Corporations as such have no power. It is overgrown goverment that provides them with such. A big difference.
Not so.
1.) If you have lots of money, then you have power. 2.) Corporations have lots of money. 3.) Ergo, corporations have power, regardless of any overgrown governmens supplying them with more (though, this certainly increases their power even more).
So, the question is not whether to be anti-big-corporation or anti-big-government. If you are against one thing, you should be against the other as well. "The State and the Capital, they sit in the same boat." - Ebba Grön
Actually, society is built on a blend of cooperation and competition, with a good dose of selfishness.
True. However, in any stable society the cooperation part must be predominant; otherwise it would just decay into dog-eat-dog chaos, something that perhaps is happening today.
If you want to reduce the vast differences in income, then presumably it's a good thing to give people welfare?
In a way, yes, but I wouldn't call it welfare. I would call it "citizen salary"; something you get for just being a citizen.
Now... the question is this: if you're making everyone economically equal, then why would anyone do anything but sit around on their asses all day and live off their welfare check?
Sooner or later the would perhaps get bored with that and start doing something...;-) But seriously, I don't propose making everyone totally economically equal. Some people are more industrious or skilled and I think they deserve more than a lazy bum. However, I think the inequatilities should be vastly smaller than now.
Someone working 60 hour-weeks obviously deserves more than someone working 30 hours only. Someone with long and expensive eduacation or very special skills deserve more per hour than someone without too. What I am against is the magnitude of it. Let's say max hourly pay could be some 5 times that of unskilled labor. No one can sustain working more than 80 hours/week. So, there is no way anyone could deserve having an income more than 10 times that of 40 h/week normal people. And even that should be very rare.
So you'd have people who work their asses off paying for those who do nothing, ending up with people who get bupkiss for their hard toil, versus people who get plenty for doing nothing.
Does this seem right, fair or 'morally and ethically correct' to you?
As I said, in my scenario, working hard would still get you more money than not doing it, just not millions. And besides, there are incentives besides money - fame, pride in a job well done, doing something just because you love doing it, you name it.
Now, today we have this "lottery" world where you have a very slim chance at striking it rich (better if your parents are rich), but where it is quite likely you will end up with chicken shit despite all your hard work. A world where you basically need money to get money, where the rich get richer without doing anything useful and the poor more and more impoverished and marginalized. Does this seem right, fair or 'morally and ethically correct' to you?
Certainly, in a perfect world, this is how it would work. But unfortunately, we don't live in a perfect world.
I know. But that is no reason not trying to make it at least somewhat better.
Open source programers are noble fools who get themselves taken advantage of when in actuality should be the ones lavished in money.
No one should be lavished in money. Not businessmen, not artists, not programmers, open source or otherwise, not anyone. Every cent of the unnecessary wealth of the rich is taken from the poor. Economics is a zero-sum game.
Do you think you somehow deserve a sports car and a SUV, vacations at luxury hotels, meals at expensive restaurants every day and a million-dollar home just because you happen to be a programmer? Do you think your work is so much more worth than that of the guys and gals who wait on you and do the shit work for you? I have news for you: It is not.
And in a fair world, you would not get away with it. But of course, the laws are written by the rich, for the rich.
IMO we should concern ourselves with trying to reduce the vast differences in income, not increase them. This is not only the ethical Right Thing to do, it is smart for yourself in the long term too.
Society is built upon cooperation, and large differences of income undermine that. Unless our society changes, it is heading for disaster (police state and/or revolution and/or civil war). More and more people are parasites on society today (day traders e.g.) who do not contribute anything and yet expects not only to get fed but to get rich! Loathsome. IMHO such people ought to be shot.
Accumulating money and possessions for yourself only should not be the purpose of life. Making a better world should. I applaud RMS for his uncompromising stand in this.
I imagine RMS standing before thousands of marketing gurus and telling them how paying for software is evil. The look on their face will be just priceless.
Why should he do that? RMS has never said that charging for software is evil or even wrong. In fact, he himself for a time got his income by selling tape copies of EMACS. What RMS and the GPL says it that you should be allowed to (from the Free Software Definition):
The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits. (freedom 3). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
Now, where in this does it say that you are not allowed to charge money for software, even GPL:ed software? AFAIK Red Hat is selling quite some GPL:ed stuff and they are not being sued by the FSF.
Well, as it happens I have personally experienced telepathy (with my GF), but above all I have OBEs (Out-of-Body-Experiences) now and then. Have had a few hundred by now.
No, I can't do it at will, much less prove it to others, and I am not really interested in proving it either. I know what I have done. It is enough.
So now, let all prejudiced people call me crazy, deluded, a liar or a kook. It doesn't matter, the truth is still the same. Mind you, I am not "evangelizing" or trying to convince anyone else; I only tell this because you asked. In case anyone has a genuine interest feel free to email me about it.
Now, some may say that I am probably just dreaming. All I can say to that is that once you experience this there can be no question whatsoever that you are not. It is a state far more profound, sometimes more clear than waking life. And it is fun!
It really is an incredibly cool thing you know... being "out"... better than any drug high. What I could tell you... the things I have done... but most people would not likely believe it, so I won't.
Contrast this to Intel, who is so bent on shoving stuff down our throats that they willingly sell products that have a short or no real life span expectancy. (p462 anyone?)
Sorry to nitpick, but Socket 462 is the same as Socket A, for AMD Athlon/Duron.
The current P4 socket is Socket 423, whereas P4 Northwood will require Socket 478.
You know what; when I decided to write it I had already seen several replies to the effect that the Earth was only 6k years old. But I decided to put it as a reply to main, since it wasn't directly an answer to any one of them, but more of the general info category.
