So instead of simply being incorrect about the effects of radiation on the local ecosystem, he was ignorant of the facts surrounding Chernobyl entirely. The latter is far worse IMO, because if he's spouting off without even basing his speculations on the proper facts, then his speculations are pure fantasy and he loses all credibility.
I don't feel comfortable even talking about it as long as there are a large chunk of people in jail for stupid things like the drug war. Not all criminals infringed on anyone else's rights.
Or the implications. "Rehabilitation" strikes at the entire concept of free will in humans.
If rehab is necessary to prevent the offender from infringing on the freedoms of others, then it is justified. I believe that is the only rational, moral justification for rehab.
I call Bullshit. It is equally simplistic to think that all cases can be rehabilitated as it is to think that there are no cases that can be rehabilitated.
I actually think everyone can be rehabilitated. I just don't think most people are willing to accept the measures needed to rehab serious cases. Other cases we simply don't know how to properly rehab yet, but "retraining" is a first step.
you don't see Microsoft telling it's customers "You don't like explorer? Fix it yourself!"
No, Microsoft says, "You don't like explorer? Tough shit!" On rare occasions it's "You don't like explorer? Well I'm afraid it's far too integrated into Windows your Honour."
I can't believe that you say that the depression of 1987 was worse than that of 1929.
This was not a comment on the severity of the depression, but the stock market. The depression started in the early 1920s, before the crash (which was all explained in the links I provided). 1929 and 1987 were stock market crashes, and yes, the severity of "Black Monday" was worse than the 1929 crash.
Regardless, you have yet to make an argument how regulation would have prevented either the depression or the stock market crash, while I have in fact argued with citations how regulation in fact caused these problems.
Whether or not monopolies are permanent is kind of beside the point. The point is, an unfettered, "laissez-faire" market inevitably concentrates wealth and power in the hands of a very few. [...] Don't get me wrong-- I am for smaller government. But what we need is not small government per se, but good government-- something which is a lot harder to define.
Whether monopolies and concentration of wealth is temporary is exactly the point. How temporary is your government? Once a government usurps some power, they will never give it back. Instead of fighting a temporary monopoly with dollars to rectify an imbalance, we'll be fighting our government with blood.
Government is the ultimate concentration of wealth and power. The proper response to a concentration of wealth, is not to create an entity with even greater wealth and power, but to create a system where such entities either cannot arise, or if that is impossible (as in natural monopolies), then a system where they must perpetually fight to stay dominant. This is the very nature of a free market. Who does the government have to compete with to make sure you are happy?
I strongly urge you to read The Machinery of Freedom. You may not become a Libertarian, but you will certainly come to appreciate the flexibility of free market capitalism.
Certain socialist policies, like subsidized education, free libraries for the people, etc., are need to offset the anti-democratic tendencies of capitalism itself.
I disagree. What is needed instead, is a complete lack of unnecessary constrictions on people's activities; they'll do the rest. If people overall are altruistic enough to ensure that the government stays "good", then they are altruistic enough to help their fellow man in all the ways you have described without being forced to by the government [1].
I do agree that widespread education is one of, if not the, most important attribute of modern civilization, but I disagree with the assumption that government is the best source of that education.
Also, you again assert that capitalism is anti-democratic, but you do not demonstrate, nor do you even explain how.
[1] Think about it: why would you need public libraries if there was no government-enforced copyright? You could get a copy of anything you wanted, anywhere, anytime, for cheap if that were the case. You could make the case that books would then never be written, but in fact the market would simply shift: instead of royalties on every copy sold, the author would be selling a manuscript for a one-time fee, and the publisher would have to recoup costs on "first to market" sales. A similar argument applies to patents.
Austrian economists are by no means mainstream, they are a weird little splinter group that mainstream economists generally scoff at. Now, of course this doesn't mean they are wrong, but it's a good clue.
Let me revise a misunderstanding on this tangent: I agree there is concentration of wealth in current economies. I disagree that these are free markets. I also disagree that concentration of wealth is necessarily a problem. It is only a problem when coercive organizations (like the government), facilitate and/or perpuate a concentration of wealth (as they currently do with market interventions and regulation). Left alone, concentration of wealth is temporary.
I merely pointed out Austrian economics as the most extreme philosophy that holds this position. There are many more economists who hold or held this view, even outside the Austrian economics.
How about you wait until Microsoft actually topples from a monopoly psition before using them as an example of how monopolies naturally disappear?
They are not the only example, merely one that we are seeing unfold right now, and one that/.ers can particularly relate to. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly
Every example of a monopoly in that article may face very little competition from within that market, but they face intense competition from other markets. Carnegie Steel faced mounting competition from aluminium which was growing in strength by leaps and bounds in the mid 20th, not to mention other metals. The NFL faces competition from baseball, basketball, hockey, soccer, and numerous other sports. "Monopoly" is not some great, undefeatable beast which trounces all other options, and when it does, like Microsoft, you'll see that people soon find or create their own alternatives.
As for lassez faire, the 19th century was well known for its social inequality and brutal working conditions, all of which were at least in part due to this outdated and failed philosophy.
As are the same conditions in third world countries that Nike and other multinationals "exploit" for cheap labour. And yet, a recent scientific study revisited these nations after multinationals pulled out due to criticism, and found the living conditions far worse [1]. Women and children that were working for peanuts resorted to their previous occupations: prostitution. Most other jobs from within the country paid less than the sweatshops.
