I should amend that to "Rejection is also O(1) once determined", ie. after search. It's O(n) before the search. Or statistically, perhaps n/2 if we know that it has been rejected (to find the patent that was prior art).
If n is the number of patents (or ideas), the patent examiner may require O(n) time to search for prior art for each submitted patent. The complexity of the whole system would then be O(n^2).
Sorry, I'm not seeing this. The patents are a list which has O(1) insertion time once a patent is approved. Rejection is also O(1). Comparison of two patents takes some fixed value, C. In order to approve or reject a patent, the examiner has to iterate over each element (ie. n times) with overhead C for each element. That makes the complexity of "submit_patent_for_approval(my_patent)" O(C * n) = O(n).
The best you could do is probably O(log n) if every patent is properly and strictly categorized in some sort of graph to reduce the required search space.
It sounds to me increasingly like "microkernel" to you means "a kernel implemented in ANSI C that uses a hand-crafted message passing object system".
Not necessarily C, but any low-level language that gives the programmer direct control over representation and runtime (this is the only real requirement). So why not C++, or BitC?
The defining characteristic of microkernels is a small set of kernel-implemented primitives upon which an entire system can be built in userspace. EROS/CapROS, and Coyotos have only one system call and a few kernel objects for instance.
Tanenbaum is unscientific: he focuses on a single variable and ignores all the others; he fails to even state his claims properly, let alone support them with data; and he fails to justify a novel approach with a detailed empirical analysis of prior work.
Even if what you say is true, there are plenty of others making very detailed analyses of microkernel architectures, and they have reached many of the same conclusions: that microkernels are feasible, useful, and practical, if done correctly. The real problem is that microkernels have a stigma attached to them, and because they are hard to properly design and implement. As such, only researchers have traditionally worked on them, and we all know researchers are not going to develop a full-featured system like Linux. Hopefully, that will change with CapROS.
Sure, but all things are not equal, and an improvement that obviously improves performance, often doesn't. OS programming isn't quite the same as pure user-level programming, so optimizations aren't so clear-cut.
People often assume that monolithic kernels are faster than properly designed microkernels due to less supervisor-user context switching, but this often isn't the largest cost in modern systems. For instance, monolithic kernels can't/don't schedule their interrupt handling through the common scheduler, so they're nearly impossible to use for realtime.
Reliability, flexibility and security is also dramatically improved in decomposed microkernel designs, so really, suffering a 5-10% performance penalty to gain an extra few 9's in reliability (99.99% uptime as opposed to 99%) is often worth it IMO.
Neither BeOS no AmigaOS are microkernels. They're probably more compact than the monolithic Linux architecture, but still a far cry from a true microkernel.
The biggest problem seems to be that that extra layer of abstraction slows things down (which makes sense really). [...] If heavy usage servers can be run as virtual machines in Xen then why not use a microkernel too?
Funny you should mention Xen, because it's essentially a microkernel running other kernels as protected processes.
So. Any examples of microkernel OS's that handle heavy server load, function well as a desktop, and can handle multimedia tasks like gaming?
Other posts mention QNX, so I won't bother.
I'd find it hard to believe that with solid numbers showing that microkernel is just as fast and without additional overhead that someone like Linus wouldn't use it since it's an easier programming model (better for security, stability, etc).
You'd be surprised. There's a lot of vested interest in the current programming paradigms and existing codebase. A principled microkernel architecture might just be incompatible with POSIX, which eliminates a large swath of portable and useful software.
If you want performance, you need look no further than L4, EROS (and it's successor CapROS). For a principled design, I'd go with EROS/CapROS or the next generation capability system Coyotos (who's designers are trying very hard to implement POSIX while maintaining capability security).
