Individual consumers (as opposed to collective market forces) have decided
What does collective market forces mean if not the aggregate (e.g. sum) of individual forces? (Likewise for decisions).
So, what you're saying is that you lament the fact that there weren't enough piracy? 'Cause if there were, that would be a collective market force, right? Or maybe you are against the state-protected temporary monopoly called copyright because it (like any other monopoly) prevents the market forces from doing their thing?
Or did you mean a political (rather than market) force, i.e. the masses should (at great transaction and information costs to each individual, more than what it is worth to most) get together and counter-lobby the politician, fighting back the "copyright industry"? Sadly, widely dispersed small interests tend to not defeat the concentrated, big interests.
TL;DR: I call your bluff. Collective just means many individuals.
Most browsers will lock down cross domain requests.
The assumption in this philosophy is that all the URLs below a particular domain are all owned by the same party.
If geocities.com/~userfoo/*html sources geocities.com/~userbar/*js, should the js files be trusted?
The other side of the assumption, that each party is limited to one domain, causes inefficiency: if I own foo.com and bar.com and I want foo.com/baz.html to source qux.js, I can't have that be bar.com/qux.js --- it must be foo.com/**/qux.js. But if bar.com/*html wants qux.js, I must put qux.js on bar.com also. (I guess virtual hosting and sym/hardlinking comes to the rescue here, and I can stop whining about my tiny, tiny js files being stored twice OH TEH NOESES...)
This probably does not include the extensive amount of fossil fuel used to excavate and process nuclear fuel, build the actual plants, nor to deal with the resulting waste.
Of course, you'd have to factor similar considerations in when comparing nuclear to other power sources.
The problem [is] that Wikipedia doesn't want the crap in the first place.
There is no "Wikipedia wants", it's not a person---that's the whole problem, people disagree about the direction wikipedia should go in.
and if the foundation is unsound, then the roof cannot be.
I cannot find any meaning to this which is relevant to what we're talking about. True, if the servers crash all day, even the best-written article is only going to be moderately useful. But bad articles don't somehow infect good articles. They don't even draw editing effort away (under my system)---the editing effort they attract couldn't be put elsewhere.
[Will be edited, most edits reduce quality, need editorial oversight]
So? What's the wrong in letting the few volunteers who want to write about some topic maintain those articles for themselves, at whatever level of quality they will bear?
lack of volunteer hours to maintain the article at the intended level of quality.
Intended by whom? And why do they get to dictate terms to others?
What my solution aimed at was giving the deletionists what they want (stars burning twice as bright but half as many), to the extent they can make people voluntarily contribute to that end, while at the same time giving the inclusionists what they want (the blooming of a thousand flowers) without detracting from the quality of the narrower core of high-quality articles the deletionists want.
I haven't seen you argue that this is unobtainable, nor why this isn't a decent compromise betweent the wishes of the people involved. I've seen you take the side of the deletionists (as I understand them), without really saying why, just asserting that it's "what wikipedia wants". Am I misunderstanding the deletionists here? If not, care to explain why the compromise is bad?
editors time is not [cheap] [...] Given the number of pages that I regularly see that have tags months and years old indicating that they need sources, formatting, etc... I'd say Wikipedia is in the midst of an unrecognized crisis in this regard.
Your argument assumes that editor time can be freely shifted from one article to another. If I'm very interested in anime and manga (and nothing else), I'm not going to start editing articles about voting theory or cladistics and the tree of life, or whatever---I don't have the interest, and/or I don't have the knowledge. A similar argument has been applied to free software contributors: people do what they're going to do, and you can't boss volunteers around.
To some extent, people care about Wikipedia in general; to that extent, you can transfer editor work hours between articles. I think the policy that maximizes use of both flexible and non-flexible volunteer labor is to direct the flexible labor to where the marginal return is greatest, given a fixed and unalterable supply of non-flexible labor. Concretely: use a bug tracker or ticket system and auto-fill it with "Most visited [citation needed]", "Oftenest viewed [flag:foobar]". That way, flexible volunteer labor can be directed to where that's useful, and the seldom-viewed stuff can coexist and be crap, and no one will care because no one reads it anyways, and in that way everyone gets to have their cake and eat it too.
