifs traffic in that stuff nowadays.
(3) Are you unaware that of the institutions you mentioned (GATT, WTO, the World Bank, and the IMF) none is "associated" with the UN in the obvious sense of being answerable to it? Each is independently governed by its own board, according to its own rules. Are you just thinking that any organization with "World" or "International" in its title (maybe the World Wildlife Fund!) is "associated" with the UN?
(4) For charity's sake I will assume you know the WTO is the successor to the GATT, so that your putting both on the list was an attempt to be historically complete, rather than mere cluelessness.
(5) I'd sure love to hear about a "war between major armies" that was prevented by the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, hee hee. Care to relate the scary tale? Panzers massed on the border between (say) Germany and Italy, the clock ticking down to mutual ultimata deadlines, the sweating ministers of...er...finance...hashing out an acceptable compromise on...um...whether or not Germany and Italy will lift their reciprocal tariffs on imported olive oil. Golly!
Hmm...or could it be you imagine all the big wars are over economics, really, when you come right down to it? It's all about the oil, access to markets, the mighty military-industrial complex needing to sell its goods, et cetera, all that classical 19th-century Marxist pseudo-thought? Maybe you're a time-traveler from the 1890s?
Well then he's wrong. We know quite a bit about how the eye-brain combination processes color information, and the problem of gracefully degrading color information bandwidth is sufficiently well understood that it can be automated.
Not so with object boundaries. We know so little about how the eye-brain segments visual scenes into foreground objects and background noise -- and distinguishes between different objects versus objects that have merely moved -- that we can't even duplicate it in software, much less figure out how to automate some kind of graceful degradation of object boundary information bandwidth. That's why it takes an artist to do the job convincingly. You can't even rely on someone who is intelligent and well-informed on on the science of vision -- you need someone with an intuitive "artistic" grasp of how to convey object boundaries with less and less information.
As another commenter points out, the UN in and of itself has zero power. It has no army, no police, no way of enforcing its will at all. The only power it gets is from member nations.
But if the only real power involved is the power of member nations, why don't the member nations just act and cut out the UN "middleman"? This is, after all, historically the way international action has been carried out. European governments trying to cope with Napoleon, the Kaiser, Hitler or (going further back) the Mongol or Ottoman invaders didn't feel a need to create a standing bureaucracy to validate by inscribing (in five official languages) on parchment what they'd already collectively decided to do. They just acted, forming governing councils and agreements as and where they were needed -- and not otherwise.
So why don't we do that nowadays? If Darfur (or Burma) is an international outrage, and most every reasonable person agrees on what should be done, what's to stop the four or five biggest countries from just forming an ad hoc Stop The Burma Slaughter task force, assigning it 25,000 troops and a naval task force, and punching the Go button?
Nothing, really. Except that this silly imaginary "world government" called the UN exists, and because it exists the major countries are off the hook. If you ask why doesn't somebody DO something, everyone can point to the UN as the agency that should be doing the doing.
In short, the UN pretty clearly now exists as a substitute for coordinated, effective international action. It's like how, in Congress or a university, if you want to just quietly kill a proposal for action, you refer it to a committee for a report. The UN exists so that big nations can ignore sticky problems by referring them to the UN for a report...or a vote on "sanctions"...whatever. You can look like you're doing something with actually, well, doing something.
Since Americans have always tended to favor action over talk, they tend to take a dim view of an institution which effectively and efficiently functions to replace action with talk. That's not what the UN is supposed to do, of course, but that's what it actually does. Yet another illustration of the Law of Unintended Consequences: there'd be much more effective international humanitarian action if the UN did not exist.
Sure. But I read "symbolism" in this context as "license to bullshit vaguely without defining your terms in a way that might leave you open to counter-argument." Useful stuff in a class on literary criticism for English majors, so everyone can be right in their own particular way. Totally worthless to someone with a more scientific or engineering frame of mind, who wants to pin stuff down so that it's measurably true or false. Since I'm not a lawyer or English major, I consider this kind of symbolism to be worthless.
Think beyond your literal shell if you could.
Why? So I can appreciate the Cosmic Oneness of it All? Be more open to Ultimate Truths that are too truthy for mere words and grubby logic? No thanks. Tried smoking that stuff once in college, found out it interferes with being able to solve differential equations and earn a good salary.
And I'm curious on how "you" and "your friends" who are excluded from the inability to "influence" Exxon is. Do you walk to work? Good for you.
You've misunderstood me. In this world, the way it actually is, I have influence over Exxon, the same as any other customer. If I don't like their product, or their behavior, I can not buy their gas. They can't force me to buy it. However, in the fantasy world that the OP would like to live in, where his "we" has great influence over Exxon, I would lose the small influence I presently have. Because his "we" wouldn't include me. So basically he and his friends get to determine what Exxon does, and, therefore, what kind of gas or other energy supplies I get to buy. I'm not in favor of that. I like my freedom.
Whatever, dude. Would you like to assert that the Constitution doesn't specify the right of "persons" to be represented in Congress anywhere at all? Does it matter where, precisely, it lies? Does that change my point, that the Constitution says all kinds of things about "persons" that only a nitwit would assume must apply to every organism that fits the dictionary definition of "person"?