Something useful right now, doesn't exist as far as I know.
the patent system imposes significant hidden costs to the economy via litigation
I should further note that the original reason behind patents, to ensure that knowledge of improvements to science and engineering is not lost but publicly documented, is a fairly moot point today. Employees move from company to company fairly frequently nowadays, and carry their knowledge with them. Without patents, there's really no reason they can't share that knowledge with future employers.
The whole patent problem can be reduced to a single point: the patent system, as currently implemented, does not scale, both in registration (filing for patents), and in resolution (resolving disputes). This is the natural result of trying manage a decentralized process (R&D) with a centralized system (patents); we are feeling these effects the most now, because of the drastic increase in the importance of information.
There have been a number of solutions to this problem proposed, including eliminating patents altogether, or significant patent reform of some kind. Both could resolve the situation.
However, one thing is clear: the problem is one of scaling a centralized system. Each patent that comes in requires decoding from legalese, and comparison with every other patent in the system that was ever recorded for prior art. For you programmers out there, that's an O(n) algorithm. 'n' is very large nowadays. 'n' will continue getting larger. Without managing this complexity in some sort of structured fashion, it will inevitably become unmangeable, just like any poorly chosen algorithm. If this is the best we can hope to do, then we have to scale our efforts at O(n) to keep up with the growth (funding, man power, etc.).
I think they could do better. Heck, hire Google properly index some the patents and come up with an appropriate process for the examiners. Personally, I prefer as little intervention as possible; in other words, a decentralized system, which can scale with decentralized development, or no patent system at all; the patent system imposes significant hidden costs to the economy via litigation and lost time. But a centralized solution can work, as long as it is designed to scale properly.
Now all you smart computer scientists, programmers, hackers, and mathematicians, let's hear some decentralized and/or scalable solutions; that's what we really need if we want to keep patents around.:-)
Keep in mind that not everyone has to be smart enough, as long as we're smart enough on average to make good decisions (or perhaps, good enough?). Even this can become a non-issue given the right system of Direct Democracy (see below).
But you'd have us believe that you'd take the time out of your life to not only vote in dozens of referendums each day, but also to generate legislation. Fah!
I think everyone would do well to read up a little more about Direct Democracy. Knowledge never stands still; something that seemed impossible yesterday, might be in use tomorrow.
A receipt, whether a plain-text record or a number you can use over the phone or the internet, makes coercion so easy as to be laughable.
The people behind these open voting designs are not so stupid as to forget about the coercion vulnerabilities. There was a voting machine design proposed a few years ago, in which the printout was a pair of tranparencies with an encrypted code indicating the vote (readable by computer). Each transparency was unreadable by humans individually. Overlapping the transparencies makes it readable to humans which vote was recorded.
Process is: Voter receives receipt of overlapping transparencies, verifies it correctly reflect their choice by visual inspection, strips off the one containing the computer code, and drops it in the ballot box. The other you can take with you. I'm fuzzy on the exact details, but that's was more or less the idea.
Can someone explain the point of this? C# is not JavaScript; these aren't true dynamically typed variables, the compiler just assigns a type for you instead of making you do it yourself. I can easily take half a second out of my day to figure out what type a variable should be, and end up with more readable code.
It's about saving time and typing effort. This C# 3.0 is honestly just a trivial hack though. Why bother with C# 3.0, when there's a.NET language that can be considered advanced enough to be C# 4.0; it's called Nemerle.
"Nemerle is a high-level statically-typed programming language for the.NET platform. It offers functional, object-oriented and imperative features. It has a simple C#-like syntax and a powerful meta-programming system."
With full type inference, not just "local" like in C# 3.0, Nemerle permits you to avoid specifying types practically anywhere. They also provide a C# to Nemerle code converter. Pretty cool. I'm definitely considering converting a major software product to Nemerle for the enhancements it provides.
I would suggest that the GET/POST dichotomy for handling data is a useful (lossy, I admit) way to beat crappy web developers over the head with a simple idea that makes the web a better place. It should have been learned a long time ago, but it hasn't been. I'm way cool on any effort that makes the script kiddies do something somewhat in line with something approaching best practice. Nobody loses.
