"Because our justice system has turned from protecting the public good and society in general towards protecting individual property and particular interest laws."
While I agree with the rest of what you said that is just plain wrong. Protecting private property is the mission here, it's a crucial part of protecting the public good. And that is exactly where the system has failed. Spam is theft by conversion, and adequately dealt with under common law, but instead of leaving well enough alone, the legislatures got involved and give us new laws that FAIL to protect our private property from the likes of Spamford.
You need to quit focusing on the idea that you lower taxes to bring foreign money in. That's *one* possible reason but hardly the most compelling.
A better reason to do it is simply to quit chasing your own money right over your border, as they are doing now. Lower the taxes to a reasonable level and they will be paid. Jack them up too high, and people will change their operations to avoid them, and wind up paying a smaller amount to another jurisdiction instead.
And Italy cannot change that without violating a number of international agreements they are signatory to. Besides which even if they said fine, we will leave the EU over it (which seems quite unlikely) the end result would be more likely to be that google and other companies quit operating in Italy entirely.
ROFL you may know how to build a gamer rig but you certainly know nothing about servers, to have said that.
You'll use an entirely different class of hardware from the ground up. Different class of motherboard, different class of RAM, at most you *might* use the same box and power supply. You dont need a videocard at all, just a serial port, and these days it's more likely to be a rackmount than a box anyway.
"Until people suddenly wisen up and stop falling for scams and stop being receptive to advertising in general, there will continue to be spam."
Insightful comment. The spammers, revolting subhumans though they are, are simply a symptom of the real problem. And the big "legitimate" marketing companies are signs of the same problem. A sane person would go out of their way to avoid purchasing anything that they saw advertised, and if a significant percentage of the population were sane advertising and marketing would be dead, and all the people currently stuck in those soul-leeching jobs could become productive members of the economy instead.
Indeed, database applications tend to bottleneck on I/O, not processor, so most uses would see little gain from this. That's probably the biggest reason no one has bothered to do it.
Certain uses would probably benefit, but then there are other reasons too. You run databases on machines built for it, not gaming machines, so it's not like they already have this hardware. You would have to buy it and add it as an expense. And GPUs are error prone. Not what you want in most database applications either (although again, there may be niches where this would be ok.)
That's nonsense. Corporate taxes are ultimately passed on and paid by those who do business with the corporation. The only thing that's true about it is it does result in some of those taxes ultimately being paid by foreigners which could be a two-edged sword.
The alternative you refuse to acknowledge is for governments to learn to live within their means and keep taxes low so that the individuals within its territory get to keep most of the fruits of their labor. Necessary state functions can and should be operated with minimal budget. Unnecessary state functions are actually bad for society and need to be shut down anyway.
Since the example at hand is Italy we could start with policing. It's really not necessary to have groups of policemen brandishing submachine guns standing around all day on the street corners harassing pretty women that pass them by, and it's got to be awful expensive, so that might be a good place to start.
Funny thing I notice in articles of this sort. There are always comments saying it's dumb because there is no point in optimising software for performance because hardware is so cheap. And there are comments like yours, complaining that having to do a recompile to achieve it is too big a burden.
Do you see the tension between the thoughts? Because if hardware is so cheap that it is more reasonable to tell the user to upgrade his computer, rather than optimise your software, then does it not follow that same line of thought that it will usually be no burden at all for a developer to compile a fresh binary?
It's very little burden to me. I type make on one computer and use the other computer until its done. And I am a scrounger with relatively little computing power - there are probably a lot of preteens that have more/better hardware than I. So it hardly seems like it should be 'nontrivial' for someone who is actually running a business doing that very thing.
A better solution would be for Italy to simply lower their taxes until it did NOT make business sense to go through such contortions to avoid them anymore.
But states really do not like the idea of having to compete, so I expect them to try crap like this instead. It wont work well, there will be unintended side effects that are harmful, and ultimately little, if any, more taxes will be collected anyway.