And as far as PSI-COP;-) is concerned... oh boy...:-D That is really funny, since I don't agree very much with them at all - especially not their methods but not all the "facts" either. That of course does not preclude that I have the same stance as they on some issues, such as e.g. this one.
I just retch to see every novelist who has to have elf-like creatures, wizard-like creatures, halfling-like creatures, dwarf-like creatures, etc.
That's probably because all you have read has been crap like Terry Brooks etc. However, there is very good new fantasy too. Robert Jordan has already been mentioned, but try out the Paksenarrion trilogy by Elizabeth Moon and the Deverry series by Katherine Kerr. Both include elves, dwarves and wizards, but they are not Tolkien-clone elves, dwarves and wizards.
Not being the creationist at the other end of your sword i still think i ought to point out that there's a fairly large bit of scientific evidence to show that there really was a large oceanic swelling that coincides with glacial movements and 'ice age' cycles.
Sure there was, if you by "swelling" mean changes in sea level due to large amounts of water being bound up in ice sheets and later melting again. IIRC the worldwide sea level during the height of the last ice age was some 150 m lower than now, but the point is that those eustatic changes took a long time; thousands of years.
However, it is possible that some flood myths came from large-scale (but still not worldwide) flooding at the end of the last ice age.
You can thump your Geology book just as well as others can thump their bibles, but you at least ought to read it now and then.
And I do. The difference between thumping the geology book and thumping the Bible is that the geology book is based on empirical data and logic, whereas the Bible is based on old myths. In addition geologists admit that the theories the present are only models, which may be changed or updated as new facts demand it, something that can not be said of the Bible. It's defenders seem more keen on changing facts to suit the book.
The Bible never says that the earth is 6k years old.
I know. Yet many (not all) creationists still insists it is.
BTW, I am quite familiar with creationism and its arguments as my parents are creationists. Sigh.
We can work out that humans have been around that long, though.
Well, if you arbitrarily decide that the genealogical listings and lifetimes as stated in the Bible are utterly correct (despite even internal contradictions), and at the same time totally disregard not only other genealogical listings from, say, Mesopotamia and Egypt, but also massive amounts of archaeological evidence from all around the world, then I guess you could believe humans have only existed for 6k years.
But if you do, at least have the decency to admit it is blind faith and don't claim there is anything even remotely akin to scientific evidence supporting it.
Many Christians believe that the Bible leaves out a really long time between the creation of the Universe and then, taking the earth from a lifeless ball of earth and water, and making it into a habitable and life-fulled planet (which God can easily do in 6 days.. since He is God). So there:)
Yeah, I know all about that variant. While not quite as preposterous as saying the entire Earth is 6000 years old, it still conflicts with enormous amounts of evidence.
Besides.. you guys keep claiming that we're stupid to believe in a creator.
I personally claim no such thing. In fact, I believe in a Creator, or Creators. I am not a materialist. I just don't believe in JHWH, in the Biblical creator, or that the Bible is more truthful or accurate than any other old mythological text. I lean more or less towards a variant of Pantheism if anything.
From personal experience, I know there is a lot more to existence than materialistic science or traditional religions think. Of course this is valid evidence only for myself and I wouldn't dream of asking anyone else to believe this just because I say so. Everyone must walk their own path.
What about you believing that we grew into humans (and humans are really complex, study biology.. work on AI.. you'll get the idea) from.. rocks?! Sounds a lot more crazy to me.
Why? Why should the idea that there is an innate property in nature to turn more and more complex by itself be more crazy than the idea that there is an omnipotent God, to which no natural laws apply, who never shows himself, to which everything we can't explain is referred?
I've had people tell me that "Satan put all the apparent evidence that the world is older than 6000 years. God looks at the whole thing as a test of your faith."
Some people (Not just creationists) will believe what they believe, no matter how much evidence there is for or against their beliefs.
I know. Those people are not the ones I am trying to reach; they are beyond help. There may be others that are not yet as brain-washed tho, who still may be reached by logic and reason.
So, if you have a very big eruption, say a magnitude 7, roughly every 10 000 years from a certain volcano, if you find ten ash layers from eruptions of that size it is not very unreasonable to think that the oldest one is ~1 million years old.
Ok Creationists, you can all sit down right now. This is not the proof that C-14 is wrong. The Earth is not 6000 years old. This is just a minor bug modifying the upper half of the C-14 dating scale somewhat.
If by any chance you listen to logical arguments there are lots of very good reasons why the Earth must be a lot older than old Bishop Usher thought. Even if you dismiss all radiometric dating as somehow unreliable - not only C-14 but Potassium-Argon and the others too - there are still other methods by which we can see that the Earth must be vastly much more old than the Bible says.
For instance, sedimentation takes time.
One example is clay layers in the deep ocean basins. Tiny clay grains that have come from rivers slowly settle in the still waters of the ocean basins. The beds generally grow less than 0.1 mm in thickness per year, and the clay beds may be many kilometers thick - this gives an age of many tens to perhaps more than a hundred million years.
Now, many creationists will say that most of that clay was deposited much faster during the supposed Flood. But that won't work - you see, clay will not sediment at all if it isn't very calm and it always does it very slowly. Also, the thickness of the beds increase linearly away from the mid-ocean spreading ridges, in perfect agreement with the slow (1-10 cm/year) seafloor spreading. The same principle of slow sedimentation also applies to large river deltas, which may be many km thick too.
Erosion and weathering also takes time.
A typical valley glacier erodes its bed and sides with roughly 1 mm/year, and the U-valleys can be many km deep. Rivers slowly eat their way down into the rock - how long does it take to wear a mountain range down? How long does it take for chemical weathering to slowly eat its way down to hundreds of m of depth in the very bedrock?