You should definitely check out the Web-Calculus as embodied in the Waterken Server; all your composable, object-oriented programming goodness, embedded in the pure resource-oriented web.
I must point out that while wealth is finite [...]
I'm sorry, but where is the evidence to back up this assertion? Unless you are implying that wealth must be finite simply because the resources contained within the entire universe are finite, I'm not sure your statement is supported by any economics that I've heard of. And even if you are saying that, we're a heck of a long way off from depleting the wealth of the universe. We're not even close to depleting the wealth that can be extracted from our own planet.
So, the big deal here is maintaining consensual state. I'm sure you know the basics here. Best practice is to POST when changing state on the server, and GET when reading. But, not everone does that. And it also took a long time to come up with that simple rule.
Not really. It's in the HTTP RFC. GET requests are supposed to be idempotent. POST requests are not.
Individual property rights are not the only way to mitigate the need for violence due to competition for resources. Indeed, should you wish to mitigate the need for violence due to competition for resources would it not be best to have a system whereby resources were shared as equally as possible?
People have this innate sense of "fairness", and it really bothers them when they accomplish so much more than their peers, yet receive no additional compensation for it. Acknowledging this, why should anyone put forth any effort at all if they are going to receive the same goods anyway? Property rights are more than resource distribution, they are an incentive system. Aside from the complete infeasibility of central planning, this is a large failing of socialist structures.
Design me a system of equal sharing, that is as resistant to corruption and centralized control as individual property rights, and I would definitely consider it.
I find it funny that people stretch something to make the argument about something they want to argue about.
The original poster decided only to make vague assertions about the supposed "immature and shallow thinking" inherent to Libertarianism, without providing any sort of concrete arguments to that effect. Left with little to address, I commented on a logical inference of his statement: that Libertarian supporters are thus also "immature and shallow thinkers" in this subject area. I merely pointed out the apparent contradiction in asserting that the leading experts in a field are "immature and shallow thinkers" in that very subject area (as economics is a core tenet of Libertarianism).
But you seem possessed of great insight, so perhaps you can expand on the "immature and shallow thinking" inherent in Libertarianism.
In American society, it seems like this kind of selfishness is a virtue Ayn Rand crap is increasingly becoming an accepted part of the culture. The crap that American is more successful because we have sociopaths running the government and corporations makes no sense.
I agree with your last statement. Can't say I see the connection with your first statement though. Was there supposed to be one? Unless you're suggesting there's a one-to-one correspondance between self-interested individuals and sociopaths.
The Enrons and Haliburtons are draining our society and only bringing American down.
I agree. Good thing we have hundreds of thousands of other self-interested businesses and people keeping America alive then hm?
People who subscribe to the philosophy that selfishness is a virtue need people who have a consciences to feed on.
That's a pretty bold statement. The U.S. constitution itself recognizes people's rights to pursue their own interests as, "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness". Are you calling the founding fathers sociopaths and leeches?
Perhaps I'm just dense, because I just can't see the difference between "self-interest" and "private business" that's currently driving our economy and is enabling us to live. We seem to be doing pretty well on the latter so far. Both are founded on the concept of "mutual trade for mutual gain". Could you perhaps expand on the line of reasoning that demarcates the two?
A world full of Ayn Rand sociopaths would not even be a place were Ayn Rand sociopaths want to live in.
I wouldn't want to live in a world of any kind of sociopath. But maybe I misunderstood. Did you actually mean to imply that all Objectivists (Ayn Rand's philosophy), or egoists (pursuers of self-interest), are sociopaths?
As a reformed libertarian, I can say libertarianism is completely immature and shallow thinking. If you think it about for more than three seconds it doesn't hold water.
I find my self a lot happier now that I don't subscribe to the selfish thinking of Liberatrianism.