Also, you'll find that investments in the third world eventually raises the standard of living in those countries. We're seeing that happen now in China, and there was a recent/. story about how China is now becoming too expensive for manufacturing as the standard of living has increased significantly.
It took unions forcing governments to intervene before we did away with lassez faire's lovely legacy of unsafe work conditions, 16 hour work-days, 7 day work-weeks, low pay, and child labor.
Unions are a legitimate response to a persistently unfair employer, but your statement does not follow: why are governments necessary in the above statement? A union on its own can force fair treatment by an employer. So how does regulation and government intervention help exactly?
It was demonstrated by the laissez-faire economies of the late 19th century. Read your history.
Please, cite me which laissez faire economies, and which failures you are referring to. The classic example is the Great Depression[1] and the market crash of 1929 [2]. Many prominent economists in fact blame government intervention for both of those disasters. The government's inflationary policy of the 1920's, ridiculously high tariffs, and improper management of the money supply are blamed. Even the current chairman of the Federal Reserve Ben Bernanke, an economic historian, concedes that the Federal Reserve was to blame [3].
It's also interesting to note that "Black Monday" (1987) was even worse than the 1929 crash. So exactly how did regulation help us here?
Nelson Rockefeller and Standard Oil. Bill Gates and Microsoft. Still feel short on evidence?
Yes. Where is the free market? And MS is addressed below.
Exactly. If you are Joe Q. Capitalist, your deepest desire is to corner the market and establish a permanent monopoly. And once you have done that, the free market is over, and progress tends to grind to a halt.
I have highlighted where you have gone wrong. There is no such thing as a permanent monopoly. It is simply impossible to have one. Using your example of Microsoft: a counter-culture arose which undercut even MS, free and open source software. Let's say we take the free release of the BSDs and Linux in the early 90s as our starting point. It has taken roughly 16 years to get to the point where open source and free software is making a serious impact on MS. Governments and educational institutions are all standardizing on it, whether just to threaten MS, or because they actually believe it is a better option. The fact is, there is a real alternative now, real competition, and MS is feeling the pressure.
Contrast this the goverment's anti-trust trials against MS which had exactly zero effect. So tell me again, how exactly does regulation help us topple or prevent monopolies?
I challenge anyone to cite me even one example of a monopoly that has not, or can not be toppled without government intervention.
That said, the free market is absoultely not a solution for everything, merely most things [4].;-)
Except that some organizations get in a position of power where the people giving them money effectively have no alternative. Such as Microsoft with operating systems, or in my past experience, "deregulated" power.
And yet, a counter-culture to Microsoft arose without any government intervention or regulation: free and open source software. The goverment has proven impotent, and the people themselves are providing competition, and it's working quite well so far.
We all know how microsoft has exploited their monopoly, and those of us in California for the rolling blackouts know how well the pied piper of free markets (Ken Lay / Enron) exploited the system for Billions of dollars.
Let's not equate poor "degregulation" plans with good deregulation plans.
I think the concentration of wealth into fewer and fewer hands was successfully demonstrated by the complete and utter failure of lassez faire capitalism and the rise of the robber barons.
You're using the 12th and 13th centuries as examples? Perhaps you meant something else? I'll just point this out for you: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Just because free markets permits unequal distribution of wealth, does not mean that said distribution guaranteed, nor permanent or somehow self-perpetuating. This is evident even today where a wealthy family's fortunes are often squandered by the descendents within 2 generations.
I also ask you to cite an instance of laissez faire capitalism that completely and utterly failed.
With enough money, you get a de-facto regulatory process. The market becomes unfree due to unfair barriers to entry being enacted by the biggest players. Look at Microsoft, and how they use their monopoly power to unfair advantage. And no one could argue that Microsfot is a government granted monopoly.
And what has been the response to Microsoft? Free software, open source, and standardization. Monopolies topple without government intervention. In fact, what Microsoft is a textbook case studdy how governments are impotent against monopolies.
I can not see how you can look at conditions in modern capitalist countries and argue with a straight face that there is no concentration of wealth. I would put it on you to prove your point, because all economic data I've seen say otherwise.
Austrian economics say otherwise. Some of the most prominent economists of the past century have been Libertarians. Perhaps that should tell you that your views on economics are incomplete at best.
Unfortunately, free markets lead to concentration of wealth. [...]
Which has not been demonstrated.
[...] Concentration of wealth leads to concentration of power [...]
Agreed.
[...] which leads to control of the regulatory process
Which does not exist in a free market.
Free markets invariably become unfree because of a runaway feedback loop.
Many people say this, yet are short on evidence or thorough argumentation supporting this conclusion.
At least in democracy we have checks and balances.
Funny, because many people view democracy as a degenerate free market in which voting priviledges are not fully distributed (as money), but centralized (one vote per person on any given issue, or further centralized in a "representative" in a republic).
Where are the checks and balances within a free market that will work to keep it free? there are none.
Except the fact that nobody controls it, and that money is not free: in order to keep it flowing (and thus stay rich), you shouldn't piss off the people giving you said money. Where do you think their money is coming from?