Or is it your position that any mistake whatever in an argument vitiates the whole thing? So for example if I had misspelled "Constitution" then my entire argument would necessarily be trash? Come to think of it, I guess that would be what passes for "logic" on/. much of the time.
Certainly any responsible politician would want to hear from someone who foams hysterically at the mouth because he thinks (having apparently been stoned throughout all of 8th-grade civics class) that Congress can by a simple majority vote suspend a right guaranteed in the Constitution. Such a herd beast could probably be convinced to believe anything, which is as useful to a politician as to any other con man.
Look out! Aliens are invading the Earth and taking over your neighbor's mind! Anal probes! You could be next! Send my campaign $100 quick so I can stop this terrible menace to your freedoms! Call now and have your credit card ready, operators are standing by...
The rights written in the Bill of Rights apply to all humans
No shit? Let's read the first sentence of the Bill of Rights, then:
"After the first enumeration required by the first article of the Constitution, there shall be one representative for every thirty thousand, until the number shall amount to one hundred, after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall be not less than one hundred representatives, nor less than one representative for every forty thousand persons."
Son of gun, you're right, it says "persons" not "citizens!" So I guess every forty thousand persons -- anywhere on the planet, whether or not they're the subject of some other king, or citizen of some other republic -- have been entitled to a representative in the US Congress since 1789. Amazing! And those bastards in Washington have just ignored this fundamental right of South Africans, Samoans, Libyans and Mongolians since the very founding of the Republic. Most of the planet has been disenfranchised for the last 220 years, apparently.
Not only that...did you notice they didn't make a distinction between criminals and free citizens? So all felons worldwide -- Nazi war criminals, Stalin's secret policemen, Pol Pot and his henchmen, Idi Amin's murdering thugs, and South African apartheidists -- have always been entitled to vote in American elections, too.
For that matter, they didn't make a distinction between adults and children, either! So this business of not letting people vote until they're old enough to, say, read and write, is totally unconstitutional.
Although...I suppose a cynic might say that the context of the Bill of Rights matters, and that only an idiot would assume the "persons" the document addresses are meant to be understood as all people everywhere, anytime as opposed to, say, the "people" specifically addressed in the opening sentence ("We the People of the United States....do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America...")
That was the most misleading and infantile summary of a worthless piece of sloganeering shit I have ever seen on this site. I'm impressed you're even willing to argue the point(s) raised in the linked article, since the gross intellectual dishonesty apparent in the article and the summary suggest the authors and any of their fellow travelers would be quite immune to the influence of reason and good sense.
Come on, family and social connections have been exploited from the beginning of crime and policing. If your brother is murdered, the cops are sure going to come around and talk to you and your sister, find out if there was any bad blood between you. If you're wife is killed, you better be in the next state at the time of death addressing a crowd of thousands if you don't want to be Suspect #1. Similarly, if your brother commits a crime, the police will come around and interrogate you, find out if you helped him, find out if you know where he's hiding.
Frankly, DNA evidence is a lot safer for the innocent than what usually passes for "evidence" in criminal investigation and trials, which is mostly the testimony of witnesses with grudges and agendas, faulty (or artfully reconstructed) memories, and other assorted fallible stuff.
What people don't often realize is that it's not a choice between the police using DNA evidence and the police doing without evidence at all. It's a choice between the law using DNA evidence and the law using shiftier, much more ambiguous evidence, like whether the victim picks you out of a line-up, or whether the jury thinks you look like a criminal and thinks you had a good motive. DNA evidence has generally proven to be the innocent defendant's friend. Just think about the Duke (non)rape case, for example. If it had happened twenty years ago, without DNA evidence, the defendants would now be rotting in jail for life. As it is, they're free men, and the "eyewitness" testimony of the accuser is widely believed to have been simply invented.
I wish it were only possible to convict someone with DNA evidence, and that it was collected from everybody pretty much as a matter of course. The remote fanciful possibility of some evil secret police of the future abusing the data someday worries me less than the possibility, in the here and now, of being wrongly convicted for a crime because I happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, or I look too much like someone else, or some telegenic "victim" (pretty white woman, distinguished US Senator with a wide stance, wealthy city councilman) with a grudge, hankering to be famous, or need for an excuse for their own crimes makes a false accusation. Brr.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, that they do. Also magical Star Trek transporters, which are about as likely.
Remember the SSC in the late 80s? That needed a mere 50 miles or so of evacuated 6-inch diameter tunnel, in a ring, with very little in the way of switching. Cost was estimated as $14 billion 1985 dollars ($25 billion 2007 dollars) before it was canceled.
Normal interstates cost about an average of $1 million per mile to build, and we have about 55,000 miles of them. Now imagine a mere 10,000 miles, say, of evacuated tunnel, enough to provide main lines from coast to coast, and north and south, more or less duplicating I-5, I-95, I-40, and I-80. Hard to imagine a cost of less than $200 million per mile, about half what the SSC estimated cost was, and a mere 200 times what it costs to just lay down a flat ribbon of concrete (plus the occasional bridge). At that rate, it would cost $20 trillion just to get the network of evacuated tubes built, roughly all of the Federal tax receipts (including Social Security) for the next 10 years.
