There is probably some informational value in those advertisements to buy gold.. It means somebody would like you to buy gold at that moment so much, they are willing to pay a television advertisement for it. Methinks if gold would go up, they would become richer if they invested that television advertisement money into gold themselves, which in turn implies that it's a good moment to sell all your gold?
I find all this stuff difficult to understand.
I've never had economics in school, but I'll bite..
But it's worse than stocks, bonds, deeds, and a host of other things.
And why's that? It must be because you assume that your stocks, bonds, deeds etc. increase in value with time, whereas gold does not and costs money to store it safely. Am I right?
Gold is an inert metal that doesn't wear down with age (unlike the Dutch tulip bulb craze;-)). This is a fact.
The paradigm that in general stocks increase in value with time is *not* a fact. It is an assumption based on past behaviour, explained by a world-wide exponential growth in economy, as we got more people, the people extracted more raw materials (including non-renewable and non-recyclable materials such as oil) from our planet's crust, and those resources in turn fueled the economy and consumption rate.
Our planet is an open system in the sense that we get free sunlight from our sun and ultimately this is the power source for all economic growth (except nuclear fission and, as mentioned in another discussion, tidal:-) ). But besides the sunlight, Earth is a closed system, and we're probably using up too much of the long-term concentrated chemical potential energy stores (oil) and should switch to weaker, more direct energy sources (solar photovoltaic, solar heating, wind, biogas, biodiesel) to sustain our civilisation longer-term than just this century.
How can you believe to have permanent exponential growth of power resources / manufacturing / consumption in a closed system? IT DOESN'T MAKE SENSE.
Listen to this:
The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function
Albert A. Bartlett, physicist
Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.
w:Kenneth Boulding, economist
In a steady-state economic system, solar energy input == economic production. Your stocks and bonds are valuable but will not increase in value (I don't see how?). I haven't found any economics articles that I could understand about what such a world would look like, but the transition is probably painful (I'm not a doomer btw).
Just because Malthus (1798) and the Club of Rome (1972) were impopular doomers doesn't make them wrong. Our generation and the next few must *prove* them wrong.
For any serious (and really not always doomer-like:-)) discussion of the discrepancies between economy and reality, I refer you to The Oil Drum forum, where people much smarter and possibly more clear-minded and rational than me discuss these things:-).
Since you seem to know a bit about Theora, tell me this: is the Theora codec also based on Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) inside just like JPEG, MPEG etc. so that if a processor/DSP combi chip can accelerate the DCT part of the video decoding then it can just as efficiently accelerate Theora decoding?
About 1): might kill them with laughter I guess..
About 2): That works the other way around..
If we should
destroy or planet through pollution and/or wars.
, the pesky human infestation of earth would be cured, and all the interesting heavy metals would be mined out of the crust already, easy to harvest from the empty poisoned cities..
It would be an effective tactic: let's destroy humanity ourselves, before the hypothetical aliens could find and attack us!
Colonization could even be framed by the alien invaders in a moral/ethic sense: the humans destroyed their planet, they've forfeited its resources, we'll treat the planet better ( after the surface has cooled down a bit).
I'm old enough to remember the protests against the neutron bomb; are you? What kind of insane species develops a neutron bomb, I ask you?
Nasty.. the description reminds me a bit of the ending of "Protector", by Larry Niven (WARNING: it's more fun to read the book than the Wikipedia entry spoilers).
Let's hope most aliens are not so xenophobic then:-)
Maybe the Golden Rule (not Terry Pratchett's verson!) is the only rational approach. For us I mean.
Forget the moon, that is just going into another gravity well. it is not a "stepping stone" to mars, the asteroids, or the other planets.
I disagree, building a moon base would be a significant stepping stone. There is lots and lots of research that still needs to be done for meaningful long-distance space exploration. For example:
The Russians and ESA are for example working on the Mars 500 project to see what happens if a group of cosmo-, taiko- and (euro-?) -nauts are locked up in a tin can together for 500 days. Where is the NASA equivalent of that? Is it not exciting enough because no big rockets are involved since the tin can is somewhere near Moscow? Long-distance travel means making sure the explorers are not at each others' throat.
For both colonization and long-distance exploration missions, you need a life-support system that is robust, repairable, and produces very little waste and waste heat. A moon base would be excellent to test it because, unlike the Mars 500 tin-can, the vacuum outside is real and the micrometeorites, radiation levels etc. are real. I believe there's a really important lesson to be shown to the world, that building a sustainable mini-ecosystem is *hard*. And, that if you fuck up the one you're currently using, the only one we know works for generations, you're *fucked*.