Casimir forces are extremely sensitive to geometries however, and the solutions are very hard to derive. A sphere was recently found to have a repulsive Casimir force IIRC[2] (ie. the force is expansive rather than contracting as with parallel plates). So while this idea would be cool, I suspect that any non-parallel plates would yield a null result, or perhaps so small as to be useless, even if you had nano or pico-scale manufacturing.
The only way to really defeat phishing is to only use the web interface to start a transaction or to view information... and require that the bank call the customer at the customer's phone number and verify that the transaction is authorized.
That's silly. There are perfectly reasonable means to defeat phishing already available. All that's required is a trusted path to a trusted component which verifies one's relationship to the site (in other words, a visible section of screen that the phisher can't alter in any way); this is what the pentame toolbar does. It's still vulernable to OS security breaches, but that's a far better than the current security models.
Please see the following excellent write up. Even if you don't agree with the conclusions, it serves as an important reminder as to the limits of our understanding of the climate, using the IPCC's findings no less.
You're seriuously asking me for evidence that warming on Mars was not anthropogenic?
He's asking for the evidence that Mars is warming, and further, that the warming trends on Mars are correlated with those on Earth (which is what you suggested). I've heard the argument that Mars has experienced warming, but I too have yet to see any evidence of it.
The chart at this site's page http://carto.eu.org/article2481.html , which is becoming a bit more frequently seen, shows the graph of C02 content in the atmosphere and temperature ranges over the last 400,000 years as derived from examining core samples, up to 1950.
Looking at the graph, it's interesting to note that temperature increases seem to have preceded CO2 increases, and that temperatures declined before CO2 levels dropped. Of course, examining graphs without error bars is meaningless anyway.
I find it really difficult to think that the human activities known to increase C02 emissions we've increasingly engaged in over the last 150 years have had little to nothing to do with the obvious increase in both C02 atmospheric content and resulting temperature/climate changes.
I think few people dispute that humans haven't affected CO2 levels; it's the presumption of a causal link between rising CO2 and "resulting temperature/climate changes" which has everyone's panties in a twist.
I'd sincerely like to hear other viable explanations for the facts, but there haven't been any
There are many in fact, many of which are just nonsense. It's been awhile since I did in-depth analysis on this debate, but I'll just leave you with a little tidbit from my last foray: you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone that will agree that we have reliable readings on solar activity for more than 40-50 years (I'm talking a large portion of the spectrum here, not just visible light). Coupled with the fact that the sun is the energy source driving the entire climate, doesn't that call the entire foundation of anthropogenic warming into question?
Just this morning in fact, I read of a publication which provided an alternative model to explain the growth and shrinkage of our ice volumes based on variations in Earth's orbital patterns (that darn sun thing again...).
the most well supported hypothisis remains that humans burning fossil fuels (in ever increasing numbers do to an also alarming rate of population growth) are truly affecting the climate.
The most well researched hypothesis is anthropogenic warming. Let's not confuse attention (which is politics and fads), with justification (which is science).
DDT and its breakdown products are toxic to embryos and can disrupt calcium absorption thereby impairing egg-shell quality [2]...
Based on the book, so this is disputed.
...In general, however, DDT in small quantities has very little effect on birds; its primary metabolite, DDE, has a much greater impact. DDT and DDE have little impact on some non-predatory birds, such as the chicken.
Still, the researchers just had a correlation between DDT and eggshell thinning. So they did what good scientists should do--they experimented. Joel Bitman at the U.S. Department of Agriculture fed Japanese quail a diet laced with DDT. His study, "DDT Induces a Decrease in Eggshell Calcium," published in Nature on October 4, 1969, found that the quail dosed with DDT had eggshells that were about 10 percent thinner than those of undosed quail. However, Bitman's findings were eventually overturned because he had also fed his quail a low-calcium diet. When the quail were fed normal amounts of calcium, the thinning effect disappeared. Studies published in Poultry Science found chicken eggs almost completely unaffected by high dosages of DDT.
It's not DDT per se that is thought to do the damage to eggshells, but a DDT metabolite known as DDE.
The article further goes on to point out that egg shell thinning in birds had started happening 50 years before the introduction of DDT.
There is no practical way within the Christian framework to challenge Jesus' flat-out prohibition on divorce. To do so you either have to avail yourself of Matthew's ambiguous loophole, or you have to deny the validity of Christ's words in this instance
Allow me to point out the obvious solution (though you might consider this outside the "Christian framework"): each gospel was written by a man, each with his own biases and viewpoint, and none of the gospels can trace their lineage to even within a century of Jesus's time. The gospels and the Bible taken as a whole give us a mixed viewpoint, which tells us that the issue was not even clearcut back then. Thus, divorce is permitted in some circumstances.
A lot of people have made quite a few good points already, so I'll just chime in with one I haven't seen yet: software will never be regulated (at least not in the near future).
Why? Because despite their comments to the contrary, execs and managers don't want regulation. Why? Because regulation and enforced quality control, as in civil engineering, would wrest control of software development from managers, and place it in the hands of professional, certified engineers that would be entrusted and liable for product quality.
Managers and execs don't want to lose their control, and they don't want costs to quadruple (as they no doubt would to ensure sufficient robustness). They want rapid development schedules, and they want control over how and what gets developed. To a certain extent, this is inevitable as the software market fluctuates far more rapidly than the civil industry; no one is looking for the next bigger and better bridge or building every 6 months. Software is often superceded many times a year.