Seems likely to me this suffers from several serious problems:
(1) I can't easily believe it's more efficient. Granted, you use a fair amount of energy raising a jetliner to 40,000 feet, but it can't be that much, compared to what you need to use to keep it levitated and push air out of the way at 600 knots for hours and hours -- and a maglev train needs to do that, too. Indeed, air resistance is surely much higher on the maglev train, which has to operate near sea level instead of at the significantly lower air pressures in the stratosphere.
(2) You've got an incredible infrastructure problem. Essentially, you've got to build the entire Interstate highway system over again -- only this time it can't be just smooth concrete, it's got to be ultrasmooth, ultrastraight rails kept in alignment to the nearest micrometer along thousands of miles, in rain or shine, snow or mud or hurricane or flood, and with marvelous superconducting magnet windings all along them that have to be kept in absolutely perfect working order all the time, because you can't afford one small booboo in your levitation when you're flying along near the speed of sound 1.5 inches off the ground. I can't even imagine how you're going to switch maglev trains from one track to another while they're blistering along at 600 MPH. Those are going to be some very, very expensive switches.
Thing is, with airplanes you only need to build airports, and that's really only just laying down a big long strip of concrete and installing radar. You don't need to build much stuff between destination cities. You also don't need to lay down power along the entire route of every route they fly, because the motor goes along with the carriage.
(3) You've got an amazing safety issue. In the stratosphere there's not much you can run into at jet speeds, fortunately. But on the ground? Say a 50 pound rock falls off a rock face and dings the marvelous superconducting track, so that when the maglev train comes along 20 minutes later it hits a "dry spot" and the carriage dips down 3 inches and hits the ground at 600 knots. BOOM. You'd have to identify the passengers by DNA analysis of tiny bone fragments.
(4) Noise? I live next to a major rail line, and those things are noisy enough at 60-80 MPH. If they came by at 600, it wouldn't be possible to live within half a mile of the track. How does that square with the fact that most of the travel would be to and through major urban areas? Thing about airplanes is, except for within a few miles of the airport, you can't hear them because they fly two miles or more above us.
An interesting distinction you make.
However...it seems to me that when you leave the realm of noble ideals and get down to grubby details, there's going to be trouble.
I mean, suppose a "Net Neutrality" law were passed that says an ISP can't discriminate against packets based on their source or destination IP addresses, but can do so based on the port number (25 = email, 80 = web, et cetera). The problem I'd see is, first, that port number is a pretty crude and arbitrary classification of type of traffic. Plenty of folks distribute files via either http (port 80) or ftp (ports 20/21). Other people use tunnels to send all kinds of stuff over SSH (port 22). Gigantic amounts of stuff goes over port 80 (http) and 25 (email), and surely it's unreasonable to classify all of it as "like" traffic. Should an ISP not be legally allowed to discriminate against spam from a known spammer, just because it uses the same port (25) as real personal e-mail? That seems silly.
Now, I understand that clever network engineers can do more subtle analysis of packets than just looking at the port number, and take a crack at figuring out what application sent them, et cetera.
But I figure the fathead doddering lawyers in Congress are just barely smart enough to understand a law forcing ISPs to treat all traffic with the same port number the same way. You think they are capable of drafting a law that works for any and all more subtle and complex methods of traffic analysis, both those now extant and any anyone dreams up in the future, and neatly forbids that which is "evil, unfair" discrimination (e.g. against Democratic activists) while allowing "good" discrimination (e.g. against spammers)? And then your local prosecutor and judge are also going to be able to interpret that law correctly, every time, so that they burn the people they should and spare those they should?
Mmmm....that doesn't pass the laugh test with me.
There are plenty of things in life -- good relations with the boss and wife, having parents who properly raise their children, picking the right career, having good health and good luck -- which are clearly desirable but for which, alas, the law is a hopelessly crude instrument with which to try to compel their existence. Perhaps "net neutrality" is one of them. Personally, I'd say the folks who want Congress to jump in and start setting rules left and right about IP traffic should sit down and think long and hard about what happens when lawyers start meddling in their affairs. I've never known the intervention of lawyers and PR people (i.e. politicians) to be something I welcomed. Frankly, I'd think a semi-anarchist community which hates being overseen by incompetent egoistic under-educated managers primarily interested in self-promotion (which aptly describes Congress) would recoil in horror from such a prospect.
I'm sorry, this is just silly. A "corporation" is not a space alien from Mars, either.
I mean, are you self-employed, unemployed, or what? Don't you work for a "corporation"? If so, then like me, you know that a "corporation" is a collection of workers and managers plus a base of satisfied investors and customers. (Please note you can't be a successful corporation without the latter.)
In other words, a corporation represents quite a large group of citizens, and they're all tied together by some significant common interest that has them exchanging money with each other all the time. If I work for LEGO, then I have skills that LEGO needs (designing toys). I have common interests with my managers (like them, I want the world to buy more LEGOs at higher prices, so my salary goes up). I have common interests also with my customers (like them, I want the component of the cost of LEGOs other than my salary to be as low as possible, so the price of LEGOs is as little more than my salary as possible, so folks buy plenty of them). I have common interests with our shareholders, too, of course, for obvious reasons.