Volcanoes ash layers are another way of dating. The exact date you get from other methods, like historical accounts, C-14, ice cores etc. - but relative dating is very easy, which ash layer is above the other? There is an approximate power-law for volcanic eruptions; the larger the longer the interval between. So, if you have a very big eruption, say a magnitude 7, roughly every 10 000 years from a certain volcano, if you find ten ash layers from eruptions of that size it is not very unreasonable to think that the oldest one is ~1 million years old.
Now, of course eruptions can come closer in time to each other, the period isn't totally fixed, but if, say, two eruptions were close to each other in time you can tell, because then there will be no fully developed earth horizon on the lower layer. It takes thousands of years for chemical weathering, leaching and nutrient uptake by plants to form a mature earth horizon.
All these maethods say is that the Earth must be at least a few hundred million years old, probably older. To get the 4.8 billion years number you will have to use radiometric dating, but there is something else supporting that too.
Theoretical models of the evolution of stars say that the sun is roughly 5 billion years old, and is is reasonable to assume that the Earth formed roughly the same time.
So, in the end the 4.8 billion year value seems quite certain. It is possible future research will find out that it really is 4.7 or 4.9, but the overall picture is clear, no matter what creationist Bible-thumpers say.
The people who are trusting the executive are not just rich greedy VCs and financiers, but also little old ladies whose pension funds include stock. The executive being a greedy bastard puts food on the table of the wheelchair bound Mrs. Farnsworth.
There shouldn't be any such thing as pension funds. Mrs Farnsworth should be helped thru her later years by her son and daughter. This is the natural way, and it worked for thousands of years before there were pension funds.
Because when you're running a business, all the investors, customers, partners, suppliers, and employees are trusting their livelihood in you being as ruthless and greedy as you possibly can.
I agree. And this is precisely why business in the end will have to be obliterated. Because it is destructive and brings out the worst in people.
Humans should spend their time with Science, Art and Love, not work. And once nanotech is here it will be possible. The only thing not replicatable will be land, which is why land must not be allowed to be owned by any one.
This is a self-limiting situation. If there's enough food for 3 million survivors for three days, and 90% of them starve, the 10% remaining have a month's worth of food.
Perhaps for dry foods (sugar, meal etc.) and cans. Fresh food will quickly spoil and as electricity disappears refrigerated and frozen food will become unedible fast too.
With a lack of infrastructure (particularly fuel), modern factory farms will be starved of production capacity. That's where the urban survivors come in - to haul tractors, combines, etc, and/or use their skills at repairing equipment.
Hardly. There will be an acute shortage of fertilizer, pesticides and fuel. People will have to plow with horses (if such can be found), or pull it themselves. Furthermore, after an impact or nuclear war, the climate will very likely be much worse (nuclear winter, anyone?). Food yields are likely to be perhaps a tenth of what it used to be, if you are lucky.
Bottom line: It (be it global thermonuclear war or a series of asteroid fragment impacts) would majorly suck. But homo sapiens would, in all likelihood, survive
Yes.
- not just as a species, but as a technologically-advanced species.
No.
Of course it depends on the magnitude of the catastrophe, but were all nukes used we can say goodbye to technological civilization for at least several hundred years, perhaps forever.
Think my 100-year figure is nuts? We didn't have electricity 100 years ago. (Oh, wait a minute, California still doesn't!;-) But we did make the transition - from an agrarian society with a small urban component into a nearly completely-urbanized techno-society - in the past 100 years.
You forget that during that time there were at all time, even during war, a functioning society. And most important of all - then we had access to easy, cheap-to-extract deposits of ore and energy (oil etc.). They are consumed now, and the only reason we can use lower-grade deposits is our more advanced technology now. But after a nuclear war, that doesn't exist anymore. So a new technological society would be much harder to build up again than it was in the 20th century.
It is more likely than not that the first 20 years or so would be chaos, with people scavenging supplies of fuel, spare parts and food as long as they can, with gangs of bandits preying upon them. In that time the Earth's population falls to 10-20% of the current.
As more and more ancient high-tech breaks down and there is no one who knows how to repair it anymore, and as the stores run out, people are more and more forced to live of the land, using older technology. Probably mostly 19th century tech with some 20th century parts. There might be some reintroduction of higher tech, like electricity from, say, hydro or wind power. At least some 80% of the people are farmers, possibly under bondage to earlier bandit leaders turned warlords.
In a few hundred years some more advanced, somewhat technological society might arise, but it will never approach today. The resources needed are already gone.
I totally agree with you, but I think we must go further still. Why do we need or why shopuld we allow advertising at all? This is not a troll; hear me out.
I think advertising has gone way too far and many people are so sick of seeing commercials everywhere. Especially since everyone knows that commercials lie to you, treat you like an idiot and generally waste your time. I mean, what is really the purpose of advertising? It is to increase the sales of a certain product through:
Making you believe the product is better than it is and/or better than the competitors' offerings.
Making you believe the product will grant you something it will not (e.g. sex appeal from a certain soda).
Making you associate the product with things cool but unrelated (pop stars, windsurfing, snowboarding etc.).
IMO this is nothing but fraud - tho legal fraud to be sure, getting increased sales on false premises. In addition to that,
advertising also has the following effects:
Making the product more expensive, since the advertising costs must be recouped.
Wasting valuable resources (time, paper, transport, bandwidth, storage space) and increasing waste production, for something almost no one wants to see.
And to boot, it is contagious. Since other companies use advertising, it creates an arms race where every company must do it, only to keep up. Like in Alice in Wonderland, you must run very fast only to be able to stay in the same place.