"It doesn't know anything about you that isn't out in the public."
I find it difficult, nay impossible, to believe that that is *and will always remain* the case.
This thing is taking pictures and phoning them home for identification. You really believe the system it sends them to will not keep them and store them and use them to the fullest extent?
I have never put a picture of me on the web. Nonetheless google manages to find a couple (one they grabbed out of my account and put to nefarious use without permission.) How much worse will that get when a significant number of people become walking surveillance points for them?
The same things that are supposed to prevent you from glassing people to begin with, which at this point in our hypothetical have obviously already failed, are supposed to prevent those people from retaliating when you do?
Kind of a twisted view of the world you have there.
If it were feeding into your own personal storage and prevented from being phoned home I wouldnt even care. But we both know that isnt how it works and isnt how its going to work. And given the reality, your actions constitute assault on everyone around you. You shouldnt really be surprised if some of them defend themselves physically.
"No one would opt in so it's not a good idea."
In other words you realize that "no one" consents to this, so what makes you think it's ok to do it anyhow?
All 'versions' of websites suck. If you have different versions for different devices you have not a webpage. Web pages are display-device agnostic, a fundamental design feature of the web.
So the answer is, write a web page, not a 'mobile version' of some AJAX monstrosity, thanks.
Slashdot, in particular, is essentially refusing my money and has for years. I mean, I know they make money from the ads. And I never block the ads qua block the ads. But I havent seen an ad since D2 showed up. Because at that point I simply had to remove slashdot from my whitelist, and quit allowing it to run javascript, just to keep it functional.
It's a good question. All I see in this paper is fresh discovery of the same facts that were well known among skeptics like the Perth group back in 1990s. Is it really such a bizarre virus that acts like no other virus, kills like no other virus, and manages to hide the way it works so well that decades of research still leave us guessing? Or is it just a weak virus that cannot survive inside an uncompromised immune system and thus serves as a great diagnostic for immune problems that it does not actually cause?
Well first off the Pi is not only short on horsepower, it's also hardly open. The GPU is the real heart and brain of the system and it's quite opaque.
As to the motherboards, look for a board that supports ECC. It's totally absurd with RAM as cheap (and dense) as it is today that anyone is manufacturing anything else. You'll have to pay more but you should get a board that performs to specs rather than a typical consumer board where you expect as you say 'subtle defects.'
"And it strikes me as really disturbing when a machine with all free software is more expensive than the same machine without free software."
Then you got the value equation backwards, my friend.
You pay for Free Software. (It is something of value to the user, who has to pay in one way or another to put it in place.)
Proprietary Software pays for YOU! (The makers of blobs literally pay the manufacturers to "preload" their stuff onto computers in the factory, so that users who do not have the time, knowledge, and inclination to format and rebuild will be stuck with them. The software is valued primarily by the maker, not the user - the user is typically the commodity being sold in one way or another here. )
"You meant to type gouge, I'm sure. 320 dollars for single core with 1GB of RAM? 60GB HDD? 1024x768? (i'm assuming the base price matches the listed base specs). The laptop is something I'd find at a salvation army for 20-50 dollars."
And then how much time would you have to spend to finish the job?
I dont know about you, but my time costs money, and to be sure and do the job right I might well wind up spending more time on it than they are charging to get it done, certified, wrapped, and delivered. If I did that every day I am sure I would get much faster at it (as they have) but the first one would involve a lot of research and very slow work.
Of course if I were doing it I would put Slack on it and not some stupid Ubuntu derivative, but hey. No big deal to install the OS as long as you know the hardware is all ready to go so it still might save enough time to be worth it.
You are paying for convenience here, just like anytime you order an assembled computer instead of a bunch of components.
"'if ( a = b )' for example. The compiler warns because you probably meant 'if ( a == b )'. But maybe you didn't."