Of course, I also have interests that conflict with the interests of my bosses, the shareholders, and the customers. That's human nature. That's why I belong to more than one interest group. I'm a LEGO employee but also (say) a member of the LEGO workers union, and a member of the Save Our Planet From Plastic Garbage pressure group that agitates for less plastic packaging around LEGO toys, et cetera and so forth. I'm in the middle of several groups, some of which sometimes come into conflict, which presents me with painful choices sometimes. (That's life, too.)
Nevertheless, clearly one of the most important of the organizations to which I, a citizen, belong, is the corporation that employs me. So actually, of all the social organizations to which citizens belong, corporations are one of the most important, if not the most important.
Perhaps you're confused by thinking that your most important interests are as a shopper, a consumer, someone at leisure. So you focus on those organizations that are oriented around your shopping, consuming, and leisure-time activities. But that's dumb. Most of your waking life you spend working, not on vacation, being a producer, not a consumer. And most of life's nastiest surprises come as threats to your role as producer, not consumer. It's far more traumatic to lose your job, or become disabled and unable to work, than to have to pay higher prices at the gas pump or be unable to buy a non-DRM copy of Bladerunner. If you're rational, you'll pay somewhat more attention to the organizations that allow you to be a producer in the way you want, that allow you to have a satisfying, well-paying job.
Without "corporations," we're all just Neanderthals scratching in the dirt, individually. It's banding together voluntarily to tackle jobs too big for any one of us that gives us this nice modern lifestyle. Decrying the fact that when we do band together the bands have a lot of influence is sort of goofy. Like complaining that when you get rich you have to suddenly start making all these difficult decisions of where to invest your money.
The most powerful lobbies are, pretty much by definition, those that represent the largest number of citizens from the broadest possible coalition of interests groups. Why do you suppose government is very solicitous of organizations like the AARP? Because they represent a very large group of people (folks over 55) who have more than the ordinary amount of money to spend, who represent lots of various political persuasions (so every politician, of any party, wants to be on their good side), and because they vote in high percentages.
Lobbies that represent a handful of wealthy individuals tend to be less influential, the ravings of assorted crypto-Marxists notwithstanding. Why would they be? How much influence can George Soros or Bill Gates really wield? They can't give more than a measly few grand to any one political candidate, and they've only got one vote each. That doesn't mean they have the same influence as Joe Sixpack. Clearly they have much more. But one millionaire has far less political influence than a million Joe Sixpacks, each with a dollar and a vote to give away to the right politician.
It's the government's job to balance special interests with the interests which are for the good of the people.
God forbid. First of all, you'd need to come up with a good operational difference between "special" interests and "the good of the people." Good luck with that. Philosophers have been working on how to measure "the good of the people" for, oh, a round four or five thousands years or so. Not much progress yet.
It's easy to know what any given person, or group of persons want. We can just ask them. Even better, in a democracy, they organize and tell us, vociferously. (That's lobbying.) But how do we interrogate The People? How do we know what is good for the people, including people who don't vote, people not yet born, and despite what actual persons think is good for them? (If a teacher asked a group of algebra students whether an algebra test tomorrow was "good for them," do you suppose the students would say 'yes'? Know any 12-year-olds who volunteer to go in for a measles booster shot? Why do people smoke when it says right on the package that it'll give them lung cancer, a frightful disease? Folks don't always know what's good for them, or act logically on the knowledge they do have.)
Secondly, you'll need to find a race of space aliens with much higher intelligence than mere humans to do the sorting you propose. Because there's just no way a handful of ordinary people are smart enough and disciplined enough to do this magnificant fine-grained sorting you want them to do, deciphering the difference between what all these random groups of shouting people say they want and what's ultimately good for all 300 million of us in the long run. Ordinary real men and women are only middling successful in deciding what's best for themselves and their immediate family over the long run. Asking a few men and women to decide delicate matters for 300 million souls is an exercise in incredibly wishful thinking.
So I have a better idea. Why not just let those groups of people yell out what they all want, and the commissioners make decisions according to (in order)...
(1) What the law says they have to do,
(2) What the loudest and most persistent voices representing the largest and most diverse groups of citizens are shouting,
(3) A determination to be cautious, and not undertake wild experimental deviations from past policy without good reason, and
(4) Common sense.
That sounds wiser. Not perfect, but maybe as good a machine as we can build out of imperfect building blocks (humans). Of course, that's what we have now. And those evil lobbyists are an essential part of the machine.
The difficulty is that you have two changes to weigh here: the HD and the DRM. Both are movements away from SD and non-DRM media. What you need to ask yourself is whether the positive (SD to HD) outweighs the negative (non-DRM to DRM).
/. denizens argue the other way, but then being (mostly) geeks they tend to mistakenly think that technological barriers are the most important capital costs of innovation. The fact that there might be very high socially-induced costs associated with moving to non-DRM in an era of broadband-connected digital file sharing tends to fall into their mental blind spot.