Good products need no commercials - they advertise themselves thru word of mouth, happy customers spreading the word. I would like a world where all advertising (in current form) is outlawed. That is, pushy advertising that steals my time when I have no interest whatsoever in the the product it tries to sell.
Of course companies must be allowed to present information about their products, but it should be done in a pully way. For instance, if I am interested in purchasing, say, a new car, then I go to a web site with links to all car manufacturers, and look there for something that
might meet my needs. Then I might read car newsgroups and owner sites to see what impression others have got of the model in my mind, and then make an informed decision. This is BTW the way I purchase things right now.
Websites should need no ads either. What we really don't need is an Internet little more than glorified TV, packed with ads and eye-candy but almost no content. The very best websites are done by people who love whatever they are putting out info about, and therefore present the content for free. Once most people have fixed net connections server space and bandwidth should be no problem either, except in some very popular sites (e.g./.), where a distributed solution is probably the best.
As for the people working in advertising, they will have to find something better and more worthwhile to do for a living. That is what I did (yes, I've worked in advertising).
Sharky is an Intel whore. DDR doesn't cost anything near $206 for 256 MB. I just got 2 256 MB PC2100 CAS2.5 DIMMs from Crucial for $104 each. Now I see that their prices have gone up slightly (very high demand perhaps), but even $115 is very much lower than $206. So the price difference for 512 MB is more like $330.
The answer to the problem of deteriorating media, is not to rely on manual transfers done by humans (e.g. floppy->CD->DVD->?), but on a redundant, automated network, that when a new node with a new state-of-the art storage facility comes online, automatically copies information from other, older nodes. Something like Freenet. It could be set up so that all nodes has some parameters denoting type, speed and size of storage type, so that the data in the oldest (those most likely to get offline) gets reproduced to the new node first.
In this way, you would not rely on humans wanting to/remembering/being able to transfer their files to new storage once the expiry date of the old is approaching. As long as the redundant network exists, the information will never be lost.
The network could also be set up to automatically translate outdated file formats with new, better ones (e.g. GIF->PNG), taking care of another problem.
However, democracy has the property that it can be self-destroying. Dictatorships never have the cunning idea to disband themselves, but democracies have voted to accede absolute power. (Case in point - in Germany, IIRC August 1934, 'The Enabling Law' (don't know the proper German name for it, sorry) was passed by a _95%_ vote and giving absolute power to Adolf Hitler...).
True.
If we allow anti-democratic forces freedom of expression there is a risk that they might take over and destroy democracy.
But that is a risk that we, IMHO, have to take. Because if we don't, then we have already lost democracy. It is then not a possibilty but a certainty.
And don't say that we should only censor nazis and the like. Restrictions in freedom of speech, once they are in place, always get abused, always get extended to more groups... and to still more... because they easily can, and because politicians can't resist.
The sad truth is that freedoms are very easily taken away, but very hard to recover.
Accepting the existence and expression of ideas repugnant to ourselves, and the risk inherent in this, is the price we have to pay for our freedom.
Because then there would be no planets to live on.
Stars in globular clusters have metallicities (metals in astronomical sense is everything else apart from hydrogen and helum) a hundredth of the sun. That means that the total amount of materials for building solid planets (silicon, oxygen, iron etc.) would be so low that there probably would only exist a few small planetesimals (like the asteroids), and nowhere for life to exist.
Of course, a young globular cluster, like the one forming in the Tarantula nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud, would have enough heavy elements. But there the UV radiation might be too harsh.
consumers have chosen to use Windows because it is the easiest consumer OS to use and is stable enough to do everyday work on. Period. If it weren't, they wouldn't buy it.
Of course the fact that it comes bundled with the OEM computer, that most people are not even aware there is anything else (except perhaps Macs), that M$ uses their Office monopoly (incompatible file formats) to reinforce their OS monopoly and vice versa, or IE-only web sites etc. hasn't anything to do with it.
Consumers haven't chosen Windows. It has been chosen for them: IBM chose MS-DOS, and corporations chose IBM. People then wanted to be able to run their software at home too, so they had to have MS-DOS too. The same reason for buying or "upgrading" to Windows 3.x, Windows 95, 98 or Me. Not because it is the best or they want to, but because they are forced to.
Yeah, right; that's a good one. That's what we are supposed to believe.
The need to be clear, precise, concise, and unamiguous forces legislators to write 200-word-plus sentences and WRITING IN ALL CAPS? Give me a break. Y N0+ wR1+3 1n 31337, +H3n 1+ 1z 3v3N m0r3 uNr34d4813?
I think my deliberate obfuscation hypothesis fits the facts better.
Actually the very purpose of legalese is to make ordinary people unable to understand it. If people can't understand the laws they won't notice when their freedom is taken from them. So the powers that be want laws to become even more impossible to understand.
All citizens are expected to know all laws (not knowing something is illegal is no excuse in the eye of the law), but in practice noone does, not even lawyers. This is clearly totally absurd, and it is steadily growing worse by new complicated laws added.
IMO we should revoke the vast majority of laws - at least 99% has to go - and make the rest fair, intuitive, simple and easy to understand. All laws with victimless "crimes", and everything dealing with "IP" should be totally abolished. The law should not concern itself with whether I smoke some pot or copy some warez.
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Corporations as such have no power. It is overgrown goverment that provides them with such. A big difference.
Not so.
1.) If you have lots of money, then you have power.
2.) Corporations have lots of money.
3.) Ergo, corporations have power, regardless of any overgrown governmens supplying them with more (though, this certainly increases their power even more).
