I am sure the pan handlers I see everyday on the streets of Boston would say capitalism has failed.:-)
Then maybe you should go ask a few of those pan handlers how much they actually make. I'm sure you'll find that capitalism is working just fine for them, and they're certainly better off than many others in the world.
I just don't understand how at even a first approximation Rand could have somehow associated money as being *a shield against* violence rather than a willing partner.
Government was the shield against violence, not money. That was government's only purpose to Ayn Rand: to ensure your freedom from coercion.
Not at all. Libertarianism leaves a power vacuum, into which large corporations would be only too happy to become the authorities.
And they will only remain large and profitable as long as they don't abuse their position. Witness the rise of open source/standards challenging Microsoft's position far more effectively than the DoJ.
Nowhere else is the term "libertarian" even known, and your run-of-the-mill US libertarian would be classified as a nut-case (sometimes right-wing, sometimes left-wing) in Europe.
Indeed, the rest of the world sees it as "classical liberalism". A hint that "libertarian" ideals cross national borders can be seen in the Austrian school of economics.
Libertarians are among the most politically and economically well-read individuals you are likely to ever encounter. Many famous economists are libertarians in fact. Consequently, drawing a connection between libertarians and ignorance or inexperience is laughable. That you personally have had poor experiences with libertarians, does not imply anything about libertarians or libertarianism as a whole.
What Makes a Libertarian? is a 1995 posting containing speculation by a CS professor about why libertarianism is so attractive to the CS-inclined. I think the reasoning is sound with respect to some people, but will not go so far as to generalize without Stuart Reges' experience. There is no more direct and plausible answer that I have found explaining this psychological connection.
Yes, but your original point still makes no sense. The GP's point is that given a white background with black text, regardless of whether we're talking about paper or monitors, *no* photon travels to your eyes from the period at the end of this sentence. Once again, regardless of monitor or paper, many photons travel to your eyes from the white background surrounding this text. It doesn't matter whether the photons were reflected or emitted, photons are photons. You drew a distinction which makes no physical sense.
Who would ever want to communicate with such stupid and warlike creatures like us? A significant portion of our scientific research is driven by our militaries in their attempts to build bigger and more sinister weapons.
Let's be serious for a second: the military will never go away, and it never should. The fact is, you can't know what's out there, what threats and dangers exist, and defensive and offensive technology of any kind is simply a sound survival strategy. Other than an offensive weapon to destroy or deflect its trajectory, how would you prevent an extinction-level asteroid from hitting the earth?
Once that feat becomes easy, and we start exploring space, how do you know there won't be further dangers that require even more destructive power? Developing military technology is just good sense. I won't argue that the applications of said technology make sense, but its development makes perfect sense.
I guess when I do a MITM attack to capture login prompts and transparently proxy that is google's problem also? Or when I resolve DNS queries to my own box, that is likewise google at fault?
Don't be daft, SSL was created to prevent exactly these attacks, so why isn't it being used? Why does the Google toolbar submit all your potentially authority-bearing https urls to their anti-spam service in clear text? As good as Google is in certain areas, they're absolutely horrid when it comes to basic security measures.
You're focusing on the wrong things. Classification does not philosophical pursuit make; it's a mistake that many philosophers make too.
The fact is, every conclusion is predicated on an argument that follows from a set of assumptions (basic logic). Ignoring people who act on inconsistent thinking (which unfortunately is the majority of people), at best we can dispute the axioms that result in a particular brand of ethics.
So in a sense, all ethics are both relative and absolute; relative to the assumptions one wishes to make, and absolutely following from those same assumptions.
Personally speaking, I view the universe as inherently meaningless; all meaning or purpose is a human projection on a neutral causal universe. I as a person, and we as a society must decide what our desirable steady state is, our ideal. In some sense, assumptions are driven by biological impulses (such as survival). In another sense, our assumptions must be a conscious choice.
My only assumption is that I live in a real physical world, and my only choice is to live and thrive in it. My ability to thrive is limited only by my ability to use my environment as I see fit. However, this also applies to everyone else, and in fact they can use resources that I myself spent energy creating or gathering, thus compromising my ability to live. Recognizing this, I choose to respect other people's wishes to live as they see fit and respect the fruits of their labours as belonging to them, so long as their choices to do not infringe on another's ability to do the same. This minimal philosophy naturally results in a form of Libertarianism.
Others who assume that the universe has some inherent meaning underlying it, will naturally reach different conclusions. I could invoke Occam's razor here to eliminate this possibility until evidence of such underlying purpose presents itself, but I'll just leave it at that.:-)
"warming temperatures will mean that in 2050 there will be about 40,000 fewer deaths in Germany attributable to cold-related illnesses like the flu."