See, I find these sorts of statements very silly. Some of the most important economists of the past century are or were Libertarians. Are you saying that their incredibly profound understanding of human interactions by trade is completely baseless? After all, Libertarianism is largely motivated by economic arguments.
I would instead conclude that you actually misunderstood the entire foundation of Libertarianism, if "immature, shallow, and selfish" are all you can say about it.
When you actually think about other people, you can reach a state of self actualization which makes you a much happier person. Libertarians are operating much lower on the Maslow pyramid
Another completely silly statement which simply highlights your ignorance of Maslow's hierarchy. How exactly does Libertarianism prevent you from achieving the level of "self-actualization".
In fact, it doesn't, as anyone arguing philosophy and socio-economics is already at the self-actualization stage; there is no higher step. Thus, people who bother to call themselves Libertarians have a much higher likelihood of already being higher on the hierarchy than anybody else.
If Libertarianism isn't for you, then fine, I hope you find something that does suit you and improve your life; but please try to avoid launching baseless attacks against something you simply disagree with; stick to rational arguments. We have enough FUD being tossed around and we don't need to add to it.
Id say the most succesful society is that which does the most to improve the quality of life of its inhabitants.
I'd say the most successful society is the one that can best ensure its long-term survival (and thus the survival of its constituents). The path of science and reason that we are currently following is thus definitely the right one (though we obviously could be doing better on this path).
I don't have an opinion on Rand one way or another, really, but I remember in philosophy class that the professor mentioned that Objectivism was the first philosophy of the 20th century to be disproven.
Do you or anybody else have a citation for this? I'm genuinely curious, because for anyone who's actually followed the reasoning underlying Objectivism, it's pretty hard to find any flaws in the fundamentals. Some of her more elaborate conclusions are certainly somewhat misguided or don't quite seem to follow, but her core philosophy seems pretty solid to me.
Reduce, reuse, and recycle is the key to solving our polution issue. Educate please. Don't prohibit a free ecconomy! And finally, stop your finger-pointing at the "right wing" as though only they are responsible for our mess.
Please educate yourself about free market economics first. Externalities such as pollution are a huge problem which are not addressed in free market economies. Unless someone owns a resource and actually has an incentive to preserve its value, the resource will be abused. No one owns our air or water, no one has incentive to keep them clean. You may think the government should have this responsibility, but the government is already a variable not factored into free markets economics, so your argument to keep the economy free is self-defeating.
In this case, the government actually should be involved. It should be taxing manufacturing and/or mining industries the true long-term cost of disposing or recycling their goods (ie. the entire product's lifecycle). Thus, businesses will take these additional costs into consideration when pricing their goods. Consumer prices increase, but disposal taxes decrease. Businesses which are more environmentally friendly would have lower operating costs which is reflected in their prices; so the economics rewards not only efficient businesses, but also environmentally friendly ones.
Not it's not. The REAL reason we don't use DC for distribution is because it's entirely unsuitable for it!
Short circuits in DC can damage (melt!) the entire line, whereas short circuits in AC damage the point where the fault occurred.
Long distance transmission is inherently an AC problem anyway. We'd still have to deal with wave propagation due to changing power flows/loads.
DC is suitable only for circuits where the speed of light can be regarded as more or less instantaneous. Power lines stretching over hundreds of kilometers obviously don't fall into this category.
Besides, high voltage is high voltage.
Except when it's not. High frequency high voltage current is an entirely different beast from low frequency high voltage. The latter will kill you, the former won't*.
* For sufficiently high frequencies. Don't try this at home.
Power lines run just under the voltage needed to ionize the air.
Air is ionized at as little as 8-10kv (depending on what gas in "air" you're actually looking at ionizing). Power lines run at MUCH higher voltages.
Slashdot Mirror
Rejection is also O(1)
I should amend that to "Rejection is also O(1) once determined", ie. after search. It's O(n) before the search. Or statistically, perhaps n/2 if we know that it has been rejected (to find the patent that was prior art).