By design it was impossible for KeyKOS to support variable-sized inodes or disk blocks, partition resizing, etc.
KeyKOS had no notion of inodes or diskblocks, it had a single-level store. Files and filesystems were implemented by processes that operated on red-black trees. There is nothing in the design the precludes the features you mention. Unless of course, you are discussing how to manage storage add/remove disks, etc. when using a single-level store. This is a completely separate issue from microkernels and the KeyKOS architecture.
Even removable media (floppy disks) were a horrible kludge that often threw the object store into an inconsistent state.
Once again removable media are sometimes a problem for single-level stores, not for microkernels or KeyKOS/EROS in particular. I also highly doubt your claim of inconsistency, as the developers were very careful to avoid those ends, so please provide a pointer to validate this claim.
The checkpoint/transaction manager was a performance nightmare once you had to scale to multiple concurrent processes; single process (which were all KeyKOS generally published benchmarks for, aside from a well-known carefully constructed transaction benchmark explicitly designed to make sure that only completely independent data was ever written to the system) were pretty efficient, but tangled references quickly forced the set of objects that needed to be committed to the ENTIRE SYSTEM once you had a fair number of processes running at once. Disk usage was incredibly inefficient.
This paragraph leads me to believe that you have little idea about how KeyKOS operated. KeyKOS and its successors are built on transparent orthogonal persistence, which means a snapshot of the entire system is always written to disk as an atomic transaction. Contrary to your assertion, disk usage has been shown to be incredibly efficient.
Unless by "transaction manager" you're talking about the ATM software which ran on KeyKOS, which would be a completely different matter and unrelated to KeyKOS as a viable OS.
Moreover, the checkpoint system wasn't ACID compliant so you didn't get anything useful for all that complexity; in crash recovery situations, a transaction that had already been committed could be replayed multiple times (causing data inconsistencies or worse).
Checkpointing is and was ACID. If you believe it was not, then please explain.
I could go on, but the major point is that all of these problems stemmed directly from the design of the KeyKOS microkernel, and the barriers to solutions were ones that would not have existed in a monolithic kernel.
Completely untrue. I suggest you read some KeyKOS kernel and architecture papers to learn the true limits of KeyKOS.
None of those problems were easily soluable, and the attempt to improve the system in EROS wound up in a development rathole that was eventually abandoned because of systemic complexity and severe performance problems.
Only partly true. The EROS founder abandoned it in favour of Coyotos because the reliability guarantees achievable via C-based development were too low, and the message passing primitives which defined the architecture made "certain" high-performance designs challenging. This is not "severe" performance problems, any more than Linux had "severe" performance problems before epoll. By high-performance, we're talking saturating Gigabit ethernet here (EROS achieved 90% saturation), which is above and beyond the bandwidth needed for most uses.
Attempts to follow it up (notably CaprOS with the EROS code, and Coyotos recoding the design from scratch) also have achieved little to date.
It's been a year. CapROS has been ported to the ARM, the Coyotos group has developed the BitC language, and the
But in real life, monolithic kernels tend to be more reliable than microkernel systems with equivalent features anyway, so it's not really a question of making that tradeoff by choosing microkernel vs. monolithic kernel; the fact that you can develop faster also means you can fix bugs faster.
I think you should review your history. In particular, investigate KeyKOS back in the early 80s, a microkernel-based operating system which operated for decades, and which hosted a fully binary-compatible UNIX environment. I would say that qualifies for a system of "equivalent features", and KeyKOS was much safer, much more reliable, and far more secure than any monolithic system you'll find in existence then or now.
The reason monolithic kernels are more prevalent is that the kernel development model is so much simpler, that even hobbiest and newbie programmers can experiment with it (and it sometimes shows in open source kernels). Microkernel development (the actual kernel) is simply harder because appropriate tradeoffs demand much more architectural and hardware knowledge from the developer.
I don't see how the userland development need be any more complicated for microkernels than monolithic. Plenty of microkernels, both old and new, have provided unix environments; granted, some of those were no safer than their unix counterparts, but that is a matter of proper design and not an inherent limitation of the core microkernel architecture (see KeyKOS, Xen, L4).
QNX is probably the closest, but it's a pretty far cry from a modern Linux, BSD, XP, or MacOS X system feature-wise.
Only because it's not targeted for the same market. Their preview desktop release a few years ago was still quite impressive.
And anybody who tells you that distributed algorithms are "simpler" is just so full of sh*t that it's not even funny.
And anybody who tells you that it's possible to have deadlock-free code in any software of reasonable complexity that uses shared state concurrency is similarly full of sh*t. Fact is, creating deadlock-free code is harder than solving distributed problems; unfortunately, people have trouble accepting this.
The whole "microkernels are simpler" argument is just bull, and it is clearly shown to be bull by the fact that whenever you compare the speed of development of a microkernel and a traditional kernel, the traditional kernel wins. By a huge amount, too.
And traditional monolithic kernels are buggy, and unreliable. This too has been proven time and time again. The important question is: what's more important to you, development speed, or reliability?
L4Ka and Fiasco implementations of the L4 microkernel architecture
The only way the system can fail is via a kernel bug, or via a component that obtains priviledged access to low-level hardware that can induce a kernel failure (ie. programming DMA hardware to overwrite kernel data).