Manufacturing and autonomous manufacturing. I don't care how hard it is, I think Robert Zubrin is spot-on about its importance for missions to the moon and mars. He talks about a fuel factory here, to be run for 10 months in preparation to the manned mission, but even nicer would be a solar-cell driven factory for crude, low-energy, amorphous silicon solar cells, or maybe even some kind of very slow separator using mass spectrometry that over a period of years collects tiny amounts of pure boron, phosphorus, etc.
The versions made this century don't have to be self-replicating:-).
Yeah... problem the first: No such patents exist, and you can't patent an already-published invention.
That's very interesting.. can you please cite *any* official Microsoft or Intellectual Ventures source saying that they don't have software patents on technology necessary for C# implementation?
As to your second point, officially you're right I guess..
I guess it must be that I assume all men would like to retreat like hermits into their cave because I sometimes feel like this (not a real cave BTW). I understand what you say about the heterogeneity of features within-category and between-category but often it's easy to fall back into the trap of over-generalization.
If there's only a closed-source driver, then it will stop working for newer versions of your operating system when the manufacturer decides it's not cost-effective (i.e. because they want to sell you a newer model graphics card).
On the other hand, if there's (also) an open source driver, then it will stop working for newer versions of open-source operating systems when nobody capable in the world can be bothered to port it to the newer version of the OS anymore (for closed-source OS such as MS Windows I think it depends on both Microsoft and the manufacturer but I'm not sure).
I have an AMD/ATI HD3200 (non-expensive on-motherboard graphics card) and I've been trying to follow and understand the development for the past year or so. My opinion is that it's changing very rapidly, that the (few?) developers working on it are working their collective asses off.
There's a hardware-news website which keeps a close tab on the developments called http://www.phoronix.com (also tracks NVIDIA developments; this article in particular might be interesting to NVIDIA owners: Benchmarks Of Nouveau's Gallium3D OpenGL Driver).
Also, you can follow the development of mesa at http://cgit.freedesktop.org/mesa/.
Current AMD status seems to be that for older ATI's (up to R500 series) there's a "normal" X driver (supporting KMS?) + "bleeding edge" newer, probably highly experimental Gallium3D r300g driver, and for the newer R600, R700 series there's only the normal X driver, with KMS, called xserver-xorg-video-ati. There's also an xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd but I think it's a bit less developed.
With the following "testing" and "unstable" stuff installed on Debian:
xserver-xorg-video-ati 1:6.12.6-1
libdrm2 2.4.18-2
libgl1-mesa-dri 7.7-4 (and the other mesa stuff)
linux-image-2.6.32-trunk-amd64 2.6.32-5
I can play tremulous, urbanterror, and openarena normally, but nexuiz crashes the X server and the commercial ETQW and quake4 crashes missing some higher OpenGL functionality, so YMMV.
It is my opinion that this risky "develop everything anew" Gallium3D strategy will pay off, because the AMD/ATI, Intel, Nouveau and VMware teams can then bundle their efforts on the exciting higher-level "state tracker" layers (such as more recent OpenGL with GLSL for games, and OpenCL!, and maybe some kind of video acceleration or at least DCT also if they agree on which one) and only need to write modesetting and Gallium driver compiler stuff themselves.
But nobody can say for sure if all the temporary instabilities and incompatibilities will all be behind us at the end of 2010. It's good enough for me:-)
If you are also a Mono developer, what's your comment on Richard Stallman's claim that, due to Microsoft's software patent saber-rattling, Mono should be used as a "read-only" language in the sense that it's good to enable running proprietary.NET software on the Mono platform but stupid to write new open source software to run on it?
Hopefully Mono will now be freed from having to track Microsoft's API hell, and it can truly blossom as an open-source software stack.
I may not understand all the legal details, but this article: Why free software shouldn't depend on Mono or C# was clear enough.
I paraphrase: there's nothing at all wrong with Mono per sé, but
(...) The danger is that Microsoft is probably planning to force all free C# implementations underground some day using software patents.
Slashdot blast-from-the-past:
2009-06-27 Richard Stallman says no to Mono 2009-10-06 De Icaza responds to Stallman
Suppose the USA keeps acting as if software patents are legit, wouldn't this mean that at any time Microsoft could claim that Mono infringes Microsoft patents, creating a difficult and prolonged lawsuit because after all Microsoft can show past collaboration with Novell (maybe not on Mono but we can't see from the outside), Novell signing the patent deal implying that they needed Microsoft's "intellectual property", etc. etc. It would be a nightmare as long as "in re Bilski" isn't concluded by the US Supreme Court.