If n is the number of patents (or ideas), the patent examiner may require O(n) time to search for prior art for each submitted patent. The complexity of the whole system would then be O(n^2).
Sorry, I'm not seeing this. The patents are a list which has O(1) insertion time once a patent is approved. Rejection is also O(1). Comparison of two patents takes some fixed value, C. In order to approve or reject a patent, the examiner has to iterate over each element (ie. n times) with overhead C for each element. That makes the complexity of "submit_patent_for_approval(my_patent)" O(C * n) = O(n).
The best you could do is probably O(log n) if every patent is properly and strictly categorized in some sort of graph to reduce the required search space.
It sounds to me increasingly like "microkernel" to you means "a kernel implemented in ANSI C that uses a hand-crafted message passing object system".
Not necessarily C, but any low-level language that gives the programmer direct control over representation and runtime (this is the only real requirement). So why not C++, or BitC?
The defining characteristic of microkernels is a small set of kernel-implemented primitives upon which an entire system can be built in userspace. EROS/CapROS, and Coyotos have only one system call and a few kernel objects for instance.
Tanenbaum is unscientific: he focuses on a single variable and ignores all the others; he fails to even state his claims properly, let alone support them with data; and he fails to justify a novel approach with a detailed empirical analysis of prior work.
Even if what you say is true, there are plenty of others making very detailed analyses of microkernel architectures, and they have reached many of the same conclusions: that microkernels are feasible, useful, and practical, if done correctly. The real problem is that microkernels have a stigma attached to them, and because they are hard to properly design and implement. As such, only researchers have traditionally worked on them, and we all know researchers are not going to develop a full-featured system like Linux. Hopefully, that will change with CapROS.
See my other posts in this thread:
Performance
Examples of microkernel sytems
All else equal, the faster code is better.
Sure, but all things are not equal, and an improvement that obviously improves performance, often doesn't. OS programming isn't quite the same as pure user-level programming, so optimizations aren't so clear-cut.
People often assume that monolithic kernels are faster than properly designed microkernels due to less supervisor-user context switching, but this often isn't the largest cost in modern systems. For instance, monolithic kernels can't/don't schedule their interrupt handling through the common scheduler, so they're nearly impossible to use for realtime.
Reliability, flexibility and security is also dramatically improved in decomposed microkernel designs, so really, suffering a 5-10% performance penalty to gain an extra few 9's in reliability (99.99% uptime as opposed to 99%) is often worth it IMO.
Neither BeOS no AmigaOS are microkernels. They're probably more compact than the monolithic Linux architecture, but still a far cry from a true microkernel.
The biggest problem seems to be that that extra layer of abstraction slows things down (which makes sense really). [...] If heavy usage servers can be run as virtual machines in Xen then why not use a microkernel too?
Funny you should mention Xen, because it's essentially a microkernel running other kernels as protected processes.
So. Any examples of microkernel OS's that handle heavy server load, function well as a desktop, and can handle multimedia tasks like gaming?
Other posts mention QNX, so I won't bother.
I'd find it hard to believe that with solid numbers showing that microkernel is just as fast and without additional overhead that someone like Linus wouldn't use it since it's an easier programming model (better for security, stability, etc).
You'd be surprised. There's a lot of vested interest in the current programming paradigms and existing codebase. A principled microkernel architecture might just be incompatible with POSIX, which eliminates a large swath of portable and useful software.
If you want performance, you need look no further than L4, EROS (and it's successor CapROS). For a principled design, I'd go with EROS/CapROS or the next generation capability system Coyotos (who's designers are trying very hard to implement POSIX while maintaining capability security).
Something useful right now, doesn't exist as far as I know.
the patent system imposes significant hidden costs to the economy via litigation
I should further note that the original reason behind patents, to ensure that knowledge of improvements to science and engineering is not lost but publicly documented, is a fairly moot point today. Employees move from company to company fairly frequently nowadays, and carry their knowledge with them. Without patents, there's really no reason they can't share that knowledge with future employers.