But not positive in terms of your own dislikes. That doesn't matter. What matters is which step (SD to HD or DRM to non-DRM) is more difficulty for the industry to take, e.g. which costs more and requires more engineering and social cleverness, more motivation from the market, et cetera. Whichever is harder to get the market to do is the step you value higher, and should reward, even if the other step is negative. That's a basic principle in conditioning. That's why (for example) we reward a child for speaking incorrectly ("I eated the spaghetti!"). We realize it's best to reward the progress towards speaking, even incorrectly, because it's easier to reverse the mistake in verb tense than to get the child to start speaking in whole sentences in the first place.
So it's not really about our mutual personal likes and dislikes -- it's about the industry's barriers to change. Now, the argument is widely made (e.g. on Slashdot) that the transition from SD to HD is difficult. Expensive, requires much technological innovation, blah blah. And the transition from DRM to non-DRM is incredibly easy -- it's only "corporate greed" that prevents it anyway, so it could be done by just a few suits having a change of heart and getting with the program.
If that is true, then the logical thing to do is reward the big, difficult step (SD to HD), even though it's accompanied by a bad step (non-DRM to DRM) because correcting the mistaken transition to DRM is much easier than motivating the transition to HD in the first place. Just like it's easier to correct the verb tense in the young child than to get him to begin to frame whole sentences.
On the other hand, one should do just as you propose -- boycott DRM HD -- if you believe the contrary: that reversing a decision to build in DRM is much harder than going to HD. You should punish the {go to HD, go to DRM} combination, because you're better off if the combination is reversed (we go back to SD, non-DRM). In other words, you'd be saying this path:
{HD,DRM} to {SD,non-DRM} to {HD,non-DRM}
is easier (requires less market motivation) than this path:
{HD,DRM} to {HD,non-DRM}.
Which would be true if the industry costs for DRM to non-DRM are much higher than for SD to HD. That might well be true. Most
Who do you suppose "lobbyists" represent? Aliens from Mars?
"Lobbyist" is just a short way to say "a representative of a group of citizens who all have some common interest and pool their money to hire someone to let elected officials know how they feel (and will vote)." Business groups (like oil companies) have lobbyists, and so do unions (like the UAW, CWA, or AFL-CIO), and so do consumer groups, environmental groups, senior citizens' groups, animal breeder groups, Jewish groups, Muslim and evangelist groups, pro- and anti-immigration groups, pro- and anti-gun control groups, PETA and cattle ranchers, et cetera and so forth.
Or are you thinking "citizens" means only those folks who have no "business" interests at all? Folks without a job, who own nothing? Teenagers living in mom's basement?
In the real adult world, we all have economic interests. If we're employed in the radio industry -- making radios, selling radios, selling products on radio shows, hosting radio shows, reporting on the news, et cetera and so forth -- or if we make use of the radio industry -- we listen to radio shows and watch TV, or we use cell phones -- then we have opinions about how the FCC should regulate use of the airwaves. Almost certainly conflicting opinions.
Do you feel those opinions should not be presented forcefully to the government bureaucrats who make decisions affecting our interests? Should we just wait around, silent and respectful, while our betters on the FCC tell us what's good for us? Should every one of us who wants to be heard be forced to take time off from work to fly out to Washington to testify every time the FCC holds hearings (every four weeks, maybe)? Or does it sound kinda' reasonable and economical if a bunch of us with similar interests and opinions might hire some good talker to go to Washington and make our case for us on a regular basis? Which is what lobbying is.
Maybe what you're doing, in the hysterical spirit of the times, is confusing lobbying ("speaking up about what you want to your elected officials") with corruption (bribing elected officials). They're not the same. For one thing, the latter is a crime. For another, it's inherently anti-democratic, whereas there's very little more democratic than groups of citizens vying for influence through their freely chosen representatives (i.e. those evil lobbyists).
I'm not disagreeing about the detail of the path towards a new market. That's pretty arcane stuff. Usually it's only (barely) possible to understand why a market shifted the way it did long after the fact, with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight.
All I'm really saying is that, generally speaking, buying has a greater influence on the market than not buying. That's because cash actually in the bank has a greater psychological influence on people than theoretical cash that could be in the bank if X instead of Y were done. After all, the theoretical cash might not materialize after all. You never know.
So, for example, if someone were to form an organization with the purpose of effectively killing off DRM, the way to do it would certainly not be to tell their members to boycott everyone who had even a hint of DRM in their plans. That would make you as "effective" as --- flamebait comin' up -- Cory Doctorow and the EFF and other such academic-minded purists, i.e. not at all. What such an organization should do is encourage its members to buy stuff, e.g. music, from whomever has the most DRM-hostile tendencies no matter how slight those tendencies are. That will drive the market in that direction far more effectively.