If you did not, then you should have written something like a=b;if b {... instead. It may be technically legal code but it's very bad and it should be flagged and warned, you are just being cute at the expense of readability and even you probably wont remember what the heck you did there 6 months later when you look at the code again.
"If Intel really is basing their compiler off of secret architecture documents, then people should be able to deduce what's going on from looking at the generated assembler. Ie, find some goofy generated code that does not seem to make sense given public documents, get a benchmark to compare it, figure out there's a hidden feature, and then make use of it."
In theory, given enough highly skilled eyes checking these things often enough, that is exactly what would happen.
In reality, who is going to go to that much trouble to do something that actually helps the miscreant here? And more to the point, why try to figure out secret Intel optimizations (and secret optimizations usually wind up being less useful than you think they will be) to make their hardware faster if you are using other hardware? No point at all in that case.
I was thinking along similar lines. The Gripen is a great aircraft, it compares very well to the competition, but we know Swedish Intelligence has been positively prostrate in terms of simply giving the NSA whatever they want and not even demanding anything in return, so I would not have any more faith in it not being compromised than I would the F18s (IIRC) they were thinking about buying from Boeing instead.
I think this is mostly a symbolic gesture though, and it may be effective in that sense. It signals potential competitors to the US arms industry around the world that the market is ripe for more competition.
First off you are making food and fuel rivalrous, which is probably not a great idea.
Secondly, E10 can be burned with minimal changes was never exactly true. Older cars still have serious issues with this junk, and even newer cars are likely to see increased maintenance or reduced lifespan from it.
There is always a certain appeal to trying to do something cheap, dirty, and only 10% in order to say you did something, but ultimately I dont see how this program has been anything but a net loss for the country and I wont be sorry to see it go.
Slashdot Mirror
"Because our justice system has turned from protecting the public good and society in general towards protecting individual property and particular interest laws."
While I agree with the rest of what you said that is just plain wrong. Protecting private property is the mission here, it's a crucial part of protecting the public good. And that is exactly where the system has failed. Spam is theft by conversion, and adequately dealt with under common law, but instead of leaving well enough alone, the legislatures got involved and give us new laws that FAIL to protect our private property from the likes of Spamford.
You need to quit focusing on the idea that you lower taxes to bring foreign money in. That's *one* possible reason but hardly the most compelling.
A better reason to do it is simply to quit chasing your own money right over your border, as they are doing now. Lower the taxes to a reasonable level and they will be paid. Jack them up too high, and people will change their operations to avoid them, and wind up paying a smaller amount to another jurisdiction instead.
And Italy cannot change that without violating a number of international agreements they are signatory to. Besides which even if they said fine, we will leave the EU over it (which seems quite unlikely) the end result would be more likely to be that google and other companies quit operating in Italy entirely.
"The only difference is the video card."
ROFL you may know how to build a gamer rig but you certainly know nothing about servers, to have said that.
You'll use an entirely different class of hardware from the ground up. Different class of motherboard, different class of RAM, at most you *might* use the same box and power supply. You dont need a videocard at all, just a serial port, and these days it's more likely to be a rackmount than a box anyway.
"Until people suddenly wisen up and stop falling for scams and stop being receptive to advertising in general, there will continue to be spam."
Insightful comment. The spammers, revolting subhumans though they are, are simply a symptom of the real problem. And the big "legitimate" marketing companies are signs of the same problem. A sane person would go out of their way to avoid purchasing anything that they saw advertised, and if a significant percentage of the population were sane advertising and marketing would be dead, and all the people currently stuck in those soul-leeching jobs could become productive members of the economy instead.
Wow, a fp that hit the nail on the head.
Indeed, database applications tend to bottleneck on I/O, not processor, so most uses would see little gain from this. That's probably the biggest reason no one has bothered to do it.
Certain uses would probably benefit, but then there are other reasons too. You run databases on machines built for it, not gaming machines, so it's not like they already have this hardware. You would have to buy it and add it as an expense. And GPUs are error prone. Not what you want in most database applications either (although again, there may be niches where this would be ok.)