The whole patent problem can be reduced to a single point: the patent system, as currently implemented, does not scale, both in registration (filing for patents), and in resolution (resolving disputes). This is the natural result of trying manage a decentralized process (R&D) with a centralized system (patents); we are feeling these effects the most now, because of the drastic increase in the importance of information.
:-)
There have been a number of solutions to this problem proposed, including eliminating patents altogether, or significant patent reform of some kind. Both could resolve the situation.
However, one thing is clear: the problem is one of scaling a centralized system. Each patent that comes in requires decoding from legalese, and comparison with every other patent in the system that was ever recorded for prior art. For you programmers out there, that's an O(n) algorithm. 'n' is very large nowadays. 'n' will continue getting larger. Without managing this complexity in some sort of structured fashion, it will inevitably become unmangeable, just like any poorly chosen algorithm. If this is the best we can hope to do, then we have to scale our efforts at O(n) to keep up with the growth (funding, man power, etc.).
I think they could do better. Heck, hire Google properly index some the patents and come up with an appropriate process for the examiners. Personally, I prefer as little intervention as possible; in other words, a decentralized system, which can scale with decentralized development, or no patent system at all; the patent system imposes significant hidden costs to the economy via litigation and lost time. But a centralized solution can work, as long as it is designed to scale properly.
Now all you smart computer scientists, programmers, hackers, and mathematicians, let's hear some decentralized and/or scalable solutions; that's what we really need if we want to keep patents around.
Allow me to pipe up here:
I know what you said, and you are wrong.
Keep in mind that not everyone has to be smart enough, as long as we're smart enough on average to make good decisions (or perhaps, good enough?). Even this can become a non-issue given the right system of Direct Democracy (see below).
But you'd have us believe that you'd take the time out of your life to not only vote in dozens of referendums each day, but also to generate legislation. Fah!
You are operating under the mistaken assumption that Direct Democracy implies direct political involvement from each and every citizen on each and every issue; this need not be the case. See: Direct Democracy by Delegable Proxy. I'll take this chance to pimp my own thoughts on the above proposal here.
I think everyone would do well to read up a little more about Direct Democracy. Knowledge never stands still; something that seemed impossible yesterday, might be in use tomorrow.
A receipt, whether a plain-text record or a number you can use over the phone or the internet, makes coercion so easy as to be laughable.
The people behind these open voting designs are not so stupid as to forget about the coercion vulnerabilities. There was a voting machine design proposed a few years ago, in which the printout was a pair of tranparencies with an encrypted code indicating the vote (readable by computer). Each transparency was unreadable by humans individually. Overlapping the transparencies makes it readable to humans which vote was recorded.
Process is: Voter receives receipt of overlapping transparencies, verifies it correctly reflect their choice by visual inspection, strips off the one containing the computer code, and drops it in the ballot box. The other you can take with you. I'm fuzzy on the exact details, but that's was more or less the idea.
Can someone explain the point of this? C# is not JavaScript; these aren't true dynamically typed variables, the compiler just assigns a type for you instead of making you do it yourself. I can easily take half a second out of my day to figure out what type a variable should be, and end up with more readable code.
.NET language that can be considered advanced enough to be C# 4.0; it's called Nemerle.
.NET platform. It offers functional, object-oriented and imperative features. It has a simple C#-like syntax and a powerful meta-programming system."
It's about saving time and typing effort. This C# 3.0 is honestly just a trivial hack though. Why bother with C# 3.0, when there's a
"Nemerle is a high-level statically-typed programming language for the
With full type inference, not just "local" like in C# 3.0, Nemerle permits you to avoid specifying types practically anywhere. They also provide a C# to Nemerle code converter. Pretty cool. I'm definitely considering converting a major software product to Nemerle for the enhancements it provides.