This is just Skinnerian operant conditioning used on humans. When BF Skinner wanted to make a bird hop on one foot, he didn't start off waiting until the bird hopped on one foot, then reward it. It never would. What he did was watch for the bird to do anything that was even a little bit in the direction he wanted -- say, shifting its weight more onto one foot, even the wrong foot, and then reward this tiny bit of progress. Then he'd wait for another small step towards the final goal. Surprisingly fast, he could get the bird to do what he wanted. The principle is general: a sequence of real, small, repeated rewards starting right now have much more effective impact than a theoretical, large reward that may occur long in the future.
It's Verizon's copper. They can do anything they damn well please with the stuff. They're not "preventing" competitors from competing -- said competitors can always make the same capital investment Verizon (or rather its predecessor telcos) did and lay copper down the street.
The only "competition" they're preventing is from assorted freeloaders who'd like to compete using someone else's capital investment. Hell, I'd like to "compete" that way, too. So I think the government should force all you yokels out there to send me part of your home equity so that I can use the cash to start a company. Since society will ultimately be better for it (you can just trust me on that) y'all should have no cause to complain.
Well, sure, but your numbers are whacked, pretty much by definition, if you think some "clever" plan can outwit everyone else and give you a better return for not much more risk. You might as well argue that some "clever" bit of machinery can outwit the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
Trust me, the free market in capital guarantees that the payoff is always exactly inversely proportional to the risk -- with the (arguably important) exception of those capital markets into which government sticks its almighty stupid if supposedly well-meaning fingers.
Mmm, yes, I understand.
Now try this thought experiment: Amazon just started selling DRM-free MP3s over the Web. Would that have happened had Apple's iTunes store not made huge profits? Nope. The suits at Amazon, believe it or not, don't give a flying fsck about DRM and the consumer's "rights" or the RIAA's moral code or anything else under the Sun except making enough profit to get a fat raise this year so they can pay their kids' college tuition and still have enough left over to take a trip to Hawaii. They'll sell you anything that makes money, and nothing that doesn't.
Prior to iTunes, there was scant evidence that you could make money selling music tune by tune in a compressed (lossy) digital format. If anything, the evidence from the old-fashioned "hi-fi" music industry was that the money to be made was not in mass sales of cheap, low-quality bits of pop music, but in modest sales of increasingly higher quality music in bigger chunks. CDs were preferred by consumers over LPs and cassettes because the music sounded much better and because you could get more on a single chunk of media -- you didn't have to flip the record or cassette over, you could get "bonus tracks," and later even bonus video or what-have-you on the CD. Who would have thought the future lay in selling bits of songs in compressed format that doesn't compare to CD quality, where you get nothing physical to keep, no liner notes, no "bonuses" or Side Bs?
But of course Apple proved the prior assumptions completely wrong and iTunes made a pile of money for them. Now Amazon wants a piece of that action and wonders on what basis they can one-up iTunes. Enter the DRM issue. Assuming Amazon makes lots of money and even cuts into Apple's profits, then expect everyone, Apple included, to abandon the DRM bandwagon.
It's not folks holding out for perfection who drive market changes. It's the folks who pick the best (or least worst) option out of the existing market. I'm not suggesting anyone deliberately buy stuff they don't want to influence the market in some microscopic way. I'm just pointing out that perfectionists in any area have pretty much zero long-term influence. That's just the nature of perfectionism.
If I buy into the HD technology at all (I probably will not until DRM is busted)...
Thus ensuring that the market forces that shape the final outcome won't include you. Brilliant!
Reminds me of all the libertarians who swear they'll refuse to vote for anybody until a true libertarian appears on a major party's ticket, thus pretty much guaranteeing that one never will.
Yes...but how do you suppose you ever do make money on the Next Big Thing, if you never take what looks at the time like quite a risk?
The rate of return on an investment is always determined by its risk. That's because the rate of return is the "price" those who want the capital must pay for the right to borrow your money. Obviously if the investment is quite safe, borrowers can pay a low price for your money. That's why the US Treasury can pay a measly 4 to 5% interest on the money it borrows. It's a very safe investment.
On the other hand, people who think they have the Next Big Thing, technology-wise, and are rushing to bring it to market without a totally clear idea of how they'll monetize the whole shebang are clearly presenting you with a very risky investment, and hence must pay enormous rates of return to get your money. So that kind of investment pays hugely, when it pays at all. It's basically the only way ordinary people (people not gifted with superhuman looks or athletic ability) can get rich.
It's all well and good to inveigh against "foolish" risk with your (or your stockholders') money -- as long as everyone is willing to settle for a 1% real rate of return, so everyone can stay middle class, and no one's ever going to get rich. But if you have bigger ambitions -- if you insist on the chance to strike it big -- then there is no option other than taking 'foolish' risks, because only risks that look foolish to cooler heads will ever pay off big.
(And of course when they do pay off, the cooler heads will immediately fall all over themselves explaining how it was actually clear that this investment was clever and low-risk, and the fact that the cooler heads didn't invest in it themselves at the time was due to some curious accident, a conspiracy, a missed phone call, it all happened before they were born, or whatever.)
Er...coupla' comments...
(1) Do you really think processes gain considerably in effectiveness merely by being formalized and having a nice office to meet in? If so, you belong in some big wealthy company's upper management. As Vice-President in Charge of Vice-Presidencies, something like that, where you can do minimal harm.