Slashdot Mirror
So instead of simply being incorrect about the effects of radiation on the local ecosystem, he was ignorant of the facts surrounding Chernobyl entirely. The latter is far worse IMO, because if he's spouting off without even basing his speculations on the proper facts, then his speculations are pure fantasy and he loses all credibility.
I don't feel comfortable even talking about it as long as there are a large chunk of people in jail for stupid things like the drug war. Not all criminals infringed on anyone else's rights.
Right, which says a lot about our legislators.
Or the implications. "Rehabilitation" strikes at the entire concept of free will in humans.
If rehab is necessary to prevent the offender from infringing on the freedoms of others, then it is justified. I believe that is the only rational, moral justification for rehab.
I call Bullshit. It is equally simplistic to think that all cases can be rehabilitated as it is to think that there are no cases that can be rehabilitated.
I actually think everyone can be rehabilitated. I just don't think most people are willing to accept the measures needed to rehab serious cases. Other cases we simply don't know how to properly rehab yet, but "retraining" is a first step.
provided you survive pre-trial motions to dismiss, etc., then during the legal discovery process, you get to look at their stuff and prove your case.
;-)
Right, and the court of law is thus a "circumvention device" as outlawed by the DMCA. Bye, bye courts!
you don't see Microsoft telling it's customers "You don't like explorer? Fix it yourself!"
No, Microsoft says, "You don't like explorer? Tough shit!" On rare occasions it's "You don't like explorer? Well I'm afraid it's far too integrated into Windows your Honour."
I can't believe that you say that the depression of 1987 was worse than that of 1929.
This was not a comment on the severity of the depression, but the stock market. The depression started in the early 1920s, before the crash (which was all explained in the links I provided). 1929 and 1987 were stock market crashes, and yes, the severity of "Black Monday" was worse than the 1929 crash.
Regardless, you have yet to make an argument how regulation would have prevented either the depression or the stock market crash, while I have in fact argued with citations how regulation in fact caused these problems.
Whether or not monopolies are permanent is kind of beside the point. The point is, an unfettered, "laissez-faire" market inevitably concentrates wealth and power in the hands of a very few. [...] Don't get me wrong-- I am for smaller government. But what we need is not small government per se, but good government-- something which is a lot harder to define.
Whether monopolies and concentration of wealth is temporary is exactly the point. How temporary is your government? Once a government usurps some power, they will never give it back. Instead of fighting a temporary monopoly with dollars to rectify an imbalance, we'll be fighting our government with blood.
Government is the ultimate concentration of wealth and power. The proper response to a concentration of wealth, is not to create an entity with even greater wealth and power, but to create a system where such entities either cannot arise, or if that is impossible (as in natural monopolies), then a system where they must perpetually fight to stay dominant. This is the very nature of a free market. Who does the government have to compete with to make sure you are happy?
I strongly urge you to read The Machinery of Freedom. You may not become a Libertarian, but you will certainly come to appreciate the flexibility of free market capitalism.
Certain socialist policies, like subsidized education, free libraries for the people, etc., are need to offset the anti-democratic tendencies of capitalism itself.
I disagree. What is needed instead, is a complete lack of unnecessary constrictions on people's activities; they'll do the rest. If people overall are altruistic enough to ensure that the government stays "good", then they are altruistic enough to help their fellow man in all the ways you have described without being forced to by the government [1].
I do agree that widespread education is one of, if not the, most important attribute of modern civilization, but I disagree with the assumption that government is the best source of that education.
Also, you again assert that capitalism is anti-democratic, but you do not demonstrate, nor do you even explain how.
[1] Think about it: why would you need public libraries if there was no government-enforced copyright? You could get a copy of anything you wanted, anywhere, anytime, for cheap if that were the case. You could make the case that books would then never be written, but in fact the market would simply shift: instead of royalties on every copy sold, the author would be selling a manuscript for a one-time fee, and the publisher would have to recoup costs on "first to market" sales. A similar argument applies to patents.
Austrian economists are by no means mainstream, they are a weird little splinter group that mainstream economists generally scoff at. Now, of course this doesn't mean they are wrong, but it's a good clue.
/.ers can particularly relate to. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly
/. story about how China is now becoming too expensive for manufacturing as the standard of living has increased significantly.
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Let me revise a misunderstanding on this tangent: I agree there is concentration of wealth in current economies. I disagree that these are free markets. I also disagree that concentration of wealth is necessarily a problem. It is only a problem when coercive organizations (like the government), facilitate and/or perpuate a concentration of wealth (as they currently do with market interventions and regulation). Left alone, concentration of wealth is temporary.
I merely pointed out Austrian economics as the most extreme philosophy that holds this position. There are many more economists who hold or held this view, even outside the Austrian economics.
How about you wait until Microsoft actually topples from a monopoly psition before using them as an example of how monopolies naturally disappear?
They are not the only example, merely one that we are seeing unfold right now, and one that
Every example of a monopoly in that article may face very little competition from within that market, but they face intense competition from other markets. Carnegie Steel faced mounting competition from aluminium which was growing in strength by leaps and bounds in the mid 20th, not to mention other metals. The NFL faces competition from baseball, basketball, hockey, soccer, and numerous other sports. "Monopoly" is not some great, undefeatable beast which trounces all other options, and when it does, like Microsoft, you'll see that people soon find or create their own alternatives.