I would suggest that the GET/POST dichotomy for handling data is a useful (lossy, I admit) way to beat crappy web developers over the head with a simple idea that makes the web a better place. It should have been learned a long time ago, but it hasn't been. I'm way cool on any effort that makes the script kiddies do something somewhat in line with something approaching best practice. Nobody loses.
You should definitely check out the Web-Calculus as embodied in the Waterken Server; all your composable, object-oriented programming goodness, embedded in the pure resource-oriented web.
I must point out that while wealth is finite [...]
I'm sorry, but where is the evidence to back up this assertion? Unless you are implying that wealth must be finite simply because the resources contained within the entire universe are finite, I'm not sure your statement is supported by any economics that I've heard of. And even if you are saying that, we're a heck of a long way off from depleting the wealth of the universe. We're not even close to depleting the wealth that can be extracted from our own planet.
So, the big deal here is maintaining consensual state. I'm sure you know the basics here. Best practice is to POST when changing state on the server, and GET when reading. But, not everone does that. And it also took a long time to come up with that simple rule.
Not really. It's in the HTTP RFC. GET requests are supposed to be idempotent. POST requests are not.
I find it funny that people stretch something to make the argument about something they want to argue about.
The original poster decided only to make vague assertions about the supposed "immature and shallow thinking" inherent to Libertarianism, without providing any sort of concrete arguments to that effect. Left with little to address, I commented on a logical inference of his statement: that Libertarian supporters are thus also "immature and shallow thinkers" in this subject area. I merely pointed out the apparent contradiction in asserting that the leading experts in a field are "immature and shallow thinkers" in that very subject area (as economics is a core tenet of Libertarianism).
But you seem possessed of great insight, so perhaps you can expand on the "immature and shallow thinking" inherent in Libertarianism.
In American society, it seems like this kind of selfishness is a virtue Ayn Rand crap is increasingly becoming an accepted part of the culture. The crap that American is more successful because we have sociopaths running the government and corporations makes no sense.
I agree with your last statement. Can't say I see the connection with your first statement though. Was there supposed to be one? Unless you're suggesting there's a one-to-one correspondance between self-interested individuals and sociopaths.
The Enrons and Haliburtons are draining our society and only bringing American down.
I agree. Good thing we have hundreds of thousands of other self-interested businesses and people keeping America alive then hm?
Selfish politicians are killing the government.
I'm not so sure. I happen to be of the opinion that most unintentional evil is committed out of ignorance, or a failure of foresight, rather than evil "self-interest", greed, etc. Remember, "never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. But, this guy said it better, Re: politicians.
People who subscribe to the philosophy that selfishness is a virtue need people who have a consciences to feed on.
That's a pretty bold statement. The U.S. constitution itself recognizes people's rights to pursue their own interests as, "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness". Are you calling the founding fathers sociopaths and leeches?
Perhaps I'm just dense, because I just can't see the difference between "self-interest" and "private business" that's currently driving our economy and is enabling us to live. We seem to be doing pretty well on the latter so far. Both are founded on the concept of "mutual trade for mutual gain". Could you perhaps expand on the line of reasoning that demarcates the two?
A world full of Ayn Rand sociopaths would not even be a place were Ayn Rand sociopaths want to live in.
I wouldn't want to live in a world of any kind of sociopath. But maybe I misunderstood. Did you actually mean to imply that all Objectivists (Ayn Rand's philosophy), or egoists (pursuers of self-interest), are sociopaths?
As a reformed libertarian, I can say libertarianism is completely immature and shallow thinking. If you think it about for more than three seconds it doesn't hold water.
I find my self a lot happier now that I don't subscribe to the selfish thinking of Liberatrianism.
See, I find these sorts of statements very silly. Some of the most important economists of the past century are or were Libertarians. Are you saying that their incredibly profound understanding of human interactions by trade is completely baseless? After all, Libertarianism is largely motivated by economic arguments.