(2) Are you really under the impression that impassioned profanity-laced sloganeering is a plausible substitute for reasoned argument? Did this work real well for you in high school or something? There's not even any point in debating your "points" -- a collection of pathetically threadbare tropes from the heyday of multiculti socalism-lite, lovingly preserved in public education systems throughout the Western world for the past forty years. 21st century reality has moved way beyond you, Rip van Winkle. Only college students and other naifs traffic in that stuff nowadays.
(3) Are you unaware that of the institutions you mentioned (GATT, WTO, the World Bank, and the IMF) none is "associated" with the UN in the obvious sense of being answerable to it? Each is independently governed by its own board, according to its own rules. Are you just thinking that any organization with "World" or "International" in its title (maybe the World Wildlife Fund!) is "associated" with the UN?
(4) For charity's sake I will assume you know the WTO is the successor to the GATT, so that your putting both on the list was an attempt to be historically complete, rather than mere cluelessness.
(5) I'd sure love to hear about a "war between major armies" that was prevented by the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, hee hee. Care to relate the scary tale? Panzers massed on the border between (say) Germany and Italy, the clock ticking down to mutual ultimata deadlines, the sweating ministers of...er...finance...hashing out an acceptable compromise on...um...whether or not Germany and Italy will lift their reciprocal tariffs on imported olive oil. Golly!
Hmm...or could it be you imagine all the big wars are over economics, really, when you come right down to it? It's all about the oil, access to markets, the mighty military-industrial complex needing to sell its goods, et cetera, all that classical 19th-century Marxist pseudo-thought? Maybe you're a time-traveler from the 1890s?
Well then he's wrong. We know quite a bit about how the eye-brain combination processes color information, and the problem of gracefully degrading color information bandwidth is sufficiently well understood that it can be automated.
Not so with object boundaries. We know so little about how the eye-brain segments visual scenes into foreground objects and background noise -- and distinguishes between different objects versus objects that have merely moved -- that we can't even duplicate it in software, much less figure out how to automate some kind of graceful degradation of object boundary information bandwidth. That's why it takes an artist to do the job convincingly. You can't even rely on someone who is intelligent and well-informed on on the science of vision -- you need someone with an intuitive "artistic" grasp of how to convey object boundaries with less and less information.
I thought I'd give it a spin, but the very first file I downloaded was screwed. Hissing static all through the first 60 seconds.
A mere $0.89 down the drain, but I'll be a lot more cautious about trying it again.
As another commenter points out, the UN in and of itself has zero power. It has no army, no police, no way of enforcing its will at all. The only power it gets is from member nations.
But if the only real power involved is the power of member nations, why don't the member nations just act and cut out the UN "middleman"? This is, after all, historically the way international action has been carried out. European governments trying to cope with Napoleon, the Kaiser, Hitler or (going further back) the Mongol or Ottoman invaders didn't feel a need to create a standing bureaucracy to validate by inscribing (in five official languages) on parchment what they'd already collectively decided to do. They just acted, forming governing councils and agreements as and where they were needed -- and not otherwise.
So why don't we do that nowadays? If Darfur (or Burma) is an international outrage, and most every reasonable person agrees on what should be done, what's to stop the four or five biggest countries from just forming an ad hoc Stop The Burma Slaughter task force, assigning it 25,000 troops and a naval task force, and punching the Go button?
Nothing, really. Except that this silly imaginary "world government" called the UN exists, and because it exists the major countries are off the hook. If you ask why doesn't somebody DO something, everyone can point to the UN as the agency that should be doing the doing.
In short, the UN pretty clearly now exists as a substitute for coordinated, effective international action. It's like how, in Congress or a university, if you want to just quietly kill a proposal for action, you refer it to a committee for a report. The UN exists so that big nations can ignore sticky problems by referring them to the UN for a report...or a vote on "sanctions"...whatever. You can look like you're doing something with actually, well, doing something.
Since Americans have always tended to favor action over talk, they tend to take a dim view of an institution which effectively and efficiently functions to replace action with talk. That's not what the UN is supposed to do, of course, but that's what it actually does. Yet another illustration of the Law of Unintended Consequences: there'd be much more effective international humanitarian action if the UN did not exist.
TFA itself says that Facebook themselves expect to rake in a piddling $30 million profit on $150 million revenue this year.
Sure. But I read "symbolism" in this context as "license to bullshit vaguely without defining your terms in a way that might leave you open to counter-argument." Useful stuff in a class on literary criticism for English majors, so everyone can be right in their own particular way. Totally worthless to someone with a more scientific or engineering frame of mind, who wants to pin stuff down so that it's measurably true or false. Since I'm not a lawyer or English major, I consider this kind of symbolism to be worthless.
Think beyond your literal shell if you could.
Why? So I can appreciate the Cosmic Oneness of it All? Be more open to Ultimate Truths that are too truthy for mere words and grubby logic? No thanks. Tried smoking that stuff once in college, found out it interferes with being able to solve differential equations and earn a good salary.
And I'm curious on how "you" and "your friends" who are excluded from the inability to "influence" Exxon is. Do you walk to work? Good for you.