Re:Gosh, I wonder what THAT will be used for....
on
ISS To Get Man Cave
·
· Score: 1
For reference, on average, Health Insurance companies are running about a 3.5% profit margin.
OK, that brings us non-Americans one step closer to understanding what the fuss is all about.. So if health insurance costs are astronomical, and the health insurance companies only make a 3.5% profit, that means that the health care costs are the culprit, right?
So why is health care so much more expensive in the USA than in comparable countries.
Actually, as another outsider (from the EU), after reading a lot of these foaming-at-the-mouth posts here on Slashdot, I am left with two observations and I hope USians will help me to understand better:
I haven't read a single thread where the word "solidarity" is mentioned. I read several posts paraphrasing it, but never the word itself. Almost as if it is a concept that's alien to the American psyche. How can it be that no poster here has written "we need this healthcare reform to improve SOLIDARITY between our citizens" and many have written "I'm not going to work my ass off to pay for healthcare for my slacking neighbours"?
It is my naïve idea that a society can't live, can't survive, without some measure of solidarity between its constituents. Evidently the USA hasn't collapsed yet, so they must have solidarity in some shape or form, but maybe it's a dirty word or tabu to mention it? I don't understand.. This is Slashdot, never heard of the Golden Rule? never heard of coöperation as a viable game-theoretic strategy?
And secondly, I have the strong feeling that I'm missing something in the debate here. Almost as if there is an aspect of the USA healthcare system which remains hidden in this discussion, meaning all the frothing-at-the-mouth is skirting the real issue because not all components are up for rational debate.
I like a good flamewar as well as anyone (hey, this is Slashdot), but the fact that this single USA healthcare law triggered 1400 responses, much more than say, ACTA or DMCA etc., indicates to me that there's something else at work here. Much as it pains me to say, I can't believe that the stereotypical USA political dualism causes all this handwringing. I refuse to believe that Americans are *that* stupid. So what aspect, what component of USA society makes it so unpalatable to have a healthcare system similar to that of many other rich countries, most of which are allies or trade partners of the US? Is American society really so different?
So let me summarize what I see as the facts (from my biased outsider perspective;-) ) and let's try to work it out:
The current USA health insurance system doesn't work and is seriously more expensive and less efficient and fair than that of comparable rich countries
The current USA government tried and succeeded to push a reform law through against seriously large opposition, with the effect that many more Americans will have access to health insurance and will try to vote to get rid of it again in the coming November election (wtf??).
To this outsider, more efficient health insurance seems like a good thing for the USA and for the world because more USA citizens will be able to work longer and in better health, improving the crushing debt situation of the USA so they can pay us (=rest of the world) back instead of following in the footsteps of Argentina and dragging us into a world economic depression.
Hundreds of Slashdotters oppose the legislation with arguments like "it's too expensive" and "Obama pushes us further into debt" so obviously they don't see it that way.
What are we outsiders missing? You can't seriously believe that the richest country in the world can't afford universal healthcare because "it's too expensive" but many countries that, although rich, are not *as* rich, can. I assume that if health *care* in the USA were similarly expensive as in other rich countries, health *insurance* would also be a drain on the US similar to the drain it is in those other countries, i.e. expensive but not *too* expensive.
I can't find a solution other than that my assumption is wrong, and that health *care* in the USA is abnormally expensive, forcing or allowing health *insurance* to be 7-10 times as expensive for the average family as it is in other countries. Also, several stories here tol
This is just a peeve of mine, but any chance this is a myth? I mean, really - who gets harmed by being "locked-in"? I can think of senarios, but how much do those senarios actually impact real world?
Well, this is just a hunch, don't get me wrong, but.. the city of München (est. 1158) is 850 years old. Let's assume it will still be around in 150 years when they have their 1000-year celebration. Do you expect Microsoft to be still around by then? If not, and the vendor lock-in is complete (which is of course an exaggeration) then they will have quite a problem upgrading.. at some unspecified point in the future when MS (est. 1975) ceases to exist. So, they can either upgrade to an open-standards-based solution then, or do it now.
(Note I'm not claiming Linux will be around in 150 years, but it's not impossible, and anyways document longevity is more important than software implementation longevity)
The problem is that individuals and companies don't have to think on larger timescales but governments do. Or, at least they should. That means the governments need to set the parameters (open standards, no vendor lock-in) for the companies they contract to adhere to. I realize I'm describing a bit of an utopia here:-)
Slashdot Mirror
There is probably some informational value in those advertisements to buy gold.. It means somebody would like you to buy gold at that moment so much, they are willing to pay a television advertisement for it. Methinks if gold would go up, they would become richer if they invested that television advertisement money into gold themselves, which in turn implies that it's a good moment to sell all your gold?