And increased deaths due to:
spread of malaria and other tropical diseases
spread of insect-carrying illnesses (like SARS) due to more hospitable conditions for insects
insect bites due to allergies
heat stroke
smog and respiratory conditions exacerbated by warmer conditions
Warmer weather is not necessarily a panacea.
Another widespread fear about global warming -- that it will cause super-storms that could devastate towns and villages with unprecedented fury -- also appears to be unfounded. Current long-term simulations, at any rate, do not suggest that such a trend will in fact materialize.'"
I don't buy that. Increased heat, means increased kinetic energy in the air, which means more movement. Storms won't necessarily increase in magnitude everywhere, but they will increase in magnitude somewhere.
Browsers don't distinguish between.com,.org, or.bank urls, so they would need to be augmented to indicate to the user that they are on a banking site, and this indicator must itself be unspoofable; so why the half measure? Why not go all the way and use the Petname Toolbar for Firefox which provides just such an unspoofable indicator right now without the need for limiting it to.bank domains?
Encourages complacency on the part of the banks, as they will think that.bank gains them some measure of security; it does not.
What is $50k when a typical attack on a bank nets the criminals >$1M?
The solution to this problem is not greater regulation (which this "solution" is -- subject to all the bureaucracy, corruption and inefficiencies that regulation entails), the solution is technical, and it already exists
Still subject to DNS spoofing/hijacking/poisoning, etc. as others have mentioned
at the moment there is no crime we cannot prevent.
In principle, most real crime is preventable with enough preparation (safes, self defense training, etc.), law enforcement (active prevention), disincentives (passive prevention), education, hindsight, etc. Effective DRM is not achievable, even in principle. This is the difference.
If a lot of you, previously unexposed to the CLR gain access to it, you will discover that it is not the crap that so many of you have read it to be.
It isn't, but it's still more complicated than it needs to be, and not general enough to be a true CLR. After almost 6 years of working on.NET for my day job, I'd say I have a fair handle on it, and there are a number of aspects of the CLR that still leave a sour taste.
It definitely improved over Java in VM-level generics, value types, and other smaller stuff, but MS ignored the advice of various language researchers when building the CLR, and it shows; it's very hard to do certain basic things on.NET, and this limits the language features that can be efficiently and safely implemented on it. See for instance inefficient tail calls, unverifiable function pointers/indirect calls, and a lack of continuations. The primitive Delegate type is also an unnecessary complication, since a delegate/closure is really a distinguished interface with a single "Apply()" method. So close, and yet, so far...
I'm glad they're adding limited type inference to C# 3.0, but adapting advanced languages to the CLR is still unnecessarily difficult.
I am not a proponent of software patents; I just don't see what makes software patents so different from other patents, and I haven't seen a single logical argument against software patents that doesn't involve circular reasoning.
Two things:
Scarcity: ideas, knowledge, information, etc. are not scarce like physical inventions are, so the implications for the market are far different.
Duration: as a consequence of the first, because information is so easy to duplicate and distribute, advancement in this field is much faster than with physical inventions, and the innovation becomes "common practice/knowledge" much sooner; also, the cost of development is much lower than physical devices. I think I would be all for software patents that lasted 1-3 years.
The terms of the patent should be dictated by the nature of the innovation; something which advances the state of the art by 20 years, can be justifiably granted a patent of 14 years. Something which advances the state of the art by 6 months to a year, as software does, cannot be justifiably granted a 14 year patent.
I think a morning show radio personality here in Tampa said it best: "These kinds of things (referring to the shootings at VT) happen in a free society. And that's that unless we all want to live in a police state."
I would add, "where the shootings will be reserved for the state."
It's also complicated by the fact that pacifying the middle east* would have many benefits. I'm firmly of the belief that the more people we raise out of 2nd and 3rd world standards to 1st world ones the better. In many cases all that's hold people back are intercine conflicts.
The only proven strategy to lift people out of poverty, is to have them do it themselves. Current invasive strategies will never succeed in the ways we want them to. The only ones that have been proven to succeed are education (sometimes causes brain drain/emigration), and investment capital (raises standards of living over time); the latter will never happen as long as the area remains as unstable as it is.
No doubt the time value of money with prudent investing is an important factor. One also has to take into account selling excess back to the grid; here in Canada, my provincial government has a subsidy where they're buying back power at a premium of $0.42/kwhr IIRC. Also, the climate has a significant impact on the timescales involved such that payback is much sooner.
At $0.10/kWhr, the cost of that much electricity is: 803,000 kWhrs * $0.10/kWhr = $80,300.
With the 5% inflation you mentioned, that cost can only increase.
So if you only need $40k of electricity by your calculations, then you'll only need a PV system half the power you specified (and presumably half the cost). Depending on your climate, 5 hours/day of sunshine is quite a conservative estimate, which means PV can pay itself off much faster than 40 years.