Common sense isn't as common as the name would imply, so the deletionists deleted it.
Actually common sense (by definition) is common. What's uncommon and (which isn't a tautology) sorely missing is good sense. The good sense it takes to make that distinction really ought to be more common:-)
The benefit of not using uranium is that you save yourself the trouble of changing to something else when uranium runs out? Doesn't not using uranium just move that cost closer (and thus makes it more expensive, as the real interest rate is positive*)?
* Basically, if we postpone the transition process, we can spend some time preparing ourselves better, thus making it require less work i.e. be cheaper
While you are correct that computers are deterministic, there are ways to generate pseudo-random numbers based on cryptography, where the "figure out the algorithm" step essentially is the same as breaking the cryptography.
(Actually what you figure out is not the algorithm---which can be publicly known---but a secret input, i.e. a secret key and/or seed.)
So while you are correct in principle, it is possible to make numbers which look so random that their pattern is in practice undetectable.
I can name several econ nobel laureates who, in my not overly well-informed opinion, have made a genuine net positive contribution to the world.
Every heard of game theory and Nash equilibria? That'd be John Forbes Nash. How about Vickrey auctions---they might add a little more honesty to the world, and help people allocate goods more efficiently. How about Kenneth Arrow, proving that social decision making processing will always have flaws (so we can stop looking for the perfect ones and start discussing trade-offs)? Or how about Daniel Kahnemann, for reminding economists the danger of their foolish assumptions about human rationality?;-)
But of course, I'm eager to learn so if econ is corrupt please enlighten me as to how.
Plus, those who wouldn't have voted would be voting randomly and skew the results.
If they vote uniformly randomly, then they vote for every option in equal amounts. For the whole body of indifferent people, it amounts to expressing no preference for any one particular option. So if all indifferent people truly vote randomly, their behavior perfectly expresses their viewpoint.
SFLC had a podcast, the Software Freedom Law Show, hosted by (among other) Bradley M. Kuhn, the former Executive Director of the FSF and currently on the board of directors.
In other words, Moglen is deeply involved with free software community organizations.
I'd want to do that with some cryptographic authentication---that is, integrity. Whether I want to my disk keep secret or not is a different matter, but I sure as heck don't want my ISP (or just cosmic rays) corrupting my file system. Maybe ssh or stunnel is the right option here.
retort of a corporate man [...] says that a 'decent' game should be worth $40-60.
Yep. His interest is (presumably) keeping his job. That means maximizing the profits of his company. His company makes big-name titles (I for one love the Zelda series, and tetris on the game boy wasn't half bad:D), so of course he wants everyone to believe that big-name titles are the best and worthy of the consumers' money. His interests are, of course, not necessarily aligned with those of the public. Probably not, in this case---otherwise he, an MBA schooled in some economics, would just put his faith in the invisible hand of the market.
more products are not produced and sold, because that would decrease the 'optimum' point.
What you're saying implies, if you think about it, that every sector is behaving like a cartel: the producers are cooperating (rather than competing) in their efforts to make as much money as possible.
If I was running my own company, I'd be a cold-hearted asshole and drop the price below what the cartel is charging and advertise this in as many places as possible, hoping to grab all the customers to myself and making a killing. Now, if these slimy weasel-suckers are half disgusting as me, they'd do the same. You're saying they don't?
corporations determining the price points (even unknowingly) instead of [the] public.
If the markets work the way economists think they do, the public exercises an influence on the price by buying some amounts at some price points and different amounts at different price points, thus influence what the optimal price (for the seller) is.