As for lassez faire, the 19th century was well known for its social inequality and brutal working conditions, all of which were at least in part due to this outdated and failed philosophy.
As are the same conditions in third world countries that Nike and other multinationals "exploit" for cheap labour. And yet, a recent scientific study revisited these nations after multinationals pulled out due to criticism, and found the living conditions far worse [1]. Women and children that were working for peanuts resorted to their previous occupations: prostitution. Most other jobs from within the country paid less than the sweatshops.
Also, you'll find that investments in the third world eventually raises the standard of living in those countries. We're seeing that happen now in China, and there was a recent
It took unions forcing governments to intervene before we did away with lassez faire's lovely legacy of unsafe work conditions, 16 hour work-days, 7 day work-weeks, low pay, and child labor.
Unions are a legitimate response to a persistently unfair employer, but your statement does not follow: why are governments necessary in the above statement? A union on its own can force fair treatment by an employer. So how does regulation and government intervention help exactly?
[1] http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=0004B7
It was demonstrated by the laissez-faire economies of the late 19th century. Read your history.
;-)
_ 1929e dom
Please, cite me which laissez faire economies, and which failures you are referring to. The classic example is the Great Depression[1] and the market crash of 1929 [2]. Many prominent economists in fact blame government intervention for both of those disasters. The government's inflationary policy of the 1920's, ridiculously high tariffs, and improper management of the money supply are blamed. Even the current chairman of the Federal Reserve Ben Bernanke, an economic historian, concedes that the Federal Reserve was to blame [3].
It's also interesting to note that "Black Monday" (1987) was even worse than the 1929 crash. So exactly how did regulation help us here?
Nelson Rockefeller and Standard Oil. Bill Gates and Microsoft.
Still feel short on evidence?
Yes. Where is the free market? And MS is addressed below.
Exactly. If you are Joe Q. Capitalist, your deepest desire is to corner the market and establish a permanent monopoly. And once you have done that, the free market is over, and progress tends to grind to a halt.
I have highlighted where you have gone wrong. There is no such thing as a permanent monopoly. It is simply impossible to have one. Using your example of Microsoft: a counter-culture arose which undercut even MS, free and open source software. Let's say we take the free release of the BSDs and Linux in the early 90s as our starting point. It has taken roughly 16 years to get to the point where open source and free software is making a serious impact on MS. Governments and educational institutions are all standardizing on it, whether just to threaten MS, or because they actually believe it is a better option. The fact is, there is a real alternative now, real competition, and MS is feeling the pressure.
Contrast this the goverment's anti-trust trials against MS which had exactly zero effect. So tell me again, how exactly does regulation help us topple or prevent monopolies?
I challenge anyone to cite me even one example of a monopoly that has not, or can not be toppled without government intervention.
That said, the free market is absoultely not a solution for everything, merely most things [4].
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Depression
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wall_Street_Crash_of
[3] "Regarding the Great Depression. You're right, we did it. We're very sorry." [1]
[4] The Machinery of Freedom was the book that convinced me of that: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machinery_of_Fre
Except that some organizations get in a position of power where the people giving them money effectively have no alternative. Such as Microsoft with operating systems, or in my past experience, "deregulated" power.
And yet, a counter-culture to Microsoft arose without any government intervention or regulation: free and open source software. The goverment has proven impotent, and the people themselves are providing competition, and it's working quite well so far.
We all know how microsoft has exploited their monopoly, and those of us in California for the rolling blackouts know how well the pied piper of free markets (Ken Lay / Enron) exploited the system for Billions of dollars.
Let's not equate poor "degregulation" plans with good deregulation plans.
I think the concentration of wealth into fewer and fewer hands was successfully demonstrated by the complete and utter failure of lassez faire capitalism and the rise of the robber barons.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robber_baron
You're using the 12th and 13th centuries as examples? Perhaps you meant something else? I'll just point this out for you: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Just because free markets permits unequal distribution of wealth, does not mean that said distribution guaranteed, nor permanent or somehow self-perpetuating. This is evident even today where a wealthy family's fortunes are often squandered by the descendents within 2 generations.
I also ask you to cite an instance of laissez faire capitalism that completely and utterly failed.
With enough money, you get a de-facto regulatory process. The market becomes unfree due to unfair barriers to entry being enacted by the biggest players. Look at Microsoft, and how they use their monopoly power to unfair advantage. And no one could argue that Microsfot is a government granted monopoly.
And what has been the response to Microsoft? Free software, open source, and standardization. Monopolies topple without government intervention. In fact, what Microsoft is a textbook case studdy how governments are impotent against monopolies.
I can not see how you can look at conditions in modern capitalist countries and argue with a straight face that there is no concentration of wealth. I would put it on you to prove your point, because all economic data I've seen say otherwise.
Austrian economics say otherwise. Some of the most prominent economists of the past century have been Libertarians. Perhaps that should tell you that your views on economics are incomplete at best.
Unfortunately, free markets lead to concentration of wealth. [...]
Which has not been demonstrated.
[...] Concentration of wealth leads to concentration of power [...]
Agreed.