Remember: every single watt of solar power that reaches the ground winds up in the atmosphere as heat, the foundation of wind.
Not true. Earth is constantly radiating energy out into space, and not just reflected energy. Earth has a temperature, and as such, is constantly emitting black body radiation.
Slashdot Mirror
I am sure the pan handlers I see everyday on the streets of Boston would say capitalism has failed. :-)
Then maybe you should go ask a few of those pan handlers how much they actually make. I'm sure you'll find that capitalism is working just fine for them, and they're certainly better off than many others in the world.
I just don't understand how at even a first approximation Rand could have somehow associated money as being *a shield against* violence rather than a willing partner.
Government was the shield against violence, not money. That was government's only purpose to Ayn Rand: to ensure your freedom from coercion.
Not at all. Libertarianism leaves a power vacuum, into which large corporations would be only too happy to become the authorities.
And they will only remain large and profitable as long as they don't abuse their position. Witness the rise of open source/standards challenging Microsoft's position far more effectively than the DoJ.
Nowhere else is the term "libertarian" even known, and your run-of-the-mill US libertarian would be classified as a nut-case (sometimes right-wing, sometimes left-wing) in Europe.
Indeed, the rest of the world sees it as "classical liberalism". A hint that "libertarian" ideals cross national borders can be seen in the Austrian school of economics.
Libertarians are among the most politically and economically well-read individuals you are likely to ever encounter. Many famous economists are libertarians in fact. Consequently, drawing a connection between libertarians and ignorance or inexperience is laughable. That you personally have had poor experiences with libertarians, does not imply anything about libertarians or libertarianism as a whole.
What Makes a Libertarian? is a 1995 posting containing speculation by a CS professor about why libertarianism is so attractive to the CS-inclined. I think the reasoning is sound with respect to some people, but will not go so far as to generalize without Stuart Reges' experience. There is no more direct and plausible answer that I have found explaining this psychological connection.
Yes, but your original point still makes no sense. The GP's point is that given a white background with black text, regardless of whether we're talking about paper or monitors, *no* photon travels to your eyes from the period at the end of this sentence. Once again, regardless of monitor or paper, many photons travel to your eyes from the white background surrounding this text. It doesn't matter whether the photons were reflected or emitted, photons are photons. You drew a distinction which makes no physical sense.
And I'm sure that blue eyes have some evolutionary significance. Not.
They do. Fair skin and blue eyes evolved in the northern hemisphere to compensate for the decreased sunshine.
It's not like windows couldn't mess with your machine anyway. If you don't trust your operating system, how can you trust your whole system.
Exactly, and I think Windows has adequately demonstrated that you can't trust it.
Who would ever want to communicate with such stupid and warlike creatures like us? A significant portion of our scientific research is driven by our militaries in their attempts to build bigger and more sinister weapons.
Let's be serious for a second: the military will never go away, and it never should. The fact is, you can't know what's out there, what threats and dangers exist, and defensive and offensive technology of any kind is simply a sound survival strategy. Other than an offensive weapon to destroy or deflect its trajectory, how would you prevent an extinction-level asteroid from hitting the earth?
Once that feat becomes easy, and we start exploring space, how do you know there won't be further dangers that require even more destructive power? Developing military technology is just good sense. I won't argue that the applications of said technology make sense, but its development makes perfect sense.
I guess when I do a MITM attack to capture login prompts and transparently proxy that is google's problem also?
Or when I resolve DNS queries to my own box, that is likewise google at fault?
Don't be daft, SSL was created to prevent exactly these attacks, so why isn't it being used? Why does the Google toolbar submit all your potentially authority-bearing https urls to their anti-spam service in clear text? As good as Google is in certain areas, they're absolutely horrid when it comes to basic security measures.
You're focusing on the wrong things. Classification does not philosophical pursuit make; it's a mistake that many philosophers make too.
:-)
The fact is, every conclusion is predicated on an argument that follows from a set of assumptions (basic logic). Ignoring people who act on inconsistent thinking (which unfortunately is the majority of people), at best we can dispute the axioms that result in a particular brand of ethics.
So in a sense, all ethics are both relative and absolute; relative to the assumptions one wishes to make, and absolutely following from those same assumptions.
Personally speaking, I view the universe as inherently meaningless; all meaning or purpose is a human projection on a neutral causal universe. I as a person, and we as a society must decide what our desirable steady state is, our ideal. In some sense, assumptions are driven by biological impulses (such as survival). In another sense, our assumptions must be a conscious choice.