This is not to say "Corporations: good" or "Competition: bad"---on the contrary. I just don't think that all corporations in every sector form cartels: the benefit of undercutting the cartel is a too strong temptation, especially whenever there are more actors in the sector. (And "Yay, go the little guy!")
Your neighborhood is full of jerks, full of people who want to steal your bank details, get you arrested for CP, peep at nude photos of your partner. Trusting them is far more insane than trusting people that, at least in theory, you get to pick.
I believe that it's possible to build distributed systems where you don't trust everyone involved, but only trust that a certain fraction (often at least half or at least two thirds) of the involved parties are honest.
It seems much more likely that at least half of the Jo(e) Randoms doesn't have the time and inclination to fiddle with the routing table on his "internet box" to screw you over than people who want power will abstain from using power to force themselves into your internet box. Especially when Joe Random can find amateur pictures of someone else's partner.
Also, even though I live in the bad part of town, I think my part of town is filled with at least 95% good people, a few who do a little bad because they're put into a sucky position by "The System", and 0.1% who are just fucked up. People generally want to get along. That's in part also why markets work (reasonably well).
I mean, you could argue that it provides taxes (minimised of course), jobs.
But so do other companies---what are the arguments that specifically Microsoft should be stable? If Microsoft got disbanded today, several small $OS Support Contractor companies might form to make use of the available labor and knowledge. What's the benefit of Microsoft compared to the alternative?
Also, taxes tend to be a net loss to society: the make the marginal price of the taxed thing be different from the marginal cost, which causes inefficient allocations as well as underproduction. Providing jobs isn't a benefit in and of itself: hiring people to dig ditches and fill them up again doesn't create value, it's just a transfer with a high labor cost. Just give them the money and skip the ditches, then the world has more free time in total.
Don't forget that this particular company produces some of the basic software (Windows itself) which is the basis for much of our communications.
We could move off of Windows and onto Linux, BSD, Haiku, OS X, [...]. We have to lose some coordination games on the way---who switches from MS Office to Libre Office first? And we might have to work on improving Wine in order to preserve the investment made in Windows API applications. But if we can solve this, we should be good to go, right? Oh, but good on you for finding an argument specific to the company in question.
I might buy that it's a benefit to the Microsoft employees that they save the friction costs of finding a new job, and the users of Microsoft's products will save similar transaction costs in switching to new products. But that's a one-time gain (or loss avoidance), which shouldn't overrule a long-term increase in productivity. Then there's the general level of churn, of these "recurring one-time" costs, but Microsoft is just one player in a sea of churning companies.
So I'm not really sure, still, what the social benefit is, except keeping the level of churn down. This doesn't seem to outweigh the problems of monopoly... err, bad stuff.
The more fields your business dominates, the safer it is.
What's the value to society of company stability?
I understand clearly why you as an investor want to use diversification to stabilize a stock portfolio (that spans multiple companies). But who benefits from having one particular company be stable and secure? Risk-averse investors? Don't they buy bonds or ultra-stable, ultra-diversified portfolios anyways?
Slashdot Mirror
Individual consumers (as opposed to collective market forces) have decided
What does collective market forces mean if not the aggregate (e.g. sum) of individual forces? (Likewise for decisions).
So, what you're saying is that you lament the fact that there weren't enough piracy? 'Cause if there were, that would be a collective market force, right? Or maybe you are against the state-protected temporary monopoly called copyright because it (like any other monopoly) prevents the market forces from doing their thing?
Or did you mean a political (rather than market) force, i.e. the masses should (at great transaction and information costs to each individual, more than what it is worth to most) get together and counter-lobby the politician, fighting back the "copyright industry"? Sadly, widely dispersed small interests tend to not defeat the concentrated, big interests.
TL;DR: I call your bluff. Collective just means many individuals.
Most browsers will lock down cross domain requests.
The assumption in this philosophy is that all the URLs below a particular domain are all owned by the same party.
If geocities.com/~userfoo/*html sources geocities.com/~userbar/*js, should the js files be trusted?