I would instead conclude that you actually misunderstood the entire foundation of Libertarianism, if "immature, shallow, and selfish" are all you can say about it.
When you actually think about other people, you can reach a state of self actualization which makes you a much happier person. Libertarians are operating much lower on the Maslow pyramid
Another completely silly statement which simply highlights your ignorance of Maslow's hierarchy. How exactly does Libertarianism prevent you from achieving the level of "self-actualization".
In fact, it doesn't, as anyone arguing philosophy and socio-economics is already at the self-actualization stage; there is no higher step. Thus, people who bother to call themselves Libertarians have a much higher likelihood of already being higher on the hierarchy than anybody else.
If Libertarianism isn't for you, then fine, I hope you find something that does suit you and improve your life; but please try to avoid launching baseless attacks against something you simply disagree with; stick to rational arguments. We have enough FUD being tossed around and we don't need to add to it.
Id say the most succesful society is that which does the most to improve the quality of life of its inhabitants.
I'd say the most successful society is the one that can best ensure its long-term survival (and thus the survival of its constituents). The path of science and reason that we are currently following is thus definitely the right one (though we obviously could be doing better on this path).
I don't have an opinion on Rand one way or another, really, but I remember in philosophy class that the professor mentioned that Objectivism was the first philosophy of the 20th century to be disproven.
Do you or anybody else have a citation for this? I'm genuinely curious, because for anyone who's actually followed the reasoning underlying Objectivism, it's pretty hard to find any flaws in the fundamentals. Some of her more elaborate conclusions are certainly somewhat misguided or don't quite seem to follow, but her core philosophy seems pretty solid to me.
Why should the government restrict me from wandering the land as my ancestors did?
Because property rights mitigate the need for violence due to competition for resources. Are you suggesting violence is preferable to property rights?
What a mouthful huh?
We have secure, distributed programming languages, and we have multi-paradigm, distributed programming languages.
Next stop: secure, multi-paradigm, distributed programming [1],[2].
[1] The Oz-E project
[2] SCOLL: A Language for Safe Capability Based Collaboration
Reduce, reuse, and recycle is the key to solving our polution issue. Educate please. Don't prohibit a free ecconomy! And finally, stop your finger-pointing at the "right wing" as though only they are responsible for our mess.
Please educate yourself about free market economics first. Externalities such as pollution are a huge problem which are not addressed in free market economies. Unless someone owns a resource and actually has an incentive to preserve its value, the resource will be abused. No one owns our air or water, no one has incentive to keep them clean. You may think the government should have this responsibility, but the government is already a variable not factored into free markets economics, so your argument to keep the economy free is self-defeating.
In this case, the government actually should be involved. It should be taxing manufacturing and/or mining industries the true long-term cost of disposing or recycling their goods (ie. the entire product's lifecycle). Thus, businesses will take these additional costs into consideration when pricing their goods. Consumer prices increase, but disposal taxes decrease. Businesses which are more environmentally friendly would have lower operating costs which is reflected in their prices; so the economics rewards not only efficient businesses, but also environmentally friendly ones.
That's a true, workable free market solution.
DC is horribly inefficient at delivering power
Not it's not. The REAL reason we don't use DC for distribution is because it's entirely unsuitable for it!
DC is suitable only for circuits where the speed of light can be regarded as more or less instantaneous. Power lines stretching over hundreds of kilometers obviously don't fall into this category.
Besides, high voltage is high voltage.
Except when it's not. High frequency high voltage current is an entirely different beast from low frequency high voltage. The latter will kill you, the former won't*.
* For sufficiently high frequencies. Don't try this at home.
Power lines run just under the voltage needed to ionize the air.
Air is ionized at as little as 8-10kv (depending on what gas in "air" you're actually looking at ionizing). Power lines run at MUCH higher voltages.