You've misunderstood me. In this world, the way it actually is, I have influence over Exxon, the same as any other customer. If I don't like their product, or their behavior, I can not buy their gas. They can't force me to buy it. However, in the fantasy world that the OP would like to live in, where his "we" has great influence over Exxon, I would lose the small influence I presently have. Because his "we" wouldn't include me. So basically he and his friends get to determine what Exxon does, and, therefore, what kind of gas or other energy supplies I get to buy. I'm not in favor of that. I like my freedom.
Whatever, dude. Would you like to assert that the Constitution doesn't specify the right of "persons" to be represented in Congress anywhere at all? Does it matter where, precisely, it lies? Does that change my point, that the Constitution says all kinds of things about "persons" that only a nitwit would assume must apply to every organism that fits the dictionary definition of "person"?
/. much of the time.
Or is it your position that any mistake whatever in an argument vitiates the whole thing? So for example if I had misspelled "Constitution" then my entire argument would necessarily be trash? Come to think of it, I guess that would be what passes for "logic" on
So my three children, all under 18, aren't represented, huh? Not real citizens?
Certainly any responsible politician would want to hear from someone who foams hysterically at the mouth because he thinks (having apparently been stoned throughout all of 8th-grade civics class) that Congress can by a simple majority vote suspend a right guaranteed in the Constitution. Such a herd beast could probably be convinced to believe anything, which is as useful to a politician as to any other con man.
Look out! Aliens are invading the Earth and taking over your neighbor's mind! Anal probes! You could be next! Send my campaign $100 quick so I can stop this terrible menace to your freedoms! Call now and have your credit card ready, operators are standing by...
The rights written in the Bill of Rights apply to all humans
No shit? Let's read the first sentence of the Bill of Rights, then:
"After the first enumeration required by the first article of the Constitution, there shall be one representative for every thirty thousand, until the number shall amount to one hundred, after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall be not less than one hundred representatives, nor less than one representative for every forty thousand persons."
Son of gun, you're right, it says "persons" not "citizens!" So I guess every forty thousand persons -- anywhere on the planet, whether or not they're the subject of some other king, or citizen of some other republic -- have been entitled to a representative in the US Congress since 1789. Amazing! And those bastards in Washington have just ignored this fundamental right of South Africans, Samoans, Libyans and Mongolians since the very founding of the Republic. Most of the planet has been disenfranchised for the last 220 years, apparently.
Not only that...did you notice they didn't make a distinction between criminals and free citizens? So all felons worldwide -- Nazi war criminals, Stalin's secret policemen, Pol Pot and his henchmen, Idi Amin's murdering thugs, and South African apartheidists -- have always been entitled to vote in American elections, too.
For that matter, they didn't make a distinction between adults and children, either! So this business of not letting people vote until they're old enough to, say, read and write, is totally unconstitutional.
Although...I suppose a cynic might say that the context of the Bill of Rights matters, and that only an idiot would assume the "persons" the document addresses are meant to be understood as all people everywhere, anytime as opposed to, say, the "people" specifically addressed in the opening sentence ("We the People of the United States....do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America...")
That was the most misleading and infantile summary of a worthless piece of sloganeering shit I have ever seen on this site. I'm impressed you're even willing to argue the point(s) raised in the linked article, since the gross intellectual dishonesty apparent in the article and the summary suggest the authors and any of their fellow travelers would be quite immune to the influence of reason and good sense.
Come on, family and social connections have been exploited from the beginning of crime and policing. If your brother is murdered, the cops are sure going to come around and talk to you and your sister, find out if there was any bad blood between you. If you're wife is killed, you better be in the next state at the time of death addressing a crowd of thousands if you don't want to be Suspect #1. Similarly, if your brother commits a crime, the police will come around and interrogate you, find out if you helped him, find out if you know where he's hiding.
Frankly, DNA evidence is a lot safer for the innocent than what usually passes for "evidence" in criminal investigation and trials, which is mostly the testimony of witnesses with grudges and agendas, faulty (or artfully reconstructed) memories, and other assorted fallible stuff.
What people don't often realize is that it's not a choice between the police using DNA evidence and the police doing without evidence at all. It's a choice between the law using DNA evidence and the law using shiftier, much more ambiguous evidence, like whether the victim picks you out of a line-up, or whether the jury thinks you look like a criminal and thinks you had a good motive. DNA evidence has generally proven to be the innocent defendant's friend. Just think about the Duke (non)rape case, for example. If it had happened twenty years ago, without DNA evidence, the defendants would now be rotting in jail for life. As it is, they're free men, and the "eyewitness" testimony of the accuser is widely believed to have been simply invented.
I wish it were only possible to convict someone with DNA evidence, and that it was collected from everybody pretty much as a matter of course. The remote fanciful possibility of some evil secret police of the future abusing the data someday worries me less than the possibility, in the here and now, of being wrongly convicted for a crime because I happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, or I look too much like someone else, or some telegenic "victim" (pretty white woman, distinguished US Senator with a wide stance, wealthy city councilman) with a grudge, hankering to be famous, or need for an excuse for their own crimes makes a false accusation. Brr.