That's nonsense. Corporate taxes are ultimately passed on and paid by those who do business with the corporation. The only thing that's true about it is it does result in some of those taxes ultimately being paid by foreigners which could be a two-edged sword.
The alternative you refuse to acknowledge is for governments to learn to live within their means and keep taxes low so that the individuals within its territory get to keep most of the fruits of their labor. Necessary state functions can and should be operated with minimal budget. Unnecessary state functions are actually bad for society and need to be shut down anyway.
Since the example at hand is Italy we could start with policing. It's really not necessary to have groups of policemen brandishing submachine guns standing around all day on the street corners harassing pretty women that pass them by, and it's got to be awful expensive, so that might be a good place to start.
Funny thing I notice in articles of this sort. There are always comments saying it's dumb because there is no point in optimising software for performance because hardware is so cheap. And there are comments like yours, complaining that having to do a recompile to achieve it is too big a burden.
Do you see the tension between the thoughts? Because if hardware is so cheap that it is more reasonable to tell the user to upgrade his computer, rather than optimise your software, then does it not follow that same line of thought that it will usually be no burden at all for a developer to compile a fresh binary?
It's very little burden to me. I type make on one computer and use the other computer until its done. And I am a scrounger with relatively little computing power - there are probably a lot of preteens that have more/better hardware than I. So it hardly seems like it should be 'nontrivial' for someone who is actually running a business doing that very thing.
The race to the bottom sucks. What I am proposing, however, would be a historical reversal of the suckage - a race to the top.
A better solution would be for Italy to simply lower their taxes until it did NOT make business sense to go through such contortions to avoid them anymore.
But states really do not like the idea of having to compete, so I expect them to try crap like this instead. It wont work well, there will be unintended side effects that are harmful, and ultimately little, if any, more taxes will be collected anyway.
"It doesn't know anything about you that isn't out in the public."
I find it difficult, nay impossible, to believe that that is *and will always remain* the case.
This thing is taking pictures and phoning them home for identification. You really believe the system it sends them to will not keep them and store them and use them to the fullest extent?
I have never put a picture of me on the web. Nonetheless google manages to find a couple (one they grabbed out of my account and put to nefarious use without permission.) How much worse will that get when a significant number of people become walking surveillance points for them?
Dont punch him, just take the glasses, disable them, and return them.
If he resists and gets himself hurt at that point it's on him.
The same things that are supposed to prevent you from glassing people to begin with, which at this point in our hypothetical have obviously already failed, are supposed to prevent those people from retaliating when you do?
Kind of a twisted view of the world you have there.
If it were feeding into your own personal storage and prevented from being phoned home I wouldnt even care. But we both know that isnt how it works and isnt how its going to work. And given the reality, your actions constitute assault on everyone around you. You shouldnt really be surprised if some of them defend themselves physically.
"No one would opt in so it's not a good idea."
In other words you realize that "no one" consents to this, so what makes you think it's ok to do it anyhow?
All 'versions' of websites suck. If you have different versions for different devices you have not a webpage. Web pages are display-device agnostic, a fundamental design feature of the web.
So the answer is, write a web page, not a 'mobile version' of some AJAX monstrosity, thanks.
Excellent website. Excellent post.
Slashdot, in particular, is essentially refusing my money and has for years. I mean, I know they make money from the ads. And I never block the ads qua block the ads. But I havent seen an ad since D2 showed up. Because at that point I simply had to remove slashdot from my whitelist, and quit allowing it to run javascript, just to keep it functional.
It's a good question. All I see in this paper is fresh discovery of the same facts that were well known among skeptics like the Perth group back in 1990s. Is it really such a bizarre virus that acts like no other virus, kills like no other virus, and manages to hide the way it works so well that decades of research still leave us guessing? Or is it just a weak virus that cannot survive inside an uncompromised immune system and thus serves as a great diagnostic for immune problems that it does not actually cause?