So, the question is not whether to be anti-big-corporation or anti-big-government. If you are against one thing, you should be against the other as well. "The State and the Capital, they sit in the same boat." - Ebba Grön
/Dervak
Actually, society is built on a blend of cooperation and competition, with a good dose of selfishness.
True. However, in any stable society the cooperation part must be predominant; otherwise it would just decay into dog-eat-dog chaos, something that perhaps is happening today.
If you want to reduce the vast differences in income, then presumably it's a good thing to give people welfare?
In a way, yes, but I wouldn't call it welfare. I would call it "citizen salary"; something you get for just being a citizen.
Now... the question is this: if you're making everyone economically equal, then why would anyone do anything but sit around on their asses all day and live off their welfare check?
Sooner or later the would perhaps get bored with that and start doing something... ;-) But seriously, I don't propose making everyone totally economically equal. Some people are more industrious or skilled and I think they deserve more than a lazy bum. However, I think the inequatilities should be vastly smaller than now.
Someone working 60 hour-weeks obviously deserves more than someone working 30 hours only. Someone with long and expensive eduacation or very special skills deserve more per hour than someone without too. What I am against is the magnitude of it. Let's say max hourly pay could be some 5 times that of unskilled labor. No one can sustain working more than 80 hours/week. So, there is no way anyone could deserve having an income more than 10 times that of 40 h/week normal people. And even that should be very rare.
So you'd have people who work their asses off paying for those who do nothing, ending up with people who get bupkiss for their hard toil, versus people who get plenty for doing nothing.
Does this seem right, fair or 'morally and ethically correct' to you?
As I said, in my scenario, working hard would still get you more money than not doing it, just not millions. And besides, there are incentives besides money - fame, pride in a job well done, doing something just because you love doing it, you name it.
Now, today we have this "lottery" world where you have a very slim chance at striking it rich (better if your parents are rich), but where it is quite likely you will end up with chicken shit despite all your hard work. A world where you basically need money to get money, where the rich get richer without doing anything useful and the poor more and more impoverished and marginalized. Does this seem right, fair or 'morally and ethically correct' to you?
Certainly, in a perfect world, this is how it would work. But unfortunately, we don't live in a perfect world.
I know. But that is no reason not trying to make it at least somewhat better.
/Dervak
Open source programers are noble fools who get themselves taken advantage of when in actuality should be the ones lavished in money.
No one should be lavished in money. Not businessmen, not artists, not programmers, open source or otherwise, not anyone. Every cent of the unnecessary wealth of the rich is taken from the poor. Economics is a zero-sum game.
Do you think you somehow deserve a sports car and a SUV, vacations at luxury hotels, meals at expensive restaurants every day and a million-dollar home just because you happen to be a programmer? Do you think your work is so much more worth than that of the guys and gals who wait on you and do the shit work for you? I have news for you: It is not.
And in a fair world, you would not get away with it. But of course, the laws are written by the rich, for the rich.
IMO we should concern ourselves with trying to reduce the vast differences in income, not increase them. This is not only the ethical Right Thing to do, it is smart for yourself in the long term too.
Society is built upon cooperation, and large differences of income undermine that. Unless our society changes, it is heading for disaster (police state and/or revolution and/or civil war). More and more people are parasites on society today (day traders e.g.) who do not contribute anything and yet expects not only to get fed but to get rich! Loathsome. IMHO such people ought to be shot.
Accumulating money and possessions for yourself only should not be the purpose of life. Making a better world should. I applaud RMS for his uncompromising stand in this.
/Dervak
I imagine RMS standing before thousands of marketing gurus and telling them how paying for software is evil. The look on their face will be just priceless.
Why should he do that? RMS has never said that charging for software is evil or even wrong. In fact, he himself for a time got his income by selling tape copies of EMACS. What RMS and the GPL says it that you should be allowed to (from the Free Software Definition):
Now, where in this does it say that you are not allowed to charge money for software, even GPL:ed software? AFAIK Red Hat is selling quite some GPL:ed stuff and they are not being sued by the FSF.
/Dervak
Here in Sweden, I am on BoNet. 2.5M/750k, static IP, server rights, for about $25/month.
/Dervak
Well, as it happens I have personally experienced telepathy (with my GF), but above all I have OBEs (Out-of-Body-Experiences) now and then. Have had a few hundred by now.
No, I can't do it at will, much less prove it to others, and I am not really interested in proving it either. I know what I have done. It is enough.
So now, let all prejudiced people call me crazy, deluded, a liar or a kook. It doesn't matter, the truth is still the same. Mind you, I am not "evangelizing" or trying to convince anyone else; I only tell this because you asked. In case anyone has a genuine interest feel free to email me about it.
Now, some may say that I am probably just dreaming. All I can say to that is that once you experience this there can be no question whatsoever that you are not. It is a state far more profound, sometimes more clear than waking life. And it is fun!
It really is an incredibly cool thing you know... being "out"... better than any drug high. What I could tell you... the things I have done... but most people would not likely believe it, so I won't.
/Dervak
Contrast this to Intel, who is so bent on shoving stuff down our throats that they willingly sell products that have a short or no real life span expectancy. (p462 anyone?)
Sorry to nitpick, but Socket 462 is the same as Socket A, for AMD Athlon/Duron.
The current P4 socket is Socket 423, whereas P4 Northwood will require Socket 478.
/Dervak
You know what; when I decided to write it I had already seen several replies to the effect that the Earth was only 6k years old. But I decided to put it as a reply to main, since it wasn't directly an answer to any one of them, but more of the general info category.
And as far as PSI-COP ;-) is concerned... oh boy... :-D That is really funny, since I don't agree very much with them at all - especially not their methods but not all the "facts" either. That of course does not preclude that I have the same stance as they on some issues, such as e.g. this one.