[...] which leads to control of the regulatory process
Which does not exist in a free market.
Free markets invariably become unfree because of a runaway feedback loop.
Many people say this, yet are short on evidence or thorough argumentation supporting this conclusion.
At least in democracy we have checks and balances.
Funny, because many people view democracy as a degenerate free market in which voting priviledges are not fully distributed (as money), but centralized (one vote per person on any given issue, or further centralized in a "representative" in a republic).
Where are the checks and balances within a free market that will work to keep it free? there are none.
Except the fact that nobody controls it, and that money is not free: in order to keep it flowing (and thus stay rich), you shouldn't piss off the people giving you said money. Where do you think their money is coming from?
I actually thought of this exact idea myself! :-)
Casimir forces are extremely sensitive to geometries however, and the solutions are very hard to derive. A sphere was recently found to have a repulsive Casimir force IIRC[2] (ie. the force is expansive rather than contracting as with parallel plates). So while this idea would be cool, I suspect that any non-parallel plates would yield a null result, or perhaps so small as to be useless, even if you had nano or pico-scale manufacturing.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casimir_effect
[2] http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0106045
The only way to really defeat phishing is to only use the web interface to start a transaction or to view information ... and require that the bank call the customer at the customer's phone number and verify that the transaction is authorized.
That's silly. There are perfectly reasonable means to defeat phishing already available. All that's required is a trusted path to a trusted component which verifies one's relationship to the site (in other words, a visible section of screen that the phisher can't alter in any way); this is what the pentame toolbar does. It's still vulernable to OS security breaches, but that's a far better than the current security models.
Please see the following excellent write up. Even if you don't agree with the conclusions, it serves as an important reminder as to the limits of our understanding of the climate, using the IPCC's findings no less.
You're seriuously asking me for evidence that warming on Mars was not anthropogenic?
He's asking for the evidence that Mars is warming, and further, that the warming trends on Mars are correlated with those on Earth (which is what you suggested). I've heard the argument that Mars has experienced warming, but I too have yet to see any evidence of it.
The chart at this site's page http://carto.eu.org/article2481.html , which is becoming a bit more frequently seen, shows the graph of C02 content in the atmosphere and temperature ranges over the last 400,000 years as derived from examining core samples, up to 1950.
Looking at the graph, it's interesting to note that temperature increases seem to have preceded CO2 increases, and that temperatures declined before CO2 levels dropped. Of course, examining graphs without error bars is meaningless anyway.
I find it really difficult to think that the human activities known to increase C02 emissions we've increasingly engaged in over the last 150 years have had little to nothing to do with the obvious increase in both C02 atmospheric content and resulting temperature/climate changes.
I think few people dispute that humans haven't affected CO2 levels; it's the presumption of a causal link between rising CO2 and "resulting temperature/climate changes" which has everyone's panties in a twist.
I'd sincerely like to hear other viable explanations for the facts, but there haven't been any
There are many in fact, many of which are just nonsense. It's been awhile since I did in-depth analysis on this debate, but I'll just leave you with a little tidbit from my last foray: you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone that will agree that we have reliable readings on solar activity for more than 40-50 years (I'm talking a large portion of the spectrum here, not just visible light). Coupled with the fact that the sun is the energy source driving the entire climate, doesn't that call the entire foundation of anthropogenic warming into question?
Just this morning in fact, I read of a publication which provided an alternative model to explain the growth and shrinkage of our ice volumes based on variations in Earth's orbital patterns (that darn sun thing again...).
the most well supported hypothisis remains that humans burning fossil fuels (in ever increasing numbers do to an also alarming rate of population growth) are truly affecting the climate.
The most well researched hypothesis is anthropogenic warming. Let's not confuse attention (which is politics and fads), with justification (which is science).
Based on the book, so this is disputed.
See also the cited Reason article.
The article further goes on to point out that egg shell thinning in birds had started happening 50 years before the introduction of DDT.
It was in fact banned because of its effects on animals, particularly eggshells.
Correct, though I'd amend that to "supposed effects on eggshells", as subsequent investigation disproved this claim:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDT
There is no practical way within the Christian framework to challenge Jesus' flat-out prohibition on divorce. To do so you either have to avail yourself of Matthew's ambiguous loophole, or you have to deny the validity of Christ's words in this instance
Allow me to point out the obvious solution (though you might consider this outside the "Christian framework"): each gospel was written by a man, each with his own biases and viewpoint, and none of the gospels can trace their lineage to even within a century of Jesus's time. The gospels and the Bible taken as a whole give us a mixed viewpoint, which tells us that the issue was not even clearcut back then. Thus, divorce is permitted in some circumstances.
A lot of people have made quite a few good points already, so I'll just chime in with one I haven't seen yet: software will never be regulated (at least not in the near future).
Why? Because despite their comments to the contrary, execs and managers don't want regulation. Why? Because regulation and enforced quality control, as in civil engineering, would wrest control of software development from managers, and place it in the hands of professional, certified engineers that would be entrusted and liable for product quality.
Managers and execs don't want to lose their control, and they don't want costs to quadruple (as they no doubt would to ensure sufficient robustness). They want rapid development schedules, and they want control over how and what gets developed. To a certain extent, this is inevitable as the software market fluctuates far more rapidly than the civil industry; no one is looking for the next bigger and better bridge or building every 6 months. Software is often superceded many times a year.