I find all this stuff difficult to understand.
And why's that? It must be because you assume that your stocks, bonds, deeds etc. increase in value with time, whereas gold does not and costs money to store it safely. Am I right? ;-)). This is a fact.
:-) ). But besides the sunlight, Earth is a closed system, and we're probably using up too much of the long-term concentrated chemical potential energy stores (oil) and should switch to weaker, more direct energy sources (solar photovoltaic, solar heating, wind, biogas, biodiesel) to sustain our civilisation longer-term than just this century.
Gold is an inert metal that doesn't wear down with age (unlike the Dutch tulip bulb craze
The paradigm that in general stocks increase in value with time is *not* a fact. It is an assumption based on past behaviour, explained by a world-wide exponential growth in economy, as we got more people, the people extracted more raw materials (including non-renewable and non-recyclable materials such as oil) from our planet's crust, and those resources in turn fueled the economy and consumption rate.
Our planet is an open system in the sense that we get free sunlight from our sun and ultimately this is the power source for all economic growth (except nuclear fission and, as mentioned in another discussion, tidal
How can you believe to have permanent exponential growth of power resources / manufacturing / consumption in a closed system? IT DOESN'T MAKE SENSE.
Listen to this:
In a steady-state economic system, solar energy input == economic production. Your stocks and bonds are valuable but will not increase in value (I don't see how?). I haven't found any economics articles that I could understand about what such a world would look like, but the transition is probably painful (I'm not a doomer btw).
:-)) discussion of the discrepancies between economy and reality, I refer you to The Oil Drum forum, where people much smarter and possibly more clear-minded and rational than me discuss these things :-).
Just because Malthus (1798) and the Club of Rome (1972) were impopular doomers doesn't make them wrong. Our generation and the next few must *prove* them wrong.
For any serious (and really not always doomer-like
The more-or-less finished ODF 1.2 already, or is that too much to ask? They have employees on the technical committee that produces it, so...
Since you seem to know a bit about Theora, tell me this: is the Theora codec also based on Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) inside just like JPEG, MPEG etc. so that if a processor/DSP combi chip can accelerate the DCT part of the video decoding then it can just as efficiently accelerate Theora decoding?
I think someone described that hurdle as the Great Filter.
Harvest time! Cue the Blue Öyster Cult's "Don't Fear The Reaper"! And don't hold back on the cowbell!
300 or so :-) http://exoplanets.eu/
About 2): That works the other way around.. If we should
, the pesky human infestation of earth would be cured, and all the interesting heavy metals would be mined out of the crust already, easy to harvest from the empty poisoned cities..
It would be an effective tactic: let's destroy humanity ourselves, before the hypothetical aliens could find and attack us!
Colonization could even be framed by the alien invaders in a moral/ethic sense: the humans destroyed their planet, they've forfeited its resources, we'll treat the planet better ( after the surface has cooled down a bit).
I'm old enough to remember the protests against the neutron bomb; are you? What kind of insane species develops a neutron bomb, I ask you?
Nasty.. the description reminds me a bit of the ending of "Protector", by Larry Niven (WARNING: it's more fun to read the book than the Wikipedia entry spoilers). :-)
Let's hope most aliens are not so xenophobic then
Maybe the Golden Rule (not Terry Pratchett's verson!) is the only rational approach. For us I mean.
I disagree, building a moon base would be a significant stepping stone. There is lots and lots of research that still needs to be done for meaningful long-distance space exploration. For example:
That's very interesting.. can you please cite *any* official Microsoft or Intellectual Ventures source saying that they don't have software patents on technology necessary for C# implementation?
As to your second point, officially you're right I guess..
Of course the FSF is biased, that doesn't detract from their argument in any way though.
I guess it must be that I assume all men would like to retreat like hermits into their cave because I sometimes feel like this (not a real cave BTW). I understand what you say about the heterogeneity of features within-category and between-category but often it's easy to fall back into the trap of over-generalization.
If there's only a closed-source driver, then it will stop working for newer versions of your operating system when the manufacturer decides it's not cost-effective (i.e. because they want to sell you a newer model graphics card).
On the other hand, if there's (also) an open source driver, then it will stop working for newer versions of open-source operating systems when nobody capable in the world can be bothered to port it to the newer version of the OS anymore (for closed-source OS such as MS Windows I think it depends on both Microsoft and the manufacturer but I'm not sure).
There's a hardware-news website which keeps a close tab on the developments called http://www.phoronix.com (also tracks NVIDIA developments; this article in particular might be interesting to NVIDIA owners: Benchmarks Of Nouveau's Gallium3D OpenGL Driver).