/Dervak
I just retch to see every novelist who has to have elf-like creatures, wizard-like creatures, halfling-like creatures, dwarf-like creatures, etc.
That's probably because all you have read has been crap like Terry Brooks etc. However, there is very good new fantasy too. Robert Jordan has already been mentioned, but try out the Paksenarrion trilogy by Elizabeth Moon and the Deverry series by Katherine Kerr. Both include elves, dwarves and wizards, but they are not Tolkien-clone elves, dwarves and wizards.
/Dervak
Not being the creationist at the other end of your sword i still think i ought to point out that there's a fairly large bit of scientific evidence to show that there really was a large oceanic swelling that coincides with glacial movements and 'ice age' cycles.
Sure there was, if you by "swelling" mean changes in sea level due to large amounts of water being bound up in ice sheets and later melting again. IIRC the worldwide sea level during the height of the last ice age was some 150 m lower than now, but the point is that those eustatic changes took a long time; thousands of years.
However, it is possible that some flood myths came from large-scale (but still not worldwide) flooding at the end of the last ice age.
You can thump your Geology book just as well as others can thump their bibles, but you at least ought to read it now and then.
And I do. The difference between thumping the geology book and thumping the Bible is that the geology book is based on empirical data and logic, whereas the Bible is based on old myths. In addition geologists admit that the theories the present are only models, which may be changed or updated as new facts demand it, something that can not be said of the Bible. It's defenders seem more keen on changing facts to suit the book.
/Dervak
The Bible never says that the earth is 6k years old.
I know. Yet many (not all) creationists still insists it is.
BTW, I am quite familiar with creationism and its arguments as my parents are creationists. Sigh.
We can work out that humans have been around that long, though.
Well, if you arbitrarily decide that the genealogical listings and lifetimes as stated in the Bible are utterly correct (despite even internal contradictions), and at the same time totally disregard not only other genealogical listings from, say, Mesopotamia and Egypt, but also massive amounts of archaeological evidence from all around the world, then I guess you could believe humans have only existed for 6k years.
But if you do, at least have the decency to admit it is blind faith and don't claim there is anything even remotely akin to scientific evidence supporting it.
Many Christians believe that the Bible leaves out a really long time between the creation of the Universe and then, taking the earth from a lifeless ball of earth and water, and making it into a habitable and life-fulled planet (which God can easily do in 6 days.. since He is God). So there :)
Yeah, I know all about that variant. While not quite as preposterous as saying the entire Earth is 6000 years old, it still conflicts with enormous amounts of evidence.
Besides.. you guys keep claiming that we're stupid to believe in a creator.
I personally claim no such thing. In fact, I believe in a Creator, or Creators. I am not a materialist. I just don't believe in JHWH, in the Biblical creator, or that the Bible is more truthful or accurate than any other old mythological text. I lean more or less towards a variant of Pantheism if anything.
From personal experience, I know there is a lot more to existence than materialistic science or traditional religions think. Of course this is valid evidence only for myself and I wouldn't dream of asking anyone else to believe this just because I say so. Everyone must walk their own path.
What about you believing that we grew into humans (and humans are really complex, study biology.. work on AI.. you'll get the idea) from.. rocks?! Sounds a lot more crazy to me.
Why? Why should the idea that there is an innate property in nature to turn more and more complex by itself be more crazy than the idea that there is an omnipotent God, to which no natural laws apply, who never shows himself, to which everything we can't explain is referred?
/Dervak
I've had people tell me that "Satan put all the apparent evidence that the world is older than 6000 years. God looks at the whole thing as a test of your faith."
Some people (Not just creationists) will believe what they believe, no matter how much evidence there is for or against their beliefs.
I know. Those people are not the ones I am trying to reach; they are beyond help. There may be others that are not yet as brain-washed tho, who still may be reached by logic and reason.
/Dervak
So, if you have a very big eruption, say a magnitude 7, roughly every 10 000 years from a certain volcano, if you find ten ash layers from eruptions of that size it is not very unreasonable to think that the oldest one is ~1 million years old.
Oops, that should be ~100 000 years of course.
/Dervak
Ok Creationists, you can all sit down right now. This is not the proof that C-14 is wrong. The Earth is not 6000 years old. This is just a minor bug modifying the upper half of the C-14 dating scale somewhat.
If by any chance you listen to logical arguments there are lots of very good reasons why the Earth must be a lot older than old Bishop Usher thought. Even if you dismiss all radiometric dating as somehow unreliable - not only C-14 but Potassium-Argon and the others too - there are still other methods by which we can see that the Earth must be vastly much more old than the Bible says.
For instance, sedimentation takes time.
One example is clay layers in the deep ocean basins. Tiny clay grains that have come from rivers slowly settle in the still waters of the ocean basins. The beds generally grow less than 0.1 mm in thickness per year, and the clay beds may be many kilometers thick - this gives an age of many tens to perhaps more than a hundred million years.
Now, many creationists will say that most of that clay was deposited much faster during the supposed Flood. But that won't work - you see, clay will not sediment at all if it isn't very calm and it always does it very slowly. Also, the thickness of the beds increase linearly away from the mid-ocean spreading ridges, in perfect agreement with the slow (1-10 cm/year) seafloor spreading. The same principle of slow sedimentation also applies to large river deltas, which may be many km thick too.
Erosion and weathering also takes time.
A typical valley glacier erodes its bed and sides with roughly 1 mm/year, and the U-valleys can be many km deep. Rivers slowly eat their way down into the rock - how long does it take to wear a mountain range down? How long does it take for chemical weathering to slowly eat its way down to hundreds of m of depth in the very bedrock?