By design it was impossible for KeyKOS to support variable-sized inodes or disk blocks, partition resizing, etc.
KeyKOS had no notion of inodes or diskblocks, it had a single-level store. Files and filesystems were implemented by processes that operated on red-black trees. There is nothing in the design the precludes the features you mention. Unless of course, you are discussing how to manage storage add/remove disks, etc. when using a single-level store. This is a completely separate issue from microkernels and the KeyKOS architecture.
Even removable media (floppy disks) were a horrible kludge that often threw the object store into an inconsistent state.
Once again removable media are sometimes a problem for single-level stores, not for microkernels or KeyKOS/EROS in particular. I also highly doubt your claim of inconsistency, as the developers were very careful to avoid those ends, so please provide a pointer to validate this claim.
The checkpoint/transaction manager was a performance nightmare once you had to scale to multiple concurrent processes; single process (which were all KeyKOS generally published benchmarks for, aside from a well-known carefully constructed transaction benchmark explicitly designed to make sure that only completely independent data was ever written to the system) were pretty efficient, but tangled references quickly forced the set of objects that needed to be committed to the ENTIRE SYSTEM once you had a fair number of processes running at once. Disk usage was incredibly inefficient.
This paragraph leads me to believe that you have little idea about how KeyKOS operated. KeyKOS and its successors are built on transparent orthogonal persistence, which means a snapshot of the entire system is always written to disk as an atomic transaction. Contrary to your assertion, disk usage has been shown to be incredibly efficient.
Unless by "transaction manager" you're talking about the ATM software which ran on KeyKOS, which would be a completely different matter and unrelated to KeyKOS as a viable OS.
Moreover, the checkpoint system wasn't ACID compliant so you didn't get anything useful for all that complexity; in crash recovery situations, a transaction that had already been committed could be replayed multiple times (causing data inconsistencies or worse).
Checkpointing is and was ACID. If you believe it was not, then please explain.
I could go on, but the major point is that all of these problems stemmed directly from the design of the KeyKOS microkernel, and the barriers to solutions were ones that would not have existed in a monolithic kernel.
Completely untrue. I suggest you read some KeyKOS kernel and architecture papers to learn the true limits of KeyKOS.
None of those problems were easily soluable, and the attempt to improve the system in EROS wound up in a development rathole that was eventually abandoned because of systemic complexity and severe performance problems.
Only partly true. The EROS founder abandoned it in favour of Coyotos because the reliability guarantees achievable via C-based development were too low, and the message passing primitives which defined the architecture made "certain" high-performance designs challenging. This is not "severe" performance problems, any more than Linux had "severe" performance problems before epoll. By high-performance, we're talking saturating Gigabit ethernet here (EROS achieved 90% saturation), which is above and beyond the bandwidth needed for most uses.
Attempts to follow it up (notably CaprOS with the EROS code, and Coyotos recoding the design from scratch) also have achieved little to date.
It's been a year. CapROS has been ported to the ARM, the Coyotos group has developed the BitC language, and the
But in real life, monolithic kernels tend to be more reliable than microkernel systems with equivalent features anyway, so it's not really a question of making that tradeoff by choosing microkernel vs. monolithic kernel; the fact that you can develop faster also means you can fix bugs faster.
I think you should review your history. In particular, investigate KeyKOS back in the early 80s, a microkernel-based operating system which operated for decades, and which hosted a fully binary-compatible UNIX environment. I would say that qualifies for a system of "equivalent features", and KeyKOS was much safer, much more reliable, and far more secure than any monolithic system you'll find in existence then or now.
The reason monolithic kernels are more prevalent is that the kernel development model is so much simpler, that even hobbiest and newbie programmers can experiment with it (and it sometimes shows in open source kernels). Microkernel development (the actual kernel) is simply harder because appropriate tradeoffs demand much more architectural and hardware knowledge from the developer.
I don't see how the userland development need be any more complicated for microkernels than monolithic. Plenty of microkernels, both old and new, have provided unix environments; granted, some of those were no safer than their unix counterparts, but that is a matter of proper design and not an inherent limitation of the core microkernel architecture (see KeyKOS, Xen, L4).
QNX is probably the closest, but it's a pretty far cry from a modern Linux, BSD, XP, or MacOS X system feature-wise.
Only because it's not targeted for the same market. Their preview desktop release a few years ago was still quite impressive.
And anybody who tells you that distributed algorithms are "simpler" is just so full of sh*t that it's not even funny.
And anybody who tells you that it's possible to have deadlock-free code in any software of reasonable complexity that uses shared state concurrency is similarly full of sh*t. Fact is, creating deadlock-free code is harder than solving distributed problems; unfortunately, people have trouble accepting this.
The whole "microkernels are simpler" argument is just bull, and it is clearly shown to be bull by the fact that whenever you compare the speed of development of a microkernel and a traditional kernel, the traditional kernel wins. By a huge amount, too.
And traditional monolithic kernels are buggy, and unreliable. This too has been proven time and time again. The important question is: what's more important to you, development speed, or reliability?
The only way the system can fail is via a kernel bug, or via a component that obtains priviledged access to low-level hardware that can induce a kernel failure (ie. programming DMA hardware to overwrite kernel data).