The other side of the assumption, that each party is limited to one domain, causes inefficiency: if I own foo.com and bar.com and I want foo.com/baz.html to source qux.js, I can't have that be bar.com/qux.js --- it must be foo.com/**/qux.js. But if bar.com/*html wants qux.js, I must put qux.js on bar.com also. (I guess virtual hosting and sym/hardlinking comes to the rescue here, and I can stop whining about my tiny, tiny js files being stored twice OH TEH NOESES...)
This probably does not include the extensive amount of fossil fuel used to excavate and process nuclear fuel, build the actual plants, nor to deal with the resulting waste.
Of course, you'd have to factor similar considerations in when comparing nuclear to other power sources.
People who pirate for trial purposes
Peter Sunde?
Thank you, I'm here all week, try the cloned and genetically modified---but only to take out the bad bits---veal.
The problem [is] that Wikipedia doesn't want the crap in the first place.
There is no "Wikipedia wants", it's not a person---that's the whole problem, people disagree about the direction wikipedia should go in.
and if the foundation is unsound, then the roof cannot be.
I cannot find any meaning to this which is relevant to what we're talking about. True, if the servers crash all day, even the best-written article is only going to be moderately useful. But bad articles don't somehow infect good articles. They don't even draw editing effort away (under my system)---the editing effort they attract couldn't be put elsewhere.
[Will be edited, most edits reduce quality, need editorial oversight]
So? What's the wrong in letting the few volunteers who want to write about some topic maintain those articles for themselves, at whatever level of quality they will bear?
lack of volunteer hours to maintain the article at the intended level of quality.
Intended by whom? And why do they get to dictate terms to others?
What my solution aimed at was giving the deletionists what they want (stars burning twice as bright but half as many), to the extent they can make people voluntarily contribute to that end, while at the same time giving the inclusionists what they want (the blooming of a thousand flowers) without detracting from the quality of the narrower core of high-quality articles the deletionists want.
I haven't seen you argue that this is unobtainable, nor why this isn't a decent compromise betweent the wishes of the people involved. I've seen you take the side of the deletionists (as I understand them), without really saying why, just asserting that it's "what wikipedia wants". Am I misunderstanding the deletionists here? If not, care to explain why the compromise is bad?
editors time is not [cheap] [...] Given the number of pages that I regularly see that have tags months and years old indicating that they need sources, formatting, etc... I'd say Wikipedia is in the midst of an unrecognized crisis in this regard.
Your argument assumes that editor time can be freely shifted from one article to another. If I'm very interested in anime and manga (and nothing else), I'm not going to start editing articles about voting theory or cladistics and the tree of life, or whatever---I don't have the interest, and/or I don't have the knowledge. A similar argument has been applied to free software contributors: people do what they're going to do, and you can't boss volunteers around.
To some extent, people care about Wikipedia in general; to that extent, you can transfer editor work hours between articles. I think the policy that maximizes use of both flexible and non-flexible volunteer labor is to direct the flexible labor to where the marginal return is greatest, given a fixed and unalterable supply of non-flexible labor. Concretely: use a bug tracker or ticket system and auto-fill it with "Most visited [citation needed]", "Oftenest viewed [flag:foobar]". That way, flexible volunteer labor can be directed to where that's useful, and the seldom-viewed stuff can coexist and be crap, and no one will care because no one reads it anyways, and in that way everyone gets to have their cake and eat it too.
Common sense isn't as common as the name would imply, so the deletionists deleted it.
Actually common sense (by definition) is common. What's uncommon and (which isn't a tautology) sorely missing is good sense. The good sense it takes to make that distinction really ought to be more common :-)
There are also benefits [...] "peak uranium"
The benefit of not using uranium is that you save yourself the trouble of changing to something else when uranium runs out? Doesn't not using uranium just move that cost closer (and thus makes it more expensive, as the real interest rate is positive*)?