Volcanoes ash layers are another way of dating. The exact date you get from other methods, like historical accounts, C-14, ice cores etc. - but relative dating is very easy, which ash layer is above the other? There is an approximate power-law for volcanic eruptions; the larger the longer the interval between. So, if you have a very big eruption, say a magnitude 7, roughly every 10 000 years from a certain volcano, if you find ten ash layers from eruptions of that size it is not very unreasonable to think that the oldest one is ~1 million years old.
Now, of course eruptions can come closer in time to each other, the period isn't totally fixed, but if, say, two eruptions were close to each other in time you can tell, because then there will be no fully developed earth horizon on the lower layer. It takes thousands of years for chemical weathering, leaching and nutrient uptake by plants to form a mature earth horizon.
All these maethods say is that the Earth must be at least a few hundred million years old, probably older. To get the 4.8 billion years number you will have to use radiometric dating, but there is something else supporting that too.
Theoretical models of the evolution of stars say that the sun is roughly 5 billion years old, and is is reasonable to assume that the Earth formed roughly the same time.
So, in the end the 4.8 billion year value seems quite certain. It is possible future research will find out that it really is 4.7 or 4.9, but the overall picture is clear, no matter what creationist Bible-thumpers say.
/Dervak
The people who are trusting the executive are not just rich greedy VCs and financiers, but also little old ladies whose pension funds include stock. The executive being a greedy bastard puts food on the table of the wheelchair bound Mrs. Farnsworth.
There shouldn't be any such thing as pension funds. Mrs Farnsworth should be helped thru her later years by her son and daughter. This is the natural way, and it worked for thousands of years before there were pension funds.
Because when you're running a business, all the investors, customers, partners, suppliers, and employees are trusting their livelihood in you being as ruthless and greedy as you possibly can.
I agree. And this is precisely why business in the end will have to be obliterated. Because it is destructive and brings out the worst in people.
Humans should spend their time with Science, Art and Love, not work. And once nanotech is here it will be possible. The only thing not replicatable will be land, which is why land must not be allowed to be owned by any one.
/Dervak
This is a self-limiting situation. If there's enough food for 3 million survivors for three days, and 90% of them starve, the 10% remaining have a month's worth of food.
Perhaps for dry foods (sugar, meal etc.) and cans. Fresh food will quickly spoil and as electricity disappears refrigerated and frozen food will become unedible fast too.
With a lack of infrastructure (particularly fuel), modern factory farms will be starved of production capacity. That's where the urban survivors come in - to haul tractors, combines, etc, and/or use their skills at repairing equipment.
Hardly. There will be an acute shortage of fertilizer, pesticides and fuel. People will have to plow with horses (if such can be found), or pull it themselves. Furthermore, after an impact or nuclear war, the climate will very likely be much worse (nuclear winter, anyone?). Food yields are likely to be perhaps a tenth of what it used to be, if you are lucky.
Bottom line: It (be it global thermonuclear war or a series of asteroid fragment impacts) would majorly suck. But homo sapiens would, in all likelihood, survive
Yes.
- not just as a species, but as a technologically-advanced species.
No.
Of course it depends on the magnitude of the catastrophe, but were all nukes used we can say goodbye to technological civilization for at least several hundred years, perhaps forever.
Think my 100-year figure is nuts? We didn't have electricity 100 years ago. (Oh, wait a minute, California still doesn't! ;-) But we did make the transition - from an agrarian society with a small urban component into a nearly completely-urbanized techno-society - in the past 100 years.
You forget that during that time there were at all time, even during war, a functioning society. And most important of all - then we had access to easy, cheap-to-extract deposits of ore and energy (oil etc.). They are consumed now, and the only reason we can use lower-grade deposits is our more advanced technology now. But after a nuclear war, that doesn't exist anymore. So a new technological society would be much harder to build up again than it was in the 20th century.
It is more likely than not that the first 20 years or so would be chaos, with people scavenging supplies of fuel, spare parts and food as long as they can, with gangs of bandits preying upon them. In that time the Earth's population falls to 10-20% of the current.
As more and more ancient high-tech breaks down and there is no one who knows how to repair it anymore, and as the stores run out, people are more and more forced to live of the land, using older technology. Probably mostly 19th century tech with some 20th century parts. There might be some reintroduction of higher tech, like electricity from, say, hydro or wind power. At least some 80% of the people are farmers, possibly under bondage to earlier bandit leaders turned warlords.
In a few hundred years some more advanced, somewhat technological society might arise, but it will never approach today. The resources needed are already gone.
/Dervak
I totally agree with you, but I think we must go further still. Why do we need or why shopuld we allow advertising at all? This is not a troll; hear me out.
I think advertising has gone way too far and many people are so sick of seeing commercials everywhere. Especially since everyone knows that commercials lie to you, treat you like an idiot and generally waste your time. I mean, what is really the purpose of advertising? It is to increase the sales of a certain product through:
Making you believe the product is better than it is and/or better than the competitors' offerings.
Making you believe the product will grant you something it will not (e.g. sex appeal from a certain soda).
Making you associate the product with things cool but unrelated (pop stars, windsurfing, snowboarding etc.).
IMO this is nothing but fraud - tho legal fraud to be sure, getting increased sales on false premises. In addition to that, advertising also has the following effects:
Making the product more expensive, since the advertising costs must be recouped.
Wasting valuable resources (time, paper, transport, bandwidth, storage space) and increasing waste production, for something almost no one wants to see.
And to boot, it is contagious. Since other companies use advertising, it creates an arms race where every company must do it, only to keep up. Like in Alice in Wonderland, you must run very fast only to be able to stay in the same place.