Well first off the Pi is not only short on horsepower, it's also hardly open. The GPU is the real heart and brain of the system and it's quite opaque.
As to the motherboards, look for a board that supports ECC. It's totally absurd with RAM as cheap (and dense) as it is today that anyone is manufacturing anything else. You'll have to pay more but you should get a board that performs to specs rather than a typical consumer board where you expect as you say 'subtle defects.'
"And it strikes me as really disturbing when a machine with all free software is more expensive than the same machine without free software."
Then you got the value equation backwards, my friend.
You pay for Free Software. (It is something of value to the user, who has to pay in one way or another to put it in place.)
Proprietary Software pays for YOU! (The makers of blobs literally pay the manufacturers to "preload" their stuff onto computers in the factory, so that users who do not have the time, knowledge, and inclination to format and rebuild will be stuck with them. The software is valued primarily by the maker, not the user - the user is typically the commodity being sold in one way or another here. )
"You meant to type gouge, I'm sure. 320 dollars for single core with 1GB of RAM? 60GB HDD? 1024x768? (i'm assuming the base price matches the listed base specs). The laptop is something I'd find at a salvation army for 20-50 dollars."
And then how much time would you have to spend to finish the job?
I dont know about you, but my time costs money, and to be sure and do the job right I might well wind up spending more time on it than they are charging to get it done, certified, wrapped, and delivered. If I did that every day I am sure I would get much faster at it (as they have) but the first one would involve a lot of research and very slow work.
Of course if I were doing it I would put Slack on it and not some stupid Ubuntu derivative, but hey. No big deal to install the OS as long as you know the hardware is all ready to go so it still might save enough time to be worth it.
You are paying for convenience here, just like anytime you order an assembled computer instead of a bunch of components.
That's right, they are in the business of improving human civilization, not of ripping off rubes.
"Having one of these won't assure you of either freedom or privacy."
True, but having anything else will be actively working against both of those outcomes, so it's a big improvement.
When will they be available in the US? I want three.
"'if ( a = b )' for example. The compiler warns because you probably meant 'if ( a == b )'. But maybe you didn't."
If you did not, then you should have written something like a=b;if b {... instead. It may be technically legal code but it's very bad and it should be flagged and warned, you are just being cute at the expense of readability and even you probably wont remember what the heck you did there 6 months later when you look at the code again.
"If Intel really is basing their compiler off of secret architecture documents, then people should be able to deduce what's going on from looking at the generated assembler. Ie, find some goofy generated code that does not seem to make sense given public documents, get a benchmark to compare it, figure out there's a hidden feature, and then make use of it."
In theory, given enough highly skilled eyes checking these things often enough, that is exactly what would happen.
In reality, who is going to go to that much trouble to do something that actually helps the miscreant here? And more to the point, why try to figure out secret Intel optimizations (and secret optimizations usually wind up being less useful than you think they will be) to make their hardware faster if you are using other hardware? No point at all in that case.
I was thinking along similar lines. The Gripen is a great aircraft, it compares very well to the competition, but we know Swedish Intelligence has been positively prostrate in terms of simply giving the NSA whatever they want and not even demanding anything in return, so I would not have any more faith in it not being compromised than I would the F18s (IIRC) they were thinking about buying from Boeing instead.
I think this is mostly a symbolic gesture though, and it may be effective in that sense. It signals potential competitors to the US arms industry around the world that the market is ripe for more competition.
Except for a couple things.
First off you are making food and fuel rivalrous, which is probably not a great idea.
Secondly, E10 can be burned with minimal changes was never exactly true. Older cars still have serious issues with this junk, and even newer cars are likely to see increased maintenance or reduced lifespan from it.
There is always a certain appeal to trying to do something cheap, dirty, and only 10% in order to say you did something, but ultimately I dont see how this program has been anything but a net loss for the country and I wont be sorry to see it go.