* Basically, if we postpone the transition process, we can spend some time preparing ourselves better, thus making it require less work i.e. be cheaper
Or am I completely misunderstanding you?
Someone please correct me if I'm mistaken.
While you are correct that computers are deterministic, there are ways to generate pseudo-random numbers based on cryptography, where the "figure out the algorithm" step essentially is the same as breaking the cryptography.
(Actually what you figure out is not the algorithm---which can be publicly known---but a secret input, i.e. a secret key and/or seed.)
So while you are correct in principle, it is possible to make numbers which look so random that their pattern is in practice undetectable.
They have to set a president
You're against campaign finance reform, I take it? ;-)
I can name several econ nobel laureates who, in my not overly well-informed opinion, have made a genuine net positive contribution to the world.
Every heard of game theory and Nash equilibria? That'd be John Forbes Nash. How about Vickrey auctions---they might add a little more honesty to the world, and help people allocate goods more efficiently. How about Kenneth Arrow, proving that social decision making processing will always have flaws (so we can stop looking for the perfect ones and start discussing trade-offs)? Or how about Daniel Kahnemann, for reminding economists the danger of their foolish assumptions about human rationality? ;-)
But of course, I'm eager to learn so if econ is corrupt please enlighten me as to how.
(who is pretty right wing by Canadian standards, but basically a flaming commie pinko by US standards)
Ah, I see Canada is yet another one of these western world countries that does have a left wing ;-)
It's spelled "you're."
Funny thing: they didn't agree about spelling in the days of youre.
Plus, those who wouldn't have voted would be voting randomly and skew the results.
If they vote uniformly randomly, then they vote for every option in equal amounts. For the whole body of indifferent people, it amounts to expressing no preference for any one particular option. So if all indifferent people truly vote randomly, their behavior perfectly expresses their viewpoint.
(See topic.)
(See title). Or maybe the Galapagos Islands?
'A Columbia law professor in Manhattan, Eben Moglen, [...]'
For those who don't know (really?), Eben Moglen has a leading role in drafting the GPL licenses and in enforcing them (or had), see http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/enforcing-gpl.html
He's also the head and founder of the Software Freedom Law Center which has the FSF as one of its clients. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eben_Moglen
SFLC had a podcast, the Software Freedom Law Show, hosted by (among other) Bradley M. Kuhn, the former Executive Director of the FSF and currently on the board of directors.
In other words, Moglen is deeply involved with free software community organizations.
nc is the more flexible, featureful
Socat has 80 different options for how to connect (stdio, TCP, raw IP packets, unix sockets, fifo files, UDP, openssl-wrappings, ...).
gzip < /dev/sdb | nc -l 33333; nc foohost 33333 | gunzip > /dev/sdb
I'd want to do that with some cryptographic authentication---that is, integrity. Whether I want to my disk keep secret or not is a different matter, but I sure as heck don't want my ISP (or just cosmic rays) corrupting my file system. Maybe ssh or stunnel is the right option here.
I still use telnet, mainly for connecting to remote http and smtp servers.
Telnet sends terminal management information included in the byte stream. Use netcat or socat if you just want to pipe stdin into a TCP session.
retort of a corporate man [...] says that a 'decent' game should be worth $40-60.
Yep. His interest is (presumably) keeping his job. That means maximizing the profits of his company. His company makes big-name titles (I for one love the Zelda series, and tetris on the game boy wasn't half bad :D), so of course he wants everyone to believe that big-name titles are the best and worthy of the consumers' money. His interests are, of course, not necessarily aligned with those of the public. Probably not, in this case---otherwise he, an MBA schooled in some economics, would just put his faith in the invisible hand of the market.
more products are not produced and sold, because that would decrease the 'optimum' point.
What you're saying implies, if you think about it, that every sector is behaving like a cartel: the producers are cooperating (rather than competing) in their efforts to make as much money as possible.