Also, you can follow the development of mesa at http://cgit.freedesktop.org/mesa/.
Current AMD status seems to be that for older ATI's (up to R500 series) there's a "normal" X driver (supporting KMS?) + "bleeding edge" newer, probably highly experimental Gallium3D r300g driver, and for the newer R600, R700 series there's only the normal X driver, with KMS, called xserver-xorg-video-ati. There's also an xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd but I think it's a bit less developed.
With the following "testing" and "unstable" stuff installed on Debian:
I can play tremulous, urbanterror, and openarena normally, but nexuiz crashes the X server and the commercial ETQW and quake4 crashes missing some higher OpenGL functionality, so YMMV. :-)
It is my opinion that this risky "develop everything anew" Gallium3D strategy will pay off, because the AMD/ATI, Intel, Nouveau and VMware teams can then bundle their efforts on the exciting higher-level "state tracker" layers (such as more recent OpenGL with GLSL for games, and OpenCL!, and maybe some kind of video acceleration or at least DCT also if they agree on which one) and only need to write modesetting and Gallium driver compiler stuff themselves.
But nobody can say for sure if all the temporary instabilities and incompatibilities will all be behind us at the end of 2010. It's good enough for me
This is the most informative posting on this topic yet, I find.
If you are also a Mono developer, what's your comment on Richard Stallman's claim that, due to Microsoft's software patent saber-rattling, Mono should be used as a "read-only" language in the sense that it's good to enable running proprietary .NET software on the Mono platform but stupid to write new open source software to run on it?
OK, I won't read it, thanks :-)
I may not understand all the legal details, but this article: Why free software shouldn't depend on Mono or C# was clear enough. I paraphrase: there's nothing at all wrong with Mono per sé, but
Slashdot blast-from-the-past: 2009-06-27 Richard Stallman says no to Mono
2009-10-06 De Icaza responds to Stallman
Suppose the USA keeps acting as if software patents are legit, wouldn't this mean that at any time Microsoft could claim that Mono infringes Microsoft patents, creating a difficult and prolonged lawsuit because after all Microsoft can show past collaboration with Novell (maybe not on Mono but we can't see from the outside), Novell signing the patent deal implying that they needed Microsoft's "intellectual property", etc. etc. It would be a nightmare as long as "in re Bilski" isn't concluded by the US Supreme Court.
c) of course.. it's a new trend, it made it to Word of the Year 2008!
Sunt pueri pueri, pueri puerilia tractant. :-)
Do you suppress your man-cave-longings because it could be perceived as puerile? 'Cause I don't
OK, that brings us non-Americans one step closer to understanding what the fuss is all about.. So if health insurance costs are astronomical, and the health insurance companies only make a 3.5% profit, that means that the health care costs are the culprit, right?
So why is health care so much more expensive in the USA than in comparable countries.
It is my naïve idea that a society can't live, can't survive, without some measure of solidarity between its constituents. Evidently the USA hasn't collapsed yet, so they must have solidarity in some shape or form, but maybe it's a dirty word or tabu to mention it? I don't understand.. This is Slashdot, never heard of the Golden Rule? never heard of coöperation as a viable game-theoretic strategy?
I like a good flamewar as well as anyone (hey, this is Slashdot), but the fact that this single USA healthcare law triggered 1400 responses, much more than say, ACTA or DMCA etc., indicates to me that there's something else at work here. Much as it pains me to say, I can't believe that the stereotypical USA political dualism causes all this handwringing. I refuse to believe that Americans are *that* stupid. So what aspect, what component of USA society makes it so unpalatable to have a healthcare system similar to that of many other rich countries, most of which are allies or trade partners of the US? Is American society really so different?
So let me summarize what I see as the facts (from my biased outsider perspective ;-) ) and let's try to work it out:
Thank you for keeping us informed, regardless of positive or negative spin :-)
Well, this is just a hunch, don't get me wrong, but.. the city of München (est. 1158) is 850 years old. Let's assume it will still be around in 150 years when they have their 1000-year celebration. Do you expect Microsoft to be still around by then? If not, and the vendor lock-in is complete (which is of course an exaggeration) then they will have quite a problem upgrading.. at some unspecified point in the future when MS (est. 1975) ceases to exist. So, they can either upgrade to an open-standards-based solution then, or do it now. :-)
(Note I'm not claiming Linux will be around in 150 years, but it's not impossible, and anyways document longevity is more important than software implementation longevity)
The problem is that individuals and companies don't have to think on larger timescales but governments do. Or, at least they should. That means the governments need to set the parameters (open standards, no vendor lock-in) for the companies they contract to adhere to. I realize I'm describing a bit of an utopia here