Good products need no commercials - they advertise themselves thru word of mouth, happy customers spreading the word. I would like a world where all advertising (in current form) is outlawed. That is, pushy advertising that steals my time when I have no interest whatsoever in the the product it tries to sell.
Of course companies must be allowed to present information about their products, but it should be done in a pully way. For instance, if I am interested in purchasing, say, a new car, then I go to a web site with links to all car manufacturers, and look there for something that might meet my needs. Then I might read car newsgroups and owner sites to see what impression others have got of the model in my mind, and then make an informed decision. This is BTW the way I purchase things right now.
Websites should need no ads either. What we really don't need is an Internet little more than glorified TV, packed with ads and eye-candy but almost no content. The very best websites are done by people who love whatever they are putting out info about, and therefore present the content for free. Once most people have fixed net connections server space and bandwidth should be no problem either, except in some very popular sites (e.g. /.), where a distributed solution is probably the best.
As for the people working in advertising, they will have to find something better and more worthwhile to do for a living. That is what I did (yes, I've worked in advertising).
/Dervak
Considering the libertarian/capitalistic streak that runs through the /. community,
How strange.
Usually the "/. community" is accused of being long-haired hippie pinko anarchists and communists... ;-)
Or could it be that the readers/posters on /. actually have different views and opinions, and do not form a homogenous "crowd"?
/Dervak
Sharky is an Intel whore. DDR doesn't cost anything near $206 for 256 MB. I just got 2 256 MB PC2100 CAS2.5 DIMMs from Crucial for $104 each. Now I see that their prices have gone up slightly (very high demand perhaps), but even $115 is very much lower than $206. So the price difference for 512 MB is more like $330.
/Dervak
The answer to the problem of deteriorating media, is not to rely on manual transfers done by humans (e.g. floppy->CD->DVD->?), but on a redundant, automated network, that when a new node with a new state-of-the art storage facility comes online, automatically copies information from other, older nodes. Something like Freenet. It could be set up so that all nodes has some parameters denoting type, speed and size of storage type, so that the data in the oldest (those most likely to get offline) gets reproduced to the new node first.
In this way, you would not rely on humans wanting to/remembering/being able to transfer their files to new storage once the expiry date of the old is approaching. As long as the redundant network exists, the information will never be lost.
The network could also be set up to automatically translate outdated file formats with new, better ones (e.g. GIF->PNG), taking care of another problem.
/Dervak
However, democracy has the property that it can be self-destroying. Dictatorships never have the cunning idea to disband themselves, but democracies have voted to accede absolute power. (Case in point - in Germany, IIRC August 1934, 'The Enabling Law' (don't know the proper German name for it, sorry) was passed by a _95%_ vote and giving absolute power to Adolf Hitler...).
True.
If we allow anti-democratic forces freedom of expression there is a risk that they might take over and destroy democracy.
But that is a risk that we, IMHO, have to take. Because if we don't, then we have already lost democracy. It is then not a possibilty but a certainty.
And don't say that we should only censor nazis and the like. Restrictions in freedom of speech, once they are in place, always get abused, always get extended to more groups... and to still more... because they easily can, and because politicians can't resist.
The sad truth is that freedoms are very easily taken away, but very hard to recover.
Accepting the existence and expression of ideas repugnant to ourselves, and the risk inherent in this, is the price we have to pay for our freedom.
/Dervak
Because then there would be no planets to live on.
Stars in globular clusters have metallicities (metals in astronomical sense is everything else apart from hydrogen and helum) a hundredth of the sun. That means that the total amount of materials for building solid planets (silicon, oxygen, iron etc.) would be so low that there probably would only exist a few small planetesimals (like the asteroids), and nowhere for life to exist.
Of course, a young globular cluster, like the one forming in the Tarantula nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud, would have enough heavy elements. But there the UV radiation might be too harsh.
/Dervak
consumers have chosen to use Windows because it is the easiest consumer OS to use and is stable enough to do everyday work on. Period. If it weren't, they wouldn't buy it.
Of course the fact that it comes bundled with the OEM computer, that most people are not even aware there is anything else (except perhaps Macs), that M$ uses their Office monopoly (incompatible file formats) to reinforce their OS monopoly and vice versa, or IE-only web sites etc. hasn't anything to do with it.
Consumers haven't chosen Windows. It has been chosen for them: IBM chose MS-DOS, and corporations chose IBM. People then wanted to be able to run their software at home too, so they had to have MS-DOS too. The same reason for buying or "upgrading" to Windows 3.x, Windows 95, 98 or Me. Not because it is the best or they want to, but because they are forced to.
/Dervak
Yeah, right; that's a good one. That's what we are supposed to believe.
The need to be clear, precise, concise, and unamiguous forces legislators to write 200-word-plus sentences and WRITING IN ALL CAPS? Give me a break. Y N0+ wR1+3 1n 31337, +H3n 1+ 1z 3v3N m0r3 uNr34d4813?
I think my deliberate obfuscation hypothesis fits the facts better.
/Dervak
Actually the very purpose of legalese is to make ordinary people unable to understand it. If people can't understand the laws they won't notice when their freedom is taken from them. So the powers that be want laws to become even more impossible to understand.
All citizens are expected to know all laws (not knowing something is illegal is no excuse in the eye of the law), but in practice noone does, not even lawyers. This is clearly totally absurd, and it is steadily growing worse by new complicated laws added.
IMO we should revoke the vast majority of laws - at least 99% has to go - and make the rest fair, intuitive, simple and easy to understand. All laws with victimless "crimes", and everything dealing with "IP" should be totally abolished. The law should not concern itself with whether I smoke some pot or copy some warez.
But then again, I am an Anarchist.
/Dervak