If I was running my own company, I'd be a cold-hearted asshole and drop the price below what the cartel is charging and advertise this in as many places as possible, hoping to grab all the customers to myself and making a killing. Now, if these slimy weasel-suckers are half disgusting as me, they'd do the same. You're saying they don't?
corporations determining the price points (even unknowingly) instead of [the] public.
If the markets work the way economists think they do, the public exercises an influence on the price by buying some amounts at some price points and different amounts at different price points, thus influence what the optimal price (for the seller) is.
You may also want to add economics to your podcasting list, at econtalk.org, or watching a few video lectures at http://www.youtube.com/user/jodiecongirl#p/c/22785443C5FB0F83 (the latter being more technical and mathematical).
This is not to say "Corporations: good" or "Competition: bad"---on the contrary. I just don't think that all corporations in every sector form cartels: the benefit of undercutting the cartel is a too strong temptation, especially whenever there are more actors in the sector. (And "Yay, go the little guy!")
Your neighborhood is full of jerks, full of people who want to steal your bank details, get you arrested for CP, peep at nude photos of your partner. Trusting them is far more insane than trusting people that, at least in theory, you get to pick.
I believe that it's possible to build distributed systems where you don't trust everyone involved, but only trust that a certain fraction (often at least half or at least two thirds) of the involved parties are honest.
It seems much more likely that at least half of the Jo(e) Randoms doesn't have the time and inclination to fiddle with the routing table on his "internet box" to screw you over than people who want power will abstain from using power to force themselves into your internet box. Especially when Joe Random can find amateur pictures of someone else's partner.
Also, even though I live in the bad part of town, I think my part of town is filled with at least 95% good people, a few who do a little bad because they're put into a sucky position by "The System", and 0.1% who are just fucked up. People generally want to get along. That's in part also why markets work (reasonably well).
I mean, you could argue that it provides taxes (minimised of course), jobs.
But so do other companies---what are the arguments that specifically Microsoft should be stable? If Microsoft got disbanded today, several small $OS Support Contractor companies might form to make use of the available labor and knowledge. What's the benefit of Microsoft compared to the alternative?
Also, taxes tend to be a net loss to society: the make the marginal price of the taxed thing be different from the marginal cost, which causes inefficient allocations as well as underproduction. Providing jobs isn't a benefit in and of itself: hiring people to dig ditches and fill them up again doesn't create value, it's just a transfer with a high labor cost. Just give them the money and skip the ditches, then the world has more free time in total.
Don't forget that this particular company produces some of the basic software (Windows itself) which is the basis for much of our communications.
We could move off of Windows and onto Linux, BSD, Haiku, OS X, [...]. We have to lose some coordination games on the way---who switches from MS Office to Libre Office first? And we might have to work on improving Wine in order to preserve the investment made in Windows API applications. But if we can solve this, we should be good to go, right? Oh, but good on you for finding an argument specific to the company in question.
I might buy that it's a benefit to the Microsoft employees that they save the friction costs of finding a new job, and the users of Microsoft's products will save similar transaction costs in switching to new products. But that's a one-time gain (or loss avoidance), which shouldn't overrule a long-term increase in productivity. Then there's the general level of churn, of these "recurring one-time" costs, but Microsoft is just one player in a sea of churning companies.
So I'm not really sure, still, what the social benefit is, except keeping the level of churn down. This doesn't seem to outweigh the problems of monopoly... err, bad stuff.
The more fields your business dominates, the safer it is.
What's the value to society of company stability?
I understand clearly why you as an investor want to use diversification to stabilize a stock portfolio (that spans multiple companies). But who benefits from having one particular company be stable and secure? Risk-averse investors? Don't they buy bonds or ultra-stable, ultra-diversified portfolios anyways?
And when "all these people" are using -- nay, customizing -- Eclipse, then they will also be geeks.
Real geeks implement their own custom version of vim in elisp!
and their legendary quality is a didtant memory.
This post are spel-cheecked by Sony.