My only assumption is that I live in a real physical world, and my only choice is to live and thrive in it. My ability to thrive is limited only by my ability to use my environment as I see fit. However, this also applies to everyone else, and in fact they can use resources that I myself spent energy creating or gathering, thus compromising my ability to live. Recognizing this, I choose to respect other people's wishes to live as they see fit and respect the fruits of their labours as belonging to them, so long as their choices to do not infringe on another's ability to do the same. This minimal philosophy naturally results in a form of Libertarianism.
Others who assume that the universe has some inherent meaning underlying it, will naturally reach different conclusions. I could invoke Occam's razor here to eliminate this possibility until evidence of such underlying purpose presents itself, but I'll just leave it at that.
Please leave your geek badge at the desk. There's the door. ;-)
And increased deaths due to:
Warmer weather is not necessarily a panacea.
Another widespread fear about global warming -- that it will cause super-storms that could devastate towns and villages with unprecedented fury -- also appears to be unfounded. Current long-term simulations, at any rate, do not suggest that such a trend will in fact materialize.'"
I don't buy that. Increased heat, means increased kinetic energy in the air, which means more movement. Storms won't necessarily increase in magnitude everywhere, but they will increase in magnitude somewhere.
at the moment there is no crime we cannot prevent.
In principle, most real crime is preventable with enough preparation (safes, self defense training, etc.), law enforcement (active prevention), disincentives (passive prevention), education, hindsight, etc. Effective DRM is not achievable, even in principle. This is the difference.
There is a rule in security: "Don't Prohibit what you can't Prevent" [1]. The same rule applies to laws.
If a lot of you, previously unexposed to the CLR gain access to it, you will discover that it is not the crap that so many of you have read it to be.
.NET for my day job, I'd say I have a fair handle on it, and there are a number of aspects of the CLR that still leave a sour taste.
.NET, and this limits the language features that can be efficiently and safely implemented on it. See for instance inefficient tail calls, unverifiable function pointers/indirect calls, and a lack of continuations. The primitive Delegate type is also an unnecessary complication, since a delegate/closure is really a distinguished interface with a single "Apply()" method. So close, and yet, so far...
It isn't, but it's still more complicated than it needs to be, and not general enough to be a true CLR. After almost 6 years of working on
It definitely improved over Java in VM-level generics, value types, and other smaller stuff, but MS ignored the advice of various language researchers when building the CLR, and it shows; it's very hard to do certain basic things on
I'm glad they're adding limited type inference to C# 3.0, but adapting advanced languages to the CLR is still unnecessarily difficult.
Two things:
The terms of the patent should be dictated by the nature of the innovation; something which advances the state of the art by 20 years, can be justifiably granted a patent of 14 years. Something which advances the state of the art by 6 months to a year, as software does, cannot be justifiably granted a 14 year patent.
I think a morning show radio personality here in Tampa said it best: "These kinds of things (referring to the shootings at VT) happen in a free society. And that's that unless we all want to live in a police state."
I would add, "where the shootings will be reserved for the state."
It's also complicated by the fact that pacifying the middle east* would have many benefits. I'm firmly of the belief that the more people we raise out of 2nd and 3rd world standards to 1st world ones the better. In many cases all that's hold people back are intercine conflicts.
The only proven strategy to lift people out of poverty, is to have them do it themselves. Current invasive strategies will never succeed in the ways we want them to. The only ones that have been proven to succeed are education (sometimes causes brain drain/emigration), and investment capital (raises standards of living over time); the latter will never happen as long as the area remains as unstable as it is.
Perhaps you'd be interested in a more comprehensive analysis instead.
No doubt the time value of money with prudent investing is an important factor. One also has to take into account selling excess back to the grid; here in Canada, my provincial government has a subsidy where they're buying back power at a premium of $0.42/kwhr IIRC. Also, the climate has a significant impact on the timescales involved such that payback is much sooner.
As a closing thought, as another insightful poster explained, are the $2 trillion dollars and the soldiers lost in pacifying the middle east factored into the cost of power from fossil fuels?
The AC here is on the right track: your math seems off.. Assuming a conservative 5 hours of sunshine per day:
11 kW * 40 years * 365 days/year * 5 hours/day = 803,000 kWhr
At $0.10/kWhr, the cost of that much electricity is: 803,000 kWhrs * $0.10/kWhr = $80,300.
With the 5% inflation you mentioned, that cost can only increase.
So if you only need $40k of electricity by your calculations, then you'll only need a PV system half the power you specified (and presumably half the cost). Depending on your climate, 5 hours/day of sunshine is quite a conservative estimate, which means PV can pay itself off much faster than 40 years.
Remember: every single watt of solar power that reaches the ground winds up in the atmosphere as heat, the foundation of wind.
Not true. Earth is constantly radiating energy out into space, and not just reflected energy. Earth has a temperature, and as such, is constantly emitting black body radiation.